John C. Wright's Journal

My novellet ‘One Bright Star to Guide Them’ will grace the prestigious pages of Fantasy and Science Fiction in their April/May 2009 issue! Oh frabjous day! Calloo, callay!

Gordon van Gelder bough the story a while back, and I have been eager to see it see in print.

Honestly, it is my favorite thing of anything I’ve written. (Well, second favorite). It takes the main character from one of those ‘English schoolchildren in trouble’ type adventures a la The Magician’s Nephew, Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Five Children and It, that sort of thing, but when he is adult, fatigued with life and over forty, and wishing his world were larger.

Then the mysterious black cat named Tybolt reappears, and tells him the Winter King has stirred again, and sent his dark champion to Earth, and Thomas must fight the Knight of Ghosts and Shadows. All England is in peril! Where is the Silver Key, the Sword Reforged, and the Book of Emrys? Where is the One Bright Star which will lead the Singing Ship across the Sea of Outer Dreaming? Of course, since little Tommy is a grown-up now, and there is not much magic left in his life….

Go out today and buy nine dozen copies plus nine! Gordon van Gelder will come by personally and kiss your Shetland pony if you do!  (Offer not valid in Canada).

The April-May issue of F&SF will make a great gift for Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day, Arbor Day, the Feast of St. Dismas, St. Crispan’s Day, the Festival of the Conversion of St. Paul, the Anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto, Earth Day, or (for you fans of the presocratic philosopher Philolaus, or John Norman’s Gor books, or the High Evolutionary) Counter-Earth Day.

Remember that the Equinox of Mercury happens twice every 88 days, so in order to honor your extraterrestrial friends and their holidays, remember to buy now and buy often!

Still too large! Here is the rest: Read the remainder of this entry »

The list was too long to include in one post, so here it continues

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Oscillon asked me to post a science fiction journal entry. He said he would buy my novel Null-A Continuum if I did so. I did, and he lived up to his word like a gentleman. Now, I will publish another science fiction related entry, merely in the hope that he will buy a copy of WORLD OF NULL-A or SLAN or some other Van Vogt book.

The London paper Guardian has been running a series called 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read and has recently published their 124 science fiction and fantasy picks. I have seen this list on one or two other blogs I frequent, and so thought I would add my own comments here.

Anything in bold I read: when I put it aside unfinished is so noted. I marked with a star those novels I agreed with Guardian must go on your must-read pile. One line book-reviews or snark follow any books on the list where I was prompted by my daemon to make a comment.

(My daemon changed shape when I was younger, but upon majority, assumed the form of a Shuggoth—a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train, a shapeless congerie of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light. The Magesterium employs me to run over gyptian villages or sink Turkish armadas, and I am safe from the Gobblers since my ego is so large that it cannot fit into the intercission chamber.)

I am a bit embarrassed to see how many books are on the unfinished list. When I was younger I had a strict reading discipline: only one book at a time, must read to the end, and no more than three books a day.

Here is the list. Read the remainder of this entry »

oscillon says he will buy a copy of Null-A Continuum if I write a post about Science Fiction instead of about politics. Fair enough!

Over at SFSignal, they asking SF writers what is the best writing advice they ever received.

You will be fascinated by Robert Silverberg’s answer to the question. Lester del Rey told him not to sell himself short.

Here is Silverberg:

From Mike Resnick:

Gene Wolfe:

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Americans, your nation is being sold before your eyes. Your children and grandchildren will be in debt their whole lives to pay off the expenses of the final month of the Bush Administration, and the first week of the Obama Administration.

The Orwellian-named ‘fiscal stimulus package’ takes money from investment markets, typically the most powerful engine of new job creation, or borrows from China. According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, some of the items in this package, where the government, not the consumers, will spend your hard-earned money:

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Randall Randall (randallsquared ) asks this: "I assume, however, that you’ve read such books as Friedman’s _The Machinery of Freedom_ and Rothbard’s _The Ethics of Liberty_, both of which were instrumental in my road to anarchist. If you’ve read those, then I’m not sure that there’s anything I know to say which will convince you."

Alas, you give me too much credit. I have read some Murry Rothbard, but not that one. I have never read Freidman.

I was talked out of Anarchy by a book that attempted to talk me into it, which I read my Freshman year in law school. I cannot recall the title or author (It may have been IN DEFENSE OF ANARCHY by Robert Paul Wolff, but I am not sure.)

It was a slim volume. The author said he meant to examine whether there was any a-priori moral justification for obedience to a sovereign authority.

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My latest and greatest novel, a sequel to A.E. van Vogt’s WORLD OF NULL-A, comes out soon in paperback. Sitting on my desk right now is the galley proofs.

I am going to reread it looking for spelling mistakes. If any of you who have read it have noticed any errors to correct, please tell me.

kaltrosomos has some questions on redirect to my previous testimony. Again I take the witness stand to plead my case.

Again, let me try to answer seriatim:

Q: (Quoting me) "History would prove them wanting." What leads you to this conclusion that history would prove them wanting?

A: The full quote is “The naturalist philosophies of life seek joy either through the satisfaction of passionate pleasures (as a Hedonist) or of moderate pleasures as governed by reason (as an Epicurean), or through the use of reason to the exclusion of personal pleasure (as a Stoic). These repretsent the options of no self-control, modest self-control and total self-control. There is no naturalistic moral philosophy left once these three positions have been found wanting. History would prove them wanting. They have been revived in the modern day…”

Sorry if this is unclear. I mean only that Hedonism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism have always been in the minority position. While the Stoic or Epicurean might wish that the common man, the rulers and soldiers, the philosophers and academics, poets and prophets, opinion-makers and intellectuals of every age of history would embrace the Stoic or Epicurean message, in fact most people find the message unsatisfactory. None of these have ever been the office doctrine or the consensus opinion of any society history reports. Even modern nation states embracing an official position of atheism (Red China or Soviet Russia) also embrace transcendentalism, a belief in a missionary mission to save the world from Capitalism, or to serve the transcendent Material Dialectic of history, to serve the Will of the People, and so on.

Objectivism is a modern day revival of Aristotelian Eudaimonaism, which is a form of Epicureanism. It differs from Aristotle in metaphysics and economics — this latter is not surprising, as economics is a science unknown to the ancient Greeks.

Q: (Quoting me) "The human condition is intolerable." I find much to live for on purely natural grounds. You might say that you personally find life intolerable on purely natural grounds, but speaking for all men is unwarranted.

A: You misread me. I am not saying that my person opinion as an art critic is that I personally find the human condition intolerable. I am not saying that all men in their personal opinion personally find the human condition intolerable.

I am saying it is an objective fact that the human condition is intolerable.

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I was most pleased to learn today at Mass that we celebrated the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul.

For those of you who forget the story, "And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, and desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem. And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: and he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. And the trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do. And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man. And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink.

"And there was a certain disciple at Damascus, named Ananias; and to him said the Lord in a vision, Ananias. And he said, Behold, I am here, Lord. And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the street which is called Straight, and enquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul, of Tarsus: for, behold, he prayeth, And hath seen in a vision a man named Ananias coming in, and putting his hand on him, that he might receive his sight. Then Ananias answered, Lord, I have heard by many of this man, how much evil he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem: And here he hath authority from the chief priests to bind all that call on thy name. But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel: For I will shew him how great things he must suffer for my name’s sake. And Ananias went his way, and entered into the house; and putting his hands on him said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost. And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized."

You would have to understand with what hatred and contempt I once held Christians and all forms of supernaturalism and spiritualism, what a loathsome and degrading superstition I held them all to be, to understand why the conversion of Saul, zealous enemy of the Church, has such penetrating personal meaning for me. I was once a petty little Saul, trying my best to shoot the arrows of scorn and doubt into the breast of every St. Stephen I chanced across. I noticed then, and recollect now with shame, how uniformly and unfailingly polite, courteous, and even-tempered was every Christian I interrogated and debated, no matter how base my own manners were, or haughty my demeanor. I noticed it, but I did not deduce anything from it.  In other words, they acted in the same spirit as Ananias.

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I read this on kgbman,and I reprint here in full. One of my friends, who calls himself a Catholic, voted for Obama. I wonder if he knew about Obama’s opposition to the child born alive act.

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In an earlier conversation, when someone said Nihilism leads to Hedonism, I made this comment:

What I do not understand is why philosophical growth does not work the other way:

Nihilism leads to Hedonism, and then, once a man is a hedonist, he realizes that short term pleasure leads to long term pain, so he becomes an Epicurean, and attempts to moderate his passions and govern them by reason.

Once he attempts to govern his passions by his reason, he realizes that he has control only over his judgment about and reaction to outside things, and that outside things are forever beyond the control of his will. True happiness, therefore, consists of nothing but iron self-control, and the limitation of the objects of desire toward one’s own mind: and this is the doctrine of the Stoics.

Once he becomes a Stoic, he realizes that no man can live up to this exacting doctrine, and would lose his humanity if he tried, whereupon he deduces that the human heart cannot be happy absent a transcendent cause to believe in.

After piddling with various political causes as a source of transcendent meaning, he realizes that these political causes are vanity […] If he looks at the roots of modern political movements, he finds, lo and behold, his old enemy, the Church spreading all the seeds from which modern ideologies grow: Marx was, after all, indistinguishable from a prophetic heresiarch: a Jeremiah of Evil.

If our man turns from false prophets from true ones, what started as a nihilistic pursuit of pleasure end with him seeking the eternal and inexpressible joys of the Beatific Vision, or, if he is oriental, the unruffled freedom from reincarnation of Nirvana.

(But a true nihilist would never become a hedonist because a nihilist thinks the pleasure principle, along with all other principles, is meaningless.)

I am not describing a process I think is inevitable. I am indeed asking a question–what is it about Nihilism that makes it a dead end rather than a starting point toward real moral growth? It is an infantile doctrine, and it is a condemnation of the corruption and folly of the post-Christian 20th Century that such doctrines are taken seriously among us.

kaltrosomos asks:

(quoting me) “Once he becomes a Stoic, he realizes that no man can live up to this exacting doctrine, and would lose his humanity if he tried, whereupon he deduces that the human heart cannot be happy absent a transcendent cause to believe in.”

I don’t see the connection between finding the Stoic philosophy too hard to live by and jumping to a transcendent cause. How does the one (impossibility of being a true Stoic) lead to the other (needing a transcendent cause)?

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• John C Wright posted on December 6, 2015
  Thanks. Fixed.
• PaMar posted on December 6, 2015
  Just a little (technical) heads-up: the current version of the post is missing a closing HTML tag somewhere, so 9/10th…

As of now, 2009, the members of that new religion called Anthropogenic Global Warming, have had snatched from their hand that potent weapon which they long to use to browbeat their opposition into silence: and that weapon is the assertion that the science is settled, that the debate is over, that the matter is established by all reputable scientists, and that to dispute the conclusions is to be a "Global Warming Denier", which is something akin to being a flat-earther and a Holocaust denier.

Sorry, no. The claim of unquestioned truth has been dashed from the inconvenient truth, leaving only the inconvenience.

For those of you who have even an amateur’s interest in science, this will come as no surprise, for even an amateur can tell the difference between real scientific technique and scaremongering. Scaremongering concentrates on absurd, alarmist claims, and reacts to criticism with personal attacks rather than facts.

Those of you with long memories will recall the scare about ‘Nuclear Winter’ forwarded, among others, by Carl Sagan of Jet Propulsion Laboratories: what you may not know is that the Nuclear Winter idea was invented out of thin air by a member of the Soviet espionage establishment for the express purpose of influencing American foreign policy, and keeping nuclear missiles out of Turkey. And Carl played along with it. The earmarks of scaremongering were present there as well: claims were long on drama and short on facts.

So it goes again. This is from Jim Inholfe, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public works.

Part of the democratic process, not to mention the courtesy becoming of a gentleman, is to put aside factional enthusiasm once the election is over, and to render to the new magistrates that same loyalty we gave the old, and to pray for the wisdom and justice of those placed over us.

However, good natured mockery of self-important Ken and Barbie dolls from Hollywood is still fair game especially when they make expensive yet vaguely creepy public service announcements.

Here, for your viewing entertainment, is an announcement from the Ministry of Truth, direct from planet Skaro:
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHvNddalwUY
More from Alonzo. I just love this guy. I like what he says and I like how he says it.