John C. Wright's Blog, page 104
March 6, 2013
Gaiman on Wolfe
Neil Gaiman’s review of Gene Wolfe’s THE SORCERER’S HOUSE
Discovered at GOODREADS
Caveat: This book is dedicated to me, so I may well be immediately biased in its favour.
It’s an epistolary novel. Very dark, very strange, dislocating and dream-like. An ex-prisoner has inherited (or has he?) an abandoned house, containing a were-fox, a ghostly butler, and, possibly, the contents of the Tarot. Twins occur and reoccur, identities are exchanged, people are not what they appear to be…
I’m loving it, but am reading it only a few pages at a time, to make it last.
…
Right, I finished it. And now, more than anything else, I want to read it again. Some of the twists, yes, I guessed, but the full way the book opens out made me start to reread immediately. I think the book, like the house, is bigger than it first appears.
As a side note, I have a mad theory that you can always find a Wolf in a Gene Wolfe book, and it will always be the key, or a key, to the text. This book does nothing to disprove my theory.
…
Am now rereading. I love the patterns in the book. (I spoke about the tarot earlier: the book consists of two sets of 22 chapters, a doubled set of trumps). I love that a lazy reader would read a book that is not as good as the one that Gene Wolfe wrote, while a reader who is working gets a book that, like the Sorcerer’s House itself, appears small and straightforward, and then grows on the inside.
Gene Wolfe once defined good literature as (I quote from memory) something that can be read with pleasure by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure, and this is one of those.
My comment: This is one of my favorite Gene Wolfe books, right after his SHADOW OF THE TORTURER and ON BLUE’S WATER. I have recently reread it, and will probably write up some of my own thoughts in the coming week. For the moment, I will but concur with Mr Gaiman that Mr Wolfe’s definition of good literature matches with C.S. Lewis’ (A NEW THEORY OF CRITICISM) and my own.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
March 2, 2013
A Peek Behind the HERMETIC MILLENNIA
Normally, I do not take up space explaining my books or answering questions about them. They are meant to speak for themselves, or not at all. If there are jests or allusions to other authors in my work, these are spoilt if I need to amplify them.
And, frankly, my books are patterned after the kind of book I like to read: lighthearted escapist fare, full of action and fury, with relatively little pondering of deep issues with which anyone would take issue.
Of course, the weasel word there is ‘relatively.’ Try as I might to keep it light, a certain amount of ponderous philosophic profundity tends, entirely without my consent, to creep into my work from some hidden hemisphere of my brain. Here I can only throw myself on the blind hope that my beloved readers will be kind enough to tolerate the flaw.
However tolerant the readers are, it is possible that this unintentional profundity obscures the plain meaning of my books, and the inattentive reader might take away a meaning the opposite of my intent.
The fault in such cases is of course mine for being unclear. While it would be more dignified and noble, no doubt, merely to endure the opprobrium my unclarity has summoned up, I confess that a certain base commercial impulse, namely, the desire to sell books, requires that I make a token protest in those few cases where the inattentiveness assumes cyclopean proportions.
A reader, whose name for courtesy’s sake I withhold, put forward this opinion about my humble work THE HERMETIC MILLENNIA:
“Some of the early bits with the variant humans were interesting, but they turned out to be kind of stereotypical when they got more screen time. Also, apparently they were all innately evil because they didn’t adhere to monogamous Christian 1950s-small-town-America values.”
I think this is a misreading of the text.
Indeed, the very opposite is the meaning of the work, had only I been able to make the meaning clear enough.
I would like to think that this one reader is alone in his interpretation, and to assure any other readers that, if you read with eyes unclouded by hate, you will see what the point of the book actually is.
Unseemly as it is for an author to have to explain his point, I myself am sometimes curious as to what an author had in mind, and should there be a solitary reader out there curious about my work, I am happy to embarrass myself before all the rest of the incurious world to satisfy that solitary fellow.
So instead of describing where or how the misreading went wrong, let me explain something about my personal writing process, and give you a peek behind the curtain to show you how a professional writer makes his auctorial decisions. It is, of course, like watching sausage being made, so the delicate-souled reader is advised to keep his fond illusions intact, and read something else.
For the solitary reader who remains, I can tell you that the short answer is that mostly you steal your ideas.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
A Peak Behind the HERMETIC MILLENNIA
Normally, I do not take up space explaining my books or answering questions about them. They are meant to speak for themselves, or not at all. If there are jests or allusions to other authors in my work, these are spoilt if I need to amplify them.
And, frankly, my books are patterned after the kind of book I like to read: lighthearted escapist fare, full of action and fury, with relatively little pondering of deep issues with which anyone would take issue.
Of course, the weasel word there is ‘relatively.’ Try as I might to keep it light, a certain amount of ponderous philosophic profundity tends, entirely without my consent, to creep into my work from some hidden hemisphere of my brain. Here I can only throw myself on the blind hope that my beloved readers will be kind enough to tolerate the flaw.
However tolerant the readers are, it is possible that this unintentional profundity obscures the plain meaning of my books, and the inattentive reader might take away a meaning the opposite of my intent.
The fault in such cases is of course mine for being unclear. While it would be more dignified and noble, no doubt, merely to endure the opprobrium my unclarity has summoned up, I confess that a certain base commercial impulse, namely, the desire to sell books, requires that I make a token protest in those few cases where the inattentiveness assumes cyclopean proportions.
A reader, whose name for courtesy’s sake I withhold, put forward this opinion about my humble work THE HERMETIC MILLENNIA:
“Some of the early bits with the variant humans were interesting, but they turned out to be kind of stereotypical when they got more screen time. Also, apparently they were all innately evil because they didn’t adhere to monogamous Christian 1950s-small-town-America values.”
I think this is a misreading of the text.
Indeed, the very opposite is the meaning of the work, had only I been able to make it clear enough. I would like to think that this one reader is alone in his interpretation, and to assure any other readers that, if you read with eyes unclouded by hate, you will see what the point of the book actually is.
Unseemly as it is for an author to have to explain his point, I myself am sometimes curious as to what an author had in mind, and should there be a solitary reader out there curious about my work, I am happy to embarrass myself before all the rest of the incurious world to satisfy that solitary fellow.
So instead of describing where or how the misreading went wrong, let me explain something about the writing process, at least in my case, and give you a peak behind the curtain to show you how a professional writer makes his auctorial decisions.
The short answer is that mostly you steal your ideas.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
February 22, 2013
The Fourth of the Big Three
During the Golden Age of Science Fiction, the Big Three Names were the three authors with the greatest prestige in the John W Campbell Jr stable of authors: Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and one now is unfairly unrecognized, A.E. van Vogt. His obscurity may be due in part to a malign attempt by Damon Knight to undermine his career.
These days, the term ‘The Big Three’ is still sometimes used, but the third name is given as Ray Bradbury or Arthur C Clarke. Why this should be is also unclear, since no one linked the names at the time, but, again, it may be due to Damon Knight, who for all I know is also responsible for the hole in the ozone layer.
Arthur C Clarke is a fairly convincing stand-in for a Campbell-style writer, and indeed sold his first story to Campbell (“Loophole”, in 1946 Astounding), so this may be why he is often photo-shopped into the position A.E. van Vogt was airbrushed out of. But I would argue that there was a theme, or even a philosophy, to Campbellian fiction, and that Clarke represents and older, and perhaps more literate, style of science fiction harkening back to H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon.
I submit to your candid judgment that Arthur C Clarke has a particular sense of a broader vision, and yet it is a darker vision, of man and his ultimate fate in the universe which is keeping with H.G. Wells and alien to Campbell.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Wright’s Writing Corner: Aristrocracy
The beautiful and talented Mrs Wright continues her alphabetical explanation of the Great Ideas of Western Literature:
In Today’s Post, I have finally returned to the subject of writing about the great ideas. Today’s idea: Aristocracy.
Come by and share your thoughts on your favorite nobleman…hero or villain.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
February 20, 2013
Recommended Athiest Reading
I am breaking my Friday-Only writing rule to answer what I think is an excellent question by a Mr Ruiz:
Who do you consider to be the most articulate and firmly-grounded spokesmen for atheism? Who did you read and admire prior to your conversion?
In not quite Chronological Order:
1. Lucretius (albeit technically a type of polytheistic deist)
2.The anonymous author of the TREATISE OF THE THREE IMPOSTORS (admittedly, this one I recommend more for its interest as a historical curio than for the rigor of its logic)
3. Thomas Paine Age of Reason (again, technically a Deist rather than an atheist, but close enough).
4. Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll– Nearly anything by this author is worth reading for the committed and serious atheist.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Twinterview
My beautiful and talented wife has an announcement:
I am being interviewed tonight on Twitter at 9pm EST with hashtag #sffwrtcht.
Come by and read about how I came to be the author of the PROSPERO'S DAUGHTER series. Ask questions. Say hi. Or just lurk and chuckle as we discover the answer to the question: will Twitter, which I have almost never used before, get the better of me?
Thanks!
L. Jagi Lamplighter (Wright)
February 19, 2013
Illustrations of the Tao
To forestall the inevitable tedium of repeating what should be a well known idea among all literate men, allow me to quote some examples of what philosopher’s call Natural Law, or Objective Morality.
The examples here are not being used to prove the maxims given. It is not being argued, for example, that merely because all literate races of man extol generosity and excoriate adultery that generosity is good and adultery is bad.
The examples are merely offered to establish the phenomenon to be explained, namely, that men of every culture and age agree on the moral principles, even if they disagree on how those principles are to be applied.
If morality were manmade, as positive law is, or as writing systems are, then they were differ as positive law codes differ, or differ as much as cuneiform differs from runes or hieroglyphs or ideographs or alphabets. But what we have here is a collection of statements, some originally written in runes or alphabets or hieroglyphs or ideograms, which all express the same few moral imperatives in different words. That indicates that this part of the moral law of man is not manmade but natural. Hence it is called Natural Law.
Myself, I would argue that the moral laws exists in the human heart due to the intention of the supernatural creator of man, who also has the authority to command obedience to them, and the power to disseminate these laws instantaneously at creation into every rational spirit. However, other theories can be argued as well. What cannot be argued is that there is no phenomenon to be explained by any theory, no agreement on the natural moral code.
The words below are those of CS Lewis.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Illustrations of the Tao
To forestall the inevitable tedium of repeating what should be a well known idea among all literate men, allow me to quote some examples of what philosopher’s call Natural Law, or Objective Morality.
The examples here are not being used to prove the maxims given. It is not being argued, for example, that merely because all literate races of man extol generosity and excoriate adultery that generosity is good and adultery is bad.
The examples are merely offered to establish the phenomenon to be explained, namely, that men of every culture and age agree on the moral principles, even if they disagree on how those principles are to be applied.
If morality were manmade, as positive law is, or as writing systems are, then they were differ as positive law codes differ, or differ as much as cuneiform differs from runes or hieroglyphs or ideographs or alphabets. But what we have here is a collection of statements, some originally written in runes or alphabets or hieroglyphs or ideograms, which all express the same few moral imperatives in different words. That indicates that this part of the moral law of man is not manmade but natural. Hence it is called Natural Law.
Myself, I would argue that the moral laws exists in the human heart due to the intention of the supernatural creator of man, who also has the authority to command obedience to them, and the power to disseminate these laws instantaneously at creation into every rational spirit. However, other theories can be argued as well. What cannot be argued is that there is no phenomenon to be explained by any theory, no agreement on the natural moral code.
The words below are those of CS Lewis.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
February 17, 2013
Mike the Martian and the Attack of the Argumentroid
One of the argumentroids of Robert Heinlein has annoyed me for years.
I was irked not the least because this particular argumentroid suckered me in my innocent youth, back when I was so proud of being a nonconformist, as were we all in my generation, and so proud of believing exactly what all the other nonconformists believed.
But let me first explain what my silly made-up word is supposed to mean.
I have always held that Science Fiction was never actually fiction stories about science. Instead, it is stories about fictional science. Writers routinely commended for the “hardness” of their hard SF, that is to say, commended for their realism, such as Larry Niven or Isaac Asimov or Arthur C Clarke, will introduce teleportation or psycho-history or faster than light drives or telepathy, none of which has any more scientific realism than flying carpets that run on happy thoughts and fairy dust.
And Robert Heinlein, the Dean of Science fiction, was like them a past master of the art of making their unscientific baloney seem scientific.
The writer’s chore is to lull the dragons of skepticism which guard the castle of the mind so that the waking dream of the tale can slip into the gates. The reader places himself into a half-hypnotic half-awake state known as “suspension of disbelief” where, for the sake of the story, the reader is willing to swallow the baloney if only his imagination is given enough excuse. In other words, it is not scientific accuracy that science fiction seeks or delivers, but scientific verisimilitude.
It is not supposed to be scientific, but scientifroid, if I may coin an awkward term for some hulking shape that looks vaguely like science in a dim light, but is not.
This is done in science fiction by mimicking some of the tropes of science. For example, Larry Niven posits in his ‘Known Space’ yarns that the law of conservation of momentum applies to teleportation booths, so that it is more expensive to teleport from the North Pole to the Equator than to the South Pole, because of the difference in angular momentum between a body at rest at either Pole versus a body being carried along at the speed of the rotation of the Earth. Teleportation is still hooey, but it seems more scientific if it suffers a reasonable scientific (or, rather scientifroid) limitation.
Now, it has been known since the ancient Greeks erected their first shrine to the Muses that poets and playwrights and novelists who have the craft of working this half-hypnotic trick of making the unlikely seem likely have a dangerous or divine power.
The novelist has the most powerful rhetorical tool of all at his command. He has an audience that willingly is attempting to suspend their disbelief for the sake of the story. This means, unfortunately, that a certain amount of mental litter, opinions, editorializing, propaganda and “spin” also can make it past the dragons of skepticism while they slumber.
And therein lies a certain danger, because the editorializing is not written like an editorial, where the readers knows the editor is opining an opinion; it is written like a tale. We judge editorials on their rhetorical skill and soundness of argument, their power to appeal to the passions and the reason. We judge tales on their entertainment value, their power to amuse and divert.
And, of course, the amusement value of any editorial hidden in a tale has nothing to do with the soundness of the argument given. If the reader already has a definite opinion opposing the writer’s, or if the reader has hair-triggered skepticism in general, will he be likely even to notice he is being played for a sap.
Because an editorial put across in a story will not actually put forth an argument, except on very rare occasions indeed. It put forth an argumentoid, a hulking shape that looks like an argument in a dim light.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
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