John C. Wright's Blog, page 189

Coolest Robot Eveh?

The fine fellows over at Sf Signal asked some sciencefictioneers their opinion of the coolest robot in sciencifictiondom. I decided to share my opinion here. What's yours?

Robots from television and movies will tend to take the prize, merely because we can see and hear them. I am tempted to say the most memorable robot from the movies is Gort from DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (the real one, not the remake). When the visor of Gort began to open (accompanied by shrill and unearthly theramin music) ...

How STARSHIP TROOPERS should have been filmed.

A little clip from an overlooked gem of the silver screen. The reason why I suffer from a gut-crunching and soul-destroying hatred of the film version of STARSHIP TROOPERS is that I like the book. This is what the book should have looked like had it been adapted properly to film.

Just add power armor, and you'd got it.



And yes, that is the immortal Jack Webb, in the role he was born to play.

Our Pursuit of Androgyny has not Aided the Task of Socilizing the Males

The title for this article is a quote from , A RETURN TO MODESTY: discovering the lost virtue By Wendy Shalit. , which I mentioned in my last post. I have not read the book, but if it contains what I suspect, it is a welcome parallel to my own thinking on the topic, which I will be happy to summarize here below:

I have long been of the opinion that the feminist movement seeks to raise the standard of womanhood by erasing differences between the sexes. How and where this has been beneficial, I...

This Culture Has Not Been Kind to Women

In marked contrast to the science fiction Utopian travelogue FOR US, THE LIVING by Robert Heinlein, allow me to quote from a recent book of nonfiction, A RETURN TO MODESTY: discovering the lost virtue By Wendy Shalit.

This is the quote with which the book opens:

Modesty, which may be provisionally defined as an almost instinctive fear prompting to concealment and usually centering around the sexual processes, while common to both sexes is more peculiarly feminine, so that it may almost be...

For Us, the Lusting

From time to time one comes across a work of fiction meriting almost perfect scorn, indignation, and hate. Heinlein’s FOR US, THE LIVING is such a book. This is a review of the first hundred pages or so, since I lack the fortitude to continue past that point.

Published posthumously, this was Heinlein’s first attempt at a manuscript, and one which he wisely never a second time attempted to sell, breaking one of his own rules about selling everything he wrote. It is not a novel properly so call...

The Sky is Closed

The Administration just announced that the USA is scrapping any further moon missions, and downsizing NASA. The loss of personnel and expertise evoked protests from Astronauts from Neil Armstrong (first man on the moon) to Gene Cernan (last man on the moon, back during the Space Age.)


“We strongly urge you to drop this misguided proposal that forces NASA out of human space operations for the...

Wright's Writing Corner: Words on a Page

In which my lovely and talented wife betrays the secret of prose and poetry that Homer went blind wrestling from the blazing hands of Apollo and his sinister muses.

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/115875.html

I entrust the dire secret to you alone! No one must tell the Great Gray Man or any of the loathsome servants of the Dreegh, lest the very Omnihedron itself be imperiled!

Comment on Borges and Chesterton

I found a brief remark on Chesterton and his contrast with Borges in Volume XI of the First (or perhaps the second) Encyclopedia of Tlön, which is shelves in its proper place in the library of Babel, unless, of course, by lottery the Babylonian Company has determined the move its location. If so, and the book cannot be found, I will ask Funes, whose memory is sharper than my own, to repeat it to me.

Oh, no, my mistake. This remark comes from an article titled "The Gnostic imagination of Jorge ...

And one more

From an ongoing, perhaps infinite review:

9. The Book of Sand (El Libro de Arena)

Jorge Luis Borges tells a brief vignette of a Bible salesman, a stranger who, coming to his door, sells him a book with no beginning and no end: neither a first page can be found, nor a last, no matter how carefully it is opened. The book is written in an indecipherable language, and no pages are numbered in any sequence. There are illustrations, crude and childish, accompanying the unreadable, uncountable, useles...

More Borges! Funes and Ruins, Asterion and Aleph

This is a review of four more baffling short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, a writer of great power, subtlety, craft and intellect, who was cheated of the Nobel Prize for literature, to the everlasting shame of that corrupt and partisan award.

I adduce these reviews to my previous (first part is here http://johncwright.livejournal.com/329660.html) as part of the ongoing effort of the entire New Space Princess literary movement  (http://johncwright.livejournal.com/76001.html)  to convince the ...