John C. Wright's Blog, page 78
March 24, 2014
A Nice Warm Cup of Shut the Hell Up, Served by Correia
Larry Correia, that rough-cut but priceless gem of a man, responds to a review from some lumpish subhuman who did not read the book allegedly being reviewed. It seems the reviewer merely wanted to rant some economically illiterate gibberish about how electronic novellas should be priced, and to demean Mr Correia’s fine and worthy readers as chumps.
But, behold, the fighting spirit of ten irate devils arises in fire in Mr Correia’s eye at this, the gloves of nicety come off, and the bare-knuckle barroom brawn of words begins! Savor the whole thing, please: http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/03/21/this-is-the-kind-of-crap-authors-have-to-put-up-with/
Below the cut is a choice quote where Mr Correia is verbally sliding his hapless opponent facefirst down the bar across beer mugs and puddles into the bottles and plate glass mirror behind the bar while the showgirls shriek. WARNING, a saloon is not a venue for ladies or youngsters or men of gentle breeding, so the language is a little salty.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
March 22, 2014
Time Shifters / Thrill Seekers
For those of you that might have heard a rumor of this and were curious, here is my movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1Z5RjuB78
It is ‘mine’ only in the rather limited sense that my friend Kurt Inderbitzen (the executive producer) asked me for an idea for a time travel story, and I came up with the basic idea and the opening scene. I did not write the script, or even a detailed outline, but he did buy the idea from me, for money, which makes it (as far as I am concerned) a professional sale.
And now you can watch it on the computer free of charge!
The only other movie connected with me is one in which I appeared: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1325014/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm
I play a character with the odd name of ‘Himself’. I have exactly one half a line of spoken monologue.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
March 21, 2014
The Eternal Whiner
Let no one be deceived by my last essay into thinking I have less than great respect for the fiction writing of Michael Moorcock. It is the essays of Michael Moorcock I despise.
There are several Moorcock books I like, and, indeed, like a great deal. He is an author that is almost good enough to write pulp like Robert E Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs.
The idea of Elric is a cunning inversion of all the tropes and stereotypes of Robert E Howard’s Conan. Conan is a healthy barbarian who is basically decent and never complains, whereas Elric is a sickly and overcivilized albino who is basically decadent and never stops whining. The idea of the antibarbarian is a stroke of genius. I wish I had come up with the concept. It is very witty.
Michael Moorcock writes light, escapist fare that has nothing whatever to say about real problems in real life.
Even the ‘conflict’ between Law and Chaos is a rather unimaginative way to exemplify the ‘Happy Medium’ proposed by Aristotle, and promote nothing in excess.
Of course, I just read the passage in G.K. Chesterton’s ORTHODOXY dismissing the gray and watery blandness of pagan moderation, which forms so unsuccessful a contrast with the vividness and adventure of Christian lauds of virtue and condemnations of vice.
I put the word ‘conflict’ in scare quotes because I can bring to mind nothing in the text of any of the dozen or two novels of Moorcock’s that I read and enjoyed that had anything about law or chaos in the plot itself, or had anything to do with the characters. The two sides of the so called cosmic conflict could have been called ‘The Blue Faction’ and ‘The Green Faction’ without any loss in meaning.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Writing Down the Dragon
A reader named Paul LaMontagne draws our attention to a simply excellent book of essays by Tom Simon. Here I reprint Mr LaMontagne’s comment in full, as this is the best way I can imagine to have my readers rush out immediately and buy Mr Simon’s book.
The bold text is Mr LaMontagne, the italics is Mr Moorcock, and the regular text is Mr Simon.
… Have you read Tom Simon’s excellent collection of essays “Writing Down The Dragon”? In “Moorcock, Saruman, and the Dragon’s Tail” (link to essay below) he also addresses and analyzes Moorcock’s infamous essay. Interestingly, at the end of the below passage he applies to Moorcock an analogy you yesterday applied to Edmund Wilson:
“…He [Moorcock] raises against Tolkien (and even more specifically against Heinlein) the old, threadbare charge of ‘escapism’:
‘The laboured irony, as it were, of the pulp hero or heroine, this deadly levity in the fact of genuine experience, which serves not to point up the dramatic effect of the narrative, but to reduce it — and to make the experience described comfortingly ‘unreal’ — is the trick of the truly escapist author who pretends to be writing about fundamental truths and is in fact telling fundamental lies.’
There, I think, is where the shoe pinches. Let us look at some of the ‘fundamental lies’ Tolkien offers us:
*Power is addictive.
*The habitual exercise of power corrodes the will and blunts the moral sense.
*There is evil in the world that we cannot hope to overcome, but it will never be overcome unless we do what we can to resist it.
*By conquering nature, we dehumanize ourselves, but by appreciating nature and preserving it, we supply a deep spiritual need.
*Good cannot be achieved by evil means. Moreover, evil itself cannot achieve the particular ends it desires by evil means: ‘Oft evil will shall evil mar.’
*There is no good excuse for cooperating with a tyrant. If you think he will spare you because of it, you are fooling yourself.
*It is better to resist evil, even if it means war, than submit peacefully to be enslaved and slaughtered.
*The desire for immortality is a cheat, for no matter how much power you have, you will never have power over death.
*If we oppose evil to the limit of our strength, though that in itself is inadequate, there is a Providence that can make our victory possible.
I think it is this last point above all that offends Moorcock. He is bitterly hostile to religion, and to Christianity in particular, and his own fiction does not suggest that he has a well-developed sense of ethics. The great struggle in the Elric books is not between Good and Evil, nor even between better and worse impulses in the human mind, but between Law and Chaos, either of which can be served just as well by evil means as by good. Actually it is a false dichotomy, as Fabio P. Barbieri has pointed out. Chaos can only occur in a context of order, and order, by the laws of thermodynamics, inevitably decays into chaos. The alternative to an ordered society is not a state of complete anarchy, but death; and everything that exists, however disorderly it may appear, is strictly subject to the laws that make its existence possible. As William Blake said, ‘Reason is the circumference of energy’: they require each other, like the poles of a magnet. But since neither law nor chaos can exist alone, there can be no final victory or defeat in any war between them. The combatants can go on fighting for ever, or at least until they grow tired and discover that the whole donnybrook was fundamentally silly.
Elric makes a pact with Arioch, a Lord of Chaos, who gives him the sword Stormbringer. Stormbringer gives its wielder great power, but also turns him, in effect, into a vampire, who must slay other living souls merely to stay alive. Nowhere in the Elric books is there any indication that Moorcock’s hero regrets his pact, or feels that his victims have any worth comparable to his own. In the end he builds up an army of barbarians, returns to Melniboné, kills the cousin who usurped his throne, destroys the entire city, and then betrays his allies to destruction themselves. From all this slaughter and betrayal he walks away more or less smiling, if the desperately melancholy Elric can ever be said to smile. It is a celebration of heroic nihilism so blatant that even Nietzsche might have averted his eyes in shame. All this is worlds away from the strict Judaeo-Christian ethics and Catholic sense of grace that permeate Tolkien’s work. Moorcock is not the only critic to have scented the presence of grace and reacted like Gollum to lembas: ‘Leaves out of the elf-country, gah! Dust and ashes, we can’t eat that.’ It is significant that Moorcock is a strong admirer of Philip Pullman, whose entire oeuvre is essentially an attack on a Gnosticized strawman version of Christianity.”
Here is a link to the whole essay, but the entire collection is, in my humble opinion, worth purchasing:
Your humble opinion is the same as my proud opinion, and I salute Mr Simon as inspired by a particular genius of insight. I strongly, strongly recommend his essays to anyone who wants to enjoy a thoughtful conversation about Tolkien.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
March 20, 2014
Epic Pooh-poohing
As an apt follow up to our last topic, this is but a brief but telling quote from Michael Moorcock concerning Professor Tolkien:
Like Chesterton, and other orthodox Christian writers who substituted Faith for artistic rigour he [Tolkien] sees the petit bourgeoisie, the honest artisans and peasants, as the bulwark against Chaos. These people are always sentimentalized in such fiction because, traditionally, they are always the last to complain about any deficiencies in the social status quo. They are a type familiar to anyone who ever watched an English film of the thirties and forties, particularly a war-film, where they are represented solid good sense opposed to a perverted intellectualism. — from Michael Moorcock, EPIC POOH
The paragraph come from an essay by Mr Moorcock, author of the Elric stories, where he attempt to prove, ah, pardon me, I misspoke, where he asserts without even making a token attempt at proving so as to buffalo the unwary, that Professor Tolkien’s popularity can be explained by saying the childish rhythm of Tolkien’s language lulls we admirers of Tolkien into sleep. Because we Tolkien fans are stupid and infantile fools, dontcha know.
The paragraph is exceptional in that it contains an error or two in every line. Let us note them, line by line.
First, we orthodox Christian writers do not substitute faith for artistic rigor, whatever that means. The comment is merely a slander, or a sneer, meant to create the impression that Christianity (which can properly take credit for the novel, the cathedral, and polyphonic music) is naturally unartistic, and that antichristianity (which can properly take credit for absurdism, cubism, atonal music) is artistic.
If it is objected that Moorcock here means only that some orthodox Christians substitute faith for artistic rigor, and G.K. Chesterton and J.R.R. Tolkien are among those few, the comment is a slander or a sneer delivered against two men of letters of considerably more accomplishment than enjoyed by the author of SWORDS OF MARS.
To be fair, Mr Moorcock wrote considerably more books than this, or, to be precise, endless variations of the same book, all with the same main character, the Eternal Champion, and the same dreary plot, that life is a disappointing betrayal. The themes and plots are predigested. I know of no author in the fantasy field who exercises less artistic rigor.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Interview with Liberty Voice
Douglas Cobb of Liberty Voice does me the honor of interviewing me, asking me about my Count to the Eschaton Sequence.
Read the whole thing here: http://guardianlv.com/2014/03/john-c-wright-on-the-judge-of-ages-and-more-interview/
The basic inspiration for the story came, oddly enough, from fans of my previous series, THE GOLDEN AGE. It seems there is a certain club or cult of folks, called Transhumanists, who take science fiction more seriously than I do, and they believe that the various marvels I predicted in that book, such as the ability to record human brain information, copy it, edit it, and download it into bodies much more durable than flesh and blood, are all to be discovered within the lifetime of men now living. In several conversations I tried to point out that the main problem was a moral one, not a technological one, although the technological problems themselves are insurmountable. (We do not even, for example, have a precise scientific definition of human thought, nor any way to reduce it to measurement).
As the conversation progressed the transhumanists (or at least those with whom I spoke) began making ever more astonishing and even absurd claims. An astonishing one was that any superior intelligence created by humans should not be educated according to any human moral standard, but allowed by trial and error to fall into any sort of moral philosophy it saw fit. This was based on an unspoken assumption that humans were so wicked that anything we tried to teach, even something as simple as the Golden Rule, would corrupt the pristine perfection of the Frankenstein’s Monster. An absurd claim was that entropy itself could someday be reversed. At this point I realized I was not dealing a scientific speculation, but cultic emotionalism.
Fairness requires I emphasize that not every man calling himself a Transhumanist buys into those last two ideas. For all I know, only the man who said it believes it, and, as time passes, maybe not even him. But it pointed out to me the easy way a man who idolizes intellect over moral sentiments, a man who prizes genius over saintliness, will easily be tempted to make an artificial intellect an idol, complete with human sacrifice.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
March 19, 2014
Oo, Those Awful Orcs !
It is with the same disquiet that one might feel stepping into a cold morgue, where a body killed after continuous pain from some deadly nerve gas he inhaled on purpose might be seen laying on a steel slab, to reread the words of the dismissive review by Edmund Wilson on what history has since decreed unambiguously to be the best novel of the modern era.
The kind reader may well wonder why any time or effort should be spent on dissecting a review over half a century old, worthy of no attention and no memory. That we must answer only after reading the review itself.
From The Nation, April 14, 1956.
Oo, THOSE AWFUL ORCS !
By Edmund Wilson
J. R. R. Tolkien: The Fellowship of the Ring.
Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings, Allen and Unwin. 21s.
In 1937, Dr. J. R. R. Tolkien, an Oxford don, published a children’s book called The Hobbit, which had an immense success. The Hobbits are a not quite human race who inhabit an imaginary country called the Shire and who combine the characteristics of certain English animals – they live in burrows like rabbits and badgers – with the traits of English country-dwellers, ranging from rustic to tweedy (the name seems a telescoping of rabbit and Hobbs.) They have Elves, Trolls and Dwarfs as neighbours, and they are associated with a magician called Gandalph [sic] and a slimy water-creature called Gollum. Dr. Tolkien became interested in his fairy-tale country and has gone on from this little story to elaborate a long romance, which has appeared, under the general title, The Lord of the Rings, in three volumes: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King. All volumes are accompanied with maps, and Dr. Tolkien, who is a philologist, professor at Merton College of English Language and Literature, has equipped the last volume with a scholarly apparatus of appendices, explaining the alphabets and grammars of the various tongues spoken by his characters, and giving full genealogies and tables of historical chronology. Dr. Tolkien has announced that this series – the hypertrophic sequel to The Hobbit – is intended for adults rather than children, and it has had a resounding reception at the hands of a number of critics who are certainly grown-up in years.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
March 17, 2014
James Stoddart on Lin Carter
I met James Stoddart exactly once, at the convention when he was presented with the Crompton Crook award for excellence in fantasy, his book The High House. I have never met a more charming and unassuming man, one with whom I had so many shared interests. I deeply regret that he is not my nextdoor neighbor, so that we could spend our evenings talking over the back fence or sharing a barbeque or a cold beer.
That year, I had just published my first Everness book, which stars a faerie-haunted house quite similar to the High House of Stoddard; so he and I joked that we should start a society of chroniclers of fantastical mansions, if only we could get Mr John Crowley to join us and lend dignity to the project.
He was instrumental in getting published my ‘Night Land’ short stories to the generous editor Andy Robertson’s webzine, which allowed me to buy a new refrigerator, stove and microwave.
With considerable emotion, I read http://www.beyond49.ca/Carter/stoddard_trib.html“>Mr Stoddart’s tribute to Lin Carter. His opinions are as mine; his words would be mine were I as articulate as he:
For those of us who grew up in the late 60s and early 70s the years between 1969 and 1974 were the golden years in fantasy literature. It was during this six year period that Ballantine Books, under the auspices of Editorial Consultant Lin Carter, introduced the “Sign of the Unicorn” line of Adult Fantasy books, a series which was to publish some of the finest fantasy ever written. Although the series was based on the success of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, most of the books were classics predating Tolkien and owing nothing to his influence. At that time, under the ownership of Ian and Betty Ballantine, Ballantine Books seemed more like a quality, niche-marketing house than a mass marketer. A deep love of books pervaded their titles.
I was fourteen when my high school English teacher handed out an order form containing, among other books, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I had heard they were good, so I ordered all four volumes on a chance. Four dollars was not an insignificant sum in those days, but I had scarcely left Bag End with Bilbo before I knew I was on to Something Big.
At the back of the Tolkien books was a modest request form for Ballantine’s catalog of current titles. As memory serves, the catalog turned out to be a 9 by 12 inch, glossy, first-class brochure with pictures of the book covers in black and white. Soon I was ordering titles through the mail and searching for them in local bookstores.
Throughout each book, Lin Carter served as host and guide. He was much more than just the Consulting Editor of the titles. Drawing on his extensive reading of fantasy literature, he chose works of beauty and power and grace that burned into my young heart. Because of his enthusiasm, his spirited introductions became very much part of my reading experience. Although I never met him, never exchanged correspondence or heard him speak, he became my friend and my mentor, a man who understood a literature that was very important to me. It was as if we were two long acquaintances, the older and the younger, he pointing here and there saying: “Have you seen this? Did you notice that? Now, look here.”
Together we saw it all. I remember as Lin and I climbed onto the back of a reptilian shrowk to fly above the mountains of the Ifdawn Marest with Maskull and the wild and beautiful Oceaxe in David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus. Or when we stood by the cairn with Rhiannon in the world of The Mabinogion, the Welsh Iliad, through the works of Evangeline Walton, a quartet of books beginning with Prince of Annwn. Parched with thirst, Lin and I crossed the burning deserts of the dying continent Zothique and stood frozen in fear with Ralibar Vooz in the caves of Hyperborea with Clark Ashton Smith. We crept down the seven hundred onyx steps and beyond the Gates of Deeper Slumber with H.P. Lovecraft in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. We eyed one another in silent awe as we fled from the descending Powers of Evil, through the Utter Darkness toward the safety of the towering Great Redoubt of William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, that bizarre and beautifully flawed story of an earth whose sun has died. Swords in hand, we fought the bloody manticore upon Koshtra Pivrarcha with Lord Juss and Lord Brandoch Daha in E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, a work written with power and elegance in archaic English.
Exhausted, heads spinning, panting, we threw ourselves down to rest. But after a moment Lin and I looked at each other and nodded. He smiled and said, “Let’s do it all again.”
I would have followed him anywhere.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Quota
The moral imagination is the principal possession that man does not share with the beasts.
–Russell Kirk
(from an article Kirk wrote in 1968 on Ray Bradbury)
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Asimov’s Three Laws reduced to Two
A reader with the everpresent moniker of ‘Ubiquitous’ asks:
You made the observation yourself in The Golden Age, as did Asimov whenever he used them, that the Asimovian rules as we have them wouldn’t work.
What Asimovian rules would you suggest, out of curiosity?
I would program the computers with only two rules: first, love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and second, love your neighbors as yourself.
So far as I know, not a single science fiction writer has ever written a story where an artificial intelligence was programmed to carry out those commands. I offer the idea freely to any writer who wishes to attempt the feat.
The closest thing we had was in the Steven Spielberg movie A.I., where a machine shaped like a cute little boy was programmed to love it’s owner as a mother.
I assume most science fiction writers would handle the idea as a parody or a tragedy. They can picture a computer acting like Torquemada but cannot picture a computer acting like Saint Francis of Assisi, or even like Saint Thomas Aquinas.
For that matter, I assume most modern people, science fiction writers included, cannot picture a Christian acting like Saint Francis of Assisi, or Saint Thomas Aquinas. Which says nothing very flattering about the attempts of modern Christians to live the Christian life, and be salt to a world of rotting meat, or light to a world of darkness.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
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