John C. Wright's Blog, page 168
February 3, 2011
That's Not a Knife. This is a Knife.
Those who scoff at the heroism of characters in books, it is refreshing to see the real life models on which they are based.
http://www.myrepublica.com/portal/index.php?action=news_details&news_id=27100
A lone soldier, armed with a khukuri knife, is riding a train when it is attacked by 40 robbers. They take jewelry, necklaces, cellphones, laptops–when when they start stripping an eighteen year old girl to rape her, she calls out to the soldier, “Help me, a sister!” and he rises, draws his kukri, kills three and wounds eight, and the others flee. They were armed with swords and (apparently) empty pistols.
His name is Bishnu Shrestha of Baidam. May this name live in glory.
For those of you don’t know what a kukri looks like:
Only Posting on Friday!
I have spoken with my wife, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and she commands that, since I have a deadline looming with the editor for my next book, I can only post on Fridays for the next six weeks or so, albeit from time to time I may post a link.
A link like this one! http://www.space.com/159-strangest-alien-planets-447.html- with this must new info about exoplanets flooding into the scientific world, any sciffy writer who has to make up his own world rather than speculating about one of these is wasting a valuable resource. I, for one, would like to read a tale set on GJ 1214b, which is 6 times the size of earth, but not a gas giant; or HAT-P-11b which orbits every four days around his primary, and is larger than Neptune, a fire giant; or the planet in the globular cluster M4 which is only 2 billion years younger than the big bang; or SWEEPS-10 who orbits his star once every ten hours, at a distance of 740,000 miles — which sounds like a setting for an RA Lafferty story.
February 2, 2011
Science Fiction, Faith, and Catwoman
Dear Mr. Wright:
As a fan of your science fiction writing, I’ve always wondered about the relationship between this particular aspect of your life and your religious beliefs.
Oddly enough, I have wondered about that too.
I would completely understand if any of the following questions are too personal in nature, but insofar as you would feel comfortable answering any of them,
I am pretty much immune to the reticence, sound judgment, and humility which makes artists unwilling to make fools of themselves in public, therefore let us proceed, no matter what the question!
January 31, 2011
Science Fiction and Wonder and Humbug
John Hutchins asks:
Does the Left Behind book count as SciFi in your estimation?
Do things that are heavily influenced by religion like Dune, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and others count as being religious in nature?
Excellent question! Allow me to wax pedantic:
Let me start by saying I am not qualified to answer. I have not read the LEFT BEHIND series. My opinion is necessarily based on hearsay and ignorance. But I used to work for a newspaper, so ignorance of the topic is no excuse for not filling up the column space!
At a guess, from what I hear of it, I would not consider LEFT BEHIND to fit my definition of science fiction.
On firmer ground, I can say I do not consider the science fiction stories DUNE or BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, nor the space-opera fairy story STAR WARS to be religious fiction.
Science fiction stories are poetical or emotional accounts of man’s relationship to the scientific view of the natural universe and the Darwinian view of the origins of life. They are basically wonders stories about the wonders (or horrors) of science, of change and progress. Fantasy stories are the nostalgia of the scientific age for the magic of the medieval and pagan world view, or, at least, the view reflected in their epics, chansons, folk tales, and wonder stories. Religious stories are those primarily meant for edifying the faith, whether they contain elements of wonder or not.
Science fiction by this definition is the opposite of, for example, the Aeneid of Virgil, which showed the eternal laws of the divine gods and the eternal order of the universe as establishing the eternal city of Rome and her central place in it. Science fiction is about change and emphasizes the instability, the non-eternal nature, of those things we would otherwise take for granted, whether the change is, for example, the degeneration of Man into Eloi and Morlock by AD 802701, or the change is the rise of Big Brother in Airstrip One by AD 1984.
All stories, to some degree, are a humbug.
January 28, 2011
Nurturing Islamic Science Fiction
This is from an article entitled HOW ISLAM NURTURED SCIENCE FICTION, which actually says nothing much about how Islam nurtured science fiction, and makes no mention of Julesbrahim al-Verne or Herbdul Jibril al-Wells or even Jalalibad W. al-Campbell, Jr., and how their devotion to the faith of the Prophet drove the growth of modern speculative fiction.
No, the article is actually meant to encourages (presumably Mohammedan) science fiction writers to write within the Islamic world view. This encouragement takes the form of drawing very strained analogies between Koranic verses and Sciffy tropes. Here are the core paragraphs:
Science fiction has been described as a literature of ideas. Knowledge and reflection are the source springs of ideas. As far as I know, no other religion in the world puts more emphasis on seeking knowledge, pondering and reflecting than Islam does.
[…]
The very first Sura (Chapter) of the Qur’an Al-Fateha states: (All praise is God’s, the Lord of the worlds). The plural “worlds” should be noted. Obviously, ours is not the only world with intelligent life. There are other worlds out there – extraterrestrial life, ripe for the imaginations of science fiction writers.
Defining the Indefinable, Defending the Indefensible
In reference to this essay here, a reader asks:
“This may be an odd point to ask this, but how are you defining ‘leftist’? For example, are you describing a garden variety member of the Democratic party or something else?”
This is not odd at all. A call for a definition is always in order, since most disagreement is based on improperly defined terms.
Alas, I am not defining the word Leftist. I cannot. They have spent so much of their time and effort to avoid, elude, evade, and weasel out of defining themselves, that no mere mortal has any ability to find a label that can fit on them.
I do not think the movement, for which I have no satisfactory name, can be defined.
January 25, 2011
Social Insecurity
What is a Ponzi Scheme? Ponzi was a confidence trickster who realized he could pay off investors their principle and interest by attracting a second group of investors and using the money loaned from them to pay the first group; and then a third group of investors would pay the second group; and a fourth group would pay the third; and the scheme could work indefinitely without any good or service of any value ever being produced or sold, PROVIDED each group of investors is larger than the group before them, and provided there is no upper limit to the number of groups. You borrow one dollar from one guy promising to pay him back two: you borrow two dollars from two men promising to pay them back four; and four dollars from four guys promising them to pay back eight; in only a few iterations, you are borrowing from the entire population of the earth.
The problem with a Ponzi Scheme is that it cannot last forever.
January 23, 2011
Gnosticism in Action
Here I offer only one additional piece of evidence that the analogy is sound. This is from an article in the Guardian, by Stephen Kinser, a former New York Times bureau chief. I trust that no one dispute that the UK Guardian and the New York Times are respectable representatives of the dominant philosophy of the age.
Founded by idealists who wanted to make the world a better place, [the human rights movement] has in recent years become the vanguard of a new form of imperialism.
January 21, 2011
Praise for Clockwork Phoenix 3
Strange Horizons offers a flattering review of CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 3, and I urge everyone to rush right out and buy 14 copies of the book for the Feast Day of St. Agnes to give to friends, relatives, mendicants and cellmates.
Somewhat to my embarrassed surprise, a story by yours truly was singled out for fulsome praise, which is odd, since, when I have my minions consult the master-list, I do not have any of the relatives or loved ones of this particular reviewer in the torture-crypt buried beneath my laboratory-fortress in Antarctica and maintained by the loyal acolytes of the Unspeakable Abomination of Ka’uu. Neither has my beautiful but evil daughter used her Tibetan mind-powers on anyone recently. Nor is this reviewer someone I have replaced with a soulless robot-duplicate created for me by Rotwang, the Inventor.
The only other possible options are (1) the Astro-Nazis from their nearby hidden vril-powered spaceship base are still annoyed with me for freeing Godzilla from the glacier, thereby destroying the only remaining corridor leading along the Earth’s axis to the hollow interior of the planet, and, continuing their petty conspiracies against me, are using this review to lull me into a false sense of security (I often have little quarrels like this with my Astro-Nazi neighbors. Anarctica is rather crowded these days, what with forgotten Nazi spaceship bases, Shoggoths, and the Thing From Another World, the Savage Land, that annoying Arthur Gordon Pym fellow, and so on) or (2) The reviewer, Hannah Strom-Martin actually liked the story.
I think option (2) the less likely, but read and judge for yourself.
* * *
John C. Wright’s “Murder in Metachronopolis,” for my money the collection’s crowning achievement, also starts with a basic scenario: a gumshoe is offered a commission. But Jake Frontino, the titular “Meta” in this noir/SF mash-up, is no ordinary detective—he’s a detective in a world where time travelers have seized control and the murder he’s investigating is his own. The irritating nature of this conundrum is not lost on Jake, or on Wright, who is smart enough to employ satire as a literary weapon against the expected time travel clichés. As Jake explains it to a pesky Time Lord:
“I don’t take cases from Time Masters, see? All you guys are the same. The murderer turns out to be yourself, or you when you were younger. Or me. Or an alternate version of me or you who turns out to be his own father fighting himself because for no reason except that that’s the way it was when the whole thing started. Which it never did, on account of there’s no beginning and no reason for any of it. Oh brother, you time travelers make me sick.” (p. 226)
Sing it, child. Wright’s own tale avoids these pitfalls by understanding the time travel narrative perhaps better than any author who has yet attempted it. Just as time travel can produce several stories out of the same event, Wright crafts several narratives out of his premise: the one he initially gives us, in which events and possible events are told out of order through a series of thirty “chapters,” a second narrative with a completely different tone that is revealed by reading the chapters sequentially, and an implied Choose Your Own Adventure option, which results in an infinitely entertaining mish-mash. Nice trick, that. But Wright isn’t done. His grasp of character—and of the moral dilemmas inherent in playing around with time—are no less keen. The world-weary Jake is an appealing narrator, guiding us through the chrome-plated wilderness as seemingly familiar territory blows up in our faces. How did Wright manage to use the requisite “Do we go back and kill Hitler?” question as both a joke and the moral center of Jake’s tale? You’re going to want to go back to the beginning and figure it out. There are infinite realities in time travel—let’s hope one of them contains an award for Mr. Wright.
* * *
The full review is here.
January 19, 2011
Gnosticism, or The Return of Simon the Magician
My answer is that the miracles of modern technology were not created ex nihilo by Thomas Edison, but were the outgrowth of medieval developments in logic and natural philosophy, the institutions of the university. The Middle Ages had as vibrant an intellectual life as that of Ancient Athens. In any case, it is not the technology of the Modern Age I find disquieting about it, it is the theology.
No doubt that answer strikes the modern ear as odd. Surely we have no theology any longer? Surely we have developed and advanced to the point where we can ignore every problem raised and answered by that science?
No. Every era and every man has some sort of theological and philosophical and metaphysical stance that informs his world view. Those who do not have an articulate stance have an inarticulate one. Those who do not ponder the issues merely accept uncritically, even unconsciously, the popular conceptions or misconceptions.
What I dislike about the Modern Age is that the modern theological stance of the postchristian world is a prechristian heresy called Gnosticism.
So it is not the modern things about the modern age I like. Those modern things, the science and logic, come from the Middle Ages when Christianity was in flower, from Albertus Magnus and William of Occam and Roger Bacon and from Saint Thomas Aquinas. The ancient things, this oldest and creepiest of heresies, the teachings of Simon the Magician, come from the dead, pagan mystery cult called Gnosticism. So it is not the modern things about the modern age I dislike; it is the long-dead things from the darkness before Christianity.
Since there are authors and stories I greatly admire who are openly Gnostic, such as AEGYPT by John Crowley and VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by David Lindsay, as well as work greatly admired who are tacitly Gnostic, such as DARK CITY directed by Alex Proyas, or THE SHADOW MEN by A.E. van Vogt, and personal friends of long standing acquaintance who are, or toy with being, Gnostics, it behooves me to voice the source of my discontent with this heresy. I attempt no rigorous logical debunking: what follows is nothing more than list of the problems Gnosticism raises which I think insurmountable.
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