John C. Wright's Journal

An already swollen ego should bloat more, when the reviewer, Mr. Nick Gevers, sent me an advance copy of his quite favorable and quite generous review of my latest work THE GODLEN TRANSENDENCE, to appear in next month’s Locus.

He says, in part:

“With The Golden Transcendence, John C. Wright completes one of the finest long novels in recent SF history…It truly seems as if baroque romantic SF has acquired a new master practitioner, and, in his first novel (or trilogy), a new touchstone text.”

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When I was young, I thought all science fiction writers were like me: people who believed in science, and, hence, in rationality and, by extension, in the virtues of reason, such as individualism, independent thinking, self-reliance, non-conformity. Hence, it was with considerable surprise that, going to my first science fiction convention, I found that most of the writers were leftists, socialists, mystics and collectivists. There are a few (libertarian) exceptions, and one or two gray-haired writers from the pre-1968 era (Mr. Pornelle springs to mind) who still support a rational, individualist world-view: but they are a quiet minority.

How can this be? When did science fiction suddenly become so — unscientific?

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THE NIGHT LAND
By William Hope Hodgson

An eerie classic of dark science fantasy

Mr. Hodgson’s THE NIGHT LANDS concerns the last remnant of mankind, alive on a darkened and terror-haunted Earth after the extinction of the sun. At the bottom of the trench of a dead sea, still kept warm by dying embers of geothermal heat, powered by the mysterious ‘Earth Current’ rises the Last Redoubt, a massive pyramid a mile or more in height, the fortress in which the final descendants of mankind survive. Around the Last Redoubt lurk massive and sinister beings, perhaps brought to Earth long ago by the unwise curiosity of man: but whether they are demons, or aliens, or extradimensional manifestations is unknown. The Northwest Watching Thing rises like a mountain near the redoubt, but history reports it has not moved in centuries. About its feet glide the Silent Ones, dimly seen by the light of the Giant’s kilns, and in certain pits beyond the Silent House the shadows of the Great Gray Man are sometimes seen. In the Last Redoubt is born a hero who has the gift of the Night-hearing, a type of telepathy. Dimly, he hears in his mind the voice of a human woman, and finds that there is another Redoubt somewhere lost in the darkness of the Night Lands, and he recognises her as his one true love from a previous cycle of incarnations. This Lesser Redoubt is besieged and dying. Alone, dressed in his armor and bearing his disk-shaped war-ax made of living metal, the champion goes for to find his love, despite all the unnamed terrors and mysteries of the Night Land.

The language in Mr. Hodgson’s work if formal and archaic, hence will be found difficult or boring for some readers. There characters are mere viewpoints, without any personality whatever. The plot is so simple as to be nonexistent: the hero voyages across the eerie landscape, avoiding monstrous beings and hulking troglodytes, finds the girl, and returns.
For me the main interest in the book was the depiction, all in hints and adumbration, of the supernatural entities looming, vast and inhuman, throughout the dead and wasted landscape: but since, during the second half of his odyssey, the hero returns by the same route he passed in the first half, no new spectacles are seen. Therefore the second half of this long book I found boring.

Night Lands is memorable, strange, quaint and horrid, and conveys a lingering sense of cosmic inhumanity, but so flawed in its lack of plot and character, its affected prose, that this book may only appeal to devoted aficionados of strange fantasy

ATLAS SHRUGGED
by Ayn Rand.

Murder mystery for philosophers: who kills the Mind of Man?

Ayn Rand has written a novel like no other: a detective story of philosophy.
The main character, a valiant railroad executive, Dagny Taggart, sees society crumbling before her eyes. In all fields, great thinkers are vanishing. Who is making them vanish and why? All joy in life seems to be evaporating. What invisible destroyer is doing this, and how?

To solve the mystery, Dagny must correctly identify her allies and her enemies; discover their motives and their goals; and bring herself to understand the root philosophy defining and motivating them.
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I am reading a review of Theodore Dalrymple’s book LIFE AT THE BOTTOM. This book is a collection of heartbreaking anecdotes about life among the British welfare class. The author makes the point that their self-destructive behaviors are supported and encouraged by the Britain’s liberal intelligensia, who do not see, or will not admit, that the welfare state encourages personal irresponsibility. If you pay people to do nothing, they will do nothing.

And then I read where one reviewer, who identifies himself as Rod Szasz has written: “Dalrymple offers no evidence beyond annecdote.  The idea that one must take responsibility for one’s thoughts and actions is nothing more than a truism. It is not something that has been proved by either the inductive or deductive study of Dalrymple.”

Here I pause in astonishment. Does Mr. Szasz seriously contend that this is a principle in need of proof?

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Here is a list of the writers and books I admire (if it were not obvious from seeing whose ideas I steal for my own work).

A.E. van Vogt, author of SLAN, WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER, THE SILKIE, and WORLD OF NULL-A

Jack Vance, author of the Demon Princes Series (THE STAR KING, THE KILLING MACHINE, THE PALACE OF LOVE, THE FACE, THE BOOK OF DREAMS), the Planet of Adventure Series (CITY OF THE CHASCH, SERVANTS OF THE WANKH, THE DIRDIR, THE PNUME), EMPHYRIO, LANGUAGES OF PAO, THE DYING EARTH. Also worth mentioning are LYONESSE and THE GRAY PRINCE.

Gene Wolfe, author of URTH OF THE NEW SUN and the four books before it (SHADOW OF THE TORTURER, SWORD OF THE LICTOR, CLAW OF THE CONCILIATOR, and CITADEL OF THE AUTARCH), as well as SOLDIER IN THE MIST, SOLDIER OF ARETE. NIGHTSIDE THE LONG SUN and ON BLUE’s WATERS are in the same background universe, and hauntingly well written. However, Mr. Wolfe is an irregular writer, and his love of experiment from time to time produces incomprehensibility: avoid his CASTLEVIEW, THERE ARE DOORS, and PEACE.

Ayn Rand’s ATLAS SHRUGGED takes place in a science fiction background as much as, let us say, 1984 or BRAVE NEW WORLD. I do not necessarily recommend her FOUNTAINHEAD, or WE THE LIVING: ATLAS SHRUGGED is her master-work.

Poul Andersen I recommend, especially his HARVEST OF STARS, which is the first book I read to deal with the cybernetic and posthuman future in a fashion that was not a copy of Mr. Walter Gibson’s NEUROMANCER (The cyberpunk genre, with its nihilistic antiheroes, is not to my taste.) Mr. Andersen deals with these cyberpunk themes with the grace and skill of a Golden Age writer. (You will see I stole the term Sophotect, which I use in my novel GOLDEN AGE from him).

Robert Heinlein, I can only recommend with the reservation that one ignores his hedonistic philosophy. Isaac Asimov I can only recommend with the reservation that one ignores his political beliefs, which (unlike Mr. Heinlien) Asimov mercifully does not inflict on the reader. Keith Laumer, I believe I can recommend without any reservations.

I also recommend reading the classics: The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost.

As far as fantastic novels go, I am a devoted fan of Tolkien’s LORD OF THE RINGS (which I have read and re-read to the point where I can write and recite in Elfish) and also of THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH by C.S. Lewis. THE WORM OROBOROS by E.R. Eddison is the richest prose ever penned in the English language; and THE NIGHT LAND by William Hope Hodgson is perhaps the clumsiest.

The prize for the most imaginative novel ever written, I would award to VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by David Lindsany.

This is meant to be a book review of TREASON, by Ann Coulter, and USEFUL IDIOTS by Mona Charon. It may be absurd to begin with a digression, but indulge me. I was reading, of all things, a review of the 1980’s toy-selling cartoon THE INHUMANOIDS, when, in the middle of a description of the science-fiction battles against giant monsters, I come across this paragraph:

>>we cut to a Russian military base… And the higher-ups on the base demand that the ships in the fleet launch depth charges instead of trying to signal or identify the strange object that just appeared on their radar. An old 80’s cartoon standby, the Evil Empire. Does anyone else remember the October Guard on GI Joe?

I am aghast. Apparently this writer forgets that about the same time when this cartoon was written, a Korean passenger liner was shot down when it crossed over into Soviet airspace, with no attempt made by the Soviets to signal or identify the plane. An act of appalling barbarism, one the Soviets denied doing until proof surfaced. It happened in real life, not a cartoon.

Imagine, dear reader, coming across someone reviewing, let us say, a movie or a comic from the 1940’s, and reading these words:

>>We cut to a Nazi German military base. And the higher-ups on the base demand that the ships in the fleet launch depth charges instead of trying to signal or identify the strange object that just appeared on their radar. An old 40’s cartoon standby, the Evil Master Race. Does anyone else remember the Aryan Knights from Buck Rogers?
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• Foxfier posted on September 29, 2014
  I've had folks try to insist that he was trying to protect the honor or the lady involved. Yes, really.