Author: Joe Vasicek

Joe Vasicek is the author of more than twenty science fiction books, including the Star Wanderers and Sons of the Starfarers series. As a young man, he studied Arabic and traveled across the Middle East and the Caucasus. He claims Utah as his home.

How I Would Vote Now: 1968 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

The Nominees

The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson

Chthon by Piers Anthony

The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany

Thorns by Robert Silverberg

Lord of Light by Robert Silverberg

The Actual Results

  1. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
  2. The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany
  3. Chthon by Piers Anthony
  • The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson
  • Thorns by Robert Silverberg

How I Would Have Voted

  1. No Award
  2. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

Explanation

I’m not a huge fan of New Wave science fiction, and by 1968, that was the hot new trend that was sweeping the genre. Of the five books nominated, I DNFed three and screened out the other two using AI. Here’s the breakdown:

I tried to read Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, but just didn’t get into it. It was too Eastern and pseudo-mystical for me. With that said, it’s not a bad book, so I could probably be persuaded to go back and try it again. It’s just not for me.

Strangely, I’ve found that to be true of most of Zelazny’s books and stories… except for his Chronicles of Amber, which I love. Granted, the last couple books in the series are turning into a bit of a slog (I’m currently in the middle of book 9), but the first five books following Corwin are absolutely fantastic. I was hooked from the first page of the first book, unlike every other Zelazny title, which usually loses me after 30 or 40 pages.

The Butterfly Kid was really hard to find, because the Orem Public Library AND the BYU Library don’t carry it—and the BYU Library has one of the best science fiction collections west of the Mississippi. So I read the free sample on Amazon, and that was enough to DNF it. Way too psychadelic and trippy for me. The whole book is basically a 200 page drug trip, with an alien invasion thrown in for good measure. No wonder BYU doesn’t carry it.

The Einstein Connection was probably the book that made me decide to blacklist Samuel R. Delany and never read anything else he’s written (that, and the fact that he endorsed NAMBLA). There’s a lot of weird and twisted sexual content, including (if I remember correctly) some sexual content involving children. There’s a reason why Neil Gaiman wrote such a glowing introduction to the book, extolling all the reasons why he loves all things Delany. Bunch of sick perverts if you ask me.

I’ve tried to read some Piers Anthony before, but found it very difficult because of all the sick old man vibes he gives off. Which is a shame, because he’s a pretty decent writer. But everything I’ve tried to read of his has a weird obsession with rape, or of the necessity of women to submit to male sexual needs (including the needs of strangers). So when ChatGPT told me this about Chthon, I decided I didn’t need to read it:

This appears to include rape, incest/Oedipal sexual themes, coercive/abusive sexuality, and a race of women whose narrative function is tied to abuse, desire, and destructive obsession. Several reader reviews specifically warn about rape, incest, misogyny, and violence against women, with one review describing “cold scenes of both rape and incest” and objecting that the story seems to frame the perpetrating character too sympathetically.

The setup itself is grim: Aton Five is condemned to the subterranean prison planet Chthon after falling in love with a dangerous “Minionette,” and the novel is described by SFWA’s Nebula page as dark, grim, and heavily prison-sequence driven. The tone seems psychologically oppressive rather than hopeful or adventurous.

Robert Silverberg has a very similar problem, though he’s not nearly as overt in his sick old man vibes as Piers Anthony. But I don’t think I’ve ever read a Silverberg novel that I didn’t end up DNFing for weird and disturbing sexual content. Here’s what ChatGPT said about Thorns:

High concern. There is definitely sexual content, and it sounds deeply uncomfortable rather than erotic in an ordinary adult-romance sense. Multiple reader descriptions flag a bizarre or disturbing sex scene, and the central relationship involves a seventeen-year-old girl paired with a much older, physically altered man under manipulative circumstances.

I did not find evidence of a conventional rape scene in the sources I checked, but the book’s whole setup involves sexual/reproductive exploitation: Lona is used by scientists for her eggs, becomes the biological mother of one hundred children, and is then denied access to them. That is not “sexual violence” in the ordinary on-page assault sense, but it is very much reproductive exploitation and psychological violation.

This sounds like one of Silverberg’s darker psychological SF novels. The central figure, Duncan Chalk, literally feeds on other people’s suffering and engineers misery as entertainment. The book seems interested in pain, isolation, bodily alienation, emotional manipulation, and the public consumption of private suffering.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that ChatGPT flagged its own description of the novel as potentially violating its content guidelines, which is never a good sign.

So there you have it. Another bad year for science fiction—which tends to support my thesis that SFWA ruined the genre by starting it down the long march through the institutions. SFWA was founded in 1965, and Silverberg was the president from ’67 to ’68.

(As an interesting side note, every one of these novels had at least one edition featuring cover art with topless female nudity and visible nipples.)

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

Full steam ahead!

I’ve been making good progress on The Unknown Sea this week, pushing forward at a very good rate now that my wife is at home watching the kids. She’s got the next couple of months off for the summer, allowing me to write full-time, and I plan to take advantage of that as much as I can. This was the first week of that, and while I still feel like I’m ramping up to full speed, I did get quite a bit of writing done.

Right now, The Unknown Sea is at about 50% for the AI draft, 28% for the rough human draft, 22% for the revised human draft, and 11% for the final polished draft. I’m experimenting with pushing through all of those draft phases at once, obviously with different parts of the novel being at different stages. If everything proceeds according to my outline, the final draft will clock in at around sixteen chapters, 53 scenes, and between 65k to 70k words (or around 180 – 220 pages).

I probably won’t be able to finish it before the end of May, but I do think I can finish it by mid-June. It’s going to take a lot of work, but I’ve got the time now, so it’s mostly just a matter of buckling down and making it happen. It’s about the same length as Captive of the Falconstar, which took about 120 writing hours to finish, and I’ve already put in about 50 writing hours. To finish The Unknown Sea by May 15th, I need to average about 3.5 writing hours per day, which is going to be a bit tricky since 1) I still have a bunch of publishing tasks to work on, and 2) we have a family trip to Coeur D’Alene in the middle of that, but I think I can manage it.

I would really like to have it sufficiently finished so that I can start work on Lord of the Falconstar before Captive of the Falconstar releases in July. That way, I can estimate how much time I need to finish Lord of the Falconstar and have it up for preorder. But I may go ahead and put it up for preorder anyway, just with a long enough lead-time that I know I can have the book done before then.

What I’ll probably do is put The Unknown Sea up for preorder with a release date around October-November 2026, and Lord of the Falconstar up with a release date around January-February 2027. I’ve got a rough AI draft done for Lord of the Falconstar, but not much more than that, and I probably need to update some of the character cards and chapter prompts, which is also going to take time. So Lord of the Falconstar probably won’t come out until sometime in 2027, regardless.

Are Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire crashing out?

I don’t usually pay any attention to the infighting among the various pundits and media personalities, even on my own side of the aisle, but as a former Daily Wire subscriber I found this very interesting. Not sure I totally agree with Malcolm & Simone on everything here, but they did share a very interesting perspective, especially as conservative influencers who (allegedly) got treated pretty dirty by Ben Shapiro as they were just getting started. If you follow any conservative media, you’ll probably find this interesting.

Is The Riches of Xulthar For You?

The Riches of Xulthar is a sword-and-sorcery desert adventure about a fallen nobleman, a freed slave woman, and a legendary lost city whose treasure may be more curse than blessing. It delivers a fast-moving heroic fantasy quest with cursed coin, dark sorcery, ruined temples, undead servants, moral temptation, and a slow-burning bond between two wounded people learning what freedom really means.

What Kind of Reader Will Love The Riches of Xulthar?

If you love classic sword-and-sorcery adventures with lost cities, cursed treasure, desert ruins, dark kings, monster-haunted catacombs, and heroes who have to fight both outward evil and inward temptation, then The Riches of Xulthar is probably your kind of story.

If you enjoy fantasy about honor, freedom, slavery, moral courage, and the corrupting power of wealth, this story gives those themes a mythic adventure shape: a dangerous quest across the wastes, a cursed city at the end of the road, and two protagonists who must decide what they are truly willing to serve.

If you like romantic fantasy where the emotional bond grows out of danger, trust, sacrifice, and shared moral struggle, Roderick and Laria’s journey gives the story a strong character-driven heart beneath the sword fights and sorcery.

If you enjoy fantasy that feels old-school in its adventure structure but more intimate in its emotional focus, The Riches of Xulthar blends pulp adventure, moral fantasy, and redemptive romance into a compact, high-stakes quest.

What You’ll Find Inside

Roderick is a disgraced nobleman seeking the lost city of Xulthar in the hope of breaking the curse that destroyed his family’s honor. Along the way, he rescues Laria, a slave woman who has never truly owned anything—not even herself—and their journey through the desert becomes as much about freedom, agency, and love as it is about cursed treasure and dark magic. The tone is adventurous, mythic, sensual, and morally serious, with fast-paced action, eerie ruins, dangerous supernatural encounters, and a hopeful emotional arc beneath the darkness.

What Makes The Riches of Xulthar Different

Readers who enjoy Robert E. Howard-style lost-city adventure, classic sword-and-sorcery quests, and treasure-hunting fantasy will recognize the familiar pleasures: desert wastes, ancient ruins, sorcerous kings, monster-haunted temples, and a warrior with a sword in his hand. But The Riches of Xulthar turns the treasure quest inward by asking whether wealth can ever restore honor, whether freedom is worth its burden, and whether a man can reject the very prize he set out to claim. Unlike many old-school sword-and-sorcery stories, the female lead is not merely a prize, temptation, or rescued captive; Laria’s moral insight and growing agency become essential to the heart of the story. The result is a heroic fantasy adventure that uses the lost-city quest to explore slavery, self-mastery, family, corruption, and the kind of love that makes freedom meaningful.

What You Won’t Find

You won’t find a sprawling epic fantasy cast, court intrigue, or a heavily political worldbuilding saga; this is a focused sword-and-sorcery quest built around two central characters and one cursed destination. You also won’t find nihilistic grimdark: the story contains violence, slavery, sensual temptation, dark magic, and peril, but its moral center remains hopeful. This is not a sanitized cozy fantasy, but neither is it cynical or despairing.

Why I Think You Might Love It

What I love about The Riches of Xulthar is that it takes the classic fantasy question—“What if the treasure is cursed?”—and makes it personal. Like Queen of the Falconstar, this is a story about power, agency, and a woman learning to stand in a world that wants to use her, but here that struggle is filtered through mythic sword-and-sorcery rather than space opera. Roderick’s quest begins as a search for wealth and restored honor, but the real treasure is the freedom he and Laria learn to choose together: freedom from slavery, freedom from despair, freedom from the lies of cursed power, and freedom to build a new life out of the ruins of the old one.

Where to Get the Book

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Daily Wire is an anti-Mormon channel now

About a week ago, the Daily Wire posted an article on their site titled “7 Reasons Joseph Smith Was a False Prophet” by Matt Fradd. This article was adapted from some exclusive content on Matt Fradd’s DW channel and released under the Daily Wire banner. Needless to say, it caused quit a commotion among DW’s Latter-day Saint subscribers.

This is not the first time the Daily Wire has shown a surprising degree of antipathy toward the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. About a year ago, Phil Cabot, one of DW’s producers, posted on his personal X account that Mormons aren’t Christians, and got into some heated online arguments about that. A couple months ago, shortly after Matt Fradd joined the Daily Wire as a host, he interviewed Joe Heschmeyer, an anti-Mormon who bizarrely argued that Mormonism is a “species of atheism.” And when the mass shooting at the church in Michigan happened last year, the Daily Wire’s coverage went out of the way to avoid using the full name of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, only editing the article after receiving backlash for it.

But all of these things were relatively minor. Phil Cabot is entitled to express his personal opinions on his own X feed. Matt Fradd can interview whoever he wants on his own show. And lots of news outlets fail to mention the full name of the church, intentionally and otherwise. However, this recent article—which was posted under the Daily Wire banner, not Matt Fradd’s channel—crosses the line. It demonstrates that the Daily Wire, as a company, has chosen to oppose the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and post openly anti-Mormon content. Which means that if you subscribe to the Daily Wire, your money will fund anti-Mormon content.

Andrew Klavan, my personal favorite Daily Wire host, took some heat for his take on the whole controversy. His response was basically “come on guys, can’t you take a joke?” Which is an incoherent thing to say, considering that the 7 Reasons article wasn’t intended as joke at all. But Klavan’s response makes sense when you realize he saw The Book of Mormon Musical over the weekend, and probably didn’t read Matt Fradd’s article at all. His explanation makes a lot more sense.

With that said, I didn’t cancel my family’s DW membership in a fit of outrage. I canceled it because the Daily Wire has clearly become an anti-Mormon channel, and I simply don’t want my money to fund that sort of content.

The question here for Latter-day Saints is this: is your religion more important to you than your politics, or do your politics come before your religion? This is the position the Daily Wire has placed us in. If you continue to keep your DW membership because you want to support their reporting and their conservative political activism—both of which are very good—know that you are doing so at the expense of your faith.

With all of that said, I actually don’t think it’s stupid of the Daily Wire to do this. With the collapse of the woke left and the ongoing cultural shift toward Christian revival, the next big fight in the culture wars is going to be a relitigation of all the old sectarian divisions within Christianity. Which means that the conservative Christian right is going to need a new enemy to hold them all together. The last time we had a major national revival, that enemy was the Catholics, which is how we ended up with Prohibition and immigration restrictions targeting (among other groups) the Irish and Italians. But all the Christian denominations hate the Mormons, partly out of how they see us as uniquely heretical, and partly because of how threatened they feel because of our church’s success.

The Daily Wire has been struggling a lot recently, and it appears that they are desperate to find a new brand of outrage bait to fill the hole that has been made by the collapse of the woke left. If it’s stupid of them to turn on the Mormons, it’s because they’re doing it too early. But ultimately, this is the cultural direction the conservative right is going to take. The Daily Wire is just ahead of the curve.

That’s why I canceled our DW membership. I encourage all my fellow members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to do the same.

The Moral Cost of Revenge in Captive of the Falconstar

Revenge can feel like freedom when every other kind of freedom has been taken away. In Captive of the Falconstar, a captive woman begins with one simple desire: to go home, reclaim her true name, and return to the life that was stolen from her. But as captivity, betrayal, and humiliation harden inside her, revenge begins to look like the only path left—not just a way to punish her captors, but a way to feel powerful again.

That is what makes the theme so morally dangerous. The desire for revenge is understandable, even righteous in its beginnings, because it grows from real injustice. But revenge does not simply restore what was lost. It reshapes the wounded, narrows their choices, and asks whether striking back is worth the cost to the soul.

Where the Idea Came From

The emotional center of this theme comes from Sonya’s captivity and the way her longing for home is slowly twisted into a hunger for revenge. At the beginning of the book, Sonya dreams of Petyr and Graznav Station, waking to the bitter reality that she is aboard the Falconstar, forced to serve Zlata—now Lady Zenoba—who has embraced the identity and power of the Hameji. Sonya’s first act of resistance is not violence, but memory: insisting that her name is Sonya, not Gulchen, and clinging to the hope that “somedayshift” she will be free.

But the more Sonya is denied escape, the more revenge begins to replace home as the thing that keeps her alive. Genzerig recognizes this weakness and exploits it. He does not merely offer her freedom; he asks whether she wants the Valdamar Clan to suffer for what they have done. When Sonya accepts, revenge gives her “some measure of control over her life”—but it also places that life in the hands of another manipulator. That tension is the seed of the theme: revenge begins as Sonya’s attempt to reclaim agency, but the farther she follows it, the more she discovers that revenge has its own chains.

How the Moral Cost of Revenge Shapes the Story

The moral cost of revenge shapes Captive of the Falconstar by turning captivity into something more dangerous than physical imprisonment. At first, anger helps the wounded survive. It preserves memory, identity, and dignity in a world determined to rename, reshape, and possess them. But as the story unfolds, that anger becomes vulnerable to manipulation. Revenge begins to offer purpose, but that purpose comes through secrecy, deception, and the temptation to treat every relationship as a battlefield.

This is especially powerful because the book refuses to make revenge feel simple. The people who have caused harm are not flattened into faceless monsters, and the people seeking revenge are not magically purified by their suffering. As emotional ties shift and loyalties become complicated, revenge becomes harder to separate from betrayal. The deeper the characters go, the more they must ask whether they are pursuing justice, survival, power, or merely the illusion of control.

That is where the revenge arc becomes most painful. Revenge promises agency, but it can also trap a person inside choices made from fear, grief, and humiliation. By the time the path begins to look darker than expected, turning back may no longer be easy. In a story filled with space opera politics, captivity, dynastic ambition, rival loyalties, and morally gray choices, revenge becomes one of the book’s central emotional engines: a wounded person reaching for freedom, only to discover that vengeance can become another kind of captivity.

What the Moral Cost of Revenge Says About Us

The moral cost of revenge reveals how easily pain can disguise itself as justice. When someone has been wronged, betrayed, or stripped of dignity, the desire to see the guilty punished is deeply human. But Captive of the Falconstar asks what happens when revenge becomes the story a wounded person tells herself in order to keep going. Sonya’s hunger for revenge is not irrational; it grows from real suffering. Yet revenge cannot give her back the life she lost, and it cannot restore the innocence that captivity destroyed. Instead, it risks making her more like the people who used her: calculating, secretive, and willing to turn intimacy into leverage. The hope in this theme lies in the possibility that even after walking far down the path of vengeance, a person may still recognize the cost—and still long for something better than destruction.

Why This Theme Matters to Me

After everything that happened to Sonya in the previous book, I wanted to give her a more active role and make her more of an agent in her own story. That was why I chose to give her a revenge arc: because revenge is one of the most emotionally understandable temptations in fiction. When a character has been genuinely wronged, part of us wants to see them strike back. But I’m more interested in what revenge does after that first rush of satisfaction fades—how it narrows the soul, how it keeps old wounds open, and how it can trap someone in the very pain they are trying to escape. In Captive of the Falconstar, I wanted to explore a revenge arc that is not simple or clean, but tragic, human, and morally complicated.

Where to Get the Book

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Related Posts and Pages

Explore the series index for The Falconstar Trilogy.

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