John C. Wright's Blog, page 54
August 29, 2014
Reviewer Praise for COUNT TO A TRILLION
My books seems to have caught Mr Moore over at Yardsale of the Mind when he was in a good mood. He begins as follows:
Nutshell: This is a good book. Go buy it now, and get a couple copies to give to unsuspecting friends.
The large pile of books I bought last year has been barely touched – I did get to read Mike Flynn’s excellent Eifelheim, reviewed here, as well as some Gene Wolf that crept into the pile of its own volition, and several good books for a Catholic reading group I’m in. But wasn’t making much of a dent.
But not anymore! I’ve got my Great Books man-cave set up, with all the stuff off the floor and into a bookcase atop a large desk, where a couple hundred books to be read or reread sit at approximately eye level, taunting me. So, cracked into John C. Wright’s Count to a Trillion, the first book of an epic six book space opera.
Whoa.
First off, the experience of reading this book brought me back to my time in high school – in a good way. Back then, I didn’t give a crap about schoolwork (have I mentioned I’m a terrible student?) and so, when a book grabbed me, I’d read almost till sunrise if that’s what it took to finish it. Well, over the few days it took to read Count to a Trillion, I twice stayed up past midnight reading (I get up before 6 every day, and have a job and dependents and stuff, so the ‘read until 4:30 a.m.’ thing ain’t happening – but 1:30 is the moral equivalent at this point in my life.) That’s a pretty gripping book to do that! AND – I picked up The Hermetic Millennia immediately upon reaching the end and its cruel cliffhanger. I’ll review volume 2 in a day or two when I’m done.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Nobody Expects
I read this article in the Community Digital News, which reports an attack by an angry mob against a group of Mohammedans.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Labor Day Sale!
My publisher has an announcement:
Labor Day Sale on Amazon
Amanda Green of Nocturnal Lives has put together a Labor Day Sale in which all of the books listed are on offer for $2.99 or less. Check out the entire list there. Castalia House is participating and the following books are available for $2.99 all weekend at Amazon:
John C. Wright: Awake in the Night Land
John C. Wright: Transhuman and Subhuman
Rolf Nelson: The Stars Came Back
Vox Day: A Throne of Bones
Vox Day: The Altar of Hate
Steve Rzasa and Vox Day: QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted
Tom Kratman: Big Boys Don’t Cry
In addition, the following books are free for the next three days:
John C. Wright: Awake in the Night
Vox Day: The Last Witchking
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Five Current Work Questions
What am I working on?
I am working on several projects: A short story for Sci Phi called ‘The Ideal Machine’; my next Count to the Eschaton, tentatively titled THE VINDICATION OF MAN volume is due early next year to Tor; I have agreed to deliver a short story to a possible anthology tentatively titled TRIGGER WARNINGS by this time next year; but at the moment and for the next month I will be polishing my second draft of the first volume of my Unwithering Realm trilogy to Castalia Books, called SOMEWHITHER.
In a nutshell:
I am writing an alternate history novel when the son of the buttkicking Deacon-ninja Templar working for the secret ‘special operations’ branch of the Vatican Swiss Guard has to outwit and outfence the evil Astrologers from an alternate timeline where the Tower of Babel was never destroyed by a miracle, so that planet has one race, one nation, one language and nothing they attempt is denied them.
Because of their ability accurately to predict the future, the Babylonians are conquering the other timelines (The other timelines include one ruled by giants where Noah’s flood never came; one ruled by Mummies and ghosts of mighty Pharaohs, where the rebellion of Moses never robbed Egypt of her work force; one ruled by mermaids where the waters of Noah’s flood have nor yet receded; the one where Christ was welcomed by the Jews and escaped the Roman authorities is ruled by vampires, because there are no crucifixes to drive them back.)
My young hero, Ilya Muromets, has to join forces with an invisible gypsy, a headless giant, an unpredictable monkey-girl with a weapon made of living metal, a levitating old-testament style prophet, Captain Nemo, and a sexy maneating mermaid from the conquered parallel worlds, and cut his way with his grandfather’s katana to where the mad scientist’s beautiful daughter from the Haunted Museum is imprisoned, slaughtering Latin werewolves and Greek Kallikanzaro and large-eared flying midgets and one-legged sciapods and one-eyed Arimaspians along the way, until he finds the forty-story tall prayer-powered robotic suit of armor needed to wrestle the Atlantis-sized leviathan turtle, to pick up the twenty-story tall burning neutronium spear, trample the armies of the dark tower, cleave the diamond admantium chains holding the trapped archangel of …
Never mind the rest. I am trying to write something as over the top as I can possibly get away with. That is why I am bringing this manuscript to Vox Day rather than Tor books. I think he has the vision to approve of the fight scene between the armored and over-adorned Babylonian Zeppelin driven by Emperor Nimrod the Hunter and the ironclad submersible Nautilus captained by Nemo, warrior-Maharaja and superscientist of Lemuria.
How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I don’t know, but maybe the answer is, that this work differs from other alternate history books BY BEING TOTALLY AWESOME.
Also, the theory of how the parallel timelines divide is unique.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
August 28, 2014
Coming soon: The Raven, The Elf, and Rachel!
My beautiful and talented wife’s next book is soon to be published.
I love, love this cover. One big advantage of the ‘new model’ of Internet publishing versus New York publishing is that authors can hire their own cover artists and describe the painting they want.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
August 27, 2014
An Unspoken Assumption
Over at Vox Popoli, this was part of the discussion. A reader there commented:
“I remember my Zen teacher (an American who was deeply immersed in Japanese culture, one of the first generation of top-level Zen teachers in America) remarking once ~30 years ago that in Japanese culture it is simply assumed that if a man and a woman are alone together, there’s some hanky-panky involved. May not always be the case, of course, but it seems to be a good default assumption, if you want to run a successful, lasting culture.”
My comment:
I assume I am a bit more old fashioned than most, but, honestly, this was the default assumption we once saw in American culture.
I was just showing my children CASABLANCA, the Bogart/Bergman film from just before WWII. Because the character Ilsa was traveling with the hero Victor Lazlo under her maiden name of Lund, Rick Blaine (and presumably the audience of the day) assumes she is a demimonde, that is, a fallen woman, a paramour, no better than a whore.
Without this assumption, Rick’s bitterness when he first speaks with her is incomprehensible: he think’s he’s been played for a sap by a manipulative harlot. When she announces in the next scene that she is married to Lazlo, the shock on his face is once again incomprehensible unless the audience understands the assumption that no woman travels alone with a man other than her husband, much less stays with him in the same hotel, unless there is ‘some hankie panky’ going on, or she is his sister.
These unspoken commonplace assumption are decried by feminists as unfair, even oppressive. Leftism is defined as a rebellion against reality and reason on the grounds that reality is unfair. Feminism is rebellion against sexual reality and reason.
In reality, these assumptions are sound and sane, and assuming a young man and a young woman can have a friendship without a sexual overtone to it is false: men young or old automatically start being gallant (that means boasting, preening, and showing off) around young women or feminine women of any age, and woman automatically being gracious (that means start flirting) whether they know it or not.
The idea that it is liberating for men and women to strip off their sex and turn into neutral eunuchs so that they can meet and work together as units in the factory or office is a false idea.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
On the Coyness of God
I’m fairly certain, if God is indeed maximally good and therefore would do everything he could to draw people, free agents, towards him, the greatest good, that logically, the best option would be to reveal himself not just occasionally, but always so that there can be no doubt as to his existence.
For though the heart of the atheist and other non-believers may be hard, and their minds closed off, I’m fairly certain even Dawkins and Osama Bin-Laden would have gotten on their knees and prayed for forgiveness and most likely would NOT have even needed to do so if God was always undeniably present.
What deficiencies, if any, are there on this option
Have you ever been an atheist? I was. I would have defied God to his face, and blasphemed the Holy Spirit. I solemnly assure you that I would have. The coyness of God is the only thing that saved from the one thing the Bible clearly says is an unforgivable sin.
The only real doubts about God’s existence come from sin, from a psychological unwillingness to face facts. God is abundantly, transcendentally, painfully obvious even to pagans — because otherwise they would not have bothered inventing gods if they did not know, deep down, that they were made for worship, designed by a designer, built by a builder.
Modern atheism springs from the wealth and plenty of the industrial revolution, men who think they can live without God, who then go looking for excuses, flimsy ones, not to believe in Him: Marx, Darwin, Freud.
1. Marxism looks for an unthinking and inanimate set of forces, call the material dialectic, to explain the fall of man, the progress of history, and the eventual restoration of paradise, all without God. But history is either an unplanned and undirected series of events, or it is a story. Marx attempted to make it a story, with a beginning (primitive communism) a middle (capitalism) and an end (worker’s paradise of socialism) but without a storyteller. That is a contradiction in terms a child can see.
2. Darwin looks for an explanation of the origin of species and the teleology of the parts of animals, that is, to explain their design and the perfect fittedness of each organ to its purpose without a designer. He wants creation without a Creator in the same way Marx wants a story without a storyteller. What his theory predicts is not borne out by the evidence around us: where are the birds who only build half a nest, or the newt with only half an eye, who are halfway to evolving real nests and real eyes? Those things that are presented as transitional or preevolutionary halfway marks, such as light-sensitive spots or bird who mash down grass without weaving a proper nest, still evince a teleology, a that-for-the-sake-of-which, which the bird or critter in question did not himself decide or determine. Either the organs and instincts are purposeless, or there is purpose in nature. But nature cannot hold a purpose unless nature is an intelligent being, that is, a being capable of making self aware decisions, which is what a purpose is.
3. Freud thought to explain, or, rather, explain away the conscience, sin and soul of men by means of fairy tales given austere Greek names. The concept of a ‘subconscious’ is a contradiction in terms: it means the part of our awareness of which we are unaware. Rather than speak of sin, be spoke of Id; rather than speak of soul, he spoke of Ego; rather than speak of conscience, he spoke of Superego, which he characterized as merely tyrannous, unthinking, negative, the source of all mental illness. His solution for madness was to urge people to indulge their impulses whether good or bad. What a boatload of rot.
Marxism and Darwinism and Freudianism are science fiction stories just as much as anything penned by HG Wells.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
August 26, 2014
Breaking Down Pink and Blue SF
At Castalia House, Daniel applies the definitions of Pink and Blue SF to what are perhaps the best examples of the genre. Both are short stories, and can be read in one sitting.
The first is Rachel Swirsky’s Nebula-Award winning and Hugo-nominated short story “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love”
The second is Gene Wolfe’s “Build-A-Bear”
Myself, I would say it is worth reading Mr. Daniel’s analysis if only to have an excuse to read Gene Wolfe’s story, which was new to me.
His article is here:
http://www.castaliahouse.com/pink-and-blue-sf-an-applied-breakdown/
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
August 25, 2014
Christians in the Pantheon called Life
A reader with the name Metzengerstein, which sounds like it might actually be a real name for once, writes and comments:
It is an interesting fix we Christians find ourselves in. On the one hand we should like to argue that Capitalism is a better system than any other by virtue of its results and its preference towards voluntary action and organization over government coercion for arranging society.
On the other hand, we are anti-materialists who would like to proclaim there are more important things in life than money, and that wealth can lead you astray. Even technological improvement and scientific advancement can lead us into a mindset of creating a heaven on Earth, rather than passing through a transitory phase in a strange land.
I confess I do not see the paradox.
We Christian men are also supposed to love our wives without worshiping Venus or being addicted to the pleasures of the marriage couch.
We are supposed to drink wine without being drunkards or worshipers of Bacchus or Belial.
We are supposed to drawn the sword in defense of right without worshiping Mars or being addicted to bloodlust, conquest, or military glory.
We are suppose to have dominion and stewardship over the Earth, but not to worship Gaea, or feed our children into the fires in the name of Moloch.
We are supposed to desire justice without worshiping Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, or becoming obsessive vigilantes.
We are supposed to give alms to the poor without becoming Socialists or Albigensians and without worshiping the imaginary evolution of man toward superman.
We are supposed to glorify and praise creation, and this certainly includes the glories of Natural Science, by whose merits alone can the hidden handiwork of the Creator in all their mathematical intricacy, balance, and perfection be brought partly to light. But we are not to worship the works of our own hands, nor turn the scientist’s bench into a conjurer’s cave, and use technology like a dark magic to dominate and destroy nature or human nature, lest we destroy only ourselves.
I do not see how a Christian is supposed to behave in the marketplace or the science lab as any different from how we behave in the marriage bower or battlefield or halls of power or courts of law.
Those who say the Church is at war with sexual pleasure, or scientific advancements, or military glory, or conservation and stewardship of the wilderness, or with republican forms of government, or at war with the press or academic freedom, are all of them, liars, simply liars.
We are against none of these good things. We are for them. We are for them so much so that only the Church has clear and wise guidelines defining how each can be enjoyed to its fullest in this sad valley of tears, because only the church sees the big picture, the God’s Eye View, as it were.
We are for them and those who want to poison and corrupt them by exalting them over their peers are actually against them. The partisans of no fault divorce and the sexual revolution are enemies of Venus, not her friends.
The partisans of the Clausewitz and realpolitik and jihad and Total War Theory are enemies of Mars because the partisans of Crusade and Just War theory alone turn the hideous gorgon mask of Mars into something like a human face, into which we can look without our hearts freezing to stone in horror.
The drunkard to whom wine is a plague and a disease rather than a source of cheer is the true enemy of Bacchus. Those who ache with the unholy and unforgivable desire to experiment on humans, on babies, on unborn babies, or who propose junk science, theories as unproven and unprovable as Darwin’s, they are the foes of science, not the Church, who is the nursemaid of science in its infancy. And so on.
This world is like a gilded temple to many gods and goddesses richly and fetchingly adorned and painted, blazing with gems, awesome to behold: harps and wine and war and gold and scrolls of secret knowledge, shining stars ascending in their sphere and shining futures burning in our dreams, and the scales of justice, and scepters of power, all of these become idols when you bow the knee to them. Most insidious, because its danger is rarely mentioned, is the idolatry of the pen, when a man bows the knee to some pet theory or fascinating vision. This is the lure of intellectual pride, the sin of scholars, when even virginal Athena turns from goddess to demoness.
This world is a temple with many gods, and we Christians are pilgrims passing through, who are meant to bow and serve and worship none of these good things. We worship the source of all goodness instead, the greater God who made the gods, and who made the good things good.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Plutoyperetonism in its Proper Place
A reader with the inattentive, fraternal, amorous yet equine name of Distracted Brony asks:
Mr. Wright,
I have learned a lot from your blog about the evils of socialism and other such wealth-redistribution ideologies. But I have not learned much about the possible corruptions and other problems of free-market systems.
It would be nice to hear about these things without having to go to a liberal site to do so. If you have any solid reading suggestions, or if you have written elsewhere on the subject, I would be pleased.
The comment flatters me beyond my merit. I am in no position to list the errors and drawbacks of the free-market and for this reason:
The problems are fraud and greed.
This has been known to all men since the dawn of time. What needs to be said of them?
The only thing to be said is that master can and do treat apprentices and employees badly, but that being a slave is even worse, because the employee is legally free to depart and seek another master. If the circumstances, for whatever reason, make the legal right difficult to exercise, enslaving the fellow do not alleviate such problems, but rather aggravate them.
You will have to seek elsewhere for your information. Since I have heard nothing but lies, horror stories, lies, criticisms, lies, nonsense, lies and lies about the free market since the time I was old enough to be propped up in front of a TV to watch THE FLINTSTONES, I am puzzled that you or anyone thinks there may be some criticism of the free market which has not yet been aired, discovered, trumpeted from the rooftops, refuted by sane economists in a paragraph or two, and, after being refuted, refuted again, triply refuted, and proven beyond any possible scintilla of a shadow of a doubt by a century or two of example and experience, the false belief goes on to become an ingrained and unshakeable core dogma of all Democrats and two thirds of the Republicans, and shows up in all the dramas and sitcoms and rock songs and half the news stories.
A man dying of thirst in the desert is not the right person to ask about the dangers of drowning in a teacup, not when you live in a culture where all the murder mysteries concern rich uncles found with mouth and nose jammed in teacups, with water in their lungs, and ninety percent of all public debates, laws, regulations, and court cases concern the manufacture, distributions, handling and filling of teacups so as to prevent accidental drowning.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
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