There Will Be War Volume Ten

TWBW_v10_480There Will Be War X, the first new anthology in Jerry Pournelle’s military sf series in 25 years, will be released on Amazon next Monday.

“It’s pretty good,” Jerry promises, with a mix of fresh names and favorites. “Several new writers I didn’t know before, and some old standbys like Bova and Anderson with stories that hold up despite their age.”

Here is the complete roster of contributors:

Gregory Benford, Charles W. Shao, William S. Lind, Lt. Col. Gregory A. Thiele, USMC, Ben Bova, Allen M. Steele, Michael Flynn, Martin van Creveld, Matthew Joseph Harrington, Cheah Kai Wai, Col. Douglas Beason, USAF, ret., John DeChancie, CDR Phillip E. Pournelle, USN, Russell Newquist, Brian Noggle, David van Dyke, Lt. Col. Guy R. Hooper, USAF, ret., Michael L. McDaniel, Poul Anderson, and Larry Niven.

The Castalia House book, says publisher Vox Day, initially will come out as an ebook, then in audiobook early next year, and finally in a hardcover omnibus edition with Volume IX sometime in Spring 2016.

325 thoughts on “There Will Be War Volume Ten

  1. michael: What are you even talking about? Your wording is so vague that it has no meaning.

  2. I have deleted a comment which amounts to “here’s what the other side sounds like” with pseudo-quotes endorsing sex with children.

    The popular mode of mimic-ing and exaggerating opponents’ views, which I always feel has no forensic value anyway, has the specific problem in this discussion that someone who reads it in isolation will be uncertain whether it is advocacy or parody, therefore is not something I want to host.

  3. but the longer you duck commenting on VD and JCW, the more evident the answer would seem to be.

    Since I am unfamiliar with the remarks your wait will be as long as your logic is sophomoric.

  4. (This is an actual argument I have seen made on Conservative blogs. Not even kidding.

    look everybody! This Gentleman has ironclad proof. He found it on “conservative blogs”. Well that settles it. Not even kidding.

  5. Michael: Since I am unfamiliar with the remarks your wait will be as long as your logic is sophomoric.

    So you are admitting that you did not read the Puppy works which were slated for the Hugo this year?

  6. So you are admitting that you did not read the Puppy works which were slated for the Hugo this year?

    Do I “admit” it? Yes, and to many other things which i never claimed in the first place. You are perhaps confusing me with someone else.

  7. ‘Turncoat’ is a simple story. Taking the Arnold name works as self-criticism.

    Left me baffled. Though I was fairly bored by then.

    I did wonder if it was something to do with the Pope, which made very little sense, or the brother from the Court of Amber, which didn’t make much more sense. I sort of discounted Mr Cumerbatch, and a friends child.

    I guess it highlights the problem with the classic punchline SF story – things like the Nine Billion Names of God, where the whole thing’s in the last sentence. If that joke falls flat, the story as a whole falls flat.

  8. Does not much of this really amount to a unsubtle attempt to soften NAMBLA and its various cheerleaders?

    Much of what? Are you incapable of making an actual case for what you’re saying?

  9. Just before the Benedict reference, the protagonist of ‘Turncoat’ transmits an image of a single finger, hoping that his boss is still human enough to recognise this. The idea that all humans will recognise iit is rather frighteningly culture-specific, and so puts the Benedict line in context.

  10. I don’t believe I’ve seen anyone defending NAMBLA in this thread. If anyone has, quoting them ought to be sufficient proof.

    @nickpheas

    Turncoat just wasn’t very good on any level. Steve Rzasa seems like a nice enough guy and he wasn’t done any favours by having a Hugo spotlight shone onto weak work.

  11. @michael:

    I confess that carefully guarded defenses of NAMBLA, or those who make such, are unlikely to provoke a lawerly response from me. Does not much of this really amount to a unsubtle attempt to soften NAMBLA and its various cheerleaders?

    No it does not. But it was kind of you to ask. Also, “lawyerly responses” are also not conversational. And lawyerly responses are pretty much what you’ve been giving since you appeared. It’s like you think you’re suing us for something. But this is neither a courtroom nor a deposition.

  12. Good grief.

    I’m feeling even more sorry for Jerry Pournelle, now that supporters of his publisher have turned the thread announcing his new book into a referendum on NAMBLA.

  13. Michael: Do I “admit” it? Yes, and to many other things which i never claimed in the first place. You are perhaps confusing me with someone else.

    Okay, cool. Thanks for clarifying that. Let’s get to the things you have claimed then.

    Michael: I confess that carefully guarded defenses of NAMBLA

    Please provide linked citations to these defenses so that we can understand what it is you are wishing to discuss.

  14. Meredith: Turncoat just wasn’t very good on any level. Steve Rzasa seems like a nice enough guy and he wasn’t done any favours by having a Hugo spotlight shone onto weak work.

    Well, and that’s the thing, isn’t it? Some of the slated authors (English and Rzasa come to mind) may very well produce Hugo-level work at some point in their careers. Having their work being subjected to this spotlight and level of scrutiny before that point arrives is extremely unfair, and may very well cause people to dismiss their work later on instead of giving it further consideration.

    It makes me ill thinking how many people may dismiss Flynn’s work based on his partial story which was nominated — and so miss out on his absolutely spectacular novel Eifelheim (which was nominated for Hugo Best Novel). That would be a huge shame, and a loss to those people.

  15. Re English, Rzasa, et al: I more or less agree. As clumsy as I found “Turncoat” and as average as “Totaled” was, with a little time, practice and (especially in Rzasa’s case) a good editor, I’d be very interested to see what both come up with in the future.

  16. An SF convention that allows children at all will have children who like SF and fantasy. Children who like to fantasize are convenient for adults who like sex with children. This is a moral hazard. What is to be done? The Robert Heinlein view- Mrs Grundy is evil, what children do is none of anyone else’s business. The Social Justice view- make Samuel Delany Grandmaster, enjoy the fruits of social progress. The Vox Day view- you deviants must be cursed and shunned. Heinlein assumes smarter, tougher children than humanly probable or observed. Social Justice assumes progressives are smarter and more virtuous than humanly probable or observed. Vox Day is annoyed by attacks on his character. Solutions unsatisfactory.

    There were solutions offered in there?

    Making Delany a Grandmaster does nothing to increase or decrease the safety of children at conventions; it’s a response to his stories, not to an interview that (if I’m remembering right) came out a year after he was named a Grandmaster.

    Basically, the solutions you’re fantasizing are Do Nothing, Do Nothing and Fulfill Ted Beale’s Fantasy Response to Every Stimulus, none of which are useful.

    Actual solutions would be about safety policies and the laws where the conventions are held; most of those places are going to have appropriate laws, and safety policies provide a means of reporting things that should be dealt with by law enforcement to law enforcement. Places where children and adults both go is not a unique descriptor of SF cons, either, it includes schools, libraries, baseball stadia, summer camps, movie theaters, restaurants and more. They are also covered by the appropriate laws and, where needed, easy access to reporting stuff to law enforcement.

    Plus, you slipped from the genre description of fantasy to the general act of fantasizing, which includes such non-genre things as imagining crime stories, imagining Western stories, imagining secret cabals in charge of the Hugos and more. Liking stories about dragons does not in and of itself make one more susceptible to predators than admiring people who shoot children or throw acid into people’s faces.

  17. @JJ-

    Flynn’s work

    My favorite Michael Flynn book is still his first- In the Kingdom of the Blind. Secret society of statisticians (and in time by logical extension superspies with plausible wild talents) predict history from about 1833, hijinks ensue. Set mostly in the present. Fixup from Analog in the 80’s where I first read it, fast-paced, lots of quirky historical and speculative historical detail, available on Amazon. It’s the book I was hoping for when I bought The Difference Engine. Flynn once wrote he was considering a sequel set mostly in the Wild West- I live in hope.

    @nickpheas

    I did wonder …if it was something from the Court of Amber

    Me too. An unexplained silvery shadowed arm-thingy, a Japanese garden, or just the one word ‘Bide’, would have improved the story. Which I liked more than you.

    @Cheryl S

    To get out of indentation

    Thanks.

  18. Bruce, thanks for the rec for Flynn’s In the Country of the Blind. It’s on my TBR list (along with several hundred others), but maybe I can move it up in the queue at some point. I enjoyed The Wreck of the River of Stars, but not as much as Eifelheim. And its epic, grand tragedy plotline is definitely not something you want to dive into if you’re having a “down” period psychologically.

  19. Kurt Busiek on January 7, 2016 at 10:13 pm said:

    Actual solutions would be about safety policies and the laws where the conventions are held; most of those places are going to have appropriate laws, and safety policies provide a means of reporting things that should be dealt with by law enforcement to law enforcement.

    Indeed – codes of conduct in particular codes of conducts around not harassing people, not treating people as sexual objects and so on.

    In addition to cons, the SF community is increasingly online as a community, so child-protection extends to how people treat each other online as well. In particular it is not obvious what a persons age is online and consequently people behaving poorly online (including harassment, stalking, threats of doxxing or violence, sexual harassment and many other things) as well damaging adults is a threat to child safety within the SF community.

    It stands to reason that anybody genuinely committed to child safety would also be committed to codes of conducts both in real-life conventions but also in how we behave to one another online.

  20. Andrew M on January 7, 2016 at 3:25 pm said:
    Just before the Benedict reference, the protagonist of ‘Turncoat’ transmits an image of a single finger, hoping that his boss is still human enough to recognise this. The idea that all humans will recognise iit is rather frighteningly culture-specific, and so puts the Benedict line in context.

    That’s just poor writing, isn’t it?

  21. thinking how many people may dismiss Flynn’s work based on his partial story which was nominated

    My opinion of Eifelheim was that it was better as a shorter story: the modern sections weren’t coming together as well as the medieval ones for me. (I liked several of his earlier novels better.)

  22. @JJ-

    The Wreck of the River of Stars… grand, epic plotline is definitely not what you want to dive into if you are having a down period

    The spaceships never quite worked for me. Not sure why.

    @JJ and Robmatic

    That’s just poor writing.

    And poor editing.

    ‘Turncoat’ is written for Americans who like to flip the bird. Parochial? To a weenie, sure. All writing with idiomatic or purple passages is open to attack on the grounds that it should have been Strunked and Whitened more. Older publishing houses drift into a bland house style- you can’t teach talent, but you can beat caution into anyone who needs a job. Vox Day and Castalia House don’t have a house style. You know David the Good on gardening from Larry Niven from Tom Szaz.

    I’m a fan of David Drake. His imperial purple passages -like Ronald Syme he writes the great good English only good latiners can write- come as a sober, thoughtful relief after the cyan powergun skull exploding action scenes. He’s great at shifting from one tone to another. But The Books of the Elements, his latest series, was kind of mellow. For charging swordsman screaming ‘Ears for Nerthus!’ at a Cyclops values of mellow. Well, still Drake, still the best action writer in SF. The other day I read Drake’s Newsletter #89.

    ‘Basically, the editor had homogenized the language of the four viewpoint characters. She hadn’t been incompetent -she was actually quite careful- but she was doing a horribly wrong thing.’ …’The editor didn’t read my desperate emails…’

    Drake is a midlist writer in that he’s obviously not at the bottom and he’s obviously not Steven King or a politician getting a mega-million bribe laundered through a ‘book’ deal. But he’s big dog middle. Publishers keep his backlist in print because his backlist keeps making money. When Tor editors automatically homogenize a quirky big dog’s style and ignore the big dog’s desperate emails, you know the small fry’s stuff is pounded flat. Or you could look at this year’s Tor lineup and know that way. If you like the bland firm smack of strong editing, Go Tor!

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