John C. Wright's Blog, page 89
October 24, 2013
I’ve Got a Secret
It is amazing what you can find on the Internet. My cousin Yvonne brought this to the attention of my brother Stephen, and I thought I would share this with you.
Can you guess the secret?
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
October 21, 2013
The Muse of Exterminator Novels
From another interview with Gaiman, The Gods of the Funny Books
An Interview with Neil Gaiman and Rachel Pollack. I came across this:
POLLACK: An amazing thing about Blake is that while he’d tell people that his work was dictated to him by angels, he was a conscious artist working an reworking his material. People who don’t understand how that’s possible don’t understand what art is about. I was reading an interview once in one of those Soldier of Fortune magazines with one of these guys that writes those series books, like Exterminator 28. The guy was saying that he didn’t feel like it’s him writing, but that something writes thought him. And I thought, bloody hell, it’s a universal experience. Here’s this hack churning our incredibly trite work, who has that same experience of a spirit writing his story for him. It has nothing to do with it being high art or low art or popular art or esoteric art.
GAIMAN: People forget there are muses for the Exterminator novels. She’s working just as hard as the muses for poetry or comic books.
POLLACK: That’d be a great idea for a story.
My comment: I notice that it is Polloack who expresses surprise that the hacks and potboilersmiths among us are visited by the muses, and Gaiman, who is much more democratic in spirit, points out that the gods visit the meek and foolish and low as well as the high and great and wise. If the goddess of love afflicts men as wise as Merlin and Solomon as well as fools like me, or the terrible war god slays the humblest private as well as kings, which should the muses love only elites? Homer’s muse on silent wings visited some rustic fiddler composing a Clerihew after she saw Homer nodding, no doubt.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Neil Gaiman: The Future Depends on Libraries
A man after my own heart has written an article (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming) well worth the reading and pondering:
The world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different.
I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?
It’s simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.
Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.
And while we’re on the subject, I’d like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it’s a bad thing. As if “escapist” fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.
If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn’t you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.
As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
October 18, 2013
Bill Whittle’s AURORA
If you are like me, you would pay good money to see a realistic, hard-as-diamonds hard SF story made into a movie.
It is called AURORA: The Free Frontier. It sounds like a cross between a Ben Bova story and a Bob Heinlein yarn with a bit of Arthur C. Clarke thrown in for realism. It has not been made yet, but listen to him pitch the idea.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
October 17, 2013
Superman at 75
You may have seen this animated short elsewhere, but if not, enjoy.
I was pleased to see how many references I recognized, including the mechanical monsters from the Max Fleischer cartoon where Superman first developed x-ray vision.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Starvation and Socialism
Stephen J asks:
there’s only so happy I can be about the fizzling of the population bomb because as much as it is due to human ingenuity finding ways to feed and manage greater numbers, it has also, I think, been tragically contributed to by widespread contraception and abortion. The number I typically hear cited by pro-life advocates is forty million people lost to abortion alone, just in the States, in the forty years since Roe vs. Wade; expand that to the world, and include not just the deaths of abortion but the lives prevented by contraception in the eighty years since Lambeth and the sixty years since the Pill, and I have to wonder if indeed Ehrlich would have been closer to the mark if none of those things had ever happened. (Which is by no means an argument for those things and I don’t want to make it one, which is precisely why I find that whole train of thought so upsetting.)
Am I overestimating the effect of these evils? Or underestimating even yet both Providence and human ingenuity? I would be very happy to be told that both Planned Parenthood and Ehrlich can be wrong.
Answer: Yes. Both are not only wrong, and dead wrong, both have done incalculable harm to so many people that even the sufferings of hell will hardly atone for it. Would there be a One Child Policy in China (which made my daughter an orphan, thank you very much, so I have a personal reason to hate it) were it not for scaremonger Ehrlich and his nonsense?
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Malthus at the Movies
An excellent article on the folly of overpopulation fears (h/t to CAEI):
http://thefederalist.com/2013/09/26/malthus-at-the-movies/
Here is a sample:
The Population Bomb FizzlesBut a funny thing happened on the way to the apocalypse. Instead of running out of natural resources, they got cheaper. Population growth led to economic growth, not economic collapse. In the 1966 novel on which Soylent Green was based, earth’s population in the year 2022 has reached the staggering level of… seven billion. In other words, the book actually underestimated world population growth. Yet from 1961 to 2007, the food supply increased 27 percent per person, despite world population growing from 3.6 to 6.7 billion.
The real problem with the panicked predictions of Soylent Green and The Population Bomb was a failure of imagination combined with a lack of faith in the creativity and resilience of humanity. Predictions of imminent resource exhaustion based on currently known supplies is the equivalent of going to your local supermarket, calculating that there is only enough food there to last a couple of weeks, and concluding that we should see mass starvation by the end of the month. The math behind the calculations might be fine, but the inability to take into account human adaptability makes them nearly worthless.
Ehrlich’s strongest critic was the economist Julian Simon, and Ehrlich proved to be enough of gambler to make a public bet with Simon. In 1980, Simon argued that, contra Ehrlich’s doomsaying, commodities would become more plentiful and cheaper over the next decade. As Simon saw things, it was a mistake to think of natural resources as finite materials in the ground. Throughout most of history, having oil on your land was kind of a nuisance. It’s black and sticky and wasn’t good for much of anything. It’s only when people figured out some valuable use for oil that it became a natural resource. Human ingenuity, therefore, is the ultimate resource. More people means not just more consumers, but more problem solvers.
In 1990, Ehrlich was forced to admit his predictions were wrong and mailed Simon a check for losing the bet. You’d think that realizing mass starvation was not inevitable would have been a relief, but Ehrlich was hardly a gracious loser. If someone had to die in order to prove scarcity and overpopulation were legitimate concerns, Ehrlich had an idea about who that might be. Five years after losing his bet, he would tell the Wall Street Journal, “If Simon disappeared from the face of the Earth, that would be great for humanity.”
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Rachel Griffin on Kindle! Unexpected Enlightenment Day is HERE!
Let sound the horns and brazen trumpets! The greatest book OF ALL TIME AND SPACE is finally available! Mortgage your homes and sell your children to gypsies to raise the available funds! Engage in a mad buying spree brought on by eating Twinkies! Throw thrift to the four winds in a gesture of heedless abandon and bravado!
http://www.amazon.com/Unexpected-Enlightenment-Rachel-Griffin-ebook/dp/B00FY1RSXC
L. Jagi Lamplighter, a fantastic new voice and a fabulous new world in the YA market! Rachel Griffin is a hero who never gives up! I cheered her all the way!
—Faith Hunter, author of the Skinwalker series
Rachel Griffin wants to know everything. As a freshman at Roanoke Academy for the Sorcerous Arts, she has been granted to opportunity to study both mundane and magical subjects.
But even her perfect recollection of every book she has ever read does not help her when she finds a strange statue in the forest—a statue of a woman with wings. Nowhere—neither in the arcane tomes of the Wise, nor in the dictionary and encyclopedia of the non-magic-using Unwary—can she find mention of such a creature.
What could it be? And why are the statue’s wings missing when she returns?
When someone tries to kill a fellow student, Rachel soon realizes that, in the same way her World of the Wise hides from mundane folk, there is another, more secret world hiding from everyone—which her perfect recall allows her to remember. Her need to know everything drives her to investigate.
Rushing forward where others fear to tread, Rachel finds herself beset by wraiths, magical pranks, homework, a Raven said to bring the doom of worlds, love’s first blush, and at least one fire-breathing teacher.
Curiosity might kill a cat, but nothing stops Rachel Griffin!
The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin, a plucky band of children join forces to fight evil, despite the best efforts of incompetent adults, at a school for wizards. YA fiction really doesn’t get better than that.
—Jonathan Moeller, author of The Ghosts series
Rachel Griffin is curious, eager and smart, and ready to begin her new life at Roanoke Academy for the Sorcerous Arts, but she didn’t expect to be faced with a mystery as soon as she got there. Fortunately she’s up to the task. Take all the best of the classic girl detective, throw in a good dose of magic and surround it all with entertaining, likeable friends and an intriguing conundrum, and you’ll have The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin, a thrilling adventure tailor-made for the folks who’ve been missing Harry Potter, Exciting, fantastical events draw readers into Rachel’s world and solid storytelling keeps them there.
—Misty Massey, author of Mad Kestrel
Please buy my wife’s book or I will cry. I did the interior pictures.
—John C. Wright, pathetic guy with no sense of dignity, author of Golden Orphans of a Trillion of Everness.Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
October 16, 2013
It’s off!
Cross your fingers and hope they buy it. Tor books, my esteemed publisher, has just been sent THE CONCUBINE VECTOR, the fourth (but not the final) volume in my COUNT TO THE ESCHATON sequence.
I wonder what the cover art will eventually look like for the Eschaton sequence? Hmmm….
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
GRAY LENSMAN by E.E. Doc Smith.
We continue down memory lane to the far future of galactic and intergalactic war, if there are any of you old enough to remember 1939 (the same year Superman came out), This essay will continue the format of my previous essay, where I speak a little bit about the book in question, and then rant about some unrelated topic, such as bimetallism or the Caledonian war.
Most second books, especially those in a multivolume series, suffer from a certain set of understandable defects: the characters no longer enjoy the freshness of having been recently introduced, the plot must grow out of the previous book but at the same time go in a new direction, and the antagonist is either a new villain, in which case the reader has no emotional investment in booing him, or is an old villain, in which case the reader has already seen him defeated once, which makes him less able to inspire fear.
Usually the second book is weaker than the first; in this case, it is stronger. Indeed, I will be bold enough to say that if it were not for GRAY LENSMAN and its sequels the first book, GALACTIC PATROL, would have been largely forgotten. That is, more largely forgotten.
E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith handles all these problems with an adroitness so skillful and yet so understated that it might not be noticed at first, and so clever that it is frankly astonishing that no other writer has copied these solutions.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
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