John C. Wright's Blog, page 68

A Sympathetic Review from Vast, Cool, and Unsympathetic

or, Vaster Than They Previously Appeared

Mr. John Markley pays my latest book high praise:

I liked The Judge of Ages quite a bit. The central premise of the entire series is one of the more intriguing ones I’ve run into in recent years, and Wright continues to do interesting things with it. We learn more about some of the post-human inhabitants of the Earth and just what’s happened to reduce the world to its desolate and seemingly uninhabited state, as well as the true nature of Azarchel’s machinations and the scope of Montrose’s response, both of which turn out to be even vaster than they previously appeared.

And I realize that “vaster than they previously appeared” sounds sort of absurd in the context of an 8000-year conflict between supergeniuses where human evolution itself is the battleground and entire sapient species are casualties, but therein lies one of the great strengths of the book and series. Wright throws out interesting ideas with wild abandon, from little details about future technologies or societies to much larger things with important consequences to the entire story or setting, and yet does so in such a way that even bizarre or outrageously grandiose concepts still seem natural and reasonable within the logic of the story. It combines thoughtfully worked out consequences of technologies and other ideas and the constraints of reasonably hard science fiction (there’s no FTL, antigravity, or my personal bugbear, nanotech-as-magic) with the sort of wild exuberance I’d usually associate with old pulp space opera or early Marvel Comics.

(Wright’s writing in general often seems to have this quality, whether he’s doing science fiction or fantasy, where there’s such a proliferation of stuff that the story seems like it ought to either be crushed under its own density or go careening out of control and over the side of a cliff, but doesn’t.)

There are some excellent action scenes, and Wright uses the collision of technologies and biologies from across his future history- powered armored and other relatively conventional science fiction weapons like railguns, a monstrous race of posthumans capable of radically modifying their own biology and ruthlessly optimized for conflict, colossal 22nd-century dueling pistols with bullets that have their own engines and countermeasures and accompanying escorts of smaller defensive bullets, a self-replicating computer system that’s been gnawing at the iron core of the earth long enough to have significant influence on the planet’s magnetic field, among other things- effectively in this regard as well.

I still like Menelaus Montrose a lot as protagonist and viewpoint character. It helps that his odd backstory allows him to serve as a sort of audience surrogate in a very strange world without being ignorant, ineffectual, or bland in the way such characters often are. He’s able to quickly understand and adapt to the bizarre conditions he finds himself in thanks to his augmented intelligence, but his original background is in a society much closer to our own then to its successors. Consequently, he appreciates just how bizarre his world and his own story are (from the perspective of a 21st-centuryish human) in a way most protagonists of far future science fiction do not, without being a bewildered primitive or inept fish out of water. He approaches things with a combination of wry, seemingly detached humor and a very serious sense of purpose, and the mixture works well.

He goes on to say that the opening chapters had weak pacing, a criticism I cannot dispute. But overall he recommends the work in warm tones and says he is eager for the next volume.

(By the bye, let me announce that this next volume is not going to be called CONCUBINE VECTOR after all, nor, after solemn discussions with the publisher, will it be called my preferred title, HARRY POTTER AND THE LUSCIOUS LESBIAN LOVE-SLAVES OF THE VOLUPTUOUS VAMPIRE VIXEN OF VENUS VERSUS GODZILLA OF GOR, but instead will be called ARCHITECT OF AEONS, in reference to the person, or planet, who is the main antagonist in this stretch of the plot.)

Read the whole thing (the whole review, I mean) here.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Alignment and Realism

As the reader may recall from our last episode:

Alignment in tabletop miniature roleplaying games is a stat that defines the character’s loyalty to a given moral code. The moral codes in a Dungeons and Dragons, and games like it, are meant to be rough and ready, and something a thirteen-year-old boy (the target audience) can grasp and play without difficulty or distraction. Gary Gygax took inspiration from Lord of the Rings by Tolkien and from the Eternal Champion cycle by Michael Moorcock, and decided on a three-by-three matrix of good-neutral-evil by lawful-neutral-chaotic. Other games, especially storytelling games like VAMPIRE THE MASQUERADE or PENDRAGON, meant for an older target audience (fourteen-year-old boys) made the internal moral conflict of the character central to the drama of the game: there the alignment is between honor and dishonor, being a monster or being a man.

The law-versus-chaos spectrum is something Moorcock invented for the admirable purpose of cranking out fairly repetitive action-adventure sword-n-sorcery paperbacks where the angst of our beloved antihero protagonist, the eternally brooding Eternal Champion, never lacks for grist for his woe. It is formula writing, but it is good a good formula, and I personally do not mock it but salute it.

The formula is this: the multiverse is a cosmic war between equally inhuman and unpleasant divinities representing total tyranny and total anarchy. Since victory for either side would be disastrous for mankind, our beloved antihero can always easily be placed in a situation where he must betray one side or the other, betray one ideal or the other, and he can always place the back of his wrist against his forehead and bemoan the fact that he is caught up in an eternal conflict (hence his name) with no meaning and no resolution. Striking this pose is sweet as fresh peaches to the target audience (fourteen-year-old boys) to whom bemoaning the cruelty of life is a newfound pleasure, and they eat it up with cream.

But, upon reflection, lawfulness and anarchy have no innate moral meaning whatever.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

The Wright Perspective: Who is on the Right?

My column for this week at Everyjoe:

http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/05/14/politics/what-is-a-conservative-who-is-on-the-right/

What is a Conservative? Who is on the Right? I am, if these words are used honestly. They are almost never used honestly.

Conservatives are placed to the Right on the traditional Left-to-Right political spectrum. That spectrum groups Whigs and Republicans as well as their enemies the Monarchists and Imperialists on the Right, Conservatives as well as Anarcho-Capitalists, and, worst of all, members of the National Socialists Worker’s Party (Nazis). The traditional spectrum is based on the assumption that enlightenment, change, revolution and progress are the exclusive property of Socialism, and that any opposition to Socialism is rooted in benighted ignorance, folly, reaction, conformity, cowardice and regress.

If we call ourselves “Right,” the unwary are likely to get a confused mental image of a follower of Torquemada, Simon LeGree, Adolf Hitler, George Bush and Gordon Gekko, perhaps with Cotton Mather thrown in. But none of these men have anything in common, except that they represent ideas Progressives hate.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Interior Illustrations by John C. Wright

In case you wanted to see the interior illustrations for my wife’s latest book, THE UNEXPECTED ENLIGHTENMENT OF RACHEL GRIFFIN, drawn by none other than yours truly, allow me to present three of them here.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Alignments in Amber

Alignment is the assignment of a rough and ready system of moral standards to tabletop miniature role playing games, mostly used to allow the Moderator to decide what happens if Boromir picks up the One Ring, or when SturmbannführerToht or Oberst Dietrichpries open the Ark of the Covenant.

Alignment is also used as the simplest form of roleplaying aid for new players who have never pretended to be someone other than themselves before. Just this last month, I saw my own son, playing a half-orc monk named Chim Pan Zi have to confront the fact that his lawful good character could not break into a building owned by the evil Baron, or even disobey the evil Baron’s evil weapons-confiscation laws. (He gave up his weapons and continued to fight bare handed). The solution he came up with was that Lawful Good members of his order obeyed Good Laws according to the spirit of the law, but Evil Laws only according to the letter, being minimally compliant, and not cooperating with an active evil. I thought that was a pretty sophisticated solution for a fifteen year old to come up with. But the point he, he had to think out how someone with a different worldview and philosophy of life would think.

Once Dungeons and Dragons got the ball rolling on Alignment, several other rules systems made several other clever rules about alignment.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Reviewer Praise for JUDGE OF AGES

Paul Di Filippo at Locus Online gives my book very high praise indeed.

 

In this installment of his far-future adventure, which blends flavors of Ed Hamilton, Stephen Baxter, Doc Smith, Jack Vance, E. R. Eddison, C. S. Lewis, Jack Williamson and A. E. van Vogt into a unique and generally tasty mélange…

I go must go on to affirm that the novel provides much pleasure. Wright marshals up a big backstory of human evolution that proves to have some secrets we had not known before. The titanic battle scenes are full of mind-boggling super science. The camaraderie among Montrose and his pals evokes Arthurian depths of feeling. Alien psychologies are plumbed, along with Montrose’s old-fashioned, native Texan, dogmatic pureness of intention. And the book’s surprise ending does represent a sea-change of sorts.

Paramount above all is Wright’s lofty fabulism of prose (with some contrasting down-home locutions from Montrose). When one recalls that Wright has recently issued a volume of his stories set in William Hope Hodgson’s baroque Night Land subcreation, some of the roots of Wright’s affinity for Homeric syntax and Shakespearean eloquence becomes more apparent.

There are moments when this book seems poised to fall into a kind of Henry Darger idiolect and private vision … But every time, at the last minute, Wright pulls back from mysticism and private symbology to show us startling philosophical vistas of futurity only he could deliver.

 

Read the whole thing (the review) here. You can also read the whole thing (the book) after you buy it, of course. It makes a great gift for the feast day of Our Lady of Fatima.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Reviewer Praise for JUDGE OF AGES

Paul Di Filippo at Locus Online gives my book very high praise indeed.

 

In this installment of his far-future adventure, which blends flavors of Ed Hamilton, Stephen Baxter, Doc Smith, Jack Vance, E. R. Eddison, C. S. Lewis, Jack Williamson and A. E. van Vogt into a unique and generally tasty mélange..

I go must go on to affirm that the novel provides much pleasure. Wright marshals up a big backstory of human evolution that proves to have some secrets we had not known before. The titanic battle scenes are full of mind-boggling super science. The camaraderie among Montrose and his pals evokes Arthurian depths of feeling. Alien psychologies are plumbed, along with Montrose’s old-fashioned, native Texan, dogmatic pureness of intention. And the book’s surprise ending does represent a sea-change of sorts.

Paramount above all is Wright’s lofty fabulism of prose (with some contrasting down-home locutions from Montrose). When one recalls that Wright has recently issued a volume of his stories set in William Hope Hodgson’s baroque Night Land subcreation, some of the roots of Wright’s affinity for Homeric syntax and Shakespearean eloquence becomes more apparent.

There are moments when this book seems poised to fall into a kind of Henry Darger idiolect and private vision … But every time, at the last minute, Wright pulls back from mysticism and private symbology to show us startling philosophical vistas of futurity only he could deliver.

Read the whole thing (the review) here. You can also read the whole thing (the book) after you buy it, of course. It makes a great gift for the feast day of Our Lady of Fatima.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Black Mass Canceled

Let the joyous news be spread:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/05/12/cardinal-sean-malley-expresses-disappointment-harvard-decision-allow-black-mass-campus/tUjYx2817C65LAHousRIeP/story.html

I should mention that I prayed a rosary over this, but the wife prayed all evening.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

An Afterword on the Stormtroopers of Toleration

Last week, I wrote an article for the Intercollegiate Review called Heinlein, Hugos, and Hogwash.

The point of the article was the a certain segment of the science fiction community has taken it upon themselves to police the rest of us for the political correctness of our thoughts. Their preferred tool to do this is peer pressure, sniping, sneering, cavorting, complaining, and being busybodies and public nuisances.

The result has been getting people fired from magazine gigs, disinvited from being guests of honor, or boycotting anthologies that offend arbitrary quotas, urging fandom to vote against Hugo nominees based on the author’s conformity to the peer pressure, or kicking lifetime members out of SFWA for holding uncouth opinions.

I am surprised, but should not be, that an obscure opinion in an obscure journal by an obscure author such as myself would provoke so many loud and hostile reactions. (Maybe it is a slow news day and there is nothing else to fret about.)

Why so vehement a reaction when so my other published opinions of mine, much more controversial, go uncontroverted? I suspect that the witchhunters hate being identified for what they are. Truth is their kryptonite.

I won’t bother linking to them. Overhearing strangers talk about me either in praise or blame bores me, since I am not a fascinating subject to myself, and none of these people know my character or my character flaws.

But I will make one comment, which I hope is telling:

Please note that these various articles critiquing my article do not say, “the witch hunt never happened; we, the socially-aware segment of the science fiction community, are completely forgiving of all personal flaws and differences of opinion, political and personal, between ourselves and Malzberg, Moon, Correia, Card, etc, and we judge their works only on the merit of the writing!”

Instead they say, “But those people he defends really are witches and pariahs! Right-thinking people must have nothing to do with them!”

Which would seem to prove, rather than refute, my point.

If a man should accuse you, my dear slow-witted stormtroopers of love and tolerance, of being unloving and intolerant to the point where you are ostracizing pariahs, and if, in reply to the accusation, your reflex is to declare the accuser to be a pariah and ostracize him, then onlookers are not likely to be convinced the accusation is inaccurate.

Even if everyone I defended were as guilty as sin, a forgiving crowd would have forgiven those sins.

The defense has proven the case for the prosecution. The prosecutions rests.

 

 

 

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AN AFTERWORD TO THE AFTERWORD: For those of you interested in following the silly gossip about me:

http://file770.com/?p=16991

My comment: A man whom no one in his right mind would call a bigot, if he asks men to be forgiving of bigots, is called a bigot. Anyone who speaks up for the lepers becomes a leper.  The problem here is that if you are expelled from a small circle, you are not shoved into a closet, but shoved out into a larger world.

The so-called leper colony of science fiction readers interested in well written science fiction work is a wider world than the science fiction readers fascinated with the the follies and paradoxes of political correctness.

I am happy to hear about a good review. I am shocked that Mr Scalzi returned my goodwill with a display of unprofessional peevishness. I will of course overlook it should he ever change his mind. He and I still need to overcome the Pluto-Haters. The Mi-Go are depending on us.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Reviewer Praise for Awake in the Night

Here is a review AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/brief-no-spoilers-review-of-john-c.html

 

No spoilers.

I bought this novella having seen the recommendation from Adam Greenwood:

http://www.jrganymede.com/2014/04/14/awake-in-the-night-land

I fully agree that this is a really, really good book; indeed it is good in a way and at a level that I found almost bewildering. The level of the thing seems to be far above me – I was just aghast at the way the story kept twisting and reversing, again and again and again, yet with a complete sureness of touch and cohesion.

I have already said that, simply as prose, it is as original and high in quality as anything I’ve come across written by authors of the past couple of generations; the plotting is, if anything, even better.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/the-prose-artistry-of-john-c-wright.html

Having said all this, I am not sure whether I got it all, indeed I am sure I didn’t. Without being in the slightest pretentious (in the way that Henry James, James Joyce or Samuel Becket – and innumerable lesser modernists – are so often pretentious; I mean that sense of deliberately trying to impress the reader with a conviction of the authors’ cleverness) I am nonetheless sure that JCW’s mind, specifically his fiction-writing persona inclusive of whatever inspirations effectual, is operating at a level considerably beyond mine.

The Roman Catholic church is fortunate in having someone as advocate of his quality – and indeed the whole nature of this fiction strikes me as the best kind of product of this most intellectually-sophisticated of Christian denominations.

Another element, which I would not regard as typically Catholic, but which I found profoundly resonant, was the general idea that the salvation was a thing that involved a man and wife, together. This seemed to come from the author’s heart and spoke to my own heart as an ideal, and indeed as a kind of ultimate or eventual existential necessity: that we are each individually, as man or woman, complementary half-persons, even at best.

I did not feel the book was anything so formal as an allegory, certainly there was no point-by-point correspondence going on – but without doubt there is an important and deliberate Christian relevance. This is a picture of the human condition in its essence. Indeed, it is the kind of book a Christian can and should learn from; and which may produce un-named stirrings and yearnings in the breast of a non-Christian.

I only finished the book today – so these are first impressions. What will be interesting will be to see and to feel how my ideas and evaluations develop over time, and (presumably) re-readings.

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My comment:

My natural modesty forbids me from making a comment, except to say that the story was just not that good when I wrote it.

Maybe the editor changed it when I was not looking or something, or Titania, the beautiful and terrifying Queen of Elfland with the lightest brush of her charming wand.

I suppose you do not believe the Queen of Elfland theory, dear reader, but there is a strange alchemy to writing which this writer, at least, does not understand, and a stranger alchemy to reading. It is like walking into dreams.

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Note: I have a sort-of declaration of interest to make here: Mr Charlton is a penpal of mine, and he knows me to be an admirer of his thought and work, and, besides, just to be sure, I commanded my human-ape hybrid minions, the Apeloids of Skull Island, connect a mind-control parasite from Starro the Conqueror to his nervous system and forced Mr Charlton, shrieking and weeping, his muscles locked and rigid, to watch while his trembling pen-hand against his will wrote this review.

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He assures me he would have written the same thing had I not done that, but then my beautiful but evil daughter, the Princess Pingping the Unmerciful, helped him to escape from the Experiment Pits, so I am not sure what to believe. According to my last good report, he was shot down while fleeing on a hawkman rocketcycle, by my cyborg Pterodactyls in close pursuit, to crash somewhere in the rocky mountainscape known as The Haunted Labyrinth of Death. There is rumored to be an entryway into a freakish underground world ruled by dinosaurs and the longlost descendants of the serpent man of Atlantis. I am wise enough not to discredit these old tales. However, since I killed the insolent ornithopter pilot who was making the report, who claimed it was impossible for Charlton to suvive, I do not exactly know whether he yet lives to threaten my global ambitions. I will be seeking volunteers from among the gladiators on Death Row to enter the Labyrinth to search. That cannot go badly.

Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.