John C. Wright's Journal

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http://www.literature-map.com/john+c+wright.html

According to this, my books appeal to respondents who also like Jack Vance and Lord Dunsany. Ah! I am in august company indeed. Also Iain M. Banks and Charles Wilson.

You see, I can use this to find out who I  might like to read.

India is planning to send a rocket to the moon by 2008. Science Fiction readers are required to rejoice, or else turn in their memberships.

The USA has done amazing things in the space program, as did USSR, but we did miss the DISCOVERY mission to Jupiter’s Moons by 2001, as had been predicted–and this not due a lack of technology, but through a lack of will, and, sorry NASA, but it is basically your fault.

Its 2006: where is my Orion Drive? It’s been 43 years!  We went from the Wright Brother’s motorized kite to Chuck Yeager’s X-15 supersonic jet flight in 43 years!

Three cheers for India!  Bollywood already makes better movies than Hollywood. Let’s hope their space program excels as well.

You watch: first man on Mars will be named either Mandeep, Arjuna or Ram, unless he’s named Chang, Park, or Kinomoto.  On the other hand, those are all American names, so Uncle Sam might still make it, if the next three administrations cooperate. On the gripping hand, the space program should get more film and television coverage than in 1960 merely because those fields are so much bigger: a wise space program would play up the media angle: so perhaps the first person on Mars will be named Aishwarya or Madhuri, Kareena or Priety.

Brilliant idea! I would tune in to watch the Mars landing if Bollywood filmed it, even if the Superbowl were on opposite, or the Bab 5 Marathon. (‘Cause I can TiVo it and watch it later.)

ABOVE: Completely gratitous cheescake shot of Aishwarya Rai,
having nothing to do with news item just mentioned.

Two of my short stories are planned for a book called BREACH  THE HULL (due out in late 2007), an anthology of space-war tales. The editor Mike McPhail wanted to have logos, military ensignia, to represent something from each story. My first story “Forgotten Causes” stars the last space marine of long-dead mankind, who is on some mission so top secret that he himself is not cleared to know who he is or what he is doing, and he wakes in the middle of battle with an artificial amnesia. The insignia for this story was a Marine Corps looking deal.

Well, my second story was called “Peter Power Armor” which was based on my theory the same parents who want all kids to wear bicycyle helmets, in time of war would want STARSHIP TROOPERS-style Mecha to protect their children from snipers. (The right to buy weapons is the right to be free! Ergo the right to buy massive weapons is the right to be massively free!)

The insignia the editor drew up for this one was a Teddy Bear armed with a Vulcan auto-cannon and toy balloons. I rolled on the floor in puppy like delight to see so droll a design, and asked him if I could get it on a tee shirt or coffee mug or something. He granted my wish, and I wanted to share the news in case someone else wanted one:

Cafe Press: Breach the Hull

Just in time for Xmas! Now you can Wear the Shirt! Read the Book! and Sip from the Mug!

HISTORICAL NOTE: Xmas is a secular holiday beloved of Shopkeepers everywhere, during which grumpy people buy each other unwanted gifts in a hideous mockery of good cheer. It is presided over by Santy Clause, an advertising gimmick of the Coca Cola Bottling Company of Atlanta, who are the illuminati secretly controlling history–why else did the US troops drink Coke overseas? The Shopkeeper holiday falls on the same day as Christmas, presided over by St. Nicholas, during which all merry Christian gentlemen rest without dismay and eat goose to celebrate the savior’s birth–they are resting and merry because the good Christian ladies are the ones in the kitchen baking the cookies (something poor Mr. Clinton, for all his fame, cannot get his missus to do) while they watch the ball game on the telly. No doubt they are wearing Peter Power Armor sweaters and sipping from Peter Power Armor mugs! 

For those of you who have to travel on this day, remember the holiday also celebrates overcrowded Inns that double-booked or lost your reservation: and the spirit of Christian cheer reminds us all how much we hate paying taxes, or why astrology is actually good for you. For those of you who cannot afford gifts to give to baby Jesus, just come by like the Little Drummer Boy and pound your drums in his ear! Wait till he is sleeping; surely babies love loud noises! 

HISTORICAL NOTE UPDATE –THIS JUST IN: I’ve just been handed a report which shows the two holidays may be related to each other! Modern science has proven that Xmas actually has pagan roots in Germany of 1850, during which simple Teutons, who had been Christian since the time of the Saxon apostle Ewald the White (about A.D. 695), decorated pine trees! The pine tree was invented by pagans (Piney the Elder, in fact, after whom it was named) so that proves it!

Here is an interview by a SF author I like, who wrote THE RISEN EMPIRE.

Now for some Science Fiction Publishing Industry Insider Info! I went on a trip to New York and saw my publisher’s office for the first time: a cramped place in the world-famous Flatiron building (in fact, TOR books occupies the very floors lashed out by Godzilla’s tail in the American remake–this is after Tor declined to do the novelization, and maybe the movie maker were feeling petulant).

We fell into a conversation about the good Mr. Westerfeld, who may not be writing SF for a while yet. It seems the publishers of ULGIES, PRETTIES and SPECIALS not to mention MIDNIGHTERS apparently bludgeoned Mr. Westerfeld with a big green plastic trashbag full of money, backing up dump trucks of greenbacks to pour it in through his bedroom window, and he simply cannot afford to write less-well-remunerated manuscripts. He also swims in it like Scrooge McDuck.

I haven’t read UGLIES, but I thought it was a Great Idea for a Book (and Why Didn’t I Think of That!) Here is the author’s description of the premise: “It’s about a world in which everyone has an operation when they turn sixteen, making them supermodel beautiful. Big eyes, full lips, no one fat or skinny. This seems like a good thing, but it’s not. Especially if you’re one of the uglies, a bunch of radical teens who’ve decided they want to keep their own faces.”

At the risk of evoking a question as troubling and profound, I must ask, first, if you were a SF writer whose book was about to me made into a movie,  which would you think was more Way Cool:

To be Neil Gaiman author of STARDUST, which gets Michael Pfiffer to drive a chariot pulled by goats?

Or to be Peter S. Beagle, author of THE LAST UNICORN, with a chance of getting Christopher Lee to reprise his role as King Haggard?

I remember the day, not so long ago, when it was seriously argued that the American public would never want to go see a Fantasy movie.

I tend to distrust statistical studies. Experts have proven that six out of seven statistics are false. But when a study confirms something everyone not ideologically wedded to unreality sort of knows anyway, it is worth looking at.

Teens from in-tact families and regular Churchgoing have better grades and fewer vices.

The rise of Modernism in India has the side effect of increasing the infanticide rate. Girls are an unwanted.

“Who has killed these girl children? Their own parents.” In some states, the minister said, newborn girls have been killed by pouring sand or tobacco juice into their nostrils.

“The minute the child is born and she opens her mouth to cry, they put sand into her mouth and her nostrils so she chokes and dies,” Chowdhury said, referring to cases in the western desert state of Rajasthan.

“They bury infants into pots alive and bury the pots. They put tobacco into her mouth. They hang them upside down like a bunch of flowers to dry,” she said.

The figure given in the article is 10 million.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/print?id=2728976

History will look back on this generation as we look back on the Aztecs.

Tell me once more, O Modern World, of your great moral superiority over all good Christian folk.

Remind me, ye Revolutionaries, once again, how liberating and empowering the Modern Time is for women. Tell me, Moloch, tell me why your modern barbarism, your faith (despite all evidence) that man is an beast of no significance, makes your creed superior to Christian civilization?

Her name was Shanice. She did not find Modernism empowering.

Christmas may not be a warmed over pagan holiday after all. I quote here from Mark Shea’s unpublished Behold Your Mother

According to William Tighe, a church history specialist at Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College, “the pagan festival of the ‘Birth of the Unconquered Sun’ instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the ‘pagan origins of Christmas’ is a myth without historical substance.”

For the fact is, our records of a tradition associating Jesus’ birth with December 25 are decades older than any records concerning a pagan feast on that day.
[T]he definitive “Handbook of Biblical Chronology” by professor Jack Finegan (Hendrickson, 1998 revised edition) cites an important reference in the “Chronicle” written by Hippolytus of Rome three decades before Aurelian launched his festival. Hippolytus said Jesus’ birth “took place eight days before the kalends of January,” that is, Dec. 25.

Tighe said there’s evidence that as early as the second and third centuries, Christians sought to fix the birth date to help determine the time of Jesus’ death and resurrection for the liturgical calendar—long before Christmas also became a festival.

More at: http://markshea.blogspot.com/2006_12_01_markshea_archive.html#116611119750997638

Mr. Shea does not explain away Saturnalia, which was celebrated anciently from Dec 17th through Dec 23. But it looks as if the early Christians took the traditional day for the annunciation (March 25) and added nine months.

As an added symbolism, any shepherds abiding with their flocks by night in December would probably be overseeing ‘lambing’–any lambs born early, in the winter months, are the one fat and large enough to serve as the paschal lamb for Passover. In other words, the shepherds in charge of the seeing to the birth of the paschal lamb were brought in to see the birth of the Lamb of God.

The three wise men may have been based on Zoroastrian lore: in Persian myth, when Zoroaster died, he promised to return in a later reincarnation, at such as place as a special star would show.

If this is true (and I cannot vouch for it, I am repeating a rumor) either real Magi, Persian holy men, were traveling east looking for the reincarnation of their great spiritual leader, the world’s first monotheist, or the Apostle thought it right to attribute such a search to them, perhaps to make the claim that Christ was acknowledged as divine, or should be, by their northern neighbors.   

Futurist  and SF Bruce Sterling writes his curtain call column for Wired.

Has the best cast in the Verse. A Firefly Convention was cancelled, and some actors from the cast showed up anyway to hang out with the disapponited fans.

My favorite commie has more here.

And (shameless plug) I wrote an article for a book on FIREFLY.

Two articles on the news item that Hugh Hefner has bought the funeral plot, and means to be buried, next to Marilyn Monroe. See here and here.

I am reminded of something I read: Joe DiMaggio, out of Marilyn’s various husbands and lovers, the man whose baby she miscarried (or perhaps aborted to extend her career) faithfully carried flowers to her grave, and her other paramours never took the time or made this gesture.

Tangentially, this article also reminded me of the puzzlement I have always felt toward the proposition that the Sexual Revolution was a friend to Feminism. Free Love is always presented in terms of Women’s Liberation, but I submit the two are antithetical.

Charles Stross runs into Ludwig van Mises in 2010. I have not read the book in question, but it sounds like a socialist rebuttal to THE GOLDEN AGE, which was my attempt not to violate any known principles of science nor of economics in constructing an imaginary commonwealth of the far future.

http://www.mises.org/story/2402