John C. Wright's Blog, page 172
December 1, 2010
Wright's Writing Corner — Great Books
First, we should distinguish between the two uses of the term “great books.” For clarity's sake, I shall refer to them as great books and Great Books.
A great book is a book you love. Perhaps, it is a book that changed your life. Perhaps, it is one you want to read again and again. Perhaps, it is one that rocked your world, or uplifted you in a time of darkness. Perhaps, it stirred your heart, ignited your passion, or brought you comfort. It is a book that touched you.
A Great Book is a book that did to a whole lot of people what a great book did to you. It is the same thing on a society level: a book that rocked many people’s world; or that introduced new ideas into society; or that led millions of readers to “burn with the bliss and suffer the sorrow of all mankind.” * It is a book that so many people found great that it outlasted the sandblast of Time, which otherwise clears away all things.
So what makes a book great?
November 29, 2010
Worst Science Fiction Title Ever
The fine fellows over at SF Signal are asking all and sundry which is the biggest Sci-Fi turkey you, dear readers, have chanced across this Thanksgiving season. The question would require an ocean of ink to answer, so allow me to answer only one smaller version of the question: which science fiction or fantasy title was the biggest turkey you ever heard tell of? Not the movie, just the title. Not the book itself, just the title?
You see, titles are supposed to be evocative. The title is supposed to be a hint of magic to lure the reader in, to set the viewer wondering. For my money, the two most evocative titles ever penned are: WELL AT THE WORLD’S END. I don’t think any book can live up to the eerie sense of awe that title evokes.
The second: THE DARK IS RISING.
You see, the title THE DARK IS RISING sounds so much more unchancy and supernal than, say, a book titled THE NAZIS ARE INVADING or THE NORSEMEN RAID or MARS ATTACKS or even THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. There is something unspeakable and unnamed in the Dark, so that way before you know what or who it is, you sure don’t want your lifetime to be the time of the rise. You do not want to peer out the window over the snow and see the lampposts being extinguished one by one quite silently, or the stars.
Harlan Ellison once wrote an essay on evocative titles — my memory cannot dredge up the title or the year — where he proposed a great title would be something like THE OTHER EYE OF POLYPHEMUS. He liked the title so much he promised in the essay to write a short story with that title (a promise he has since kept). But he contrasted this with the lest evocative title he could invent: THE JOURNEY.
It tells you it is a story about someone going somewhere.
Harlan Ellison then confesses that coming up with a title as bland and meaningless as THE JOURNEY was difficult. It had taken him hours and driven him to the bottle and caused him to sweat drops like blood. It takes true anti-genius to be able to invent a title so unimaginably unmeaningful.
Well, someone matched that genius, or at least came close. When Hollywood made THE DARK IS RISING into a film, they changed the title to THE SEEKER.
It tells you it is a story about someone looking for something. Or playing quidditch.
I defy anyone, even a mad genius like Harlan Ellison, to come up with a title even more bland, unappealing, uninformative, unevocative, unmagnificent, unmagical.
THE SEEKER! A guy looking for something!
To take the most evocative title in fantasy-dom and turn it into the least is noteworthy, is not awe inspiring, for the same reason seeing corpses of cows spilled out of a train wreck of cattle cars and flung across bundles of smashed and burning freight is noteworthy.
November 22, 2010
The Fall and Rise of Science Fiction
If the editors made the claim that science fiction was popular and mainstream before Campbell, and ghettoized after, I scorn this opinion as not merely ahistorical, but absurd.
The first fathers of science fiction, Wells, Verne, and the now-forgotten Olaf Stabledon, wrote for a general audience and were admired and respected as much (or as little) as any other writers. However, the next generation of science fiction writers, including figures like Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt, and Robert E. Howard, wrote boy’s adventure fiction. Beloved as these stories are to fans like myself, they were comicbookish, aimed at children, and dealt with their themes in a childish way.
These stories are, in my fanboy opinion, simply great, but simply not great art.
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November 18, 2010
Judging a Movie by its Cover
After all, highbrow stuff is just lowbrow stuff with more good stuff in it, by which I mean, in the case of Shakespeare, ghosts and witches and fairy kings and people getting run through with swords, and in the case of Milton, war in heaven between archangels clad in gold and adamantium. In the case of Homer, there are more fight scenes on the windy plains of Troy than there are in Jackie Chan’s DRUNKEN MASTER, which consists of a fight scene leading to a fight scene with a fight scene in between, and Jackie’s doomed friend Patrocles donning his armor to face the ninja-assassin master Hector, unless I am confusing the two. Then, of course, Jackie is out for revenge, and so he has to undergo intense training with the help of a magic book of fighting techniques, or maybe his mother the goddess gets him better armor — one of those two. I remember there was fighting. Then Luke blows up the entire invulnerable city of Troy with a lucky shot into the lower thermal exhaust port. Which the stolen plans revealed was the only point of Achilles not dipped in the moat of hell, and therefore his one hidden weak spot.
So this appeals to me. Take a look.
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November 17, 2010
The Age of the Accuser
I have written in this space in recent days about the modern world view, what I here called Dehumanism. Let me say a word about that word, and also say a word about the spirit of the age.
To be a man means to seek a truth that satisfies the mind, a beauty that breaks the heart, and a good that sates the conscience. Deprive a man of any of these things, and he will find no rest, no happiness.
Consider the scene from the MATRIX movie where Cypher, one of the awakened in the real world, sells out his comrades to the machines in order to enjoy a life of pleasure he knows to be illusion.
Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.
I doubt anyone in the audience agreed with Cypher’s pragmatic empiricism: we would not be happy eating stake we knew to be nothing more than electrical stimulations having no reference to reality, or taking money we had not earned or to which we had no right, or living in a lie, no matter how comfortable. The idea that there is no truth, which is the cornerstone of the Dehumanist doctrine, reduces us all to the same moral level as that character.
The other two articles of faith in the dehumanist dogma are that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that therefore rank ugliness can be made “Art” merely by declaring it to be so; and that the conscience does not exist because all values are relative. We no longer even talk of virtues, or the strength of character needed to act in a praiseworthy fashion. We no longer talk of the self discipline needed to pursue one’s self interests rightly understood. The relativity of all values at one stoke eliminates goodness, and beauty, and truth.
A creature that exists without goodness, truth, and beauty, no matter what else he is, is not a human being, any more than Gollum is a Hobbit. Read more
November 11, 2010
Epilogue: the Morlocks and Me
A reader asks: “Mr Wright – when you were an atheist, did you write Morlock fiction? Why or why not?”
I most certainly did not write Morlock fiction during my atheist days. (Ironically, the one short story I penned that was clearly nihilist in theme and tone, “Silence in the Night”, was one I wrote after my conversion, not before.)
While I was not a Christian, I was a Stoic, and I upheld and promoted the classical virtues (fortitude, moderation, temperance, justice) as well as the Enlightenment virtues (reason, liberty, individualism, liberty) — and I was also a Romantic. I believed and still believe in True Love. I believed and still believe life is worth living, that reason allows one to discover truth, that truth is better than lies, that logic is better than illogical, beauty than ugliness, life than death.
If anything, I was a more vituperative enemy of the modern culture of death than I am now: I provoked considerable scorn and wrath and Jihadist ire from the Left for suggesting in one book written while I was an atheist that self-control of the passions, especially in the realm of the sexual passions, was a rational and honorable virtue. They had never met an atheist who believed in virtue before, and so their heads exploded.
Another book I wrote when I was an atheist suggested that life was worth living, and that our mission in life was to order our passions, reasons, and appetites to reflect reality and to follow justice — to do what is in one’s own enlightened self-interest and to avoid what is self-destructive. I was saying nothing other than what a Houyhnhnm would say. One reviewer cautioned readers that my book was a work of Christian apologetic.
Again, I recall a private conversation where I pointed out that abortion was against the Darwinian imperative to reproduce the species. Any race, tribe, or clan that had a genetic weakness favoring abortion of its own young would in a few generations be out produced by any race, tribe, or clan lacking that weakness, and their greater numbers would give them a greater talent pool to draw upon. My argument was that any moral code which failed to promote survival was in the long run self destructive, because it was a moral code that would eventually edit itself out of history. My interlocutor accused me of being a Bible-bashing Godbotherer and a Fundie.
This is why I often say that not just Christians are involved in the culture war.
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Wrights Writing Corner: The Logic of Character Revisited
http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2010/11/10/wrights-writing-corner-the-logic-of-character-revisited/
The logic of character is the thing that makes it so that characters come alive, the thing that makes it so that quality A and quality B overlap to make Character C who not only seems vivid and 3-Dimensional but also begins to act on his own.
What do I mean by “act on his own”? Surely, characters do not write themselves without writers!
November 9, 2010
Superman and Dehumanity Part VI — On Heroics
Finally we reach the question: Why Superheroes? What is it about the Superheroic genre that makes supermovies better than modern mainstream movies?
The answer is threefold.
First, older mainstream movies, such as GONE WITH THE WIND and WIZARD OF OZ did not follow the modernist and postmodernist tastes which have ruined so many recent movies. Those mentally empty and morally corrupt philosophies had not yet reached mainstream popular entertainment in those days.
So the first part of the answer is not that superhero movies grew better than normal, just that mainstream movies grew worse. This happened as nonconformists of the 1960′s and 70′s became the establishment in Hollywood. Their world view, which I here have called dehumanism, when consistently portrayed, lack sympathy, drama, purpose, point and meaning; and therefore the films that win acclaim by accurately reflecting the dehuman world-view, lose the ability to tell a tale in a dramatically satisfying way. Dehumanity and drama are mutually exclusive. More of one means less of another; and it is a rare genius who can reconcile the two.
The modern movies that most obviously defy these corroded modern conventions are deliberately nostalgic homages to serial cliffhangers: STAR WARS and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. These are among the bestselling movies of all time, and they transformed the industry and the audience expectations: summer blockbuster tentpole movies spring from nostalgic roots.
November 5, 2010
Superman and Dehumanity Part V — On Aesthetics
Continued from Previous.
Are the rules of drama subjective, conventional, or objective? The short answer is a qualified yes: a heavily qualified yes.
The first qualification is that any work of art follows the conventions of its genre, and these conventions, being conventions, are subjective from the point of view of the universe, but objective from the point of view of the individual. Like the rules of chess, the rules for how to write a sonnet cannot be changed by an individual. If you play a game where the pawns move backward, it is not chess; if you write a poem where not of 14 lines of ten syllables in iambic pentameter ending with a rhyming couplet, it is not a sonnet. Call it something else.
The second qualification is that personal matters of taste cannot be fully removed from the question. This does not mean we should fall into the opposite error of assuming all aesthetics is merely personal taste and nothing but: and yet it means that any conclusions admit of doubt, mayhap of grave doubt.
Superman and Dehumanity Part IV — the Contradiction
Continued from previous.
One can indeed write a story that contradicts one’s own world view. Any author unable to disguise his personal opinions for the sake the story he tells lack the essential Puckish dishonesty of the auctorial tribe, and should not be set to telling tribal lays.
However, one cannot hide the world view of the story itself, since this forms the theme, and informs or influences (at least, in works of art maintaining minimal integrity) the plot, character, setting, and style.
A Dehumanist author can write a dramatic tale, but a dramatic tale cannot be a dehumanist tale except in the one exception all ready mentioned: any story of rebellion against authority, and story that expresses relief or morbid enjoyment at the discovery that life is meaningless, and that no final judgment nor eternal life awaits us, can be written dramatically and honestly.
Anything else is dishonest, or, at least, lacks an essential element of drama.
I have made a bold statement: but if we accept what has been said previously about the elements of drama, no other statement will do. Let us recall these elements. What is required for a drama to be truly dramatic?
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