John C. Wright's Journal

All I can report is that to myself I seem oriented as to time, place, and person. I am not aware of any failure of my reasoning faculty, nor do I see other evidence of hallucination or psychosis in my thought or action. If anything, I seem better equipped to deal with life than before, more human, more charitable. I actually try to be nice to people, and, once in a blue moon, I am.

Also, if this is an hallucination, it more useful than sanity. For one thing, this ‘hallucination’ resolves certain philosophical conundrums that have haunted me for years, such as the mind-body problem or the determinism-freewill paradox.

An aside: For those of you interested in such questions, I am in the same school as Bishop Berkeley (“Esse est percipi”) and Boethius (Consolatio Philosophiae). While mind and matter cannot be of the same substance, surely mind and perception can and must be: for reason is thought is about thought and perception is thought about objects. Perceived objects (whose existance we know only by induction) follow the laws of consistency for the same reason a syllogism follows the laws of logic. When we see perceptions that do not flow from one to another consistently, not shared in common with other men, we call it dreaming.

Allow me to quote from that eminent Christian theologian, Puddleglum:

‘Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things — trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself… Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.’

Speaking as a philosopher, one who has sworn upon Truth itself never to turn aside from where Reason leads, all I can say it that Christianity makes for better philosophy than philosophy itself. It is a rational and self-consistent meaningful view of the world, one which promotes virtue and honesty, as well as a philosophical attitude toward suffering.

Pagan philosophy, like that of Aristotle and Plato, urge men to live and die like great-souled men, like Stoics, and to live honestly and honorably, without fear: but their world is one where even Achilles is a shade in Hades, their universe is one where fear is rational, for the Unmoved Mover will not move itself to save you. Stoicism, the doctrine of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Cicero, shows logically why it is better to live a life in accordance with Nature, but it does not arm the soul with the tools needed to do so.

Modern philosophy, the speculations and screeds of Rousseau, Nietzsche, Sartre, Marx, Russell, Wittgenstein, is rubbish, and a sophomore can detect the self-inconsistencies, inhumanity, and outright absurdity in their work. Christianity does all that these thinkers set out to do, plus you get Cathedrals and the St. John’s Passion, Christmas and John Milton.  

Following Puddleglum, my philosophical soul tells me that that the saints are more sagacious than the sages, the martyrs more stoic than the Stoics, the schoolmen more rational than the Rationalists, the ghostly catechism a good deal more human than the Humanists, not to mention more humane. If this is illusion, why is it the only thing that gives deep meaning to an otherwise dull, dead, paradoxical and futile reality? 

But the question of it being a dream is unreasonable. At some level, I am aware of Christ living in me, the way you might be aware of your own heartbeat. You do not really hear it, except in moments of excitement, but you know it is there, in the background.

Is that hallucination? Or it is merely an assumption, an axiom of the empirical epistemology, to place no credit on the testimony of eyewitnesses credible in all other respects.

If you ask me to prove to you God exists, I will ask you to prove to me that your conscience exists. If you cannot prove it, why should I waste my time and effort presenting evidence before a jury which very well might have no conscience? How will I know your verdict will be honest?

And yet surely, surely your conscience is real! If you do have a conscience, tell me by what means you are aware of it: not through the senses, surely. Do you admit immediate perception of a nonphysical reality is possible? If so, perception of other real things, even perception of divine things, is not impossible. It then merely becomes a question of prudence whether all those who claim to have had religious experiences have perceived something by this means. Since this seems to be the only point that all cultures of all the history of mankind has in common, that some sort of spiritual reality exists, it is not prudent to begin the discussion with the assumption that spiritual reality does not exist.

You might think all this was some great privilege or awesome experience.

It was totally humiliating.

So much evidence of the Christian religion was given to me so abundantly that it is an embarrassment to me. Other Christians, who have faith, do not need to be hit over the head with the blunt instrument of obvious supernatural events, one after another after another. I was visited not because I was wise or smart, but because I was foolish and stupid.

You might wonder why, if God can convince atheists to worship Him merely by dropping by for a visit, He does not do it more often. The reason is that it does not help, not at all, not a bit. When I suffer doubts, when my faith gets weak, my faith in my memory gets weak too. Faith and faithlessness have NOTHING TO DO with evidence presented to reason or senses. It has to do with a humble will and an upright heart. If God presented evidence to skeptics, all that would happen is that skeptics would doubt their evidence. If God gave a logical argument to prove His own existence, all that would happen is that skeptics would doubt the power of logic to prove anything.

Skepticism pretends it is all about open-mindedness and evidence. Not so. Skepticism is about suspicion and pride and self-will. It is about pretending you are smarter than people who, if you only knew, are actually wiser than you and your sneering questions and foolish word-tricks. The only place we ever see a humble skeptic is in the physical sciences, because scientists are willing to let their conclusions be ruled on by nature.

Once I was touched by the Spirit (I, who did not until that moment even believe the word ‘spirit’ had any meaning) everything else fell into place.

The Christian religion places an emphasis on Reason that other religions, with the exception of the Jewish, do not share, or not to the same degree. None of them mention LOGOS, the rational account, the word, issuing directly from the Father. The Incarnation makes the Christian God more human and humane than the God we see in the Old Testament or the Koran.  The God of the Trinity is not alone.

Christianity seems to fit better with the way human life actually is than other religions, at least in my humble estimation. There is a concern and a love for children I have not noticed in other religions, a sanctity toward marriage, a concern for human life, a concern for monogamy, for individual worth, more central to Christian tradition than to the traditions of other faiths. Christendom wiped out slavery world wide; Christendom invented science. If Christianity were the foe of science, the West would be the most backward of technological powers, and the Chinese, following the pragmatic and this-worldly Confucius, would be the leader.

( It is popular these days to remark on the scientific and philosophical achievements of Islam during the darkest days of the Dark Ages. This is an historical error. The peoples conquered by the savages from Arabia were Romans, members of the Roman Empire, Byzantines who had been Christian for four or five centuries. They were a highly civilized and advanced people. The Turks did not destroy their culture and learning. But to give them credit for their invention is like crediting the Soviets with the industry and wealth of East Germany. It is something they found and took, not something they made. The difference in learning was between the Latin and the Greek speaking parts of the Roman Empire: the West collapsed long, long before the East was overrun. )

The Christian world-view is not only NOT incompatible with the scientific and logical one, they reinforce each other. You must imagine my befuddlement when I see science presented as somehow being the enemy of religion. Science is the enemy of Taoism or Buddhism, perhaps, but not the enemy of a religion that combines the rationalism of Athens with the mysticism of Jerusalem. We invented the University, for God’s sake.

Science without philosophy simply makes no sense: it leads to Behaviorism and Nihilism. Philosophy without religion is abstract and bloodless, unable to perform, at least in my limited experience. I could not live as a Stoic back when I was a Stoic: as a Christian, a spirit allowed me to do endure what Stoics are supposed to be able to endure. As a theist, I can live as rationally as, back when I was an atheist, I thought atheists were supposed to live.

The absence of reincarnation, the horrible doctrine of hell, places a certain urgency beneath the question which Eastern religions, for all their manifest glories and good works, do not share. Christianity seems, to me at least, to possess the good points of other religions but also to have a clearer insight into the human condition they do not share. I believe the other major religions, and certain forms of paganism, to be on the right track, children of light, but simply not go far enough.

But I am a bit of a heretic in one respect. I am not convinced Christianity is the final doctrine, nor that revelation has ceased its work. History may have something planned for us as startling as Jesus was, the first time he came, for the Jews. God being infinite, there is always more to discover about Him.

So I am not a Deist because Deism is not a satisfactory model for my experience. I did not meet a generic god, the god of the philosophers, or some nondenominational new age Being of Light. I met the three persons of the Trinity, one after another.

And Mary. I spoke with her. I wish I could tell you of her kindness, her simple, unaffected goodness of heart. She is more celebrated now than any queen, and lives where joy lives forever, and bright spirits like votive candles surround her, but I wish I could do something, anything to undo the sorrows she knew in life. Poor woman. Poor, poor woman.

If this was all hallucination, if this was all madness, I tell you truthfully that I would believe it nonetheless, just on the smallest chance I might see her again in heaven, and hold her hand again. Hers was the callused hand of a working woman.    

Definitions, in general, are by genus and difference, that is, by categorization and distinction: you identify what category the thing is a member of, and then distinguish it from other members of this category by naming its distinctive feature. For example, if man is “an animal who laughs” the category is animal, of which man is one of many; the distinct feature is laughter, which no animal but man possesses. 

The task of defining Science Fiction goes astray because most attempts assume “fiction” is the category, and words are spent trying to find the distinctive feature separating Science Fiction from the surrounding mainstream; saying how SF differs from the Mainstream.

Allow me to suggest another approach. What we call Mainstream fiction is not the genus, but the subset.

Fiction is the exercise of the imagination intended to reveal, by the poet’s words, both the great glories and the great sorrows of the world, the sufferings of noble heroes, the antics of simple men, the awe of heaven and the terror of the deep. All fiction is the tale of Jack the Giant Killer, about man facing an overwhelming adversity. When it is told from the point of view of giants, including gigantic figures like Achilles and Hector, it is tragedy, a tale of loss. When it is told from the point of view of jacks, humble men, or men who have lost everything, figures like Job of Uz or Odysseus of Ithaca, it is comedy, a tale of lost things found again. 

Fiction, for all of history except the present day, included fantastic elements, the gods and monsters, the ghosts and magicians, saints and devils, as a right and proper part of the tale. The witches in MACBETH, the ghost in HAMLET, the magician Prospero in THE TEMPEST, the angels in PARADISE LOST are none of them characters from SF. They the things of literature, pure and simple: the creatures and furniture of normal story-telling.

Science Fiction, along with its Siamese twin Fantasy and its malformed cousin Horror, is nothing more or less than normal story-telling. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Superheroes, Pulp Fiction, Weird Tales, Ghost Stories, comprise normal story-telling. The allow for strange imaginative efforts: the reader enters a world different from his own. Genre fiction such as spy stories, Westerns, cop stories, war stories are normal story telling where the story is limited to particular imaginative forms. The reader enters a world like what his own world should be like. Mainstream literature is abnormal. It ranges from worlds arguably the same as our own, such as WAR AND PEACE or GONE WITH THE WIND, to worlds clearly inferior and demented, ULYSSES by Joyce. What is called the mainstream is actually a sub-set of literature, a strange corner of the field, which has held popularity for what an historian would call a relatively short time. Hence, what we really need to do is define the Mainstream. It is the ghetto. SFF is everything else.

What is called now the Mainstream is merely one narrow channel occupied by the so-called realistic story. I say ‘so-called’ because a story of the school of Realism is not realistic at all, merely a story loyal to a certain ideology, one which largely ignores the real heart and soul of life. The ideology is Modernism.

Modernism is a complex ideology, all-pervasive, with infinite nuance and ramification. Here I can touch on no more than a few basic points of Modernism, hoping the reader will recognize the beast if I merely describe its ears and tail, and be able to fill in the rest of the body himself. 

1.      Modernism holds that there is nothing of significance aside from the physical universe, which is a clockwork mechanism. There are no witches, no ghosts, no spirits. This branch of Modernism is called materialism.

2.      Modernism holds than men are animals not significantly different from other animals. It holds that heroes are not demigods, but men with flaws like ours. This branch has no name, being more an attitude than a school of thought, but we can call it pseudo-Darwinism. Real Darwinism is a scientific theory to explain the emergence of species through natural selection, that man and ape spring from a common ancestor; pseudo-Darwinism is an attitude that emphasizes the similarity of man to ape, and mocks the pretension that man is a noble and rational creature.

3.      Modernism holds that good and evil are arbitrary social constructions, a matter of willpower and emotion, not a matter of intellect. Morals, to the modern mind, are something we make up, like a sonnet, not something we discover, like a periodic table. This is called Relativism or, in its most aberrant form, Nihilism.

4.      Modernism holds that men are driven by subconscious mechanisms and do things they know not what for reasons they know not why. This is called Freudianism, or, in its most aberrant form, Behaviorism.

This has several immediate implications to the story teller. It touches the scenery, props, plot, characters, but most of all it touches upon a certain theme, a view of mankind and his place in the world. That view is intensely pessimistic and skeptical.   

The doctrine of materialism holds that there are no utopias and no otherworldly realms, other dimensions, or other worlds. This not only robs tales of their most interesting locations (what would PARADISE LOST be without a paradise to lose?) but it robs even realistic locations of their realism. If you do not believe in heaven, a heavenly place on Earth, a quiet wood or a happy home, cannot seem realistic to you either. The hellish scenery of NINETEEN-EIGHTY FOUR or ANIMAL FARM is removed from the mainstream of realistic fiction by being placed in the future. They are too extraordinary as scenery to tell a realistic tale, even though, honestly, they are as realistic as Soviet Russia or Cambodia. 

Hence the scenery in realistic fiction must be drab and ordinary. Stories can no longer be set in the past as our ancestors, who lived in the past, understood their time: to be realistic, a story can only be set in the modern idea of the past. The stories cannot be set in the future, because there is no realistic consensus as to what the future will hold. The future can only be imagined with an act of speculation, and realism relies for its effect on the absence of speculative or imaginary elements that are found in normal story-telling.

Realism does not lend itself easily to adventure stories, which rely for part of their appeal on the exotic locations, unclimbed mountains, impassable jungles, vast deserts, artic wastes, oriental realms of splendor.

Setting a realistic tale in China brings too much of hint of the air of Cathay, which smells like the air of elfland to those of us from the West, or contains the charm of Arabian Night’s Tales, or the menace of Fu Manchu. Realism relies for its appeal on the pseudo-Darwinian conceit that man is not so extraordinary a creature, and this naturally makes writers of Realistic fiction shy away from exotic locales. The mysteries of the Sphinx are not for them; the gold of Ophir is not in their tales. Realistic writers might set their stories in downtown Dublin, or fascist Spain, but not in Tir-n’a-Nogth or Eldorado. 

The point here is notthat realism necessarily excludes the exotic. One can find real adventure in the real world, in stories of espionage, war, exploration. But the close parallel between real world adventures and fantastic adventures tends to make realistic fiction shy away from them: they seem, oddly enough, to unrealistic. Neal Armstrong was a real person, and so was George Washington or William of Orange. No realistic stories will star such heroes, except in a way meant to discourage hero-worship, for heroes worthy of hero-worship have too much of the glamour of elfland about them, too much of the sacredness of the Temple of Mars. MOBY DICK is set in the real world and is peopled by characters one could have met in Nantucket during the whaling days. And yet the more fantastic elements of the story, the eerie menace of the White Whale, the omens and prophecies that foretell the coming death of the Pequod, give the story an unrealistic flavor.

Here I must make an aside on the role of irony in realistic fiction. Irony is meant to rob any fantastic elements in a story of their fantasy, a thing realism finds disconcerting. So, for example, in MOBY DICK, when some omen, such as the loss of Ahab’s cap, or some prophet, the not-so-subtly-named Elijah, prophesizes doom, the event is told with humor and irony, so that the fantastic effect is diminished, robbed of its supernatural mood, and the event can be seen as merely one of those odd and unexplained coincidences. The colorless world of the realistic writer allows for odd coincidences and ironies. Indeed, for realists of the more nihilist school, the unexplained is a welcome element, provided it does not induce awe or respect in the breast of the audience. The realist seeks to produce disrespect for the world, not respect; confusion, not awe; a conviction that the world is mad, and incomprehensible, and that reason of man is too weak to grasp it. With irony, a realistic story teller can reintroduce magical and fantastic elements in his tale, but rob them of their force, so the tale is still bound within what the Modernist ideology allows as being realistic.

The irony and humor in MOBY DICK, the gravity of the theme, and particularly the pessimism of the theme, allows it to remain in the mainstream of realistic fiction. If the tale had been told without the droll exaggerations of Ishmael’s dialog, if the story had been a story of Christian redemption rather a paean to pagan fatalism and agnostic pessimism, it might have been too fantastic and too imaginative for the school of realism.

As with the scenery, so with the props. The great sword Excalibur, or the Ark of the Covenant, or Peaches of Immortality, cannot make an appearance in realistic fiction. The attempt to introduce a prop with some significance and grandeur tends to move the story outside of the stream of realism, and into Pulp Fiction or Boy’s Adventure Tales. The special gadgets of spies and heroes, jet-packs or bulletproofs cars in GOLDFINGER or GREEN HORNET or even JONNY QUEST make the story less realistic, even though jet-packs and armored cars actually do exist. The “McGuffin” was Hitchcock’s word for whatever the object is that drives the plot: the thing the spies care about but the audience does not.

When the McGuffin is something that can save or doom the world, launch an atom bomb or decode all the enemy messages, it tends to have that glamour of elfland around it, like the one magic sword that can save the kingdom, the one magic ring that curses gods and heroes. Realistic fiction tends to do without props of any particular note. They don’t like McGuffins. Modernism emphasizes that all objects are inanimate and fungible, merely goods for exploitation, not things of value in and of themselves. Tales about real things that exist, such as the Hope Diamond, which famously brought bad luck to all who owned it, cannot comfortably be fit into a realistic tale. Leopold Bloom is not going to come across the Hope Diamond in his adventures, because he does not have adventures. The fact that the Hope Diamond really exists does not mean it can appear in a realistic story, because realistic stories are never about the extraordinary.

A plot is a structure of events such that each event is a painful choice between two or more alternatives dictated by the previous events. All the events must be meaningful; crucial. A tense and fast paced plot moves from crisis to crisis with no room for error. A chessgame has a plot: each move is narrowed to specific possibilities by the move of the opposing side. Spy thrillers, detective novels, adventure stories, and other normal story-telling fiction outside of realism, all have plots and concentrate on plot reversals and surprises. In a chessgame, with its highly structured rules, reversals can be sudden and absolute. A chessman can escape from check and checkmate his opponent in one move.

This is why, in boy’s adventure stories, Superman is vulnerable to Kryptonite: the presence or absence of the one glowing green stone can suddenly reverse the plot. This is why the One Ring can destroy the Dark Lord even at the highest peak of his dread power: because there is more drama, more hopes and fears bound up into a smaller space of time, if the villain is defeated at the moment of his utmost strength. The rare green rock, or the one magic ring, becomes as important as the King in chess: it is the one piece that can win or lose the game.  

Realistic stories shy away from plots for the same reason they shy away from McGuffins. A plot requires that one event, a climax, determine the outcome of the story. A climax is hence an extraordinary event, not merely one meaningless happenstances following another meaningless happenstance. Realism shuns the extraordinary for the ordinary. Hence, realism tends to prefer pointless and meandering stories, rather than plot-driven stories. ULYSSES by James Joyce has no more plot than ALICE IN WONDERLAND: things simply happen, one after the next, but no extraordinary events that reverse the direction of the plot or drive the plot to a climax.

Relativism begins as a caution against judging the actions of men of other lands and ages with our modern standards, but ends with a standard so judgmental that it is useless as a standard: namely, that one must never judge anything to be meaningful. What begins as simple courtesy or justice toward strangers ends in nihilism. This absence of moral meaning in the Modernist ideology makes stories loyal to that ideology  uncomfortable with ascribing meanings even to simple acts.The effect is to rob realistic stories of their moral meanings. Even a simple moral, like a pulp novel’s ‘crime does not pay’ comes across as too fantastic, because unrealistically simplistic, to the sophisticate of realism.

Stories with an obvious moral meaning, where a hero prevails because he is faithful, or trusting, or pure, or does not break his word, moves out of the realm of realism and back into normal story telling. In the movie SIGNS by M. Night Shyamalan, what seemed to be unconnected coincidences actually turn out to be the signs of an underlying pattern of events, a divine providence unheard-of in realism, but common in ghost stories and other normal story-telling. Nothing is fated and no fate is deserved in realistic fiction. Normal story-telling, from OEDIPUS REX to RETURN OF THE JEDI is all about fate, and also in any time travel story where the character’s actions cannot break the pattern of events: Fritz Leiber’s THE BIG TIME or Heinlein’s ‘All You Zombies.’

Science Fiction differs from other normal story telling in that the moral purpose of the events is usually tied into the scientific world-view or the philosophy of reasoning and enlightenment. Logical thinking, the men of the mind, are the heroes in science fiction tales, the people who think the way the universe itself thinks, which is to say, logically. Detective fiction also has this same logical cast to it. 

Character development is likewise lacking in imagination in a realistic story. There are heroes in real life, every one from a soldier, to a fireman, to a boy scout lost in the woods who uses his wits to find rescue, displays some element of courage and greatness. But Modernism, thanks to Freud, no longer believes man is responsible for the content of his character for good or for ill. If one man seems heroic, it is either a falsehood perpetrated by the press for propaganda reasons, or his lack of fear is due to a genetic accident. Consider the difference between a phobia and a fear. A phobia is something one cannot cure by reason. Hector can be afraid of Achilles, and yet he can be encouraged to go fight him, prodded by shame or inspired by virtue to do the right and excellent thing, and die like a man rather than like a coward. But victims of phobias are not cowards: they suffer a traumatic malfunction of their thinking machinery. There is no excellence and no honor in their world: one is either irrationally afraid or irrationally lacks fear, and there is no rhyme or reason as to why one man has good character or one bad. Well, not only have you no heroes in realistic fiction, you have no villains either.

A real villain, such as a Nazi war criminal, an apologist for Communism or a serial killer cannot be placed in a realistic novel without moving it into the realm of thriller, war story, detective novel or horror. The worst villain (indeed, the only villain) in a modern realistic novel is the hypocrite, because this is the only sin in their psychoanalytical theory of the character of men.

Character development in the modern novel is as lacking in development as the plot is in motion: character studies generally tend to look at the sick, the mad, the dipsomaniac, the loser, the fraud, the zero. The characters of realistic novels do not even contain the virtues and vices of real people, but instead turn out the inmates of Bedlam for their cast of characters. Heroism is regarded as unrealistic and childish, and perhaps slightly sinister.

Even such simple human emotions as love and romance, because these also contain a hint of the air of Elfland, a memory of paradise before the fall, cannot be tolerated in mainstream literature, but must be moved to their own special genre, that of romantic fiction. A realistic novel, such as LOLITA, must treat romance as some particular type of sickness, as something without meaning, not something that ennobles and uplifts. If the romance uplifts the hero to greatness, as in CYRANO, the story becomes too adventurous and too exotic for realism.

All these things combine to one theme, which is pessimism or irony. We can see a pattern in the realistic fiction: the scenery is mundane and unimaginative. The props and events are ordinary rather than extraordinary, and hence unimaginative. The events also must lack the one thing the human imagination always reads into events, that is, a moral purpose or providential meaning. The way a dull and unimaginative mind sees life, as a flux of events in which no pattern can be found, is the viewpoint of modernism. No extraordinary characters, no men of sterling virtue or villains of blackest vice, can exist in modernism, because there is nothing extraordinary in their world. It takes an act of imagination to picture the personality and behavior of a saint or a serial murderer.  

In sum, the realistic novel is the novel that is as unimaginative as possible in all areas of scenery and setting, props and plots, characters and themes. The only area left for the imagination is cleverness of presentation, symbolism, dialog: hence these are the areas on which writers and critics of this genre concentrate. It is all form with no substance. Even here their contempt for the extraordinary has prevented another Milton or Shakespeare from emerging from the ranks of the modernists. One can find, at best, clever gibberish or plays on words in James Joyce, but you will not find a St. Crispens’ Day speech which could be profitably read to a craven man to restore his flagging courage. 

Fiction is an exercise of the imagination. Realism is that particular type of fiction which uses as little imagination as possible, and in ways means to inspire as little as possible.

Normal story telling is everything else: everything in the land of imagination, everything that stirs the heart to heroism or devotion, from fearless detectives to brilliant scientists to clean-limbed fighting men of Virginia teleported to Mars to men raised by apes to British spies cool under pressure with a garrote in his wristwatch and a bomb in his briefcase. 

Having defined this, the boundaries of the various genres of normal story telling fall across the expectations of the readers for the story. Each genre can be defined by where it is free to be imaginative, and where it restricts itself to certain conventions.

Genre fiction, such as adventure stories, Westerns, detective novels, are free in various dimensions except their particular limits. Westerns not only must take place within a given span of years in the American West, but they also must contain the props and characters unique to the Cowboys-and-Indians genre. Merely a story set in the Navaho Territory in 1890 but which had no cowboy, no sheriff, no pioneers, no Indians, no horses, nothing that identified it as Western, would no longer be a western. Likewise, adventure stories need adventure and detective stories need detectives. In the first case, the readers seek the thrill of heroism, danger and great deeds; in the second, the intellectual and emotional satisfaction of seeing crime discovered and punished, or, in darker versions, the bitterness of life’s injustice when it is not punished. Any story that satisfies the specific need of the audience is within its particular genre.

If he reads to be horrified, the reader seeks horror. Horror can contain either human bloodshed or supernatural enigmas, just so long as what the characters confront is the unknown. If he reads to be swept away by sentiment, the reader seeks romance. Unusual coincidences, even the old fashioned tropes of love philters or sudden bouts of amnesia are accepted in this genre, if they lend to the effect of producing a heartbreaking and heart-mending romance. Horror and romance are basically free to do anything that will produce the emotion, be it fear or love, they seek to produce.

Science Fiction is simply the opposite of horror: it is the genre that looks at the unknown, and seeks the romance, the sense of wonder, hidden behind the veil. Science Fiction is about as realistic about science as spy novels are about spies or romance novels about marriage, which is to say, the science is only as realistic as will serve to lend an illusion of authenticityto the tale. Science fiction is free in all dimensions but one: it has to be a story within the scenery and setting, the props, of an arguably scientific universe.

This scenery blends into fantasy somewhat. Any magic that happens, such as telepathy, teleportation, time travel or faster-than-light drive, must be presented as a product of scientific investigation, the discovery of added laws of nature, not the product of gifts from the gods and genies. Even “The Force” must be described as an energy field surrounding the galaxy, not as a spirit.

The same way Science Fiction is a romance about the unknown future, fantasy is a romance about the forgotten past: it is the artificial attempt to tell a tale, not in the past as we understanding it to be, but in the past as our ancestors actually lived in. High fantasy contains the tropes and themes of medievalism, as in Tolkien; low fantasy contains the tropes and themes of paganism, as in E.R. Eddison, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard. Oriental fantasy, as in Jack Vance, attempts to capture the glamour of an Arabian Night’s Tale, the strangeness of exotic cities with onyx towers rising like a mirage from the desert, or the pearl-crusted pagodas of Cathay and Taprobane.

In short, what is called mainstream fiction is a ghetto genre, destined to be forgotten, consisting of unimaginative stories set in mundane worlds. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Pulp Fiction, Superheroes, Weird Tales, Horror, Ghosts Stories, and in short, what by rights should be called normal story telling is simply everything else.

We tell stories about the universe, all the worlds that are, have been, will be, could be, or could never be; they tell stories about the mundane earth, and, at that, only about the mundane and earthy parts of it.

Sorry. All I meant is that the cover art makes Amelia Windrose looks totally cute in her flier’s cap, deer legs and all, and badboy rock-angel  Colin is not the kind of guy most girls would throw out of the bed for eating crackers and dropping crumbs on the covers. Good cover art.

Honestly, I am not one of these sad, pathetic weirdoes who is only attracted to multidimensional schoolgirl aviatrixes. My tastes are MUCH healthier and more normal.

I am attracted to evil cartoon space princesses!

No, no, just kidding. Ha, hah! My tastes are MUCH healthier than that. I am attracted to women’s auxiliary naval officers of Star Fleet who have been swept off their feet by evil alien space gods, and forced to dress up like a futuristic version of Io or Europa or something.

And Fembots. But who is not attracted to Fembots? I mean, if I could get a date, I wouldn’t be a science fiction fan, right?

And fembot sex workers. I means, they’re BUILT to be attractive, so it is perfectly, uh, understandable that a red-blooded, um….

Robo-Harlots are not to be confused with Space Harlots, er, Companions! Entirely different sort of thing. Only a Mundane would confuse the two. It will be a perfectly respectable profession in the future.

And there is nothing abnormal about being attracted to Orion Slave Women.

Because, um, they’re so very green, and…

And no man in the galaxy can resist them! It said so in the pilot episode!

Did I mention that there are whole websites devoted to green pleasure-slaves from Orion? So it is not just me who is odd.

(It SHOULD be, but it is not.)

So I am not just some loser who is only attracted to evil cartoon space princesses. (*)

I also like, er, evil live-action space princesses.

And just in case any one doubts for a moment that real life earth princesses do not look as good as imaginary space princesses, I have offer the following as Exhibit A and B

Her Majesty, Rania of Jordan

Her Serene Highness, Grace of Monaco.

Hubba, as they say, Hubba, Your Grace.

This has absolutely nothing at all to do with my book, does it? Of course, two of my characters are good looking space princesses, or princesses from other dimensions or something, so maybe there is a connection there somewhere.

Anyway, go buy the book, or I will tell you more details of my psyche you just don’t want to know.

(*Footnote: Yes, I know that this is Hal Jordan’s mind-controlled girlfriend Carol Ferris, Earthwoman, but, nonetheless, he was raised to royal dignity by the  Zamarons, she counts as a space princess, the same way Grace Kelly, American, counts as a Princess of Monaco.)

Here I must confess my shortfalls as a reviewer: a good reviewer can give a good reason, when he dislikes a book, of what he dislikes about it. In this way a reader with tastes different fro the reviewer can tell how much of the negative review might apply. But I am not sure what disappointed me in this book.

One cannot express disappointment without expressing expectations. Here is what I expected from a book on the topic of Chesterton and Science Fiction: 1. a description of Chesterton’s work and life, something I didn’t already know about him. 2. a description of science fiction, what it means and what it is for, some insight into the nature of the field I did not already have. 3. A review of what in Chesterton’s work was arguably science fiction, or, better yet, what was like science fiction in spirit, even if it was not science fiction per se. 4. The impact SF, such as Wells, had on Chesterton. 5. The impact Chesterton, if any, had on science fiction. 6. The contrast and analysis between the world-view of Science Fiction and the world of Chesterton.

Perhaps that is asking too much for a book on SF and Chesterton; but I would have been satisfied with at least one of these points being covered. What I wanted was what any reader wants in a nonfiction book: some new facts to edify me, and analysis to make me think, some insight.

Insight is the particular quality any Chesterton fan cherishes. Insight is the ability to look at old and worn and commonplace things and see the marvels in them; to open the lamps of elfland and glimpse the old world by its new and magical light. Insight! One cannot be a Chestertonian without delighting in insight, because it is Chesterton’s main strength. With a single witticism he can hold up the world in a glass that is the opposite of a funhouse mirror, so that everything is seen, not distorted as we always see it, but clean and beautiful and in its proper proportion for the first time.

Here, taken at random from the nearest Chesterton book at my elbow:

“Imprudent marriages!” roared Michael. “And pray where in earth or heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might as well talk about prudent suicides! You never know a husband till you marry him. Unhappy! Of course you’ll be unhappy! Who the devil are you that you should not be unhappy, like the mother that bore you?”

The character ends his speech by proposing.

That, dear readers, is insight.

What Stephen R.L. Clark did not do is provide me with any new insights about science fiction, nor G.K. Chesterton, nor both topics together nor either topic separately. When he referenced a science fiction book, which he did very rarely, it was usually to use as an example, but no analysis or insight ever surrounded the example. If Chesterton was using cannibalism as an example of vegetarianism run amok, Clark might say that cannibalism is mentioned in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, but then not say how it was mentioned, or why, or what point Robert Heinlein was making by mentioning it, and how G.K. Chesterton’s orthodoxy and sound thinking could run rings around Heinlein’s vaporings, logically.

The author perhaps was simply too diffident. Clark did not seem to want to express an opinion on any topic, much less a strong opinion, much less a strong and daring opinion backed by examples and evidence. He did not have a point. Even after reading the last chapter, which was called “Conclusion” I closed the book having seen no conclusion the author came to, having missed whatever point he was driving at.

There was a chapter, for example, called “Man the Prince of Animals”, where, or so I supposed, the author could take the time to discuss the science fictional aspect of man as one animal among many, an ever-changing being that the future must make shaped in body and mind nothing like this. The majestic work of Olaf Stapledon and H.G. Wells could have been mentioned, THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU could have been discussed, or the way the Martians in WAR OF THE WORLDS were shaped by evolution, including the evolutionary pressured created by their own successful machine-civilization. This could have been compared with Chesterton’s pragmatic common sense, the argument given in THE EVERLASTING MAN, that the differences between man and beast are too huge to be overlooked or mistaken. Instead, upon reading the chapter, I am left with no impress at all on my brain as to what was discussed. In fact, nothing was discussed, aside from a single line, perhaps the author’s only venture at opinion in the whole book, where he wonders whether vegetarianism is not, after all, the only proper posture for Christians to adopt, out of respect for animal life.

The book jacket promises that Chesterton will be defended against modern charges of racism and sexism and ungoodism and doubleplus ungoodism, but no real defense was mounted, and no clear statement of charges was read. This, I think, was merely a sign that the book was written, and meant to be read, in a different mental and moral atmosphere than my own. Perhaps the author simply thought that Chesterton’s breeches of Political Correctness were too obvious to mention, or too poignant and dreadful to put into words.

In any case, Chesterton’s thought crimes are unknown to me, because I am his conspirator in those crimes. Does he offend modern notions of feminism, vegetarianism, capitalism, socialism, multiculturalism, pervertarianism or other pieties in fashion this week? Good for him.

The current age is hardly one I would hold up as a standard of moral probity compared to Chesterton’s England. Chesterton makes somewhere the droll observation that the myth of progress is no more than the mere assumption that all one’s ancestors were fools: hearings those who believe it expound so unlikely a theory might persuade one it is true, is we in addition assume the condition is hereditary.

In any case, aside from lame and halting exposition, and pointlessness, and lack of insight, the author, Mr. Clark, had one habit so annoying that it is fortunate I did not fling the book into the fire grate. He would quote Chesterton in some paragraph where Chesterton, a master of the English language as few others will ever dream of being, was using grammar correctly; and Mr. Clark would mark it as [sic] as if the usage was unexpected or improper. For example, Chesterton correctly uses the word “he” as the pronoun to use when the sex of the subject is unknown or undetermined, or when speaking of a single individual in a group of both sexes. “Every chicken must lay his egg.” No matter what unlettered partisans of Newspeak would have you think, True Believers, this is the correct construction in English

<>Grammar tip: Even though only hens lay eggs, chickens, as a group, lay eggs, and a single unidentified member of a mixed group of male and female is “he.” For the same reason, you would say, “Every patient must remove his bra prior to the the mammogram.” because a patient is a member of a groupany individual of which could be male or female. (Sorry, folks, I don’t make the rules of English, I just know them.) If you want to change to rules, you have to stoop to the folly of correcting a correct useage by people like Chesterton. The “correctors” either have to rewrite their ancestor’s books, or misread them, or cease to read them–which is, of course, the point of Political Correctness.

Mr. Clark would [sic] this pronoun. Sorry, I am sure Mr. Clark is a great guy, but this type of fussy behavior, incorrectly making a grammar correction, makes him comes across as petty (if he knows what he’s doing) or absurd (if he does not).

In my case, I am happy to report that the hatred I feel toward them is gone, and I pray it remains forever gone.  Reading their responses, and seeing how wretched they are, how confused, how lost, has moved me to feel human sympathy for them, despite the horror of the dark crimes they urge.

That sounds like a paradox, doesn’t it? It is not.

We are dealing with people who, at least some of them, cannot tell the difference between a little baby and a malign tumor. They are not logical enough to reason it out on their own; they have not enough common sense to believe their own eyes; they have not enough respect for others to trust the experience of older and wiser generations; they have not enough experience themselves to know what they’re talking about.

The question is not how to reason them free from his position. He does not have a position, he has a feeling, and the feeling is a sick, proud, and angry one. Once a person is so far from the sunny fields of healthy human sanity that he approves of killing babies and comatose old woman, he is lost in the wild with no paths back. Reasoning will not guide him. He is like a man possessed, like a victim of hypnosis. The question is what has cast the hypnotic spell, and how to break it: Abortion is just a side effect. The core problem is the Culture of Death.

The fact is that human beings are not psychologically equipped for lives of selfishness. When we try to be selfish, thinking self-centeredness will make us happy, all that happens is that we become self-destructive. A good and likeable person can be deceived or self-deceived into a death spiral. When his moral compass starts pointing south, every other value and virtue gets reversed, but his innate goodness, the boldness and sympathies that make him human, still exist. The engine driving the ship is still sound, the crew is still loyal, it is merely that the captain is mad. The very strengths that would make a good man a hero, when pointed in the right direction, make a good man self-destructive, when pointed in the wrong direction.

In this case, the destruction is literal: abortion, and the general self-centeredness of the Culture of Death has decimated the next generation. The reproduction rates in Europe are below replacement levels, in some places, far below. Saturn has feasted and consumed his heirs. Evolution is a force that in this case will successfully wipe out those who look to it for moral guidance. Those of us who are too meek to think we have the right to sit in judgment over which babies merit life, will, as scheduled, inherit the earth.

It is not too late to save the sinking Titanic of secularism. This vessel had three main bulkheads: Marxism, with its belief that state control of economic and social institutions could perfect mankind; Freudianism, with its belief that human perfection could result from lack of inhibitions, the absence of rules; and Progressivism, by which I mean the Darwin-flavored myth that human progress is a natural and inevitable process, like building a pyramid, not a continuous and doubtful struggle, like bailing a boat. Progressivism is a fine philosophy in May, when each day is brighter than the last, but in November, as the darkness grows, one must doubt that something will be better merely because it arises later.

While all these optimistic science-tinted daydreams might have been viable during the heady days of the Victorians, when every dawn saw new improvements in European civilization, two world wars, a cold war, and the ghastly terrors of scientific socialism run amok have put paid to notions of human perfectibility. If there was ever any religious dogma that empirical evidence supported, the doctrine of the Fall of Man is that one.  Marx and Freud are on the dustbin of history, except in the hermetic halls of academia, where nothing disturbs the dust. Using Darwin to claim some races of man are naturally more evolved or more advanced than other races still has the burnt smell of the death-camps clinging to it, and not even academics believe it any more. All parts of the ship of the secular world view have been holed below the water line.

We have to invite any who will hear us onto the Ark, if they want to escape the waters. That means having love and forgiveness in our hearts, no matter what they advocate.

1. We live in an age where metaphysics, the queen of sciences, is neglected and despised, and so the metaphysical question of the essential nature of humanity cannot be discussed. We have neither a vocabulary nor a shared set of assumptions, a mental framework, to discuss it.

2. We live in an age of selfishness, where only rights, not duties, are debated.

A moral philosophy that never discusses duties is one that simply refuses to examine its axioms. It is an analysis that cannot examine things to the root, and therefore cannot be other than shallow, for whatever ignores the roots of things is shallow.

No philosophy actually excuses all duties as voluntary. Even the most extreme form of denying involuntary duties always assumes at least one natural, involuntary duty. Every voluntary duty assumes that there is an involuntary duty by which one already is bound to abide by.

Take a promise to be honest, for example. One cannot only be bound to be honest after the promise is made, because one must be honest before any promises are made in order to be a person who can make promises at all.  

3. We live in an atomistic age, where only individuals, not families, are discussed. Only the conflict of the rights of mother and her unborn child are debated. Fathers, though legally bound to support any child he fathers, or to pay for needed prenatal surgery, need not even be dropped a polite note when his wife or paramour decides to kill his beloved son or daughter.

4. We live in an age of gross and disgusting inhumanity. No one holds it shameful or monstrous to declare some other person’s life not worth living. We live in an age of pleasure, were vulgar and degraded souls cannot imagine a life without pleasure to be worth living. Here is a coma victim: her life would not cause a shallow man like me pleasure, ergo she should die. There is a child born to impoverished parents of dark skin or slanted eyes. Who would want to be a poor black child? Far better he be killed. Look, a Jew! No one wants to be one of them. Look! A retard! Death. This is what passes for compassion and enlightenment among those who hold themselves to be our betters.

5. We live in an age of cruelty and indifference. Concern for the weak and helpless is not in evidence, at least, not on this one topic. The mother is stronger than her unborn child. The child is more dependent on her when in the womb than he is during any other stage of his life. It is this fact, this absolute weakness, this unparalleled helplessness, which is used as the main argument, not to protect his life with stricter bulwarks, but to expose him to death. Because he is weak and only because he is weak (so runs the argument) ergo his mother owes him no protection and no love, aside from what her need or pleasure grants. He is not even human unless she says he is. This is the argument of Thrasymachus, the argument that the strong ought to oppress the weak merely because they can.

6. We live in an age of passion, not reason, and so rights belong to those who seem most sincere and authentic in their mindless screaming, rioting, and vandalism. Whoever cries the loudest gets his way: and the unborn cries are never heard at all. No one sees them; no one sees the little corpses. 

For all these reasons, this topic, and other topics of public debate touching on non-material realities, debates about imponderables, such as the sacredness of holy matrimony, cannot be discussed clearly and dispassionately. The subject matter cannot be defined. Indeed, the subject matter cannot even be admitted to exist.

The debate is between a healthy view of life and people who have been crippled by all the mental pollution of the modern age. They live lives of fear and desperation, hopeless materialism, joyless pleasure, pointless selfishness; and they are intellectually numb, spiritually drained, and their fear and severe moral retardation makes them cruel.

If you want a visual picture of the moral landscape of these modern nihilists and existentialists, look at “The Scream” by Edvard Much (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream). You will see the dreary shapelessness, the blurred distortions, the neurotic half-nightmarish flux of undefined color of a the conscience that has lost its moral compass, of the consciousness that rejects the intellectual discipline needed for reasoning.

Our culture, turning its back both on faith and on reason, our philosophy, which neither trusts collective tradition to be wise, or trusts individual thinking to be reliable, has not taught the partisans of the Party of Death how to “do” morality. The positive and negative signs have all been reversed, and they are told whether twice two is four is a matter of opinion. They cannot do simple moral arithmetic. How do we expect them to do moral calculus? No matter how smart they are (and some of these partisans are among the most learned academics of our age) they have not the mental tools to do the work.

One response was that I was an idiot or a lunatic. This is ad Hominem. I don’t count this as an objection, it is merely a verbal flourish, something like the scream a samurai utters before he strikes, or blowing a trumpet before a charge. People make noise in battles, and those who see an argument as a battle make noise, not words. 

The first objection was that I was being hypothetical. Would that I were. There is a real case of a woman who was wounded during an abortion. Her twin sister was not so lucky, and died. The operation was a failure because the patient lived. The means used to kill the baby, saline abortion, did not kill the baby, who then was born and grew up to adulthood, still suffering the cerebral palsy induced by the operation. Her name is Gianna Jessen. (http://www.abortionfacts.com/survivors/giannajessen.asp). As rare as finding someone who escaped Auschwitz, she escaped the abortion holocaust.

My argument is not hypothetical at all. If you say that no harm can be done to the unborn in the womb, that their pain and suffering somehow does not “count” because they were not really persons to you in your imagination yet, because you don’t regard them as being human beings, then, logically, the cerebral palsy inflicted on her by her mother was not an injury, not a dereliction of the mother’s duty to see to proper prenatal and postnatal care.

If you can say that a mother loves her child, and, at the same time, can give her child a lifetime-long crippling disease, then you contradict yourself. No matter whether Gianna Jessen was properly alive by your definition, or properly a human person by your definition, the fact is that she is human now, and crippled now, and that your philosophy in action crippled her.

The second objection voiced was that I was not using the correct vocabulary as approved by the politically correct language of the pro-abortionists. This is definitional quibbling. The logic of the argument does not change merely because arbitrary labels used to point to concepts change. In logic, the form of the argument matters, not the labels. In philosophy, the concepts matter, not the labels.

This second objection is also deceitful, and all honest men should be offended by the naked insincerity of it. The point is to rob the victims of humanity before death, so as to hide the emotional impact of what is done. For similar dishonest reasons, mothers in abortion clinics are not allowed to see the sonograms the technicians use.

This second objection is also scientifically illiterate. To refer to the homo sapiens in the womb as “a fetus but not a child” or “a fetus but not a human being,” from the point of view of a biologist, is worse than false: it is mere is nonsense. As if someone were to insist that an egg is not a member of the animal kingdom, or that an acorn of the vegetable kingdom, or that eggs and acorns were not alive, or somehow not members of the species which generated them (but membership in species is defined by no other criteria but generation—that is why a mule is considered a different species as a horse).

The third was that I said life begins at conception. I said nothing of the kind: indeed, the point of my argument is the opposite: it is that the duty of parenting obtains before life begins.

The forth was that I said the child was a person with rights. I said nothing of the kind, indeed, the point of my argument is the opposite: the duty of parenting obtains before personhood is invested.

The fifth was that only women have the intellectual equipment, moral stature, needed to discuss this issue, or the pragmatic experience. A person not a woman so said. This is another form of ad Hominem, a type called polylogy, the assertion that the rules of logic differ according to race or sex or some other collective membership. One is reminded of Nazis claiming Relativity was “Jewish physics.” This is not a serious objection: it need not be dignified with an answer.

The sixth was a half-serious claim that we celebrate birthdays, not conception days, and that Christians celebrate Christmas, not the day Christ was conceived. The most adroit answer, one that made me smile, was to point out that the Feast of the Annunciation is May 25 th. Touché.

But even as a half-serious point, this objection is an error: the birthday celebrates birth, not the creation ex nihilo of a baby out of non-baby. The birthday celebrates the successful conclusion and fulfillment of the pregnancy, a most significant step in the child’s development, the heroism of the mother in her labor, in the same way that the Fourth of July celebrates the successful progress of the Revolutionary War and the heroism of the patriots.

Now, the war was started before 4 July 1776 and concluded after; nor was our current Constitution in place. But by the logic of the pro-Abortionists, no one could be a patriot on 3 July 1776, because the country as a legal entity did not yet exist. One can have no duty and no love to a non-existant country, right?

By this logic, the founding fathers had no love for their country, no duty toward it, and the patriots who bled and died under British bullets and Hessian bayonets were under no moral or ethical obligation to do anything. Only sacrifices made after the country is born are worth mentioning. Benedict Arnold was not a traitor! Acting to abort the country before birth is morally acceptable!     

The seventh objection was that I was making a religious argument. This was not only irrelevant, it was the opposite of the truth (as well as being an embarrassing betrayal on the part of the speaker, otherwise a right guy, of his ugly bigotry). While it is true that I am a Christian now, I invented this argument back when I was an atheist, and brought it forward almost word for word into my journal here. I said nothing religious of any kind, and the argument does not change based on religious sentiment or dogma one way or the other.

Ironically, the only people making a religious argument are the pro-abortionists. Here is the significant quote:

“Life and a person are two very different things. I’m not arguing against the taking of lives; I’m arguing that a person isn’t a person before a certain point. Clearly, those cells are live and they are human. Those things in my mind do not make a person with rights alone.”

What is here called a “person with rights” refers to an immaterial, unidentified, undefined measure of the thing that makes up persons with moral significance when dealing with ethical questions: persons in the eyes of the law, persons in the eyes of our fellow men.

What is the imponderable, undefined, non-material substance that makes us truly human called? Every prior age called this substance a soul.

If stated clearly, their argument boils down to a claim that a baby does not have a soul until birth. Before birth, it is not a thing made in the image of God, its life is not sacred. Therefore may be killed at the pleasure or need of the mother, as it is no more morally significant than a housecat. (Actually, most pro-abortionists are more chary of the lives of housecats than of human children, since they would object to slaying a housecat on demand, without some showing of need or hardship.)

This mysterious and undefined imponderable essence, this soul, only enters or transubstantiates the child when the skull clears the birth canal: this is neither a legal doctrine nor a scientific fact, nor a deduction from reason. It is an article of faith, a dogma.

Under the current law, which permits partial-birth aborticide, the child is only human when his head clears the birth canal: if he is breech, that is, feet first coming out of the womb, he may be killed at the mother’s pleasure, even though, were he the same in every way, except turned upside down, he would be a human with a soul, and all the rights and privileges and protections recognized and honored by our laws. A more arbitrary and stupid conceit cannot be imagined, that turning a baby upside down turns him into a human person, but there you have it.