John C. Wright's Blog, page 93
August 29, 2013
Unexpected Enlightenment Day!
If I have ever found favor in your eyes, kind reader, please go to Amazon and click on my wife’s book to help raise her numbers.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Unexpected-Enlightenment-Rachel-Griffin/dp/1937051870
If you want to read a Harry Potter style book with lots of teen angst and a clever mystery (and see my character Sigfried Smith in action — I was the adviser on that character, meaning he talks and acts just like me) then by all means buy the book. But clicking on it will be a service to us nonetheless.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
August 28, 2013
The Infinite Cage and the Escape from Middle Earth
I had occasion to re-read another book, THE INFINITE CAGE, by Keith Laumer, and again to compare what shallow youth recalled versus what older eyes perceive.
This book was one of those rare cases where not only did I not remember the ending, I misremembered it, thinking some matter of my own unintentional invention was in the text when it was not. Here was my greatest surprise, for normally I have a very crisp and accurate memory of books I’ve read, as accurate as my memory for people I meet is vague, shabby, and neglectful.
A smaller surprise, but one more interesting to comment upon, was the unrelenting grimness, cynicism, and sourness of the tale. This was something which made no impression on my sunny youthful mind, who had neither taste for misanthropic pessimism nor, apparently, any ability to recognize or notice it. At the time, I also thought innocence was the same as naivety. It is not; they are nearly opposites. More on this later.
Laumer is a treat to read. Other writers try to put conflict and tension in their works, but end up lumbering along. Laumer defines conflict and tension. There are no wasted scenes and hardly a wasted word, and some dramatic thing happens each easy-to-turn page. His works written after 1971 might lack this quality; none from before do. I will not say he is in top form, because all his books are written with this same sparse prose, vivid turns of phrase, and lean, fast-paced action.
The novel is short and to the point. It concerns the tragic misadventures of an mind-reading superman with perfect memory, apparently infinite intelligence, but possessing at first no selfhood nor self-awareness, and, later, a simplistic and naïve personality, utterly innocent and trusting.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Google and the Sacred
You can tell what a man holds sacred not by what he says about it but how he treats it.
I notice today that Google has an image glorifying Martin Luther King, on the anniversary of his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech, which was one of the inspirations for the overthrow of Democrat Jim Crow laws in the Democrat South, which remained as a shameful legacy of Democrat slaveholding which the Republicans stopped, even at the cost of a hideous and ruinous war. The Republicans also voted in the Civil Rights Act. (Why do the Republicans never get the credit and the Democrats never the blame for these things? Because the Democrats control the public education. Thanks, Dewey.)
I notice that on Easter Sunday, Google put up an image of a communist agitator for workingman’s rights. No doubt the fellow was brave and devout, but is there no one else whom one should remember and honor on Easter Sunday?
Why does Google honor Dr King but not the King of Kings, the Lord whom King worshiped? Because they hold his struggle for equality and equal rights to be sacred, but not the faith which gave Dr King the strength to make that struggle, nor the Creator which gave him and us those rights.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
August 26, 2013
DONE! Er… Almost
The first draft of THE CONCUBINE VECTOR is finished as of this moment. It is roughly a zillion words over my word limit, so I will have to spend weeks and fortnights cutting it down to size.
It runs from AD 11049 to AD 51555.
The first three chapters of the next book, tentatively titled THE ASYMPTOTE OF MAN, are already written. It picks up the action at AD 70220.
The final volume, tentatively titled COUNT TO INFINITY, will have its second-to-last scene set somewhere around 21, 000,000,000 AD
For those of you keeping track of dates.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
August 24, 2013
Book Recommendations and Revolution Recommendation
Earlier I posted a rather lengthy list of recommended books for anyone interested in the Great Books; let me provided a shorter list here, taken from Peter Kreeft:
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
August 21, 2013
Night of Delusions; Works of Subversion
This is not a book review, but a meditation upon the enemy prompted by a book.
The book is NIGHT OF DELUSIONS by Keith Laumer, a minor effort by an accomplished author whose accomplishments are all but unknown these days. This author is a particular favorite of mine, and always has been, and only recently did I come to realize that he is not as well known in science fiction circles as authors of frankly smaller skill and output. I cannot recall when last I saw any of his books even at the used bookstore. And I find it hard to understand why. (I hope to introduce his works to some readers who have not had the pleasure, and urge you to try him.)
The enemy is, of course, the one enemy. There is only one. More on him later.
This non-bookreview will read as if I am criticizing this book, or, rather, a single scene or a single line in the book. It will read as if I am criticizing the author. I am not. I adore this author.
I am criticizing the spirit of the age; I am criticizing subversion in literature as in life; and I am contenting with powers and principalities that have very little indeed to do with science fiction.
However, spoilers abound, since I discuss the surprise endings of several books below. Readers are warned.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
July 31, 2013
Cover Art for THE CONCUBINE VECTOR ??
The Tor Art Department has not yet decided on a cover for my next book, CONCUBINE VECTOR, which, to be frank, I have not finished or sent to them yet. But I was able to find an artist’s conception of a possible cover online. See below the cut.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
July 30, 2013
Cover Art and Synopsis of JUDGE OF AGES
Here is the cover to JUDGE OF AGES.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
July 27, 2013
Panphysicalism
Part of an ongoing, possibly endless, conversation. My apologies to those whose patience with this is not superhuman.
A reader of the philosophical materialist persuasion named Andreassen offers me the following axiom, which I call the panphysicalist axiom:
All atomic motions without exception, including those in the bodies of free-willed beings, are exactly described by the laws of physics.
I asked him, if this axiom is true, how he knows it to be true? Explained the question in the following terms:
Specifically I was attempting to discover from you whether the axiom (1) applies to this and every logically conceivable version of the cosmos (2) happens to apply to this cosmos but conceivably might not (3) applies only to local conditions within the cosmos, such as at or near the earth’s surface.
His answer:
Your second option is true: Materialism is a conditional universal.
My reply is below
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
July 26, 2013
On the Garden of Paradise
This is an essay I was asked to write for a Spanish language anthology, not yet released, asked of several men of letters their thoughts and opinions about the life to come. I reprint it here with the editor’s permission.
The garden of paradise lies beyond the fields we know, where we slumber and labor, and we father sons and see them fall in war, where we have toothache and heartache and mighty loves and tiny wasps to engage our attention, and to console us is the Church like a mother who takes a crying child in her arms. This is called the valley of tears not because life here is nothing but tears, but because life there is nothing like tears.
Little can be known of these gardens and less can be said, for words are curving yardsticks and crooked walking sticks indeed. But what little can be said must be said, for to that gate of pearl we all must go, whether we will or not, and all who fear eternal death yearn for eternal life, which is not found on this side of the gate. But how can we know what no man has seen, sight which mortal eyes, by their nature, might be too dim to see, and mortal minds too dark?
Perhaps we can know the unknown by what little clues the unknown has made known to us.
Once, two twins in the womb were discussing conditions outside, for they no doubt had heard a rumor or report that they were soon to be disembarked or, rather, decanted into that strange outward realm so much unlike their present condition. One twin thought the world outside the womb might be two or three times as large, but otherwise would be much the same as this, a dark and comfortably narrow space, filled with warmth and fluid, and nutriments sucked in through the belly button. The other, more daring, mentioned the voice he sometimes heard through the living walls of their world, the voice of the mother who comprised the whole world, and he dared to dream that one day, after birth, he would see the mother face to face. He wondered if he might hear her more clearly there, and perhaps find the owner of the beating heart beneath which they slept.
The first was doubtful, pointing out that if they departed from the world of the womb, the umbilicus which fed them might drop away, and belly button would become useless, and they would starve. The second one sucked on his thumb a while in thought, and answered that perhaps there was some other organ, some method of taking in nutrient, which the babes in the womb world had not yet imagined.
Now if the unborn were truly wise, they might examine their eyes, and wonder if the world outside held light, for otherwise these organs have no use. They might inspect their hands and feet, and grasp that in the world outside there would be things to grasp, and surfaces on which to walk. But they could not imagine, even in their most daring leaps of fantasy, that in the months after mother’s milk there would be fruit and food and even feasts, and that their hands would not only grasp things as various as the strings of the lyre or the trigger of a gun, and that their feet would wade through clear pools or flowery grasses, or carry them dancing with their beloved in their arms, arms which would one day in turn carry babies like themselves.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
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