John C. Wright's Journal

I saw two movies recently, AEON FLUX and ULTRAVIOLET, which the adverts made look like typical lonely teen fanboy fare: by which I mean (sorry, lonely teen fanboys) movies made merely to show off the athletic bodies of beautiful women cavorting through gymnastic mayhem. I was pleasantly surprised.

Now, I freely admit it is easier to be pleasantly surprised when one’s expectations are low. If you go into a film thinking it will be lemons, and it does not taste half so sour, you come out thinking that it was almost sweet.

MILD SPOILERS
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This one is a winner. The best of the best. If you ever forget why you liked Heinlein, read this one and remember.

CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY has the most of what makes a Heinlein juvenile good: it is a coming of age story with a profound theme, scribed with solid characterization.

Let us explore these points in order. First, what makes for a good coming of age story?

Well, such stories are, at the root, a Cinderella or Parsifal tale: stories about inexperienced, inept youth learning and growing and achieving the status of manhood. In this case, the author starts, not merely with an inexperienced youth, but with an orphan boy whipped into slavery, half-feral, hardly human, and shows his growth upward through every rung in society to the very tiptop. His rise through society parallels his rise to maturity, and the reader gets to see the culture from different perspectives at each rung of the social hierarchy.

SPOILER ALERT I give away all the surprises in the paragraphs below, so READ NO FURTHER, if you haven’t read the book.

On John Crowley’s Perpetual Interview, I read this eye-opener (eye-opening to me, at least):

http://www.littlebig25.com/PerpetualCrowleyInterview.html

Speaking of Little, Big: “I’ve always been sorry that I didn’t make clear one connection that’s so evident most readers have probably made it for me: Russell Eigenblick/Barbarossa is the our-world cognate or avatar of Brother North-wind, whose role he will take when he too reaches Faerie at the end. Ah well.”

I discover to my chagrin that John Crowley , a man of letters whose muse has given us such works as LITTLE, BIG, maintains a Live Journal. Even in writing impromptu extemporania, he shows his master-craftsmanship of the use of the English language; for example, this brief mention of a time he met Lin Carter struck me as dignitied, melancholy, elegaic, but funny.

http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/21738.html?nc=13

The short version: Carter asks Crowley when is a sequel to BEASTS coming out? Lin Carter (who no doubt was working on RETURN OF THE SON OF THE PIRATES OF CALLISTO TO ATLANTIS UNDER A GREEN STAR) is astonished anyone would go to the trouble of making up a world and not revisiting it to milk for profits year after year.

One wag in the comments box asks when we are going to see ENGINE AUTUMN and ENGINE WINTER or LITTLER, BIGGER? He he he.

You are wondering why I am chagrinned to read the dignified prose of a great writer? Well, inspecting his journal closely, I notice not once where he has photoshopped in a vigilante toon head on his body, advocating pistol-duels to settle the question of Plutonian planet-status, railed against Alan Moore, discussed the kidnapping of space princesses, or mentioned the bottled city of Kandor. Some people are just better suited to appear in public without a keeper than others. I console myself that I am more grave and stately in public than Harlan Elison.
Undignified? Me…?

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/08/24/pluto.ap/index.html
Yeah, right, and Brontosaurus is now Apatosaurus.

Look, I am as much in favor of scientific and technical precision in terminology as the next guy, but scientists should learn something from lawyers: a terminology that confuses more than it clarifies has failed in its function. In law, we have both what is called a Rule of Adverse possession (which states that if a squatter is in open, notorious, unchallenged and continuous possession for 20 years, he gets title) and a thing called the Grandfather Clause ( which allows that rights under the previous statute cannot be lost when the statute is amended). In other words, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

While there is nothing wrong with a definition of ‘minor planets’ that identifies smaller and eccentric bodies like Sedna or Ceres, Pluto has been a planet since 1930.

It is an Ex Post Facto law to strip it of its dignity; I would call it unconstitutional! I am an American, so I say, let’s put together a class action suit and sue on behalf of Pluto. (If the plaintiffs in  ACLU v NSA  have standing, anyone has standing to sue on any hypothetical case).

Now, if the international conference of scientists with too much time on their hands wanted to rename the body from Pluto, to, say, YUGGOTH, that would be cool.

LOCUS online has an excerpt from their interview with me. Mostly I end up sounding pompous, which is good, because I like pomp. The world needs more pomp. You monkey-boys are entirely too casual and slovenly these days. Just wait until Yoyodyne, Fu Manchu, Ming of Mongo, Doctor Doom and Pinkey and the Brain take over the world. Then things will be squared away and ship shape!  

And here is a picture of me. Some people say I look like George Kennedy. Frankly, I do not see the resemblance.

NO, NO, I am just kidding around. This is what I really look like.

What I really look like

In 1970, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori observed that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance (such as anthropomorphic talking mice, or something) the human reaction is positive, but once it is too close to human appearance, it looks like an eerie thing with dead eyes, and the reaction is negative. Most people find manikins slightly spooky, particularly if they move when you don’t expect it, or find a prosthetic hand more unnerving than, say, a hook.

Well, an eerie thing with dead eyes would be about my reaction to SUPERMAN RETURNS. It copies slavishly the music and lines and tropes of its predecessor, the Alexander Salkind masterpiece, but it merely left out the dignity, lighthearted humor, stellar acting, originality, wit, verve, and charm of the original.
MANY SPOILERS BELOW! DO NOT READ! Unless you’ve seen the first film, in which case you know exactly what happens

Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one’s nation’s defense, publicly revealed
=================================================================================
Text of Address by Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises, Thursday, June 8, 1978

I am sincerely happy to be here with you on this occasion and to become personally acquainted with this old and most prestigious University. My congratulations and very best wishes to all of today’s graduates.

Harvard’s motto is “Veritas.” Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.

Three years ago in the United States I said certain things which at that time appeared unacceptable. Today, however, many people agree with what I then said… A World Split Apart by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The split in today’s world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of entirely destroying the other. However, understanding of the split often is limited to this political conception, to the illusion that danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is a much profounder and a more alienating one, that the rifts are more than one can see at first glance. This deep manifold split bears the danger of manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a Kingdom — in this case, our Earth — divided against itself cannot stand.
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http://holyoffice.livejournal.com/82325.html#cutid1

I swear this fellow would be Pope by now, if it had not been for Guelph intrigues.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/14/npassport14.xml

“A five-year-old girl’s passport application was rejected because her photograph showed her bare shoulders. Hannah Edwards’s mother, Jane, was told that the exposed skin might be considered offensive in a Muslim country. The photograph was taken at a photo-booth at a local post office for a family trip to the south of France.”

The article goes on to say this was the action of one clerk, not the policy of the Passport office, so we are talking about merely the madness of one man, not a whole bureau. But the true degree of absurdity does not become evident until one actually sees the picture that this clerk opined might offend a Muslim. Here it is:

Surely, in the world, there are the pictures our Muslim friends should be more worried will cause offense.
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I have always daydreamed that the Frank Herbert estate should authorize a crossover with the LENSMEN books, so that the Galactic patrolmen swinging their space-axes can face Feydakeen fanatics with their crysknives, and we would see who would win. Can the future visions of the Kwisatz Haderach outmatch the Visualization of the Cosmic All of the Second Stage Lensmen? Both are, after all, the end product of centuries of directed evolution…

Of course they would be enemies. Aren’t the people in DUNE just Zwilniks after all? Isn’t Arrakis nothing more than a dry version of Trenco, the source of the galaxy’s most potent drug?

On more step down memory lane, rereading Heinlein’s juveniles. I am not sure if STARSHIP TROOPERS counts as his last juvenile or his first grown-up book, but it is included in the SFBC bound edition called OUTWARD BOUND, which includes two other RAH novels between its covers.

STARSHIP TROOPERS is a coming of age story where a young and somewhat feckless Juan Rico goes through boot camp, finds out that the infantry turns boys into men. He is at first opposed in his ambition by his wealthy father, but in the final scene we see, in a very brief but delightful reversal of fortune, that the father now serves as Rico’s NCO in a platoon he has risen through the ranks to command. My grade: Heinlein’s best juvenile.

But let me qualify that grade. As a reader, this is one Heinlein’s best work for kids. As a writer, I see evidence of the same slap-dash, first-draft carelessness of craftsmanship which marred PODKAYNE of MARS. The plot here is that there is no plot.
more here, including one rude noise

Here below I reprint certain comments I posted elsewhere

I am a Potter fan. While I do not think Potter is the greatest thing since sliced bread, it is certainly on the order of the greatest thing since pop-tarts. The writing is solid and workmanlike, the characters engaging. Potter is the only modern example of what used to be a common type of boy’s fiction: loyal-school-chums fighting evil spies.

In this case, the school chums are in Roke, the school for Wizards, and that adds a Halloween flavor to the mix.

In addition, JK Rawlings adds some dignity to the proceedings by touching on deep themes: the death of Harry’s mother, the power of her salvific love, is something deeper than what one might find in a TOM SWIFT Jr. book, or DANNY DUNN.

I would not call these books ‘Modern Fantasy’ if by that we mean the genre promoted by Lin Carter at Ballantine in the post-Tolkien 70’s. Fantasy has certain conventions, certain expectations in the audience that the reader of HARRY POTTER need not know to enjoy the book. From time to time, Rawlings will do something that displays an ignorance of fantasy conventions.
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Spoiler warning if you haven’t seen PIRATES, DEAD MAN’S CHEST yet.
Absolutely fascinating
http://community.livejournal.com/triskaideka____/16644.html

I am walking down memory lane, rereading the Heinlein juveniles I so enjoyed in youth. I just finished PODKAYNE OF MARS. My reaction is a firm and enthusiastic meh. This is a fine book for a bookish teen with an afternoon to kill, for the main character is spunky and charming, but a grown-up might get irked (as I did) with the author’s trademark trotting out his personal hobbyhorses, and with the clumsy shapelessness of the narrative. Meh, and I say again, meh. My life is too short, and the pile of books I have to read is too long, and the author did not deliver my book-buying dollar’s worth of entertainment. I liked Poddy, though.

The nicely-bound Science Fiction Book Club edition has both the author’s original ending, and the ending he rewrote at his editor’s direction. I will discuss both endings, so beware

SPOILER WARNINGS! SURPISE ENDING REVEALED BELOW!

A wag once said that Robert Heinlein novels were divided into his early novels, his juveniles, and his seniles. Seniles include his post-STRANGER works, such as I WILL FEAR NO EVIL, NUMBER OF THE BEAST, FRIDAY, CAT WHO WALKED THROUGH WALLS and TO SAIL BEYOND THE SUNSET. The complaints lodged (I think, with justice) against these later works is that they are plotless and meandering, that they read like first drafts, that they dwell on kittens and babies, and, like Asimov wrapping all his early works by unconvincing sleight of hand into one background universe, were self-referencing to the point of self-indulgent.

Well, this complaint leaves out that Heinlein, to his last day, was still a damn fine writer, who could pen a crisp, clear scene, voice a likeable character, or describe a widget or mock a social custom, or wax philosophical, and make it all sound convincing. But he was not a good plot-weaver.
more here, mostly bellyaching