John C. Wright's Blog, page 166
February 25, 2011
You've Come a Long Way Down, Baby!
Guys versus Men: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704409004576146321725889448.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read
Hat tip to Catholic and Enjoying It. http://markshea.blogspot.com/2011/02/fascinating-piece-on-guys-vs-men.html
The money quote:
I see [puerile shallowness] as an expression of our cultural uncertainty about the social role of men. It’s been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate courage, physical prowess or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal was to prove their competence as protectors and providers. Today, however, with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete, even a little embarrassing.
Today’s pre-adult male is like an actor in a drama in which he only knows what he shouldn’t say. He has to compete in a fierce job market, but he can’t act too bossy or self-confident. He should be sensitive but not paternalistic, smart but not cocky. To deepen his predicament, because he is single, his advisers and confidants are generally undomesticated guys just like him.
Single men have never been civilization’s most responsible actors; they continue to be more troubled and less successful than men who deliberately choose to become husbands and fathers. So we can be disgusted if some of them continue to live in rooms decorated with “Star Wars” posters and crushed beer cans and to treat women like disposable estrogen toys, but we shouldn’t be surprised.
February 24, 2011
Mr. McCabe and the Long Sought Utopia
Let me post a link to the book HERETICS by G.K. Chesterton, the author most famous for his Father Brown detective stories, albeit this polymath also wrote apologetic, political and social observations, biographies, plays, trifles, and even a science fiction yarn or two.
As an atheist, I read the essays of Joseph McCabe long before I read a word, or even heard the name, of Mr. G.K. Chesterton.
So it is with a peculiar sense of revisiting a long-forgotten childhood scene that I come across the following quote by McCabe, part of an ongoing (but apparently congenial) debate between the two. Call me unobservant, but I had not known the two were contemporary, much less engaged in a joust.
Here is McCabe:
“Mr. Chesterton [...] is as serious as I am in his ultimate purpose, and I respect him for that. He knows, as I do, that humanity stands at a solemn parting of the ways. Towards some unknown goal it presses through the ages, impelled by an overmastering desire of happiness. To-day it hesitates, lightheartedly enough, but every serious thinker knows how momentous the decision may be.
It is, apparently, deserting the path of religion and entering upon the path of secularism. Will it lose itself in quagmires of sensuality down this new path, and pant and toil through years of civic and industrial anarchy, only to learn it had lost the road, and must return to religion? Or will it find that at last it is leaving the mists and the quagmires behind it; that it is ascending the slope of the hill so long dimly discerned ahead, and making straight for the long-sought Utopia? This is the drama of our time, and every man and every woman should understand it.
February 22, 2011
The Death of Higher Beings in Science Fiction
So here is the link, followed by a comment:
I happened across this essay by Alexei and Cory Panshin called ‘The Death of Science Fiction.’ The half-joking theory is that Robert Heinlein’s NUMBER OF THE BEAST killed off science fiction.
The authors describe a change between Victorian science fiction and modern science fiction.
By Victorian SF they mean HG Wells and Olaf Stapledon, with their cosmic visions of man evolving into the remotest future, either into diabolic Morlocks, or into the godlike Eighteenth Men.
By ‘modern’ they mean the Hard SF of John W. Campbell Jr. and his three star writers, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and A.E. van Vogt.
The principle difference, so the Panshins argue, was a loss of the cosmic sense of wonder at the appalling sweep of evolution, from deep past to remotest future, and the substitution of the Heinlein’s ‘competent man’ or Van Vogt’s superman, who overcomes by means of his superiority in technical ability or an advanced non-Aristotlian ‘thought system.’
The Panshins go on to argue that a similar cusp occurred between Campbellian Hard SF and the New Wave, which they call (with saccharine crude cuteness) ‘New Head’ SF.
The subject of the essay is the causes behind the the death of Campbellian SF and its rebirth as New Wave.
The bottom line is that the ‘competent man’ SF hero has innate limitations (for what happens when he meets something beyond his competence?). When confronted with those limitations Heinlein (and by extension, the whole Campbellian philosophy) collapses into solipsism, such as is painfully on display in NUMBER OF THE BEAST, both as a theme and as a literal plot mechanism.
I confess I am not persuaded of the main points in the essay, for reasons cramped space and menacing deadlines permit me not to relate. I will merely say that authors write from the viewpoint of narrowly conformist Leftwing piety, not even hinting that any other world view could exist, and so there is no examination of the axioms of their argument. It is presented as a take it or leave it deal. I leave it.
But the essay is rich enough in insights and germs of new ideas that it can be enjoyed even by one skeptical of its persuasive value.
February 19, 2011
Steampunk is a Diabolical Czech Invention
This is a tale of dreams lost and dreams found again, a tale of wonder. But first, I will irk you, dear reader, with a discussion of definitions.
Damon Knight once famously defined ‘science fiction’ as “whatever I am pointing at when I say ‘science fiction’!” — this is a perfectly useful definition, if you happen to have Damon Knight on hand to come by your house and point at your science fiction bookshelf, so he can tell you whether a technothriller, lost race tale, magical realism tale, science fantasy, vampire romance, space opera or Cthulhu mythos tale or other sub-genre is really science fiction or not.
I have a simplistic one word definition. If it is extraterrestrial and futuristic, it is science fiction; if it is otherworldly and nostalgic, it is fantasy. I realize this is two words rather than one, but I am an SF writer, not a mathematician, dammit.
What do we do, then, now that science fiction is such an old genre that our earliest works of future speculation are themselves nostalgic? The era of the Extraordinary Voyages of Jules Verne is as lost and past to us as the Third Age of Middle Earth. How can my one word definition explain the futuristic nostalgia that is steampunk?
The answer is: it cannot, darn it. I have to call Damon Knight and have him come over to my house and point at my manuscripts, or otherwise I cannot make them science fiction. And Mr Knight is getting tired.
This lead us immediately to ask: who dared to invent this ‘steampunk’ genre, whose only point in life is to make it hard for me to make up a one-word definition? Is not steampunk a DIABOLICAL INVENTION? Is it not a Communist Plot from Czechoslovakia?
That answer is “Of Course”! For behold! Here is the film Vynález zkázy, the DIABOLICAL INVENTION, which, if it is not the steam-powered Holy Grail of Steampunkishness, it surely ought to be.
February 18, 2011
Wright's Writing Corner – Plot We've Got
Slightly tardy, here is Wednesday’s writing column.
Skip on over to the journal of Mrs. Wright for an interesting insight on the nature of plot and significance. It is not an insight I have heard before, and may be original to her.
Postmodern Blasphemy: Deconstruction and Darkness
An afterthought posted here draws a distinction between deconstruction (which I was criticizing) and dark, pagan, grim or melancholic fantasy (which I was not).
This is just a short follow up to those earlier posts. A reader (whose family no doubt has some blood of Liosalfar in their veins) asks:
Speaking of deconstructions, are you familiar with Poul Anderson’s “The Queen of Air and Darkness”?
I have read it, and enjoyed it. It is one of Anderson’s more famous works.
Are you offering that up as an example of deconstruction? If so, would beg to differ.
Spoiler after the cut. I give away the suprise ending. Don’t look until you’ve read the story.
And if you have not read it, hang your head in shame! Turn yourself in to the Reading Police of the World Science Fiction Guild, so your fanboy card can be ripped up, and you will be classed as a a “mundane” until you rectify the oversight.
February 17, 2011
Fritz Leiber
A few weeks ago, the 100th anniversary of author Fritz
Leiber’s birth passed largely unnoticed. The literary
community offered up no tributes. No celebrations or
symposiums were held. Perhaps that should come as
little surprise. None of Leiber’s books are in stock at my
local chain bookstores, and most of his writing is out of
print. Yet few authors of the 20th century anticipated the
storytelling of the current day with more prescience than
Leiber…
Read the whole thing then go out an buy at least two Fritz Leiber paperbacks, you young whippersnappers!
Kids today! Say “Grok!” or “R’Lyeh!” and they look at you like you are from the dread and dreaded planet Ploor. They don’t even know what ether is, or why it is QX for the ether to be clear. Do they even know enough to fear the beautiful but evil Sorainya of Gyronchi, Queen of the End of Time? Do they know why Tweel of Mars says “one-one two, yes! two-two four, no!” or why the Ninth Barsoomian Ray is so needed to preserve life on that remote, dessicated planet, lest the Sorns perish?
Now git off my lawn!
Postmodern Blasphemies: An Afterthought
I don’t regard this statement as controversial, or rising above the level of a platitude: everyone who has ever complained that violence on television glorifies violence in the eyes of impressionable children says the same.
However, I do regret that I did not take the time to define what I meant by “cynical nihilism” and to distinguish it from the noble yet doomed melancholy of paganism, which, in my humble opinion, Robert E. Howard captures as well as any man not born in Homer’s day.
My criticism of nihilism is actually rather narrow, and I mean not to mislead anyone into thinking I would direct the same criticism against the broader target of all dark, pagan or melancholy books, such as the work of Edgar Allan Poe, or E.R. Eddison, or Michael Moorcock, or the unjustly under-appreciated dark fantasy of Darrell Schweitzer. For that matter, Tolkien’s work itself is redolent with melancholia. I would not call any of this nihilism.
I was also not complaining about originality in writers, or re-imagining old tropes, or using elements of horror or whatnot. One imagines such objections issuing from all the usual suspects: it is the default counter-attack. Deconstructionism is not the same as originality, and not the same as any dark or negative portrayal of tropes or characters other writers portray positively. Herman Melville, for example, turns the tropes of pagan epic on its head by placing epic characters in a New England whaling ship covered with bones the Pequod — named after the final war and massacre that crushed Indian power to resist the White Man. But I would not call his work nihilism. Dark, bitter, ironic, bathetic, godless, despairing–yes. But it is human despair, and has no part in that cool and detached inhumanity the nihilists love.
Perhaps another day will afford me leisure to expound my ideas to the four people reading my blog (Hi, Mom!) and my cat, Graymalkin.
I also regret that I did not take the time to find an excuse to post another picture of the Catwoman.
Postmodern Blasphemies: Superversive Agrees
Only posting a link and a mess of quotes!
A follow up to a previous post, Superversive and his commenters have an intelligent discussion of the issue of postmodern nihilism in fantasy: http://superversive.livejournal.com/94056.html
February 15, 2011
Democracy in Outer Space
Over at the Big Hollywood website, where conservative gather to bellyache (not without some justice) about Hollywood lockstep leftist conformity, one of the bellyaches elicited a belly laugh from me.
Ned Rice writes in high-pitched purple patriotic style about his disdain for soap operas and melodramas starring royalty. http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/nrice/2011/02/10/off-with-the-heads-of-hollywoods-misguided-royalty-genre/
My main problem with The King’s Speech is that the character we’re supposed to identify with, the down-trodden-schmuck-who-can’t-catch-a-break-but-we-root-for-him–anyway-because-for-all-his-faults-he’s-got-a-heart-of-gold just happens to be…THE KING OF ENGLAND!
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