John C. Wright's Blog, page 167
February 14, 2011
Postmodern Blasphemies against Myth
Here is an essay on the genre of high fantasy and swords and sorcery which I hope will be studied seriously, both now in and in years to come, by all who read, write, and review in the genre.
The Bankrupt Nihilism of Our Fallen Fantasists by Leo Grin. Read it here:
I don’t particularly care for fantasy per se. What I actually cherish is something far more rare: the elevated prose poetry, mythopoeic subcreation, and thematic richness that only the best fantasy achieves, and that echoes in important particulars the myths and fables of old.This realization eliminates, at a stroke, virtually everything written under the banner of fantasy today.
The mere trappings of the genre do nothing for me when wedded to the now-ubiquitous interminable soap-opera plots (a conservative friend of mine once accurately derided “fat fantasy” cycles such as Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time as “Lord of the Rings 90210”). Nor do they impress me in the least when placed into the hands of writers clearly bored with the classic mythic undertones of the genre, and who try to shake things up with what can best be described as postmodern blasphemies against our mythic heritage.
February 13, 2011
Atlas Shrugged
To my infinite surprise, this actually looks like they took the book seriously. I was expecting another STARSHIP TROOPERS debacle.
One cannot tell from the trailer, of course, what they changed and what they kept, but unlike the trailer for GREEN HORNET, I do not see anything here indicating that the film-makers despised the source material.
Maybe this is a sign. Perhaps films like this get made when a sufficient number of people, weary with the false narratives, airy promises, and empty rhetoric of the idolaters of the all powerful Nanny State, would like instead to see a return to a more honest, rational and practical way of life. Perhaps. Or this could be a final farewell before the euro-collapse of the American Dream.
February 11, 2011
The Mechanical versus Tactical View of History
It was not until this week that it occurred to me to question something I have assumed about the nature of history and the way it unfolds. It is an assumption no ancient or medieval thinker would have made, and it is an assumption few modern thinkers can avoid.
The assumption is that the process in history, particularly the process by which social and political orders become corrupt, is akin to an inevitable mechanical process, a matter of incentives and disincentives, and therefore a process wise statesmen leading a virtuous body politic could slow, stop, or reverse, if the proper corrective process were applied, either wise laws or the indoctrination of certain habits of public virtue.
I have, in other words, always assumed political economics was a matter of social engineering. It is a non-supernatural and mechanical view of history.
February 10, 2011
The Abomination of Desolation
From the Office of the District Attorney in Philadelphia:
Viable babies were born. Gosnell killed them by plunging scissors into their spinal cords. He taught his staff to do the same.
This is a remarkable moment in American life: A man is killing actual living, gurgling, bouncing babies on an industrial scale – and it barely makes the papers. Had he plunged his scissors into the spinal cord of a Democrat politician in Arizona, then The New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC and everyone else would be linking it to Sarah Palin’s uncivil call for dramatic cuts in government spending. But “Doctor” Kermit Gosnell’s mound of corpses is apparently entirely unconnected to the broader culture.
Why? Well, because it’s all about a woman’s “right to choose”. What women? Well, how about the misses Robyn Reid and Davida Johnson:
FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD Robyn Reid didn’t want an abortion. But when her grandmother forcibly took her to an abortion clinic one wintry day in 1998, Reid figured she’d just tell the doctor her wishes and then sneak away.
Instead, Kermit Gosnell barked: “I don’t have time for this!” He then ripped off her clothes, spanked her, wrestled her onto a dirty surgical stretcher, tied her flailing arms and legs down and pumped sedatives into her until she quit screaming and lost consciousness, she told the Daily News yesterday…
In 2001, Davida Johnson changed her mind about aborting her 6-month fetus after seeing Gosnell’s dazed, bloodied patients in his recovery room, she said. But in the treatment room, Gosnell’s staffers ignored her protests, smacked her, tied her arms down and sedated her into unconsciousness, she said. She awoke no longer pregnant.
February 8, 2011
Buried Antarctic Lake May Hide Prehistoric or Unknown Life
Hat tip to kmo for this horrifying newsflash:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/04/us-russia-antarctica-lake-idINTRE7135MB20110204
For 15 million years, an icebound lake has remained sealed deep beneath Antarctica’s frozen crust, possibly hiding prehistoric or unknown life. Now Russian scientists are on the brink of piercing through to its secrets.
February 7, 2011
The Age of Martyrs
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2011-02-07-column07_ST_N.htm
I was looking up the name of some obscure minority to be the ruling power in a future century. My theory was that no Roman in the First Century could have imagined the world where the world would be dominated by an obscure cult from the province of Judea in one corner of the Empire would dominate the world, and by a language, people and culture springing from the Tin Islands near Thule from the opposite corner of the Empire, where the savages held back by Hadrian’s wall painted themselves blue with Woad, and burnt captives alive in wicker baskets. Likewise, the imperial and hegemonic powers of the future will springs from corners of the world currently obscure.
So for the most frivolous reason imaginable I became aware of the Copts.
Their two or three centuries of persecution as heretics from my Church were followed by twelve or thirteen centuries under the persecution as dhimmi infidels under the heel of the haughty Moslem conquerer. As the fortunes of history turn, in some decades the Christian minorities rose to second-class citizenship status, in other falling to the status of slaves, livestock, or vermin to be eraticated.Their history is merely a long bloody record of genocide and hatred akin to that suffered by the Jews, and, in that part of the world, by the same hands.
And they are merely one of many Christian sects throughout the lands traditionaly and anciently Christian in North Africa, Asia Minor, and the Near East.
When I was an atheist, I was, of course, completely unaware of Christian persecutions in other lands, and floated along in happy ignorance, believing that most religious persecutions were by Christians against others, not by others against Christians. Now that I am awake, I have heard statistics claiming two-thirds of all crimes of violent oppression against religious minorities worldwide are performed against Christians. Far more have died in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century for professing the name of Christ than in the ancient world.
This is the age of martyrs.
February 5, 2011
Progress Report!
My favorite exchange of dialog is between Menelaus “Meany Louse” Montrose, a gunslinger from the Free and Armed Republic of Greater Texas, circa AD 2210, and Drosselmeyer, a warlock of the Old Iron Dreams Coven of the haunted ruins of Detroit, circa AD 4400. The gunslinger is carrying the warlock on his back out of a prison camp where archeologists of the year AD 10505 have taken them and other cryo-suspended revenants exiled from former millenniums.
With apologies to my Wicca friends and Christian friends alike, the exchange runs as follows:
Edifying the Faith via Rocketry and Rayguns
Let us look at a misleading answer, a better answer, and also ask why answer the question at all?
As befits a discussion of Christianity, the last question shall be first. Why bother debating which genre and subgenre tales might fit in? Most readers have eclectic tastes, and do not care if a unicorn or a raygun or a vampire is on the cover, provided the book is good. Who, beside from the marketing departments or the art department and the clerks shelving books in the bookstore, cares what labels we paste on genres, or where we draw the boundary lines?
The answer, dear reader, is that you, dear reader, care about where the metes and bounds of genres fall.
If you did not care, neither the marketing departments nor the clerks shelving books in different sections of the store nor the art department trying to decide whether to paint a bathing beauty riding a unicorn on the cover or a bathing beauty shooting a raygun or a bathing beauty in black leather staking and/or kissing a brooding vampire would trouble themselves to make it easier for you, the book buying public, to find works to your taste.
You care because of the way the human mind works, including the minds of science fiction readers: the human mind works by association.
February 4, 2011
Harvest of Stars
Let me very strongly recommend HARVEST OF STARS and STARS ARE ALSO FIRE by Poul Anderson. He is one of the only stock John W. Campbell Junior authors who never achieved the kind of fame that, for example, as Heinlein, Asimov, Herbert or Clarke did, fame that made him “too big” to be edited.
Consequently, unlike most famous authors, his later books still had the energy and imagination of his earlier books. He never wrote self-indulgent self-referencing crap like NUMBER OF THE BEAST or endless sequels to FOUNDATION or DUNE or RAMA that bigger therefore lazier authors did.
In HARVEST OF STARS, Anderson successfully writes the book that all the cyberpunk authors should have written, but didn’t, or couldn’t.
Killing Girls in China
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