Blog Archives

Last week, China Mieville’s latest novel debuted: This Census-Taker. I was surprised to discover this, as I thought his King Rat, The City and The City and Embassytown were notable and strong outliers of the past decade in an otherwise generally weakening genre. From the description: In a remote house on a hilltop, a lonely […]

Game designer S. John Ross had a flash of insight when he went to the movies this past weekend: I noticed that one movie had a PG-13 rating for including “brief teen partying.” Another threatened both “crude humor” and “thematic elements.” Someone needs to collect MPAA jargon into a d100 table to be used as […]

Amazon reduced the KU payment again in December 2015, from .0049 per page in November to .0046 per page. That means the breakeven point for the average $4.99 Castalia House book is now 733 pages. That is down nearly 21 percent from July 2015, when it was .0058 per page and the breakeven was 579 […]

Doing this series on Leigh Brackett shook some things loose. Don Herron (The Dark Barbarian, Willeford) contacted me offering some scans of interesting items. He has been selling books from the E. Hoffmann Price library. E. Hoffmann Price was a pulp fictioneer who wrote about 500 stories from the middle 1920s to the early 1950s. […]

As Castalia House has grown, it has become increasingly difficult to balance my responsibilities as Lead Editor and as the manager of this blog. Because Castalia House shoots for excellence across the board, I have decided that it is time to step back and hand over my responsibilities for this blog to someone else. And […]

Full Series Part I – Pedophilia in Science Fiction – Introduction Part II – The Vocal Enablers Part III – Leaders in Silence Part IV -The Samuel R. Delany Problem Part V – The Victims Supplement I – Defending Your Children: Understanding the Mindset and Tactics of a Pedophile Supplement II – The Enablers in […]

Full Series Part I – Pedophilia in Science Fiction – Introduction Part II – The Vocal Enablers Part III – Leaders in Silence Part IV -The Samuel R. Delany Problem Part V – The Victims Supplement I – Defending Your Children: Understanding the Mindset and Tactics of a Pedophile Supplement II – The Enablers in […]

Full Series Part I – Pedophilia in Science Fiction – Introduction Part II – The Vocal Enablers Part III – Leaders in Silence Part IV -The Samuel R. Delany Problem Part V – The Victims Supplement I – Defending Your Children: Understanding the Mindset and Tactics of a Pedophile Supplement II – The Enablers in […]

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines […]

WARNING: This post deals seriously with child sexual abuse  in science fiction and extensively quotes from the work of a science fiction author who endorses, and is believed to have engaged in, criminally abusive sexual behavior. Not for the faint of heart; contains vulgarities, obscenities, and descriptions of extremely deviant and disgusting behavior. This is […]

Considering how rampant the abuse has been historically and how leaders in the science fiction community have gone out of their way to enable and encourage the abusers, I can’t possibly recommend that you expose children in your care to science fiction conventions or other events where fans of science fiction might gather to form […]

Defining the “Safe Space” Group silence can be very noisy. A useful tactic in a mass cover-up of unpleasantness is for the participants to become as loud as possible…about something else. Ed Kramer’s molestation news was generating all sorts of media attention in 2013, but when John Scalzi, president of the SFWA, launched his personal […]