My Nebula Biography
Nebula Award Nominees were invited to write their biography and an essay “on any topic” but usually about their nominated story, to appear in the issue of SWFA bullitan given out at the Nebula Awards banquet. Here is mine:
My Bio:
Born in 1961, the third son of a naval chief test pilot Orville Wright, John Wright graduated in 1984 from St. John’s College in Annapolis, home of the ‘Great Books’ program, the school right across the street from his father’s school, the Naval Academy. He graduated in 1987 the Marshall Wythe School of Law on the campus of the College and William and Mary’s in Williamsburg, going from the third oldest to the second oldest school in continuous use in the United States. He graduated third from the bottom in his Class Rank, which leads to the shocking conclusion that, lurking somewhere in Virginia, there are two attorneys even less serious than him.
He was serious enough to get admitted to the practice of law in three jurisdictions (Passing the bar in New York, May 1989; Maryland in December 1990; and waived into the District of Columbia in January 1994). His law practice was spectacularly unsuccessful enough to drive him into bankruptcy thereafter.
He worked for a time as a newspaperman and newspaper editor, for a small but crusading paper, the locally notorious Saint Mary’s Today, a paper that fearlessly told the truth about the goings-on in bucolic Southern Maryland. Crooked Cops and Corrupt politicians, Good Old Boys and Drug Dealers all took a cordial dislike to the little newspaper, and tried to drive it out of business. During this period of prosecution, John Wright was falsely accused, not served process, and had a bench warrant issued against him, but friends in the Courthouse clerk’s office warned him, and he fled to escape arrest. Like all good hardened criminals, he hid out at his Mom’s house. A fearless State’s Attorney volunteered to quash the case, but was fired before he could do so. (You will have to buttonhole Mr. Wright yourself to hear the end of the story.) But never underestimate the power of the press: four out of the five of the Country Commissioners were voted out of office the next election cycle, thanks in large part to the efforts of the St. Mary’s Today.
John Wright currently works in Virginia, as a technical writer for a large military contractor whose budget exceeds that of most first-world nations. The company makes, among other things, the space-based lasers that you read about in science fiction books. As a Virginian, he is convinced the South Shall Rise Again, but if that proves not feasible, he hopes that GONE WITH THE WIND can be remade by George Lucas so that the Yankees shot first.
John Wright lives in fairy-tale-like happiness with his longsuffering wife, who writes under her maiden name, L. Jagi Lamplighter, and their three children, Orville, Wilbur and Juss Wright. The kids are not old enough at the time of this writing to know what a cruel prank their father has played with their names. His science fiction credentials include short stories appearing in Isaac Asimov’s Magazine, and his critically acclaimed THE GOLDEN AGE trilogy, which his mother says she liked, even though she only read the first half of it.
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My Essay:
I have been informed that, while it is traditional to write a few words about the nominated work, that I can write on any topic; therefore I want to address one of the most pressing issues of two centuries ago: bimetallism.
The advantage of allowing the free market to determine exchanged rates between species of currency metals is, of course, that since Gresham’s Law stipulates that the non-debased currency will be held by investors reluctant to spend good coin, which increases reserves, and this paradoxically, tends to lower the interest rate of the non-debased metal, which creates a counter-tendency to push the non-debased metal back into circulation, therefore maintaining two currency metals without fixing an exchange rate between them allows the market to self-correct away from debased money.
Just kidding. I am not really going to write about bimetallism. I just wanted to make sure that my bragging and reminiscing about my nominated story would seem exciting by contrast.
The book is called ORPHANS OF CHAOS, and the inspiration for the work, as for all truly original and creative works, came by stealing ideas from authors smarter than me.
The promotional copy from the publisher told some reviewers that the book was riding the coat-tails of HARRY POTTER, that this book was sort of a grown up version of that. Naturally, as a truly original and creative author, I resent the implication that I was stealing ideas from JK Rowling. I did not have the opportunity, since my manuscript was written before her work came out. I was nicking ideas from Roger Zelazny.
Here, I wondered what it would be like if, instead of the NINE PRINCES IN AMBER, the Olympic Gods were involved in a murderous war of throne-succession; and so I told my story with his bad guys being my good guys. The other great inspiration for true works of fine art, as everyone knows, comes from role-playing games. ORPHANS OF CHAOS is based on an idea my wife had for a Dungeons-and-Dragons type adventure we played with our circle of friends. The idea was you play a kid in an orphanage haunted by black magic, and you find out your parents were Oberon and Titania, who had to smuggle you out of the forest of Arden on the sly. For those of you who recognize the names here, you’ll recognize that Zelazny was nicking from Shakespeare who was nicking from Plutarch and others. In any case, HARRY POTTER was not only not an influence, it is in one way an antithesis: POTTER is about a muggle learning to be a magical being, and my story is about magical beings learning to be muggles.
The other inspiration for any story is dissatisfaction. I was not quite satisfied with the way Doc E.E. Smith in his SKYLARK series described the fourth dimension, or the way Michael Moorcock, in his ETERNAL CHAMPION sequence, handled the concept of Chaos. Mr. Moorcock in particular, much as I admire his work, by portraying Chaos as a needed balance to order, made anarchy the equal, in moral terms, to law. This was not the ancient Greek conception, which I thought more true to life: namely, that Chaos was a primitive condition which contained the seeds of its own growth into order. The Stoics envisioned a universe where periodic universal conflagrations overwhelmed the system of the cosmos, from which ruins order would naturally evolve, and the scattered elements return to their original stations: a conceit almost oriental in its sublime and eternal futility. The vivid descriptions of jarring elements at war in Milton, when Satan wings his way across through outrageous gulfs of fiery hurricanes in Chaos, was also truer to the ancient idea, and I wanted something of the Miltonian mystery and horror of Primordial Night to appear in my tale.
This led naturally to a second conceit. If chaos were truly chaotic, truly without order or reason, how could any mind perceive it? For the purposes of my novel, it was convenient to assume that each observer’s view of the world, his philosophy, his paradigm, would render the unknowable to him according to his own lights. Each different paradigm would see it differently. A spiritualist would see spirits, a materialist would see matter, a dualist would see a multiplicity of substances, a monist would see a unity.
Reviewers have suffered a similar diffusion of paradigms in examining the book. One good fellow asserted that it was at once a work of Christian apologetics, a treatise on Objectivism, and a work of sexual fetishism, and he concluded that your humble author was seeking to break into the lucrative fundamentalist Christian-Atheist libertarian bondage erotica science fiction market, for all those fans of C.S Lewis, Ayn Rand, and John Norman. I think this shows that reviewers are more imaginative than authors, than this author, at any rate.
I certainly wanted to read the book that reviewer described. John Galt fighting Aslan on Planet Gor. I can only say that I wish I had written a book half so interesting or controversial as that. My idea of the book is that it is a rather more pedestrian: a prison break out story. I made my protagonists in the late teens, because, well, they were from Chaos, and the concepts of adolescence and Chaos naturally go hand-in-hand.
I am honored to have my work nominated for this august award, but I note that only the first third of the tale I want to tell is in this volume. The second third has yet to been published, and the last third has yet to be completed. To compare small things with great, it would be like Shakespeare getting an award for THE FIRST PART OF HENRY THE SIXTH, or Quentin Tarantino for KILL BILL VOLUME ONE.
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.
