John C. Wright's Journal

So, yes, I decided to put in amnesia and self-discovery in my books because I like those themes. But I did not set about to decide what I would like and dislike.

My favorite books when I was young were WORLD OF NULL-A by A.E. van Vogt, NINE PRINCES IN AMBER by Roger Zealazny, DINOSAUR BEACH by Keith Laumer, DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH by HP Lovecraft. An astute reader will recognize what these books have in common: anagnorisis. Gilbert Gosseyn does not know why he has an extra brain; Carl Corey does not know he is Corwin of Amber; Igor Ravel does not know he is a time traveler; Randolph Carter does not know that the fabulous sunset city he seeks is his own native city of Boston, seen through the lens of his childhood memories.

Had I read him in my youth, I would also have enjoyed THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY by G.K. Chesterton. The true identity of the membership of the Supreme Council of Anarchists has that same delicious irony as one often sees in other British spy fiction: I am thinking of the television shows THE AVENGERS or THE PRISONER.

So, even if I had not deliberately put in any anagnorisis, they would have naturally cropped up anyway, since this is the kind of story I like.

But I wanted to have memory loss be the main problem for Phaethon, because the technology involved in editing and downloading human brain information automatically implies that a person in such a society cannot trust his own memories. I am actually a little surprised that other writers in so called post Singularity fiction do not make more of this: total human control of the environment, including all the information in the environment, would mean the trustworthiness of your senses, memory, personality, and identity would only be as trustworthy as the men (or machines) controlling your mental environment. Even in a libertarian utopia (such as I propose in my book) you would still have to decide if you trusted the judgment of the version of you that decided to redact your memory. From the other side of the Singularity, the posthumans will look back on us the way the elves might wistfully long for mortality: to them, we will seem to be living in the primitive Eden of “back in the days when a man could trust his senses.”

The memory loss in ORPHANS OF CHAOS was more due to storytelling technique than to a philosophical regard for anagnorisis: I could not have my teenagers start out the story by knowing who they were, and amnesia in a story is a elegant way to have the reader make discoveries about the character at the same time the character does. Otherwise, the reader has to play ‘catch-up’ to the character. If the character is from an alien dimension, it becomes far less awkward to try to describe things (especially in first person) if the character is born and raised on Earth and can relate things to the reader’s frame of reference and background.

The memory loss in LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS was a matter of mood: dreams are dreamlike because we forget them when we wake up. The idea of a ‘memory mansion’ is one I stole without a qualm of guilt from John Crowley, who got it from Giordano Bruno, who got it from the Greeks. I loved the idea that mnemonics, the Ancient Art of Memory, was the only ‘superpower’ my hero possessed: he recalled what other men forgot. Everness, of course, is my homage to Edgewood: a memory mansion built in the real world.

NULL-A CONTINUUM is a sequel to WORLD OF NULL-A. Gilbert Gosseyn still does not know who he really is.

The book I am writing now does not have a main character who is an amnesiac—so naturally, I am having trouble with it. Maybe I will have him hit over the head or something in chapter five.

(Anagnorisis (ἀναγνώρισις), recognition also known as discovery, it was the hero suddenly becoming aware of a real situation and his own true identity: e.g. Oepidus recognizing Jocasta as his mother. Aristotle discusses it at length in his Poetics. )

And yet such girls are doing nothing other than acting on the advice of the current generation (whom we should call the generation of vipers). The vipers say that sex is a casual thing, and that sex has no real consequences. If sex is a casual thing, there is nothing wrong with servicing a nice older man in order to get a free movie, a ride in his car, or a new dress. It becomes a business matter. You become a harlot, or, as they say in the FIREFLY universe, a companion. All you give up is love and self-worth.

But sex and romance, love and marriage are nothing like a casual vacation. I am not saying that it will always be  unrealistic to rely on birth control. I am saying it is unrealistic to assume, that merely because the cause-effect link between sex and reproduction is weaker in a society that has reliable birth control, that ergo there is no categorical link between sex and reproduction. The two are still related as means and ends, even if the cause and effect link will one day be utterly and reliably cut. Our biology and psychology are still established in such a way to recognize that link. The circumstances of reality, what I called the logic of the human heart, the laws of supply and demand, still obtain.

A girl for whom sex is cheap, a value of low priority, cheapens herself, places her self-value at a low value. Her feelings toward the opposite sex must be forced down to a low value: she feels contempt for men (because contempt is the emotion that inevitably accompanies an intellectual assessment of low value), and contempt for sex and romance (because sex is nothing more than mere entertainment to her). All the arguments in favor of cheap sex assume human life, human romance, motherhood, virginity, and girls themselves are of low value. It cannot logically be otherwise. That is the operation of the law of supply and demand. Oneman, or one society, cannot at the same time and in the same sense cherish romantic superlative emotion about something and also hold it to be of no particular interest or importance.

I am not trying to deduce an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. I am not trying to argue that a duty can be deduced from a fact. I am arguing that the ‘ought’ is innate in the situation. The duty exist as a matter of plain fact, and it is bad logic to pretend it does not.

The pleasure one gets by stimulating the sex organs does not exist in a vacuum; it exists in a context. The context is that sexual organs are sexual organs, reproductive organs. Using them for selfish pleasure has a psychological cost, demeaning their utility as reproductive organs.

Darwinian evolution might not care, as you say, if the race lives or dies, but I assume anyone reading my words now is alive, and, if only tacitly, he has made a moral valuation of the preference of life over death. Humans require civilizations to live in large numbers, and laws and customs to live life at all. If one were arguing with a non-living object, like a rock, perhaps one would have to prove the advantage of life, health, sanity, and happiness over the alternatives, but no one in my audience need ponder those arguments, as they are all living beings. If someone wants to argue the advantages of single-parent households, or of abandoning children to strangers, one no longer is a member of the culture that values life and happiness.

“Common experience, if nothing else, shows that unwed women are as jealous of their rivals as wives for their husband’s mistresses…” Lots of animals have “casual sex”–look at bonobos, for example–so it’s clearly not true that “Darwinian logic” commands that animals be jealous…

I am sorry I was not clear here. Here I am speaking of the common experience of real people, not the hypothetical experience of the moral decisions that would be made by dwarf chimpanzees if they were intelligent enough to identify their own offspring.

No one can seriously argue that human females ought not to be jealous when their boyfriends cheat merely because dwarf chimpanzees are not jealous. Girls who act this way–as if they have no right to be jealous–get treated with profound disrespect. The dwarf chimpanzee strategy of raising children communally is a somewhat, ah, Spartan approach to the matter. Like plans to breed humans like horses, communal child-rearing involves the annihilation of human rights and human dignity. Likewise and by the same logic, communal mating rights hold a girl to be available to all comers, or a guy within his rights to sow his wild oats wheresoever he may.

This is the life-style of those free of jealousy: every trespasser is your guest. So why should Arthur mind if Lancelot is getting some hot Gwen on the side? Isn’t jealousy (as Bob Heinlein famously said) merely a sign of sickness and lowmindedness? One might as well ask why treason is a bad thing.

Black Widow spiders also kill their mates. As far as Darwinian logic is concerned, this would not be the best strategy for human beings, because human males, although their intelligence clearly drops during their mating season, are alert enough to take prudent steps to guard their own self interest. Marriage is a prudent step intended (and often successful) in guarding the self-interest and the general interest of individual men and of the human race.

The culture of Sterility, according to Darwin, will be outnumbered, everything else being equal, by the culture of Fertility.  Good or bad, that is simply the fact. 

And the laws of economics and the logic of the human heart still apply. You cannot adore something casually; you cannot dismiss the core value of your life without dismissing the related values.

All the arguments in favor of cheap sex are arguments in favor ofcheapening women. What amazes me is that the women let this happen to them. They were promised cheap sex would give them equality with men; all it has done is reduce them to exploited Barbie dolls in the estimation of the society. I can see why the men would be in favor of this particular brand of lawlessness, for the same reason I can see why Attila the Hun would be in favor of Trial by Combat. I am just not sure why Juliet or Penelope or even Princess Buttercup would be in favor of it.

This legal principle is to prevent (for example) men who shoot into a crowded house, hoping to hit the owner, from being found not-guilty if they happen to hit his wife, or her cat. If you shoot into a house, you mean to harm those inside. If the bullet flies through the house and out the other side and hits Fluffy the cat, you still have to pay for the cat. It matters not whether you meant to hit the cat or no. The action was negligence on your part.

A better example might be car insurance. Driving a car is an innately “dangerous” operation: it involves a foreseeable risk of accident. Hence, taking out an insurance policy before you drive is so reasonable and so obviously a reasonable thing to do, that the law requires it. In this way, the driver is in a position to pay for any harm he might be responsible for, EVEN IF he did not intend to get in an accident, nor, being a safe driver, EVEN IF he did not think he would ever be in an accident. Because accidents are a natural consequence of driving, our laws and customs require drivers to prepare for the eventuality and get car insurance. Hence any questions of partial and specific cases are not to the point.

Likewise here. Having sex is an innately “sexual” operation: it involves a foreseeable risk of pregnancy. Hence, taking out the insurance policy of making it clear your mate is ready willing and able to be a father is so reasonable and so obviously a reasonable thing to do, that the law requires it. No sex unless you are married, i.e., vowed to love, honor and support. In this way, the sex-partner is in a position to take care of any outcomes he might be responsible for, EVEN IF he did not intend to father a child, nor, being a safe sex-partner, EVEN IF he was using birth control and only seducing women after menopause, he did not think pregnancy would ever be an issue. But because sexual reproduction is a natural and foreseeable consequence of engaging in the act of sexual reproduction (no duh!), our laws and customs require our young women not to yield to those suitors who are not prepared for the eventualities of sexual reproduction. Hence any questions of partial and specific cases are not to the point.  

In addition to the risk of pregnancy, sex has psychological dangers. Sex also involves a risk of falling in love with one’s sex partner, or, equally, the risk that one might have to become the kind of person who cannot fall in love in order to avoid this risk. Heartbreak or callousness are the two choices: you cannot both be a romantic at heart and be a harlot or the patron of harlots. 

In addition to the risk of pregnancy and the psychological dangers, it also involves the social dangers: sexual anarchy increases the risk of bastardy, of wife-beating, of child-murder, of rivals fighting over mating rights. 

It is perfectly true that not every sex act results in a pregnancy. It is perfectly true that the psychological dangers and the social dangers do not crop up each and every time. It is also true that you do not get into a wreck each and every time you get behind the wheel; it is also true that you do not spook a horse to its destruction each and every time you fire a fire-arm negligently. But the law should hold you liable for all these outcomes, because to do anything else is to reward negligent behavior.

That is the point I am driving at. One should be held liable for the class of harms that issue from one’s actions even if the specific case was a surprise. You might be surprised that your birth control failed this time. You might be REALLY surprised that Sarah got pregnant after menopause. But no one can say he is surprised that sex makes babies; no one can say honestly that he is surprised that there is more to sex than mere pleasure.

The ones who say sex is merely pleasure, and who react with umbrage AS IF restrictions on free love were no more than zany and arbitrary restrictions on pleasure (Ayn Rand, Bob Heinlein), are not being honest: their world-view is leaving out the one most obvious central fact of the world. A is A. Sex is sex.

It was not to prove the truth of the claim that I called my witnesses to the stand, but merely to prove the fact that my conclusion was not the neglected minority opinion my friend thought it was. Every writer whom any civilized peoples (and by civilized here, I mean city-dwelling and literate) regarded as a moral authority or fountainhead of wisdom was on my side. Those peoples who practiced polygamy and concubinage called it immoral to steal another man’s wife. Whether they were right or wrong to call it immoral, I do not here dispute: the claim under consideration was whether the vast majority of people called it immoral or not. We are not debating morality, but history.

I reprint it here, because I see the error repeated. The so-called cosmopolitans among us are in truth parochial and innocent. They honestly don’t know what other people think or say, outside their own little clique of modern fashion.

Here is what I wrote.

The first person I will call onto the witness stand is your Lord Jesus Christ, who says in no ambiguous terms that anyone who divorces a woman and remarries is an adulterer. (Mark 10: 11, Matthew 19: 9, Luke 16; 18; 1 Corinthians 7: 10) Any man who looks at a woman not his wife with lust in his heart is an adulterer (Matthew 5: 28). He seemed to take the sacrament of marriage quite seriously: do you think He would have preached fornication without marriage was acceptable? If so, give me the quote where He says so.

 For more on fornication, see also Ephesians 5: 3, 1 Thessalonians 4: 3, Colossians 3: 5.

 Next, I will call his Dad, God Almighty, who decreed that thou shalt not commit adultery. (Deut. 5.1-21 1, Ex. 20.14) Correct me if I am wrong, but the commandment here forbids sex outside of marriage, not merely stealing another man’s wife.

 Next, I call the Schoolman: “The sin of lust consists in seeking venereal pleasure not in accordance with right reason. This may happen in two ways. First, in respect of the matter wherein this pleasure is sought; secondly, when, whereas there is due matter, other due circumstances are not observed…

 “First, because it is inconsistent with the end of the venereal act. On this way, as hindering the begetting of children, there is the “vice against nature,” which attaches to every venereal act from which generation cannot follow; and, as hindering the due upbringing and advancement of the child when born, there is “simple fornication,” which is the union of an unmarried man with an unmarried woman.

 “Secondly, the matter wherein the venereal act is consummated may be discordant with right reason in relation to other persons; and this in two ways. First, with regard to the woman, with whom a man has connection, by reason of due honor not being paid to her; and thus there is “incest,” which consists in the misuse of a woman who is related by consanguinity or affinity. Secondly, with regard to the person under whose authority the woman is placed: and if she be under the authority of a husband, it is “adultery,” if under the authority of her father, it is “seduction,” in the absence of violence, and “rape” if violence be employed.” (Summa Theologica II-II, Question 154)

 I will not bother to quote St. Augustine, Calvin, or Luther, or the Book of Mormon or Science and Health. No denomination of your religion, over the last two thousand years, has promoted sex outside of marriage as an innocent form of love: all have condemned it. Can you quote me any contrary authority?

 Marriage in a sacrament in your religion, friend, not mine: nor do I believe I will be burned on Judgment Day in the Hell-fire for disobeying Holy Writ.

 If you prefer pagans to Christians, the next person I will call to the stand is Epictetus who says that one of the duties of Stoic is to marry and beget children. (Greek List of Duties, III vii.)

 See also de Officiis by Cicero.

 Next I call Norse Sybil, who says, “I saw in Nastrondr (i.e. Hell) beguilers of other men’s wives.” (Volospa, 38, 39)

 My next witness is Confucius: “There are three things against which a gentleman is on his guard. In his youth, before his blood and vital humors have settled down, he is on his guard against lust…” (Analects 16.7) I hope I am not reading too much into this, but I cannot see logically how fornication and adultery can take place without lust, which is here being condemned, and not lauded as a source of innocent pleasure.

 My next witness is the Prophet (peace be upon him): ” Neither fornicate, for whosoever does that shall meet the price of sin–doubled shall be the chastisement for him on the Resurrection Day.” (Holy Koran 25.68-69)  see also sura 23.5-11.

 Next I call to the stand, the Enlightened One, the Buddha, who is also called Siddhartha:

 The fourth branch of the Noble Eightfold Path, which the Buddha preached the deer park at Benares, is “Right Action” which includes avoidance of improper acts such as killing and fornication. (Astangika-Marga)

 “The husband receives his wife from the gods; he does not wed her according to his own will; doing what is agreeable to the gods, he must always support her while she is faithful. “Let mutual fidelity continue until death;” this may be considered as a summary of the highest law for husband and wife.” (Laws of Manu 9.95, 101)

 And, again: “Four misfortunes befall a careless man who commits adultery: acquisition of demerit, disturbed sleep, third, blame; and fourth, a state of woe. There is acquisition of demerit as well as evil destiny. Brief is the joy of the frightened man and woman. The king imposes a heavy punishment. Hence no man should frequent another man’s wife.” (Dhammapada 309-10)

 Next I call Vishnu, the Preserver, most benevolent of the Three Gods: “A man should not think incontinently of another’s wife, much less address her to that end; for such a man will be reborn in a future life as a creeping insect. He who commits adultery is punished both here and hereafter; for his days in this world are cut short, and when dead he falls into hell.” (Vishnu Purana 3.11)

 This is from Krishna, avatar of Vishnu: “When a family declines, ancient traditions are destroyed. With them are lost the spiritual foundations for life, and the family loses its sense of unity. Where there is no sense of unity, the women of the family become corrupt; and with the corruption of its women, society is plunged into chaos. Social chaos is hell for the family and for those who have destroyed the family as well.” (Bhagavad Gita 1.40-42)

 Next I call Lao Tzu: “Do not approach thy neighbor’s wife or maids.” (Tract of the Quiet Way)

And, from the Sikh: ” The philanderer lusting after numerous women does not give up seeking in others’ homes. What he does daily only brings regrets– In sorrow and greed he is shriveled up.” (Adi Granth, Dhanasari, M.5, p. 672)

From the Tirthankara (The Englightened One or Pontiff of Jainism): “Continence is to regard the wife of another as one’s own sister or daughter, and to realize that the bodies of women are full of impurity and that charm can only delude the mind.” (Swami Kartikeya, Anupreksha 337-39)

 My brother is a member of the Unification Church. Let us not forget the Moonies: “Violating and misusing love is the gravest of all crimes. Abusing love is a greater crime than cutting the universal root of life [murder]. (Sun Myung Moon, 3-20-77)

 Last I call the Master of Those Who Know, the Philosopher, Aristotle: “Such emotions as spite, shamelessness, and envy have no mean and are simply base, just as some actions are bad such as adultery, theft, and murder. Such bad actions do not have a right time or manner.”

 If you prefer law to theology or philosophy, fornication is defined as: “the unlawful carnal knowledge of an unmarried person with another, whether the latter be married or unmarried. When the party is married, the offence, as to him or her, is known by the name of adultery. However, fornication is included in every case of adultery, as a larceny is included in robbery.” (2 Hale’s P. C. 302.) The State of Maryland, where you live, has a law on the books against fornication. Apparently your “majority” is not so overwhelming that they have been able to remove the statute. (The similar statute in the Commonwealth of Virginia was removed, not by a majority vote, but by a narrow margin in the state High  Court: by fiat, in other words, representing no majority, but their own legal opinion.)

 Let us review the score so far. In my corner, I have God, the Son of God, the avatar of God, the Prophet of God, the Enlightened One, the Sage of China, the Other Sage of China, the Philosopher, the Stoics, the Saints, the Pagans, the Sybil and the Law.

 Who have you got in your corner? Hugh Hefner? President Clinton?

(Sarcasm on).

 Alas and Alack! I am woebegone to discover that, as someone who knows the logical arguments supporting monotheism and monogamy, I am self-alienated from science fiction! Apparently I cannot read about John Carter, Warlord of Mars, rescuing Dejah Thoris, the most ravishing beauty of two planets, without first signing onto the Robert Heinlein credo that sodomy is sacred.

 I cannot conceive the alternatives to the romantic and prudent institution of monogamy! Cannot! Despite having been deluged since youth with advertisements, praise, and propaganda trumpeting free love, homosexuality, metrosexuality ambisexuality, polysexualy, robosexuality and omisexuality, slave-marriages of the planet Gor, line-marriages of Luna, four-way marriages of the planet O, and even the rishathra of the Ringworld, and despite having once been a card-carrying member and standard-bearer of this particular school of libertarian thought, I have never once been exposed to these ideas! Yikes!!

I have no understanding of any theological system from the Orient! None! It must be my bad karma. Well, the way that can be spoken is not the spoken way, I suppose. I am overcome: I must speak to my charioteer and ask his advice about this battle. Perhaps if I Recited the words of the Prophet (peace be upon him!) I would understand.

Oh—huhn—that is funny. It looks like I HAVE looked into the theological systems of non-European religions. And you know what? They all agree on one thing: sexual promiscuity is unclean and impure. It is the illusion of Maya. It violates the Eightfold Path. It is opposed to the Duties of the Gentleman. Allah punishes unchastity just like Dharma does. Funny. I thought in the paragraph just above this, we had established that sexual promiscuity was a sign of broadmindedness. But when you read outside your own little corner of your culture, you find a universal agreement between societies, peoples, and eons on this one point.   

 Do I really need to be pro-non-mainstream-sexual-practices to enjoy science fiction? Who would have thought that playing plug-the-bunghole with one’s love sausage was so central to the mental capacity needed to enjoy a tale of the intrigues of House Harkonnen with House Atreides, or of the struggle of Jommy Cross against the oppressive world police-state, the suffering of Winston Smith, the passion of John Savage, the psychohistorical workings of the Seldon Plan, the war with Klendathu, the war between Arisia and Eddore, or the War of the Ring? 

 This is an alarming development. No SF for me! May I still read comic books and sword-and-sorcery novels, please?

 (End sarcasm.)

 Not to lose the point, the esteemed Mr. Modesitt is entirely correct about the theme of his essay—it is not a conspiracy, it is a different world view, that makes the literary mandarins uninterested in and unamused by SF. Let us not lose sight of the fact that my tangent disagrees only with Mr. Modesitt’s credo of faith, not with his logic.

 I only climb onto my soapbox here, and don my coat of camel hair and leathern belt, because of the casual way he introduces his casuistry. As an example of a lack of imagination, he produces, not someone who cannot envision pantropy or zero-gee, but someone who does not approve of polygamy or practice Zoroastrianism.

 Keep in mind, another one of these elitist jackanapes from the counterculture was just here on this journal telling me the conservatives lived in an echo-chamber of their own opinions, innocently unaware that other people might have valid reasons and sound arguments for conclusions different from our own. Got that? We, who live with a living tradition that embraces the thought of many periods of time, we are the parochial ones. They, who cannot admit a respectful disagreement of opinion exists—for all disagreement with them is based on and only on our lack of imagination or our mental capacity—they are the cosmopolitan ones.

 I am not a mind-reader, so I cannot tell what Mr. Modesitt intended, but I am not blind either. The strained casualness of the attempt betrays its point: it was not an example selected randomly. One does not pick out, for a casual reference, one of the more controversial topics of the day, without being aware of the controversy. Usually this is done as a rhetorical slight of hand, in order to make the controversy look non-controversial. The pretense that the argument is over, settled and decided, is a cheap trick to shame the opposition into silence. (All enlightened people are against monotheism and monogamy: all the cool kids are against it. Look at how casually we just assume all SF people are on the same bandwagon with us! Why revisit that dead issue! Silence, thou fossil! Do you also believe in the phlogiston theory?)

 It is possible that Mr. Modesitt is merely pulling a Pauline Kael. He honestly but ignorantly believes honest differences of opinion on these topic do not exist in his colleagues. He thinks each, every, and all Science Fiction writers and readers are left-of-center, including Jerry Pournelle, Jules Verne, and J.R.R. Tolkien.

 Another alternative is that he is engaging in that particular type of creative voodoo, where merely by saying something you know in your heart to be false, by pretending something you don’t like doesn’t exist, your Words of Power can alter the surrounding reality, and make the unpleasing thing go away.

 Another alternative is that he is merely being polite by his lights. As it is polite to call a bride beautiful or to say to a mother that her baby is the cutest in the world, words we say with no regard for their truth, the pose of mental and moral superiority adopted by the counterculture may be one such thing, known to be false, but a falsehood to which the faithful pay lip-service. It is a politeness in the counterculture to look down one’s elevated nose at the culture.  

 None of these alternatives speak well of Mr. Modesitt’s ability to adjust his perceptions to reality. The person he is trying to blot out of his perception is me: a man whose intellect, study and scholarship is at least equal to his own, but who respectfully and sincerely—not through mere ignorance or inattention, and certainly not through lack of imagination—comes to different conclusions on matter of romance, religion, and political economics.

 Let me make clear, it is the philosophy, not the person, I condemn. The philosophy is a smug and condescending one. The practitioners thereof are, for the most part, right guys. That is why you have the odd spectacle of perfectly humble and well-meaning men uttering utterly outrageous smugness and nasty condescension. It is like listening to an antebellum Southern Belle, a sweet lady who would not hurt a fly, explaining with wide-eyed innocence why the Negro was subhuman. Nice guys can believe nasty things.

 Real example: An editor who admires my science fiction novel for being so imaginative was telling me that conservatives were conservative because and only because they were so unimaginative. This was maybe one sentence after he was done complimenting how much more imaginative I was than he would ever be. So I asked him which it was—was I imaginative or unimaginative?

My kind editor suffered a momentary cognitive dissonance, and so he laughed.

 In my latest and greatest book, I have a character with a potty mouth, who speaks the way he speaks because it was authentic to the character and because I write with no concern for public opinion. I simply did not think my Mother or anyone I knew would read my books: she is not a science fiction fan. I have a teenage-or-twentysomething character who is suffering from hormonal overdose because that is the way I think teenager-or-twentysomethings act. I have a number of cheesecake scenes because I like cheesecake—Oh la la and viva la difference. I have a character who is a monstrous pervert, in addition to being a monstrous monster.

 Well, it harmed the book. I was shocked when I read an online review written by some fifteen year old schoolgirl: I am hoping she is innocent enough not to have noticed what kind of thing she was exposed to. I don’t want kids to read this stuff.

 The other thing that happened, which I did not expect, is that some readers simply misread the book—which is to say that your humble author was not clear enough. The main plot point that drives the action is that the characters are adults who are being kept past their age of majority in an orphanage by bad guys who have destroyed all record of the age of their charges. If you look at the clues in the book, you can figure out that the youngest must be at least eighteen, the oldest over twenty-three. But the bad guys tell the twenty-one year old, for example, that she is sixteen, and so some readers are creeped out when grown men roll a lusty eye at her, because she is ‘underage.’ Well, sorry, that was not the author’s meaning. (Indeed, if the orphans had still been underage, there would have been no plot, because they would have been below the age of majority and therefore would have had no right to leave the orphanage, and no conspiracy needed to imprison them.) I just did not expect readers to believe the lies of the Bad Guys: when my main character is told she is sixteen, the reader is supposed to wonder why the Bad Guy thinks he can get away with such an outrageous lie. This is the character who can solve fourth-dimensional geometry equations in her head, not something most sixteen year olds have studied. I should have had him tell her she was twelve, to make it clear.

 But let us not get off topic.

 “You have to be willing to lay yourself bare, lay your characters bare, and tell the truth”—fine. Good advice. Follow it. But it is merely a lie that being honest means being crude, graphically sexual, impolite, offensive, creepy or nauseating. When someone wants to write filth, the idea that they are “just being honest” is the excuse he uses.

 Stick with Darn It. Or, if you are writing science fiction, you can say Gorram, or Frell, Frack, Tanj, Taxes, or even Noy Jitat! Those are shiny words. Lily, cobber?

 Have you ever watched in movie aboard an airplane, where they dub over cleaner swearwords for PG and PG-13 films, and actually paused and thought: “Gee, this film would be better, more of an artistic masterpiece, if only they had fucktified it up with more crapocetic Anglo-Saxon words! Why isn’t the hero swearing up a blue streak?” –? Perhaps you have. I have not. When the four-letter words are missing, I do not miss them.

 The standards of clean language rise and fall, and at the current day we are in the middle of a trough. Anything written to be ‘normal’ by our current (diseased) standards will be unacceptable in one generation, or whenever the cultural pendulum swings back. Anything written according to an older and cleaner standard, will be able to be read with pleasure by any generation.

 There is a process going on in this country analogous to the “dumbing down” we see in public schools. Let us call it “filthing down.” Sometimes with malice aforethought, and sometimes without malice aforethought, authors and playwrights set about to coarsen the public.

 Here is how it works. Some of it is unintentional. You say “Badass” a few dozen times, and by the 144 th repeat of the word, you no longer realize you are saying a word women and children should not hear.

 Some of it is intentional. Women, driven insane with the modern fashion to be as unfeminine as possible as quickly as possible, now go out of their way to talk like sailors and drill-sergeants. It’s not pretty. Some of it is intentional and zealous. Sexual perversion becomes not merely a mental or moral disorder, but a Noble Cause to be trumpeted and spread, and every effort is made to make it seem normal.

 Some of it is actually called for. When Rhett leaves Scarlet at the end of GONE WITH THE WIND, I think he really should swear there, even though the audience of the day was shocked. The scene was meant to be shocking. “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a darn.” Just does not make the cut. The problem is, that seven decades later, the damn swearword appears in every damned place whenever some damned fool wants to swear, dammit, and I have no word to use when I want to refer to those souls who are cast into the Inferno because the Wrath of God has determined their fate, and it is not salvation nor purgatory.

 Well, if you live in such an environment, it all starts to seem normal to you, and the people with standards seem as odd as Martians, and their objections seem either exaggerated, arbitrary, or, worse, reactionary—as if they are not loyal to the Noble Cause. 

 The filthing down operates on a ratchet. To go from refined to coarse is easy; all it takes is a relaxation of standards. To go from coarse to refined is work. And it is work that will be opposed.

 Where the Standard of having no standards is flown, the troops will rally. The egotism and the loyalty of the pro-Filthers is engaged. Normal people, right guys, are actually offended even by an abstract discussion of whether we should have standards or not. People who would never say the word ‘niggardly’, people who call a Negro from France ‘A French African-American’ (I wonder what they call a Sioux living in French Africa?), will lecture you in vexed outrage merely for suggesting that words relating to the scatological, theological, or reproductive indelicacies ought not be placed into the public discourse. They think you are being too sensitive. They think that being polite is an aggressive insult.

 Those who are loyal to neither camp, but merely wish the status quo to rest undisturbed, will side with the pro-Filth faction, because, once it seems normal, the objections of the anti-Filth faction seem arbitrary.

 So far, dear readers, not one person has complimented me for my Sawyerly indifference to public standards and my unflinching artistic honesty in portraying the character’s potty mouth as exactly as the muse presented it to me. I have, on the other hand, run across more than one reviewer whose opinions I deeply respect who speak with reluctant distaste about the creepiness of some of my scenes. It hinders their enjoyment of the book. Such scenes are a distraction from what I meant the point of the book to be: I shot myself in the foot with my so-called bold artistic honesty.

 Meanwhile, I could not finish reading either OLYMPOS by Simmons nor THE SYSTEM OF THE WORLD by Stephenson nor PERDIDO STREET STATION by My Evil (or whatever his name is—I assume he is Scott Evil’s brother) merely because the bad language was too distasteful to me.

 My reading time is limited; I do not enjoy reading swearwords, and I do not owe it to the author to put up with their particular verbal peculiarities: I buy books to entertain me, not them. The burden is on them to please my book-buying tastes; the burden is not on the public to have its tastes alter to suit the Artiste. The author is the employee of the book-buying public, and authors who think they have a higher and finer mission in life, authors like David Lindsay, tend to die in poverty and obscurity like David Lindsay.  Never heard of him? He was an author who was greater in creative genius than any other science fiction author, but he thought he had a mission.

 Clarke, Asimov and A.E. van Vogt were somehow able to write award-winning books without dipping deeply into the septic tank area of their vocabulary. Even Heinlein could do it, when he was writing juveniles.

 Pull your punches, Mr. Sawyer, gosh darn it! I pick up your books for the ideas and for the science fiction sense-of-wonder, not to have my ear dragged into the gutter where the cool people live.

Meanwhile, Frodo, while still somewhere in Hollin, steps behind Bill the Pony, gets kicked in the head, and dies! Sauron the Great trips and falls down the stairs of Barad Dur! Gandalf survives the fight with the Balrog, but is killed by peanut allergy when eating a PBJ given him by Galadriel! James Bond gets venereal disease and dies! James Kirk is disintegrated  in a Transporter accident while beaming down to the corner store for milk!

No, sir, the idea of God dying because He slips on a banana peel is only interesting to those people already filled with such hate and contempt for the whole idea of God that even making Him an impressive bad guy is beyond the reach of their stunted imaginations. Such a lame and pointless death would perhaps, if done right, make a good joke. It would make a good ironic comedy. You can do it in something like HITCH-HIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY. You can’t do it in an adventure fantasy we’re supposed to take seriously.

Mr. Pullman’s hatred blinded him to the needs of drama. Only readers already in the same frame of mind will find the scene rewarding or interesting to read. A good writer can reach readers not of his party, faction, or religion, because a good writer will reach toward certain eternal ideas, or at least long-lasting conventions, that any readership can appreciate.

If your characters are trying to kill God, then you are writing a Jack the Giant Killer story, except in this case, the Giant is an all-powerful super-being. If Jack climbs up the beanstalk and the Giant dies in the bathtub slipping on the soap, there is no drama, no story, no nothing.

If on the other hand, the Great God is simply a hoax, like the God in GATHER DARKNESS by Fritz Leiber, the drama involved is in (1) having the heroes discover the fraud or (2) having the heroes reveal the fraud to a disbelieving and shocked public.

We have seen STAR TREK do this plot a million times and do it right! The thing the cute sixties babe in a space bikini was worshipping as a god turns out to be a computer, and after Kirk destroys it by means of the Cretan Paradox (or whatever), she is always staring up at the stars misty-eyed and promising that she will join the march of progress and one day inherit the stars.  In Pullman there was no set-up and no pay off. 

Here is what I mean by pay-off. In TARTUFFE, when the hypocrite is revealed, the father suddenly understands how deeply he has been deceived. He repents his folly and learns betters. Who at all in His Dark Materials repents and learns better?

 Simple question for anyone: name the main character in “His Dark Materials” who had a vested interest or something at stake in God’s identity? If neither Asriel nor his daughter nor her boyfriend nor the race of four-wheeled creatures is a devout-but-deceived worshiper of the Evil God, it makes no difference to the plot or any character in it that the Evil God turns out to be a drooling old man in a coffin. Second question: name someone who suffered at the hands of Evil God who rejoiced when He died? If Sauron the Great has never done anything ON STAGE to anyone, no one cares if he does by falling out of his wheelchair. It does not change anything. No one has any vested interest in the Evil God’s life or death.

 A brain-dead villain drooling a wheelchair is pathetic. Having a ‘hero’ come into his hospital room and shut off his life support is hardly the battle between the Archangel Michael and the Prince of Hell we were promised.

 Mr. Pullman says he set about to write the anti-Narnia, to do right and wholesomely (by the Pullmanic idea of wholesomeness, i.e. what we would call crude and sexual) what Mr. Lewis did wrong and unwholesomeness (by the Pullmanic idea of unwholesomeness, i.e. sexually repressed, politically incorrect, etc.) But he does not follow the dramatic path of Narnia. Consider: in order to do an anti-Narnia, Lyra, as the anti-Lucy, would have to have discovered early on that Mrs. Coulter (the anti-White Witch) was right and The Authority (anti-Aslan) was the cruel usurper; her beloved but deceived comrade-in-arms  Will Parry (anti-Edmund) should have betrayed her to the Authority, requiring her to both save and forgive him, a dire process involving the Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time … or the Deeper Magic from Before the Dawn of Time. There should have been loss and forgiveness, sorrow and hope, mighty battles on earth in among the stars, and, in the end, something should have been different. Instead, Lyra goes off to school, trying to learn how to do something she had been doing for three books, and promising to build the New Voter-Friendly Version of Heaven starting at her school. The world is not improved or changed by the change in the rulership of all reality.

The drama should have turned on the point of God’s identity. When God turns out to be an evil demiurge who deceives rather than creates worlds, Will Parry should be at least as shocked as the guys in STAR TREK who find out Landru is only a computer. The revelation should have meant something to someone.