John C. Wright's Blog, page 20
May 18, 2015
Hugo Packet Ready
HUGO NOMINEE PACKET AVAILABLE
Spokane, Washington, 18 May 2015
A digital file of many of the Hugo Award nominees is now available for members of Sasquan to download at http://sasquan.org/hugo-awards/packet_download/. This free download is supplied by the creators and publishers of works that are nominated for the awards. It is free to all current Supporting, Attending and Young Adult members of Sasquan, and those who become members before 31 July 2015. Its purpose is to allow those who are voting on the Hugo Awards to be able to make an informed choice among the nominated works.
All of the short fiction and graphic novels are included in their entirety (((assuming Zombie Nation comes through!))). The packet contains the full text of three of the novels: The Dark between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson, The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, amd The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. Skin Game by Jim Butcher and Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie are represented by extensive excerpts. One of the five finalists in the Related Work category is represented by an excerpt: Letters from Gardner, by Lou Antonelli. There is some material in each of the other categories except the Dramatic Presentations, but not everyone wanted us to include their work in this packet.
Voting on the Hugo Awards is open to all Supporting, Attending or Young Adult members of Sasquan. More information about voting and a ballot may be found at http://sasquan.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2015-Hugo-Ballot.pdf. In order to vote, you will have to enter your membership number and Hugo PIN at http://sasquan.org/hugo-awards/voting. Sasquan membership and registration information is available at https://sasquan.swoc.us/sasquan/reg.php
And may the best man win.
N.B.: If you are getting a PIN invalid message when you try to download, a reader tells me that the original number issued which looks like a membership number (e.g. SQ89773765280) is actually the PIN number. The Voter ID number (e.g. 7115) is actually your membership number.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
NR on SP
I am too cheap to spend the quarter it costs to read the article. From the opening paragraph, this writer sounds like he did his homework, however, and might produce something fair and balanced:
https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/417713/sci-fis-sad-puppies
It turns out that pop culture doesn’t inexorably drift toward political correctness. The forces of “social justice” are not invincible, and conservative artists do have cultural power. Just ask the very angry, very frustrated members of the science-fiction Left. Conservatives are by now familiar with the depressing pop-culture script. Angry at perceived injustice or exclusion and eager to spread their particular brand of “social justice,” the Left targets for transformation an artistic medium that was previously not overtly or intentionally politicized. Within a few short years, the quality of art — or its popularity — becomes far less relevant than either its message or the identity of the artist. As part of this process, prestigious awards are no longer a means of rewarding the best work but rather a means of rewarding the best work from the list of acceptable choices.</p>
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
JCW on ERB
If you want to read some essays on the master of adventure, Edgar Rice Burroughs, including one humble contribution from yours truly, today is your lucky day:
Charles A Madison is the editor.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
WSJ on SJW
A lamebrain and lazy Wall Street Journal article: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-culture-wars-invade-science-fiction-1431707195
For any reader without the patience (or the nose-clothespin) to wade through this, the summary is: “We asked two white guys with lots of awards and they said the system was fine and the Sad Puppies are pulp-writing carpetbagging racists.”
First, the issue is not about literary fiction versus pulp adventure fiction. The Social Justice Warriors do not write literary fiction, they write boring lectures and finger-wagging trash. They are members of a clique who have controlled the awards for about a decade.
They excuse the poor craftsmanship of their meandering tales by claiming them to be written to erudite and aethereal literary standards beyond the grasp of the hoi polloi. (Or they would say, if they were literary enough to use phrases like the hoi polloi (a Greek remark!), or drop Gilbert and Sullivan allusions casually into their sentences.)
For the record, I write literary fiction, and Larry Correia writes pulp, and he and I are on the same team.
Second, the notion that the Sad Puppies are intruders or newcomers is risible. I am an established Tor author was over a dozen novels to my name. Jim Butcher is far bigger and better than I. Anyone whose looks at the titanic figure towering atop an asimovian number of books, namely, Kevin J Anderson, and calls him a newcome needs to have his head examined. And yet the lazy column writer passes along this ort of Morlock propaganda without bothering to check it. Perhaps he meant only that we are outsiders to the clique — but, if so, he should have said so.
Third, the notion that the Sad Puppies are racists or wifebeaters or flying purple people eaters is a routine and almost ritual accusation the sad old white men of the clique throw against anyone and everyone, Anglo, Portuguese, Red Indian, male or female, whatever, who troubles or challenges them.
It is a thought-avoidance reflex, as automatic as startled squid squirting out ink. It is as routine and unconvincing as the accusation of an official royal Witchfinder.
And the column ends with a smarmy quote chuckling over the fact that any Puppy winning a Hugo will get it from David Gerrold or an unknown named Tananarive Due—a gay man and a black woman.
As if any sane and normal person cared about where Mr Gerrold chooses to park his dick, or about the melanin content of a midlist Mystery writer.
We read stories, not skin colors, you cheap and lazy hack, and thank you for ending on a gratuitous yet childish sneer showing you just uncritically bought into the lamebrain and lazy libels our lamebrain enemies lazily tossed against us. Thank you for not doing your job in such a negligent fashion.
If I seem more irate than is my wont, please recall that I used to be a journalist. Dear heavens, am I happy to be out of that shameful field.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
May 16, 2015
From the Pen of Dan Hess
Allow me to quote this sobering remark without comment.
http://www.scifiwright.com/2015/05/su...
Dan Hess says this:
What developed in Germany was a weird attitude that intellectual things were valued according to who produced it rather than whether they were true or good. You had the weird phenomenon of “Deutsche Physik” for instance, which labeled the important discoveries of modern physics as ‘Jewish Physics’ and rejected them on that basis (never mind that they are empirically true). This was even worse than nothing scientifically speaking: Because Jewish scientists had discovered things that were true, the Germans literally took positions that were false just to be contrary. (On the bright side, the Germans put the Bomb out of their own reach.)
The German-speaking world lost intellectual and scientific leadership after World War II. There is little chance of repeating the most famous catastrophe of that era. But the intellectual catastrophe is certainly being repeated.
Choosing intellectual output based on who produced it is no way to achieve excellence. But it is worse than that. We are in an era when many of the left seek wholesale rejection our intellectual heritage, that is, what we have found to be true, based on who produced it. Plain old truth is considered white male truth and the left, like the Germans behind Deutsche Physik, actually embraces things that are not true in contraposition to what came before.
That this project cannot succeed is obvious. That the left is degrading itself by carving out an embarrassing place in history is becoming more so.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
May 15, 2015
Analog’s One Thousandth Cover
Analog magazine, originally Amazing Stories, came out with its one thousandth issue. Here is the original January 1930 cover, showing an aeronaut fending off a bug monster with manly fisticuffs from a cowering cavegirl:
Here is the June 2015 cover, , showing an spacegirl fending off a bug monster with Amazonian yet slender-wristed blow from a dull-faced cavehunk:
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Supergirl!
Trailer below the cut.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Supergirl Trailer!
Trailer below the cut.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
The First Monster is Free
Mr Larry Correia has an announcement over on his site, Monster Hunter International (http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/05/14/my-first-novel-is-free-right-now-on-amazon/):
Monster Hunter International, is available for free right now. We just added MHI to the Baen Free Library.
Monster Hunter International (Monster Hunters International Book 1)
My publisher follows the same basic marketing philosophy as crack dealers. The first hit is free! If you like it, there is a whole lot more where that came from.
My comment: I can give this book a strong recommendation if you are in the mood for action-adventure, guns and monsters. I liked this book. A lot. I read all the sequels in an extended ecstatic spasm of biblioholic haste.
If you are looking for a thoughtful meditation on the melancholy nature of the human condition, this is not the book.
If you want to drop headfirst into a madhouse full of vampires and ghouls being blasted by loving-described heavy-duty firearms, free market bounty hunters, lawn gnomes with attitudes, werewolves with eating disorders, trolling trolls, men from the government who are not here to help you, hot girls with cool guns, not to mention Lovecraftian monstrosities from beyond space and time, then this is the book.
Here is the opening paragraph. If it hooks you, read the free book. It’s free.
On one otherwise normal Tuesday evening I had the chance to live the American dream. I was able to throw my incompetent jackass of a boss from a fourteenth-story window.
Now, I didn’t just wake up that morning and decide that I was going to kill my boss with my bare hands. It really was much more complicated than that. In my life up to that point I would never have even considered something that sounded so crazy. I was just a normal guy, a working stiff. Heck, I was an accountant. It doesn’t get much more mundane than that.
That one screwed-up event changed my life. Little did I realize that turning my boss into sidewalk pizza would have so many bizarre consequences. Well, technically, he did not actually hit the sidewalk. He landed on the roof of a double-parked Lincoln Navigator, but I digress.
My name is Owen Zastava Pitt and this is my story.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
May 13, 2015
Atheism, Nihilism, Woe, and Ire
I think we have the answer to the question we have been pondering here these last few days. It is not a complete answer, but it will do for now.
One of the few people on the Internet with a human name, Mr Hess, writes as follows:
(Quoting me) “I would like someone to volunteer to show me, in simple steps, how to get from statement (a) there is nothing of eternal meaning to statement (c) there is nothing of meaning. ”
I can’t. But I can say if (a) there is nothing of eternal meaning then (b) the meaning one gets is dimmer and much less motivating or inspiring than eternal meaning.
This discussion is clarifying for me. I have a bit arrogantly taken the view that life without faith in the eternal is just meaningless. That is not correct, as this thread abundantly shows.
However, the meaning that most people can get without faith in the eternal is thin gruel as compared to what they can get with it. It has heavy short-term bias. It tends to lead one toward more selfish decisions. It tends to lead one toward smaller, more temporary goals. It tends to fail or be weak in the face of adversity.
Building nations or institutions or even families that will be good or great after one is gone is difficult, suffering work. Standing up for truth in the face of pressure and ridicule is difficult. I think experience shows that those with little or no faith in the eternal do not do as well as those with faith in the eternal.
Examples abound. Compare the Cathedrals of Europe with Communist-era architecture. Compare the Britain when it was gloriously animated by Victorian-era faith with the Britain of today. Witness the achievements of past scientists with the craven modern scientists who are unwilling to confront even the most ridiculous and easily-disproved things if it means confronting the left. Witness the fear of men to commit as compared to men of the past.
It is clear to me in these and many other examples that modern man with weak faith lacks greatly in drive, courage, ambition and much else.
My comment: hear, hear, and I completely agree.
I suspect if you looked through the lists of who commits suicide, and who performs self-destructive behaviors as a slow substitute for suicide, such as drug abuse, divorce, and indulgence in sexual deviancy, and compared it to the list of married couples with children who regularly contribute to charity, you will find the Christians living much more meaningful lives and toying with self destruction far less.
“However, the meaning that most people can get without faith in the eternal is thin gruel as compared to what they can get with it. ”
Thin gruel indeed, and it will not nourish.
Without God, you either end up as a Stoic, a man who is bitter but does his duty without complaint, or as a Hedonist, a man who seeks every fewer false pleasures with ever more fervor and ever less reward. At the end of either the Stoic road or the Hedonist treadmill is the same void, which can be filled only with wrath or sorrow. Read Homer. Read the writings of the Buddhists. Pagans are a grim people. They talk about resignation, renunciation, loss, sorrow, defeat, and the futility of pride. Atheists have not even the comforts of paganism.
“It is clear to me in these and many other examples that modern man with weak faith lacks greatly in drive, courage, ambition and much else.”
Amen.
I think the case cannot be made that an atheism logically implies nihilism, but I do think it is easy to make the case that atheism is gray and damp and sad compared to the bright scarlet and dazzling white of the martyrs and saints, the gleaming gold of halos and crowns, the savor of the bread, the heady scent of wine, the flowers in a bridal bouquet, the laughter of the feast and lamentations of the fasts, the clatter of prayer beads in the solemn stillness, the peal of the bells in the steeple. Even their crusades are bland and inquisitions are dull compared to ours.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
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