John C. Wright's Blog, page 51
September 22, 2014
A Cover Update
An announcement from my publisher:
A cover update
We had a bit more trouble getting John C. Wright’s latest masterpiece out the door than usual due to the cover artist being temporarily knocked out of commission. Since the book was already late, JartStar stepped in and colorized the low-res greyscale comp that we had, which was why the initial cover was not quite up to our usual standard. Fortunately, the artist is back up to speed and last week he sent us the final image, which has now been incorporated into the ebooks on both the Castalia store and Amazon. If you wish to update your ebook accordingly, I believe Amazon does it automatically if your Kindle is set to permit it, while if you have purchased ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM from the Castalia store, you already have the ability to download it again via the original download link provided. If, for some reason, it doesn’t work, email me from the same email you used to purchase it and I’ll send it to you.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
September 20, 2014
Praise for ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM
Forgive me for repeating a reader’s praise of my work, but if you recall my theory which I recently posted that the proper motive for writing is not fame nor money nor the applause of crowds, but merely to touch the heart of that one reader one might never know who knows what your work really means.
Here is a reader for whom I am happy to have done my work.
You may keep the applause of worlds for more popular books. I am writing for this one, and for anyone willing and able to be for me the one, the only one, for whom I write:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R1OVH7X9F93LMV/ref=cm_cr_pr_rvw_ttl?ASIN=B00N9760GO
Bright Star,” indeed
By
Pax Romana
It was very difficult for me to sort through my feelings in reading One Bright Star to Guide Them, for it is a complex book wrapped in a simple premise.
Many of us have read Narnia, watched Star Wars, or heard some other adventure story where the average joe hero is plucked from his simple and boring life to be taken on A Quest, usually taken out of his world (as was the case with Narnia) and thrust into an unknown environment to fight some evil or right some wrong. It’s a tale as old as the first heroic myths.
Ah, but what happens when the Quest ends? Lewis touched on it – very briefly – in The Last Battle. 3 of the 4 children from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe return to Narnia, but one sister got too wrapped up in the trappings of being “an adult.” She chose to forget. It quite probably was the greatest tragedy of that series. But that’s all we get about the Pevensies’ time after Narnia.
Mr. Wright takes us on the most bizarre of hero’s quests: the one that takes place AFTER the quest, and that takes place in the “real world.” In so doing, he brings back a bit of the magic of Narnia and – much like Lewis’ Chronicles were a parable to point the young reader to Jesus – One Bright Star reminds us that there is hope when youth has faded, innocence lost, and the black-and-white morality of a child seems but a memory. There is hope that a man can find “childlike faith” and find again the magic and joy of belief. That restoration of faith and hope is why I marked the book 5 stars; because it took me back to my First Love and reminded me of that otherworldly joy I felt when reading Lewis’ timeless novels.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
September 19, 2014
Nachtritter
I am trying to concoct a German sounding name for a group in my next novel.
Nachtnebeldunkelritterbruderchaft.
It is supposed to mean the Brotherhood of the Knights of the Night-dark Mist.
Does it? Anyone here speak German?
Their shorter form is Nachtritter, which I am hoping means Night-rider (or, literally Night-knight)
Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
September 17, 2014
The Wright Perspective: The Utopias of SF – The Crazy Years
My latest is up at Every Joe: http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/09/17/lifestyle/utopias-science-fiction-best-world-raise-family/
Most imaginary worlds are interesting places to read about, but few are places one would like to live. We continue our look at the Utopias of Science Fiction with an eye to which perfect world is the best place to live and raise a family.
In our last episode, we saw two utopias where the laws of economics were just ignored. The writers, LeGuin and Holland, simply assumed that stores and shops and factories would somehow run, even without policemen to prevent theft, the militia to prevent riots, or slavedrivers and taskmasters to prevent malingering, goldbricking and featherbedding.
The writers of the next era, or at least some of them, attempted at least some explanation of how corruption of their nearly perfect societies would be prevented: L. Neil Smith outlaws Congress, a prime source of corruption, and Iain M. Banks outlaws human ownership of the means of production, by having artificial intelligences control and distribute all property, so that mankind need no more work for a living than a housecat needs hunt for rats to earn her keep. But unless the artificial intelligences are as incorruptible as archangels, this just shifts the problem one remove. In Ken MacLeod’s world, the suggestion seems to be that if troublemakers are given powerful military hardware to play with, and told to mug a gas giant filled with post-singularity superintelligences, everything will somehow work out.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
September 16, 2014
Crossexamined by the Honey Badger Brigade
Here is the link of my interview with the fine ladies of the Honey Badgers, who are ardent anti-feminists hence pro-women. I was delighted to find such specimens still existed, but I was only able to speak from the depth of a cave, as you will detect from the audio quality.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Love Letter to a Princess of Mars, Postcript
So Number Three Son and I have read to chapter XI of Princess of Mars, when we came across these words. John Carter is trying to explain his origins to Dejah Thoris.
She addresses him thus:
“I heard your challenge to the creature you call Tars Tarkas, and I think I understand your position among these people, but what I cannot fathom is your statement that you are not of Barsoom.”
“In the name of my first ancestor, then,” she continued, “where may you be from? You are like unto my people, and yet so unlike. You speak my language, and yet I heard you tell Tars Tarkas that you had but learned it recently. All Barsoomians speak the same tongue from the ice-clad south to the ice-clad north, though their written languages differ. Only in the valley Dor, where the river Iss empties into the lost sea of Korus, is there supposed to be a different language spoken, and, except in the legends of our ancestors, there is no record of a Barsoomian returning up the river Iss, from the shores of Korus in the valley of Dor. Do not tell me that you have thus returned! They would kill you horribly anywhere upon the surface of Barsoom if that were true; tell me it is not!”
Her eyes were filled with a strange, weird light; her voice was pleading, and her little hands, reached up upon my breast, were pressed against me as though to wring a denial from my very heart.
“I do not know your customs, Dejah Thoris, but in my own Virginia a gentleman does not lie to save himself; I am not of Dor; I have never seen the mysterious Iss; the lost sea of Korus is still lost, so far as I am concerned. Do you believe me?”
My son and I, both gentlemen of Virginia, immediately rose to our feet, sang the anthem of the commonwealth, and made the salute, and shouted Sic Semper Tyrannis.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Which Space Princess would you choose?
The fine fellows at Meme Therapy have posted a discussion about which Science Fiction starship one should own? The general consensus there is the TARDIS, as this vehicle travels both in time and space, is user friendly, and grants the Gift of the Time Lords, allowing one to speak all languages. However, this assumes that vehicle is ment to be used for sight-seeing or other Lawful Good purposes.
But we all know the real purpose behind man’s yearning for star-drive, do we not? The Lensman core was specifically designed in response to this real purpose: the real purpose of starships is to commit outrages on distant worlds and be away faster than the speed of light before the crime is detected. PIRACY! Being a pirate is passing brave, to be sure, but being a Space Pirate is the ne plus ultra of human ambition. It is like being a pirate, but with rayguns.
Let us agree, without further discussion, that the Death Star is the best SF star-vehicle for piracy. It has mass and presence, and when it is seen rising like a dark moon above the horizon of the capitol city of some hapless victim world, all will quail when the radios of the world clamour: THIS IS CAPTAIN BLOODSTAR of BOSKONE. PLACE ALL YOUR GOLD AND VALUABLES INTO ORBIT AT ONCE! Hapless redcoats will run every which way while TIE-fighters manned by scurvy Tortuga mongrels fly low over burning buildings, taking pot-shots at the panicked crowds.
But what act of piracy to commit? Looting treasure? Nawr, maties. Ar. That is not big enough. You want to kidnap a Space Princess and hale her back to your hidden lair on Skull Asteroid for a quick Pirate Wedding. Law won’t touch you if your married to Royalty! And not just any old Space Princess! We want a thionite-sniffers dream, a seven sector callout!
The question then merely becomes, which one? Which Space Princess do you want to carry off?
Many pictures of Space Princesses below the cut
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Victory
A reader named VunderGuyasks how we Christians and our allies among all men of goodwill shall win the Culture Wars?
How do we especially take back Hollywood? How do we take back academia? How do we take back the publishing world?
Another reader, Brain Niemeier, speaking on another topic, nonetheless answered this question so well, that I here quote him in full:
PC’s ability to perpetuate itself is limited by what Mr. Wright calls the Unreality Principle. In everyday life, real world experience slowly but inevitably “rebuilds the compiler”. That’s why the Left must cling to their control over academia and the media. They use these mouthpieces to constantly barrage us with PC propaganda while the government coerces our conformity via hate crimes legislation and affirmative action.
Human nature cannot be changed and always reasserts itself. The fire always burns no matter how often the PC Commissars insist that we can touch it without harm. If that weren’t the case, there would be no reason to oppose them.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
I’m Hungry. Please Feed Me. I Want Food.
In the United States, doctors starved and dehydrated stroke patient Marjorie Nighbert to death despite her pleading “I’m hungry,” “I’m thirsty,” “Please feed me,” and “I want food.”
From an article titled The Revenge of Conscience by J. Budziszewski appearing in FIRST THINGS.
http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9806/articles/budziszewski.html
Here are the opening two paragraphs:
Things are getting worse very quickly now. The list of what we are required to approve is growing ever longer. Consider just the domain of sexual practice. First we were to approve sex before marriage, then without marriage, now against marriage. First with one, then with a series, now with a crowd. First with the other sex, then with the same. First between adults, then between children, then between adults and children. The last item has not been added yet, but will be soon: you can tell from the change in language, just as you can tell the approach of winter from the change in the color of leaves. As any sin passes through its stages from temptation, to toleration, to approval, its name is first euphemized, then avoided, then forgotten. A colleague tells me that some of his fellow legal scholars call child molestation “intergenerational intimacy”: that’s euphemism. A good-hearted editor tried to talk me out of using the term “sodomy”: that’s avoidance. My students don’t know the word “fornication” at all: that’s forgetfulness.The pattern is repeated in the house of death. First we were to approve of killing unborn babies, then babies in process of birth; next came newborns with physical defects, now newborns in perfect health. Nobel-prize laureate James Watson proposes that parents of newborns be granted a grace period during which they may have their babies killed, and in 1994 a committee of the American Medical Association proposed harvesting organs from some sick babies even before they die. First we were to approve of suicide, then to approve of assisting it. Now we are to approve of a requirement to assist it, for, as Ernest van den Haag has argued, it is “unwarranted” for doctors not to kill patients who seek death. First we were to approve of killing the sick and unconscious, then of killing the conscious and consenting. Now we are to approve of killing the conscious and protesting, for in the United States, doctors starved and dehydrated stroke patient Marjorie Nighbert to death despite her pleading “I’m hungry,” “I’m thirsty,” “Please feed me,” and “I want food.” Such cases are only to be expected when food and water are now often classified as optional treatments rather than humane care; we have not long to go before joining the Netherlands, where involuntary euthanasia is common. Dutch physician and author Bert Keizer has described his response when a nursing home resident choked on her food: he shot her full of morphine and waited for her to die. Such a deed by a doctor in the land that resisted the Nazis.
Here are some details on the Nighbert case mentioned above:
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
September 15, 2014
The Superversive Literary Movement Stakes its First Claim
Intercollegiate Review has published a column wherein I wrest the glory of Harry Potter out of the grasping, flabby-fingered, pallid, moist, wormlike, and malodorous hands of the Leftwingers.
I hope I will be forgiven if I think my opening line sounds like Chesterton:
In reality, the best way to find reality is through fairyland.
Fairy tales of any sort are more truthful about the eternal verities of the human condition than many a tale told in the realistic style. Stories about a bold champion of Camelot or the enchantress of Aeaea, or the great dragon beneath the Lonely Mountain, will tell you more of sin and salvation, love and loss and love found again, than a yarn about a cuckold in turn-of-the-century Dublin, or a decadent drunk living in West Egg, Long Island. This is because so-called realistic tales deal only with the surface features of life, what we see with our eyes, so to speak; fairy tales touch the mystery and wonder at the core of life.
…
Harry Potter is the most successful book of all time next to Pilgrim’s Progress and the Sear’s Catalogue. And so, naturally, there is a certain cult, known in his world as Deatheaters, and in our world as Political Correctness, that seeks repulsively to claim that success as their own.
A recent article in i09 reports that Anthony Gierzynski, a political scientist at the University of Vermont, found that Harry Potter fans are more open to diversity and are more politically tolerant than nonfans. The fans are also less likely to support the use of deadly force or torture, more politically active, and more likely to have had a negative view of the Bush administration.
From this the conclusion is put forth (in a leap of logic that would make the cow jumping over the moon blush with shame) that Harry Potter draws children toward the political Left.
What an utter load of rubbish.
I have inspected neither Gierzynski’s data nor his methods, but I know blast-ended skrewt dung when I smell it.
http://www.intercollegiatereview.com/index.php/2014/09/15/the-superversive-world-of-harry-potter/
This column brings the term ‘superversive’ (a neologism coined by Tom Simon) for which the Superversive Literary Movement, of which I am a founding member, is named.
Read the whole thing, click through the link several times a day, and write fourteen letters a piece to the editor of the Intercollegiate Review larding me with unlikely praise, and leave comments there.
Then build a ninety-one mile tall statue of me out of an admixture of gold, orichalcum, admantium and unobtainium, atop the magnetic north pole of Ellesmere Island, called by the Eskimo wizards Umingmak Nuna; and send seventy-one of the fairest virgins in the land to dance and sing to the sound of harp, viol, flute, cornet, pipe, psaltery, organ, dulcimer, timbrel, and sackbut, in adoration of me at the foot of the colossus; while captive kings, weeping while still crowned and robed in ermine above their helms and harnesses, are forced to fight with net and trident, or dirk or brutal hatchet, in the circus of gladiators against each other or against wild beasts becostumed in the heraldric animals of their fallen kingdoms, so that the Czar of Russia may be torn by bears, and the Queen of England gored by the unicorn and eaten by lions, while the hapless leader of America, nailed to a broken bell, will have his liver torn out by a trained bald eagle; and meanwhile masked and hooded priests serving nameless chthonic goddesses sacrifice to my glory a hecatomb of arctic whales, giant squid, and leviathans of the sea in a grisly aquatic ceremony!
Well, okay, never mind the giant statue, or the circus, or the sacrifices. Just read the article. I and don’t need seventy-one singing and dancing virgins. Only send seven fair virgins by my house to help my wife do the house cleaning, and we only need one or two to play the dulcimer and sackbut.
You have no idea how hard it is to find a really fair virgin who can play the sackbut these days.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
John C. Wright's Blog
- John C. Wright's profile
- 449 followers
