Happy May the Fourth! No doubt Disney will be using Star Wars Day as a chance to parade the zombified corpse of their converged franchise before an increasingly resentful public. Well and good for them. This year, the cool kids will be cutting Intersectional Studies class to enjoy beers, smokes, and Golden Age pulp mags out behind the equipment shed.
Following the artistic failure of the last five Star Wars movies and amid growing demands for enterprising content creators to fork the creatively bankrupt franchise, Castalia House once again prove themselves to be swift, sure-footed mammals running circles around the plodding legacy media dinosaurs.
From the blog of CH Lead Editor Vox Day:
We’ll be launching a new supernatural Mil-SF book tomorrow, but due to the aforementioned date, the author and I decided that it is time to formally announce that the creative deconvergence project I’d mentioned a few months ago is not only in the works, but has now entered the editing phase.
An excerpt from FARAWAY WARS: EMBERS OF EMPIRE:
Not a day went by that Vel Exollar didn’t think about the war. His brief, but brilliant career as one of the Insurgency’s ace fighter pilots remained a source of pride to him. But after spending his youth flying from one hidden base to the next in between hit-and-run strikes against supply convoys, shipyards, and imperial weapons installations, he’d been very much enjoying the relative relaxation as the captain of Lady Haut-Estas’s private starliner.
Now he marched through his ship’s alabaster corridors, sumptuously carpeted in scarlet. The air smelled of fear, tension, and spilled wine. Flanked by a pair of ensigns as he ordered richly dressed passengers who’d ignored the ship-wide order to return to their cabins, Vel was forced to consider the unfortunate possibility that his current employer’s decisions might have spurred his old friends to new violence.
Vel trudged over the plush carpet lining the corridor as if it were a path leading to a gallows. He’d known perfectly well that Lady Jesla’s plan was not without risk. Some might have even called it rash, and once again he asked himself why he’d agreed to it. Had he simply grown restless after playing it safe for so long?
Perhaps she reminds me too much of her mother.
But regardless of whatever had led him to roll the dice one more time, the luck that had always sustained him had finally run out at Koidu. A galaxy cruiser belonging to the Commonwealth had shown up just as what was supposed to have been a harmless demonstration had gone to hell, and now it appeared that even a single misstep could lead to a second civil war throughout the galaxy.
Despite his worries, Vel tried to remain focused on the task at hand. Hiding in Anat’s cloud banks should buy us some time. The magnetostorm would render them essentially invisible to the deep space sensors of any ship that might be following them. What was critical now was getting Jesla to safety and scrubbing every trace of her presence on board. Deep willing, we just might pull this off!
A sudden shock that caused the deck to ominously vibrate derailed Vel’s train of thought. The two junior officers burst into action, casting about for threats and shouting demands for status reports into their comms.
Read the whole excerpt at Vox Popoli.
My Comment: Dragon of the Apocalypse Nick Cole has spoken of Vox’s multi-front war against the forces of SJW convergence. Having already taken on Wikipedia and mainstream news aggregators, it looks like Vox intends to challenge the Mouse itself.
Good. Star Wars is heir to the pulp tradition that pink SF types sneer at. Castalia House, with its stable of pulp-inspired authors like Appendix N’s Jefrro Johnson and Dragon of Science Fiction John C. Wright, has a far better claim to exercise stewardship over space opera than the does the current regime at Disney.
Tomorrow’s announcement should be highly entertaining. I for one can’t wait.
And if you can’t wait for fun, thrilling space opera that doesn’t lecture or insult you, I just happen to have an award-winning space opera-horror series available on Amazon right now.
Sounds like it'll be good. Wonder if we'll see any rogue employees at Amazon acting the fool because of the title.
Based on Amazon's recent actions, will it even be offered on Amazon? Vox stated he'd be pulling many current and future titles to Castalia House for sales.
Build your own Platform.
@ Rawle; It's to be hoped.
@ Man of the Atom: Building your own platform is mandatory.
I did see that Vox plans to pull most CH books from KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited, which in my experience is a good call. I do hope that CH eventually gets big enough to go it alone, but right now Amazon is 80% of the book market.
Agreed on the size of the Amazon behemoth. While it can't be ignored and discounted, it's best to have a fallback store outside the Bezos Cloud.
Since Amazon has moved to "All-DRM-All-the-Time", I'm looking for an alternative source of ebooks as well.
What if Amazon goes Tango Uniform like Karl Denninger fears? How do I read my ebooks from Amazon with the User Friendly DRM that only affects the Bad Guys when the Big Smile isn't there to provide the encryption key? Nope, not gonna do it!
Interesting times ahead, but boy, am I glad to be along for the ride.
That reminds me: if you need an epub copy as a backup for any Soul Cycle book you already have on Kindle, send me an email.
I thought that this was an announcement of your CH project! And I thought 'How cool that will be!'
It's the thought that counts 😉
Also, you need to check out this mashup between Star Wars and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: http://hotair.com/archives/2017/05/03/video-unbelievable-full-album-sgt-pepperstar-wars-mash/
Hilarious
Great news! I'm working on my own. It'll be a mashup of post Return of the Jedi and First order. So a conventional story but hopefully more adventury 🙂
xavier
More adventury is good.
The PC era is over. News, entertainment, the arts, politics, and religion itself, are all shedding the skin fashioned around it by the Boomers by those that have had enough of it.
I was pessimistic for a long time, but ever since last year there has been a seismic shift. The majority might not see it now but by the time the '20s hit I suspect they will.
It's certainly an exciting time to be alive.
It's a lot like how new scientific theories finally come to be adopted.
Because the senior scientists who espouse the theories eventually die and allow new ideas through.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
— Max Planck
Truth wins in the end.
So if I understand the Vox periscope, it's a sequel form the point of view that Luke turned to the dark side? Not a big fan of villainous protagonists, but I'll probably still give it a chance.
As for Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off, I too have an outline of a Not-Star Wars story. Mine is more of an EU type thing on how they could have done a revitalized Sith without the Jacen Solo nonsense they got into. Focuses on a NOT-Sith lord who is after anarchy and chaos instead of totalitarian control. Also features NOT-Kyle Katarn, NOT 'Reborn' from jedi outcast, NOT dark troopers, and totally NOT the force ghost of a Kotor character. It's in the pipeline, but I have other things to finish first.
(The first draft of my first novelis about 75% complete. It's so close I can almost taste it.)
Luke turning to the Dark Side was how Lucas originally meant for RotJ to end. In the first draft of the script, he even dons Vader's mask and declares himself the new Dark Lord.
Honestly, Luke's turn to evil is foreshadowed so heavily from the first movie onward that failing to follow through constitutes an unfired Chekhov's Gun.
Congratulations on your novella. Please let me know when it's available.
Congrats on your novella. Keep at it!
>Luke turning to the Dark Side was how Lucas originally meant for RotJ to end.
I'm certainly not denying that star wars was made up as it goes along. Lucas is great idea man, but storyline… Yeah, we know how that goes.
>Congratulations on your novella. Please let me know when it's available.
Sure will.
>Congrats on your novella. Keep at it!
Thanks JD.
I think you mis-spelled frork.
http://www.ocregister.com/2017/05/04/heres-where-you-get-mcdonalds-wacky-utensil-the-frork-in-california/
McDonald's is trying to be Wendy's, I see.
Don't they understand that McD's=burger engineering and Wendy's=burger art?
Too true. This is also why Mickey Ds can't make an edible salad. Salads must be art to be edible.
@Talitha: You have shown me a new truth, and I thank you for it.
After Corroding Empire, I'm quite interested to see how this turns out. Star Wars, and space opera itself, deserves better than preferred pronouns and barely-second-draft caliber prose.
It should indeed be interesting.
Vox said that EoE will be a more conscious correction of a particular story than Corrosion, which was more of a pastiche in the vein of Campbellian SF.