Praise for COUNT TO A TRILLION! (plus a Helpful Hint on How to ID the Bad Guys)
Douglas Cobb on his website of the same name has posted a kind review of my latest novel. You can read the whole thing here: http://douglascobb.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/count-to-a-trillion-by-john-c-wright-review/
By ‘read the whole thing’ I mean the whole review, not the whole novel. For the novel, you have to go here: http://www.sff.net/people/john-c-wright/Book_Count_to_a_Trillion.htm
But allow me to quote a flattering paragraph or two. It is one of the simple and innocent pleasures being a writer (or mountebank, clown, politician, or other pastime afflicted with the enduring vice of vanity) affords to one.
Another simple pleasure, somewhat less innocent than the first, is self-absorbed bellyaching in undignified fashion about the alleged cruelty of critics, and to this pleasure I shall turn in a moment.
John C Wright’s Nebula Award Nominated SF novel, Orphans of Chaos, blew me away with the imagination behind it and Wright’s ability to craft an excellent novel. Now, his just-released Hard SF novel, Count to A Trillion, I am prophesizing right now, will also be nominated, and could very possibly win the award. Yes, it’s that good, despite some controversy it’s already engendered among some members of the reviewing community.
What’s so great about it? How about: Everything.
High praise indeed. I assume this means he likes the cover art as well as the story. Mr Cobb also makes this comment:
How has Wright’s novel become as controversial as it has, within mere days of when the brick & Mortar stores began selling it, on December 20th? My surmise is that a few reviewers mistakenly have taken certain beliefs of Wright’s characters to be his, such as the supremacy of Darwinian theories. I’d say, even if they also might happen to be Wright’s beliefs, what does it really matter, as in the context of the novel, they are the beliefs of the characters, and Menelaus is determined to thwart these theories, as opposed to giving in to them.
He concludes:
I highly recommend Count To A Trillion to anyone who is a fan of MilSF, and science fiction in general. It’s a promising start to the series, with a cliffhanger that will make you long to read the rest of the trilogy. Check it out today!
My comment:
There are some reviews I have not read, so I am not quite sure to which reviewer Mr Cobb refers.
Let me therefore speak only hypothetically. If there is a single reviewer who possesses the facility of mental contortion to read a book in which the hero in the first chapter takes a solemn vow to oppose the remorseless doctrine of eugenics most often mislabeled Darwinism, and from that, to deduce that the author is a fan of Darwinism, should turn in his credentials as a book reviewer, and take a job more in keeping with his limited reading comprehension skills, such as ditch-digger, burger flipper, or television news anchor.
I call it mislabeled, because real Darwinism is a biological theory concerning the natural causes of the origin of species, hence the name of the book in which Darwin explicated the theory.
The theories propounded by Malthus, Hegel, Nietzsche, Herbert Spencer, Margaret Sanger, Ernst Roehm are also called Darwinian, but they are abortive theories of social or economic phenomena, or a warped moral philosophy advocating ruthless wars of extermination between allegedly superior and allegedly inferior races, in the mystical belief that such barbarism will elevate the survivors, as if by fairy magic, up to the plateau of the superman; or, rather, down to what is actually the abyss of the would-be superman, in times of old called Tartarus.
If (hypothetically) a reviewer out there in the toad-croaking bogs of reviewer-land actually did call me a Social Darwinist or something along those lines, then this will be the third time in my brief and humble writing career reviewers have attributed to me the beliefs and opinions, not of the heroes of my yarns, but of the villains.
This is akin to accusing Smilin’ Stan Lee and Jack ‘King’ Kirby of seeking the dominion of Homo Superior over Mankind on the grounds that Magneto, Mutant Master of Magnetism, seeks it.
(The other two times were ORPHANS OF CHAOS and THE GOLDEN AGE — in the latter case, the logic was particularly warped; the reviewer concluding that, since Phaethon came from a arch-libertarian society, your humble author must be a Stalinist.)
While by no means I am the only author to whom such misreadings happen (for they happen to all), I truly hope this confusion is not due to any lack of clarity on my part. It is not as if I write postmodernistic novels where the antihero is indistinguishable from the antivillain, so the reader cannot tell which character the writer is rooting for.
My heroes fight for things like truth, justice, and the American Way, sanity and liberty. For those of you keeping a scorecard, Phaethon stands for and fights for classical free-market hope and hard work that defies conservative caution, i.e. the American Way; Anton Pendrake for Justice; Wendy Ravenson for truth; Amelia Windrose for liberty; Gilbert Gosseyn for sanity. (Gosseyn is not actually one of my characters, but as an adopted hero, I love him as my own.) Menelaus Montrose stands for … well, let me finish writing the whole sequence of books first. I am not sure, but I think he stands for bad grammar, cold beer, and hot lead. Don’t mess with Texas.
While my good guys are usually a little imperfect (to allow room for a little character development), or a lot imperfect (to allow room for a lot of character development), I confess that I am old fashioned enough to put a black hat or even bent horns on the bad guy so the friendly reader can tell which one is he. The guy who kicks a teary-eyed yet orphaned one-legged blind puppy-dog in a rusty wheelchair down the stairwell and out into the blizzard on Christmas Eve is the bad guy.
Okay, that was a joke. I have not written that scene. Such a scene would be ridiculous and overmeladramatic! Let no one accuse me of being absurd! The scene I wrote had the teary-eyed yet orphaned one-legged blind puppy-dog on a wobbly termite-riddled crutch, not in a rusty wheelchair. Who ever heard of a dog in a wheelchair?
But the bad guy in my first story exterminated and absorbed every living thing in the Cygnus X-1 star system and sought to exterminate the Earth, if not the Cosmos. The bad guy in my second story sought to conquer or exterminate the Earth, if not the Cosmos, and he was a fallen archangel. The various bad guys in my third story did not want to conquer Earth because they already ruled the Cosmos as absolute tyrants, and they were fighting each other over possession. There were two bad guys in my fourth story, and one sought to conquer the Galaxy if not the Cosmos, and the other sought to exterminate not just the Cosmos, but the Multiverse.
Hmmm … let me see. What ultra-subtle theme seems to tie together the various villains of my novel-length works, a theme so nuanced and indirect that rare indeed is the eagle-eyed reviewer able to detect it? What could it be … ?
Note to future critics: I write Space Opera. What little subtlety or philosophical depth I bring to my work is not in the selection of the theme.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
