John C. Wright's Blog, page 195

Nowadays the youngsters have a much harder time.

This is from an interview Tangent Magazine held with Leigh Brackett (you know, NORTHWEST SMITH, EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, and some non-SF flick called THE BIG SLEEP) and Edmond World-Wrecker Hamilton (my idol). It touches on a point I've noticed before.

TANGENT: Leigh, there were very few women writing science fiction during the 30's, 40's, and 50's. Were there any special problems you had to face being a woman?

BRACKETT: There certainly wasn't with me. They all welcomed me with open arms. There...

And, because good essays are hard to find

Those of you unfamiliar with the thoughtful and elegant pen of superversive  are invited to correct the defect:

Ad effigiem
The strawman fallacy in Utopian fiction
Of all the habitual fallacies and prejudices that have poisoned the wells of reason in our time, none, perhaps, has been so destructive as what Owen Barfield christened ‘chronological snobbery’.

Moorcock, Saruman, and the...

Wright Writing Corner: Putting In the Stuff People Skip

The latest column from my lovely and talented wife, Mrs. John Wright:

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/111904.html

I see I am mentioned in the opening paragraph.

" What is the number one thing that people skip? (Come on, admit it, you probably skip stuff, too…unless the “you” in question happens to be my husband, who probably never skips anything.)"

She is correct. I cannot imagine reading a book and skipping any of the paragraphs. It would seem to be an insult to the writer, if not a disservice t...

The Feast of Saturn

One thing I like about being Christian is that I find a greatly expanded scope to who is with me. I have more brothers and neighbors than I once did. Allies turn up in unexpected places, such as in jail in Birmingham.

There was a time when the church was very powerful--in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a...

Any good Gnostic SF Lit Out There?

Has Gnosticism ever inspired any good science fiction?

I would argue that David Lindsay's VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS, which was Gnosticism almost undisguised, merits praise as one of the greats and classics of science fiction literature, an attempt to tackle truly profound issues, matters of God and Devil, life and death, vice and virtue, in a science fictional narrative and metaphor. I think all the answers are most wrong and wickedly wrong, of course, but the audacity of the narrative is intoxicati...

Follow up Question!

Continued from last entry. An alert reader, noticing an oddity in my snippet of a scene, makes bold to ask:

"But the World Dictator agrees to hand cannons at dawn with the roustabout mercenary because.....?"

Excellent question!! A question worthy of double exclamations points!!!

Ah! I will have to finish writing the book, and sell it to my editor, and get it printed, and you will have to buy the book to find that out.

But I will give you a hint. One of the reasons given below is the not the rea...

Progress Report

3146 words written tonight between 10.00 and 4.30.

I threw out my last idea. My wife, aka my muse, gave me a better one. Just have the hero, Menelaus Montrose, go shoot the villain, Ximen "Blackie" del Azarchel.

Good guy and bad guy shooting each other in the face with futuristic hand cannons. That is what makes science fiction! (I ask you: Did Frodo Baggins ever shoot the Dark Lord Sauron the Great in the face with a high-caliber pistol? No! And that is why LORD OF THE RINGS is not science f...

H.G. Wells' scornful Review of Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS

Science Fiction luminaries clash!

http://erkelzaar.tsudao.com/reviews/H.G.Wells_on_Metropolis%201927.htm

The review has three surprises for me. First, Wells did not like the film, which was (and is) a brilliant milestone in sciencefictioneering. He thinks it derrived from his own THE SLEEPER WAKES (and perhaps with some justice). Second, H. G . Wells, a damned socialist, actually has the wit and wherewithal to make accurate and correct criticisms of the socialist mopery in the film, pointing o...

johncwright @ 2010-02-26T14:28:00

To think, I used to admire James Randi almost above any other living man.

http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/524-suggestions-for-the-us.html

However, the "brights" have left the socially useful and entertaining hobby of debunking frauds and magicians (something the Church used to do, see here, for example) and now seek to put forward arguments about as devoid of logic as an argument can be.

"If you don’t believe in gay marriages or in abortions, don't have one. If you don’t...

Gnosticism and Socialism and the Discontent of Philosophy

Part of an ongoing conversation.

dirigibletrance   said: "I wish there were an Academy of English! French and German and Spanish have one, why not English?"

I answered: To safeguard our liberty, no doubt. The Academy of English would be an entirely leftwing-political-correctness organ, if it existed, and words such as "blind" or "Negro" or "Sodomy" would be decreed ungrammatical. The word "he" would be redefined to mean only male antecedents, and the word "they" would be declared the singular ...