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.
