John C. Wright's Journal

I am more than pleased to hear that the current administration has publicly come out against the Fairness Doctrine. See here.

President Obama opposes any move to bring back the so-called Fairness Doctrine, a spokesman told FOXNews.com Wednesday. 

The statement is the first definitive stance the administration has taken since an aide told an industry publication last summer that Obama opposes the doctrine — a long-abolished policy that would require broadcasters to provide opposing viewpoints on controversial issues. 

"As the president stated during the campaign, he does not believe the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated," White House spokesman Ben LaBolt told FOXNews.com.

Of course, the wary will be on the alert for the reintroduction of this doctrine under some other name, or in the guise of some other policy, such as ‘local content’, etc.

There is some spunk, and some legal knowledge, still left somewhere in the Republic. The following bill was introduced into the Texas legislature yesterday. The bill explicitly references my two favorite amendments, X and IX.

http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/81R/billtext/pdf/HC00050I.pdf

Those of you who have read EMPHYRIO by Jack Vance, particularly the scene where Amiante the woodcarver, relying on the antique charter of Ambroy, violates the regulations of the Welfare Agency, will know how this will end.

In the meanwhile, all you Texans, write your representative to support this bill. You can track its progress here. http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/BillLookup/History.aspx?LegSess=81R&Bill=HCR50

At the time of this writing, the President is preparing to sign the largest spending bill in world history.

The two most appalling things about this bill HR 1, is first, its utter dishonesty—spending tax money on pork projects is not the way to end a government-caused recession—and second, to add insult to injury, no one has actually read the bill. The Congressmen who voted on it did not read it. The President has not read it. The monster is over a thousand pages long, longer than WAR AND PEACE or a Harry Potter novel.

Imagine the outcries from the Greens and Conservation groups if the ecology were handled with the casual contempt used by this Congress to handle the economy.

Imagine some problem, let us say, soil erosion, or the loss of crab fishing the Chesapeake Bay, were handled in this fashion. Instead of actually, you know, investigating the causes of the erosion or the crab depopulation, the state proposes that a flood of organisms shall be imposed into the ecology, redistributed from elsewhere in the ecology: more than half of the animals and plantlife are to be removed from the wetlands, forest and field, and stored in zoos and nurseries, and then replanted and restocked in public parks, in backyards and fallow fields more or less at random, and all done according to some massive document no one has read.

The Secretary of the Treasured Greenery, let us say, when asked about the details of the world-saving plan announces that there is no plan, no details. The greenery will be handed out, not according to any rational account of what makes the ecology go, but according to a checklist of political favors to be paid back, or fashionable political causes. To save the whales, whale herds will be decimates, and the money used to fight venereal disease in Africa or to grow soybeans in greenhouses in Tibet. To halt soil erosion, trees and green cover in runoff areas will be removed to build a stadium or a monorail or a museum of famous gangsters.

Imagine, if you will, a set of balances between capital and labor, wages and costs, prices and interest rates and the stability of the laws of contract and property, as delicate and interconnected as the various balances between predator and prey, herbivores and scavengers and food supply and habitat the conservationist with such good intentions seek not to disturb. Now imagine an Omnibus Captain Planet Super-Hosanna Save-the-Globe Bill which will affect every habitat, almost every organism, in the nation and beyond, introducing new organisms, species and chemicals into the air and water with no forethought as to the possible consequences. Further imagine that no one has read the bill before it is signed into law, so that no one knows what will be done, or what will be changed, or how, or in what magnitude, or when, or why.

When the rabbits of regulation decimate the crops of the Australia of our economy, it will be too late merely to blame Bush.
Read the remainder of this entry »

You might think getting on the Times’ Best Seller list is the goal of the writing professional seeking fame? Not so. The secret ambition of every geekizoid is getting his own page on the TV TROPES website.

Here I am: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JohnCWright

The entries are terrifically spoilerific, so do not click through unless you’ve read the books already.

At first i was worried to see such a lengthy list of cliches, but then I was delighted to see that, in every case I checked (I have not clicked through all the links) everything described as a trope or a cliche, in one of my books, turned out to be something that (1) either the book explains it–it is there for a reason, not because the author was lazy– or (2) it is the opinion of a character (who has some reason to have that opinion), not a in-world fact established by the narrator.

It might be a cliche for a character to be hit on the head with a sandbag and only forget his name, and not his ability to ride a bike. It is hardly a cliche in a SF world, where memory-editing technology has been established to exist in chapter one, and a character was deliberately shaved of certain memories and not others.

Again, it might be a cliche for a character to conveniently find a ventilator shaft big enough to crawl through to escape, but not if we are talking about the character whose reality-warping magical power is the ability to create such escape exits at will, even in places such exits could not, in Euclidean geometry, actually fit.

Again, I am not sure if it counts as the "Mother Bear" cliche of pissed-off Moms able to defend her cubs if the "Mom" we are talking about is immortal and chthonic Echidna, the mother of all monsters from Greek Mythology. I mean, Homer has her attacking Olympos. Its not like she wasn’t killing people before she got angry. Angrier.

Let me hasten to add that the page is not listing cliches as such, but any trope or idiom (hence the name). I am complimented by the entry for the Argent Nautilus under the Cool Boat trope. I am glad someone thought Vanity’s silvery ship was cool.

Now, the Argent Nautilus is not as cool as KNIGHT BOAT, the boat that fights crime, but what boat is? 

matt_robare  asks the following:

Q: "How do your make your outlines?"

A: Not as often as I wish. So far in my writing career, the only story I outlined was NULL-A CONTINUUM, and therefore I was able to write it in record time. That book was a delight to write. Nothing has ever been so easy: everyone should outline.

Usually what I do (and I do NOT recommend this undisciplined style of writing be imitated by any new writers) is simply make up a rather simple hero with a rather simple goal, and a rather simple villain with a rather simple goal, and I write the story as if it were a chessgame. Then I just play out the whole chessgame until the villain is checkmated or stalemated.
Read the remainder of this entry »

As we saw in our last episode, your friend, Big Brother, for a mixture of reasons (some well-intentioned but woefully ignorant, some ill-intentioned yet woefully ignorant) stumbled into a depression for basically the same reasons Hoover stumbled into the last depression. But to make the depression into a truly Great Depression, lasting decades, we needed a truly economically illiterate semisocialist leader, Franklin Roosevelt, trampler of the Constitution.

History repeats itself: Bush trampled the Constitution in his haste to destroy the free market by saving it ( or save the free market by destroying it, I forget which) and now Pres Obama, whom history will remember as the First Ever Utterly Unqualified President, rushes to fill FDR’s shoes, by doing what FDR did, but more of it, and more expensively, and without FDR’s executive experience.

Read the remainder of this entry »

Well, work on my latest novel continues slowly but surely. Last week I had to throw out some 500 pages or so: this is the disadvantage of writing without an outline. Young writers, learn a lesson from me and avoid my time-consuming mistakes.

In any case, I am restarting at about page 100, keeping the beginning of the tale the same, but jazzing up the middle and end. Of the 500 thrown out pages, I should be able to rework and reuse most of it. A thrifty cobbler never throws away good leather.

Anyway, here is part of what I wrote this week. To set the scene–naw, never mind. You’ll pick up what’s happening as you read.

1. Thaw

AD 2399

Menelaus Montrose woke to a sensation of floating serenity. His thoughts seemed focused and sharp, but his head ached liked it had been filled with helium. Had he been drugged?

He sat up in bed. That was the first surprise: because it was a bed, an old-fashioned four-poster, big enough to hold a family of bounders, their first cousins and their dogs, hung with heavy drapes, with sheets and coverlets around him like a snowfield, and a real down pillow where his head had lain.

Menelaus felt the back of his head. There had been some sort of appliance there, stuck to his skull, implanted halfway into his skull, right at he top of his spine. The pillow from the previous room—a white, empty place with padded walls—had plugged into the skull-jack, no doubt feeding him brain-chemicals.

No, there had been two places. The second place had been clean but lacked that smell of blood and antiseptic Montrose always associated with infirmary tents. It looked more like a room in a fancy Japanese motorist-hotel, with mirrors instead of windows to make the small room look large. Montrose had been blurry-headed for those days, his memory stuttering like a bent datastick, complaining at the nurses who helped him through the physical therapy sessions, demanding to see a phone, a lawyer, a gunsmith, a doctor, in that order.

Read the remainder of this entry »

Bojojoti comments: "I thought the problem with the banks was that they had lent too much money poorly, and that brought about a great deal of the mess we are in at present."

Basically, you are correct. Here is my account of what happened to create the financial crisis. Let me explain the theory, and recite the historical events wherein the theory is played out. Unfortunately, I am simplifying complex phenomena, and telling it from a partisan point of view, so take everything here with a grain of skepticism. Nonetheless, the general outline is clear.

Read the remainder of this entry »

Some items in the news, possibly unrelated:

The Dutch MP Geert Wilders has been refused entry to the United Kingdom despite being invited to visit by a member of the House of Lords, the British parliament’s upper chamber.

The reason? Geert Wilders wants to slow the inundation of paynims into his country, The Islamic Republic of Hollandistan, or whatever it was once called. (snark) His comments offend the Muslims, who, no doubt, are so easy-going, placid, peaceful and so very difficult to offend that the comments, no doubt, must have been outrageous. (end snark). He is being barred from the country because the Islamics have a de facto veto on public movements of famous poeple in and out of the UK. The crown cannot or will not control the multitudes.

See here
Here is the letter given by the British embassy to Mr. Wilders.

Dear Mr Wilders

The purpose of this letter is to inform you that the Secretary of State is of the view that your presence in the UK would pose a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society. The Secretary of State is satisfied that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK.

You are advised that should you travel to the UK and seek admission an Immigration Officer will take into account the Secretary of State’s view. If, in accordance with regulation 21 of the immigration (European Economic Area) Regulations 2006, the Immigration Officer is satisfied that your exclusion is justified on grounds of public policy and/or public security, you will be refused admission to the UK under regulation 19. You would have a right of appeal against any refusal of admission, exercisable from outside the UK.

Yours sincerely,

Irving N. Jones

On behalf of the Secretary of State for the Home Department

Read the remainder of this entry »

I was asked a few days ago what I so admired about David Lindsay’s fascinating, hypnotic, gorgeous work Voyage to Arcturus. To answer, I gave a short excerpt from the beginning my unpublished (and perhaps unpublishable) essay on Lindsay, The Lament of Prometheus. I said at that time, to explain my misgivings and reservations about the work would require a longer answer.

My misgivings I can summarize in a paragraph. Harold Bloom, the famous literary critic, attempted to write his own version of Voyage to Arcturus, called, tellingly enough, Flight to Lucifer. My misgiving with Lindsay’s work is that the title of Bloom’s work would have fit it all too well, if by "flight" we mean not aviation but escape. The book is about a man who flees away from joy and life, creation and Creator, and into an aching abyss of pain and death, nonbeing and Nihilism. Voyage to Arcturus flees indeed into that spiritual nothingness fitliest called Lucifer, wretched king over all the sons of pride. It is a book with no laughter in it.

Here again is an excerpt from that same essay, explaining my thoughts at greater length. If you hear rumors of any publisher willing to publish this essay in its complete form, please tell me.

Read the remainder of this entry »

Well, despite my best efforts, I did not get a novel written in 2008. I generated enough pages for two novels, but I could not, (or, alas, did not) despite the time allotted for the task, shape it into publishable form.

This does not mean I was entirely idle during 2008!
“One Bright Star to Guide Them”
“Last Report on Unit Twenty-Two”
“Guyal the Curator”
“The Far End of History”
“Choosers of the Slain”
“Twilight of the Gods”
"C.S. Lewis was the Joshua Flattening the Walls of My Disbelief" (nonfiction)

If you would like to read these stories, friends and fans, let me tell you where to find them: Read the remainder of this entry »

An excellent essay and book review by Tom Simon (superversive ) of Tolkein’s CHILDREN OF HURIN. Mr. Simon logged this last year, but I have only just now seen and read it. Here is an excerpt:

Tolkien’s weakness for making his heroes so very, very good and his villains so very, very bad is particularly grating. Middle-Earth is the place to go if you must have the morality of your fiction be black and white, and apparently the simplicity was worse early in its history.

Read the whole thing.

Read the remainder of this entry »

Catholic.org reports the Traditional Anglican Communion might be received into the Church this year.

As a recent convert who was put in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between denominations — a task I enjoyed about as much as sitting in judgment on a bitter divorce case —  I have always hoped for the reconciliation of the various churches into the one universal church that formed the first thousand years of our history (East and West did not schism until the 1000’s).

The breakup, historically speaking, is recent, and many of the political pressures that aided it along (Henry VIII’s need for a divorce) no longer obtain. The doctrinal differences are more severe in some cases than in others: I assume that if Christians were really Christian in love, we could find a way to overcome the Filioque controversy that split the Catholics and the Orthodox out of brotherhood.

Whether doctrines like Sola Scriptura or Double Predestination could be reconciled, smoothed over, renounced or embraced by all sides, that I find more doubtful.

The skeptics throw our lack of unity into our faces as an argument against the truth of our religion unceasingly. How can the truth be divine, if we do not agree on its contents? How can we be said to be guided by a holy spirit, if we act as if that spirit guides us into contention with our brothers? The skeptics can see we are not acting like Christians should, even if we can’t see it.

It would be an inspiring testimony against that skepticism if the body of Christ took some step to heal its deep wounds.

I published this announcement before, but I did not have the Table of Contents before. I am appearing in the same book with Orson Scott Card, L.E. Modsitt Jr., Allen Steele, George R.R. Martin and Robert Silverberg. August company indeed!

I have a novella called “Twilight of the Gods” slated to appear in an anthology called FEDERATIONS John Joseph Adams (www.johnjosephadams.com.), editor (to be published May 2009 by Prime Books)

For in interview on this and other topics, see here.

Read the remainder of this entry »

I have been wanting to write this belated book review for a while. Years, actually. It is a combination of an homage and a eulogy for a once-beloved favorite of mine.

CATCHWORLD by Chris Boyce is a book that I read as a child, which haunted my memory for decades. There are certain books one reads just at that golden time of life, usually age twelve, that do that. Coming across a paperback copy again as an adult, on impulse I purchased it.

I was curious to see if, like the writings of Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe, the tale would hold up on rereading, when seen with adult eyes. I was also curious why the book (and author) was unknown. I had never read anything else by Chris Boyce, had never heard his name discussed where science fiction fans gathered, had never known anyone else who had read him. Considering how thrilled I was with CATCHWORLD in my youth, I was puzzled at the omission.

The shock of disappointment could not have been greater. The book is bad. The mystery of why the work was obscure was solved.

Even had the book been as wonderful as I recalled, the Internet reports that Mr. Boyd was Scottish and his output was very small and intermittent (CATCHWORLD (1975), BRAINFIX (1980), BLOODING MISTER NAYLOR (1990)). This alone would have made him an unknown here in the United States.

And yet my curiosity remains. I can still see the things in CATCHWORLD that I liked. I think I can guess what the author was trying to accomplish. What did the book do right and where did it go wrong?

I mean to discuss the plot in detail, because this is not really a book review, it is more like an autopsy. My purpose here is to find out for myself exactly what went wrong in a book that had many things going right for it.

Read the remainder of this entry »