John C. Wright's Journal

I liked M. Night Shyamalan’s SIGNS; I thought it was a great Twilight-Zone or Weird Tale style movie. It was, however, a lousy Science Fiction movie, if you get my drift.

While SF aliens are a staple of Science Fiction, aliens are creatures like Klingons or Wookies or Barsoomians, that is, people from other planets who have strange looks and customs and laws. They fill the same literary role as Antipodians filled in Traveler’s tales.  But they are real people, portrayed as mortal creatures, with loves and hates like ours, who have histories and traditions and basically act like us.

UFO aliens are not, I say again, not SF Aliens. UFO aliens are spooks. UFO aliens are nightmares. They are unearthly, perhaps with supernatural powers and they are only scary when they stay in the shadows and do not speak. They are creatures of horror literature, or new age spirituality, or fantasy. A UFO alien is someone, who, for the purposes of the story he appears in, the reader need know nothing about. An SF alien one needs to know: does a Barsoomian lay eggs? Does a Vulcan think logically? But a UFO alien is merely there to be Spooky.

The UFO Aliens in SIGNS were spooky. I watched the DVD in a darkened room when my family was asleep, and I was spooked. It worked. Good job. Good movie. Two thumbs up.

But it was not good SF. As UFO aliens, they worked. As something that hides in the closet, those aliens were a success. As SF aliens arriving from Rigel VII in a warp drive ship with a cloaking device, no, nope, don’t make me laugh. They were not realistic and were not meant to be.

A poem by John Derbyshire (and Rudyard Kipling)

If you can hack the head off from a hostage
Who’s kneeling bound and helpless on the floor;
If you can purge yourself of each last vestige
Of decency, morality, and Law;
If you can hate and never tire of hating,
Or, faced with truth, still hold fast to your lies,
Or, while you’re hard at work decapitating,
Show no trace of pity in your eyes:

If you can teach your kids the “victim” story,
Stir Muslim losers trapped in English slums,
Fill youthful heads with crackpot dreams of glory,
And urge them on to fiery martyrdoms;
If you can use religion as a cover
For deeds no man could pardon or excuse,
Or claim that all the ills we humans suffer
Are machinations of the evil Jews:

If you can use the fruits of Western science
(A science that your culture cannot match)
To broadcast all your hatred and defiance,
Or carry out your crimes with more dispatch;
If you can put aside sectarian violence,
Co-operate with Shi’ites from Iran,
Unite Islam; intimidate to silence
All Muslims who won’t sign up to your plan:

If you can fly a plane into a building
Filled with harmless folk you’ve never seen,
Or seize a school that’s full of little children
And murder them when rescuers break in;
If you can fill each precious living minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of evil done, 
Yours is heaven, and all the virgins in it,
And then you’ll be a real jihadi, son!

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OWE0NjRkNjRjMzkzZjliMTI4NDVkZDYwYjhhMzllMzA=
and
http://www.swarthmore.edu/~apreset1/docs/if.html

SciFi.Com has a puff-piece on Alan Moore’s porn book, LOST GIRLS. Unintentionally hilarious. 

SciFi.Com: Did you steep yourself in Victorian-era pornography and such when researching the book?
Moore: Yeah, the amount of research I had to do on this project—it was really a strain.

from http://www.scifi.com/sfw/interviews/sfw13282.html

I do not know how long this link will remain good, so watch this at your first convenience. It come courtesy of MEMRI, from a woman who knows what the stakes are in our current war, and why we fight. Would that the intellectuals of our civilization knew as much.
http://switch3.castup.net/cunet/gm.asp?ai=214&ar=1050wmv&ak=null

Note the part where she mentions that no Jew has protested their holocaust by burning a church or blowing up an embassy, but instead have contributed the greatest scientific and technological advances of the current century. The guy who looks like Mojo Jojo will not answer her because she is a heretic.

The fine fellows at Meme Therapy have posted a discussion on  which Science Fiction aliens one would prefer to invade the Earth, given a choice? Yours truly weighs in on this matter with all the sobriety of a judge and the care of a philosopher. The short answer is that he high-heeled miniskirted showgirls from Venus in QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE should invade us, because Zsa Zsa Gabor had good looking legs back in 1959. 

Even a good writer can take a pratfall once he writes outside his field.

Nicholas Wade has written a thoroughly brilliant and engaging book on the recent discoveries in genetics, and the influence these discoveries are having on prehistory and history, linguistics, paleoanthropology, and the related fields. The science is remarkable and the influence is wide-ranging, even revolutionary.

But, instead of praising this books many merits, I will only mention one flaw on page 275. In a section titled Future Directions of Human Evolution, he commits the following howler:

“The most improbable feature of science fiction movies is not the faster-than-light travel or the transporter beams but a feature that audiences accept without a second thought: the people. The inhabitants of the far future are always portrayed as looking and behaving exactly like the people today.”

You think he could have asked a grad student, or his local twelve-year-old SF fan, to find out if this statement is true. Is this indeed how the far future is always portrayed in SF? Always? Does no one assume a golden age of remote strangeness?
more here

From the Roman Catholic Rite:

Benedic, Domine, creaturam istam cerevisae, quam ex adipe frumenti producere dignatus es: ut sit remedium salutare humano generi: et praesta per invocationem nominis tui sancti, ut, quicumque ex ea biberint, sanitatem corporis, et animae tutelam percipiant. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.

Bless, O Lord, this creature beer, that Thou hast been pleased to bring forth from the sweetness of the grain: that it might be a salutary remedy for the human race: and grant by the invocation of Thy holy name, that, whosoever drinks of it may obtain health of body and a sure safeguard for the soul. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

I would prefer to write about something a little more lighthearted, but, alas, more on Moore seems to be called for:

From http://www.cinescape.com/0/editorial.asp?aff_id=0&this_cat=Comics&action=page&obj_id=50999
The interviewer is complimenting Mr. Moore’s work:

“I think what really hit home for me were the single-page splash illustrations that Melinda did that showed more literal interpretations of the fantasy aspects, like when Peter Pan and Captain Hook are dueling with their giant phalluses out, or when Dorothy’s being taken by the Tin Man character. I was thinking that they almost look like something out of HEAVY METAL, except tasteful and even epic.”

A reader here tells me I should not condemn pornography without having read it: in effect, he is urging me to read pornography.

Um. Riiiiight.

Does that strike anyone but me as a somewhat tortured bit of logic? Do I really need to pore over the splash page pictures of Dorothy ‘being taken’ by the Tin Man in order to have the right to voice an objection?
more here

In the general war between the culture of life and the culture of death, I should note that the laissez-faire sexuality wing of the battle line has joined with the child-hating reserves.

In particular, I read in this month’s LOCUS magazine that famed cartoonist Alan Moore has penned a work called LOST GIRLS, starring Dorothy Gale, Alice Fairchild, and Wendy Darling, where the beloved girl characters from our childhood tales are depicted in acts of pornography on every page, including group sex, homosexuality, bestiality, and pederasty.

His reasoning? Mr. Moore claims our culture does not think and publish enough about sex. We’re repressed. Showing the girl from ALICE IN WONDERLAND having anal intercourse with a rabbit or something will be good for our mental health and emotional wellbeing.

I kid you not. I am not making this up.

http://www.cinescape.com/0/editorial.asp?aff_id=0&this_cat=Comics&action=page&obj_id=50999

Note how the humorless Mr. Moore wraps himself in the flag of moral sanctity to excuse himself. He is bringing enlightenment and culture to the rubes; honesty consists of glorifying sick perversions with all the wit and craft his art can bring to bear. What a smug jackass.

To think, I used to admire this man. Somewhere, bound in ice in the lowest circle of hell, the devil pauses in his gnawing on traitors, his tears of ice are checked, and he smiles a grim, lingering smile, and orders his lesser angels to prepare a place for someone who betrays his muse.

Show me a culture that hates virginity, and I’ll show you one that is bent on demeaning, and, yes, desecrating every pure and happy memory of childhood.

The fine fellows at Meme Therapy have posted a discussion about which Science Fiction starship one should own? The general consensus there is the TARDIS, as this vehicle travels both in time and space, is user friendly, and grants the Gift of the Time Lords, allowing one to speak all languages. However, this assumes that vehicle is ment to be used for sight-seeing or other Lawful Good purposes.

But we all know the real purpose behind man’s yearning for star-drive, do we not? The Lensman core was specifically designed in response to this real purpose: the real purpose of starships is to commit outrages on distant worlds and be away faster than the speed of light before the crime is detected. PIRACY! Being a pirate is passing brave, to be sure, but being a Space Pirate is the ne plus ultra of human ambition. It is like being a pirate, but with rayguns.

Let us agree, without further discussion, that the Death Star is the best SF star-vehicle for piracy. It has mass and presence, and when it is seen rising like a dark moon above the horizon of the capitol city of some hapless victim world, all will quail when the radios of the world clamour: THIS IS CAPTAIN BLOODSTAR of BOSKONE. PLACE ALL YOUR GOLD AND VALUABLES INTO ORBIT AT ONCE! Hapless redcoats will run every which way while TIE-fighters manned by scurvy Tortuga mongrels fly low over burning buildings, taking pot-shots at the panicked crowds.

But what act of piracy to commit? Looting treasure? Nawr, maties. Ar. That is not big enough. You want to kidnap a Space Princess and hale her back to your hidden lair on Skull Asteroid for a quick Pirate Wedding. Law won’t touch you if your married to Royalty! And not just any old Space Princess! We want a thionite-sniffers dream, a seven sector callout!

The question then merely becomes, which one? Which Space Princess do you want to carry off?

Many pictures of Space Princesses below the cut

There is an interview with me in the August LOCUS.
Click here to see the cover

In the spirit of filling up the World Wide Web with useless and amusing clutter, here is my response to a chain letter I got from SfSignal.

1. One book that changed your life?
There are many books that have changed my thinking on certain issues, including the ENCHIRIDION by Epictetus and HUMAN ACTION by Ludwig van Mises: but if the question is taken literally, there is only one book that actually changed by life: AWAKEN THE GIANT WITHIN by Anthony Robbins. I was trapped in a dead-end job as a newspaperman, harassed by the IRS, dishonorably seeking the protection of the Bankruptcy Court, and reading this book gave me the spleen and backbone I needed to go get a job as a newspaper editor at another paper.

It is one of those self-help, rah-rah, you-can-do-it tracts that were so popular in the optimistic 80’s. I moved my family to a new state. I liked it because Tony Robbins preaches a version of Korzybski General Semantics popularized in SF circles by A.E. van Vogt’s WORLD OF NULL A, the theory that the personality is shaped by the nature of the abstract concepts we use to think about the world.

2. One book you have read more than once?
The question is unfair: In my youth, I never bought a book unless I expected to reread it at least three times. Every book in my collection I have read and reread.

LORD OF THE RINGS by JRR Tolkien is the book I have reread the most often and with greatest reward. When I was younger, and I had more reading time, and joy and pleasure lay waiting behind each sunrise, brighter in those days than in these Novenmberish years of rain, I would reread this treasure at least once a year.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?
BOY SCOUT’S HANDBOOK by Robert Baden-Powell. Or the KING JAMES’ BIBLE by Moses and various authors (God, ed.). The first to let me survive on the island, the second to let me pray for rescue.

more here