Well, well. It looks as if THE GOLDEN AGE, my three-volume love-letter to Liberty, has finally attracted the attention of the Libertarians.
In Indiana.

I read this announcement on the website of the Indiana State LP:

Futurists Announce 2009 HOF Finalists

The following is the list of finalists for the 2009 Prometheus Hall of Fame award:

• Falling Free, a novel by Lois McMaster Bujold (1988);
• Courtship Rite, a novel by Donald M. Kingsbury (1982);
• "As Easy as A.B.C.," a short story by Rudyard Kipling (1912);
• The Lord of the Rings, a three-volume novel by J. R. R. Tolkien (1955);
• The Once and Future King, including The Book of Merlyn, a novel by T. H. White (1977); and
• The Golden Age, a novel by John C. Wright (2002).

Well, well, I have just been interviewed for CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT by Sandra Miesel (whose name you might recognize if you read THE DA VINCI HOAX — a debunking of Dan "all descriptions of made up stuff in this novel are accurate" Brown). I am placed alongside such luminaries as Gene Wolfe, (whom we rverently refer to as ‘The Master’) Tim Powers (whom we rvently refer to as, ‘The Powers That Be’)  andMike Flynn (whom we reverently refer to as ‘The author of FALLEN ANGELS who wasn’t Jerry Pournelle or David Niven but that Other Guy. And didn’t he write a book about a blind man wrecking a river of firestars or something?’) 

Unfortunately, since I haven’t actually written anything very good or memorable yet, it is sort of embaressing to read the author of the article listing great works by Christian authors, for example, SHADOW OF THE TORTURER or DECLARE or PAST MASTER or CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWICZ and then in the next paragraph mention, "And Mr. Wright is a dirty old man who writes spanking scenes starring buxom sixteen-year-old schoolgirls. His next novel will be entitled LESBIAN SWEDISH BIKINI TEAM OF GOR, a sequel to John Norman’s famous SLAVE GIRL OF GOR. Look for it in smutty bookshops everywhere."

OK, the article writer did not actually say that, but I haven’t written any books I want my father confessor to read, either.

As if right now, I have made 700 first drafts of my latest novel.

That number is no doubt inflated. I save my work as a separate ‘draft’ when I make any change, even minor ones, in case I feel the urge to return to a previous wording of a scene. But, still, draft 01 is dated February 2006. I am not sure why this project is taking so much longer than my others. I went from first to final draft in NULL-A CONTINUUM in seven months. THE GOLDEN AGE from start to finish took only about nine months.

Please read this: http://faculty.ugf.edu/jgretch/syllabi/psy450DeRevolutione.pdf

A fascinating article by Michael Flynn, author of the FIRESTAR books, WRECK OF THE RIVER OF STARS, and, more recently, EIFELHEIM. 

In proper Aristotlean fashion, Mr. Flynn politely demolishes the persistant myth (and I mean myth in the sense of lie) that the Middle Ages were a period of scientific backwardness. This is not merely false, it is the precise opposite of truth: the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries were when logic and reason were paramount, and the foundation stones of modern science set in place. He also offers thoughts on why the Scientific Revolution occured in Europe rather than in the long-lived civilizations of China or India. Like a proper medieval schoolman, he defines his terms — a practice which ought to be revived for anyone intending any serious thought on any serious topic.

My most recent brush with the ‘meme’ that Christians burn scientists was quite accidental. I was looking up the name of an article I wrote for a Catholic newspaper (an examination of whether and how modern discoveries of the size of the universe pose a scandal to the Church) and so lazy was I, and possessed of such great faith in the Internet, I "googled" for it rather than looking in my own records. As it turned out, the article had been reprinted on the website of Richard Dawkins, global village atheist.

The comments appended to it were uniformly shocking in their sheer ignorance. Normally an ignoramus is comfortable with his ignorance, much like Sherlock Holmes dismissing the Heliocentric Theory because it was pointless for crime-detection. But these were a gaggle of geese loudly squawking about how knowledgeable and enlightened they were, how scientific and precise they were in their thoughts. They were the ‘brights’, you see.

Well, these brights were bright enough that they simply made up facts out of their own imaginations to suit themselves.

One poor soul dismissed the idea that I had ever been an atheist: he did not bother to check. It just suited him to believe it. He took it on faith. Another said the Catholic Church kept me in storage against a day when I could be trotted out onstage. (Hm. I am still awaiting my coded instructions beamed into my brain chip via Papal Satellite from my robotic Jesuit-ninja assassin-masters in the Holy Office.) A third said he read only until I referred to the Pope being a public figure speaking about Reason. The Bright was too bright to read to the end of the paragraph — we all know brights do not need to do research, or read their opposition, or anything — and too bright to read the newspapers. I was referring to the Holy Father’s Regensburg speech, (entitled Faith, Reason and the University) which was famous enough to make headlines, and get its own wikipedia page.

Another bright fumed that the Church taught the world was flat. Another said science fiction writers could not be theists. Another bright criticized me for being a science fiction elitist when it came to space opera. (Me, the founder of the world-wide New Space Princess Movement, which now contains at least 3 members, and is poised to take the scifi world by storm!) And so it went, on and on, and not a single comment I read had anything to do with the topic of the article.

I admit I was flabberghasted by the uniformly low quality of the responses. You see, I am confident that I was not the last intelligent atheist to jump their sinking ship. There must be some out there who do not make simple errors in logic, or make up facts, or substitute emotion for reasoning. But this was like tearing off the roof of roaring hell, and beholding a burning cloud of malice and illogic rise up forever —  if hell were where an intellectual god had flung the smug, loud and stupid, instead of the sinful.

I wish the brights had been bright enough to read Mr. Flynn’s article.

It behooves those who idolize science and reason to restrict themselves to scientific and reasonable conclusions on all topics, including the topic of religion, and not to single it out for some bizairre exception, as if it were toodangerous to touch, too dangerous to think about. There are rational atheists out there in the world I am sure, but they evidently don’t gather at Richard Dawkins’ website to leave comments.

(Maybe the selfish genes in which they have such touching, unquestioning faith, have programmed them not to.)

Hat tip to: m_francis 

James Franklin has a collection of links (some of them dead) in an attempt to debunk some common myths about the Middle Ages. This list is a summary of his longer essay here: The Myth of the Renaissance, where he argues that the Renaissance was a period when thought declined significantly, bring to an end a period of advance in the late Middle Ages.

I note two of the items on Mr. Franklin’s list — the one about Medieval thinkers believing the Earth was flat, and the one about why Catholics eat fish on Fridays, I myself have encountered in the last week. The comments below are his.

Here is his list.

MYTHS ABOUT THE MIDDLE AGES

James Franklin

There are so many myths about the Middle Ages, it has to be suspected that the general level of "knowledge" about things medieval is actually negative.
Here are some of the more famous ones.

• In the Middle Ages it was believed the earth was flat.

  There’s a whole book devoted to refuting this one: J.B. Russell’s Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (New York, 1991) (review; also `The myth of the flat earth’.)
  The facts are that the Greeks knew the earth was spherical from about 500 BC, and all but a tiny number of educated persons have known it in all times since. Thomas Aquinas gives the roundness of the earth as a standard example of a scientific truth, in Summa theologiae bk. I q. 1 art. 1.

• The scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

  This has not been found in any scholastic, nor has the allegation been found earlier than in a Protestant writer of 1638. See `Heads of pins’; further; discussion.
  Aquinas does discuss "whether several angels can be in the same place at the same time" (Summa theologiae bk. I q. 52 art. 3), but that does not quite have the farcical ring of the original.

• Medieval lords had a ius primae noctis: a legal or customary right to sexual relations with the newly-married wives of their underlings.

  There’s a whole book on this one, too: A. Boureau, The Lord’s First Night: The Myth of the Droit de Cuissage. In short, there’s nothing in the story.
  (The same author wrote The Myth of Pope Joan but I don’t include this myth as I don’t think it’s ever been seriously believed.)

• Some medieval Pope (unnamed, of course) instituted fasting from meat on Fridays to help the fishing industry of the Papal States.

  Mediev-l archives `Fish on Fridays’ thread.

• The alleged fragments of the True Cross would have added up to a whole forest.

  In a truly obsessive piece of scholarship, Charles Rohault de Fleury’s Memoire sur les instruments de la passion de N.-S. J.-C. (Paris, 1870) counted all the alleged fragments and showed they only added up to considerably less than one cross … more

• Vikings wore helmets with horns

  How would you know Hagar the Horrible was a Viking if he didn’t have horns? … the facts

• Chastity belts.

  A report; an article.

• An early medieval church council declared (or almost declared) that women have no souls.

  History of the error.

• "In the times of St Thomas it [woman] was considered an essence as certainly defined as the somniferous virtue of the poppy …St Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an imperfect man"

  These claims are made in the introduction to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, one of the founding texts of feminism. Aquinas believes all humans have the same essence. Though not exactly a believer in the equality of men and women, he did not call women imperfect men. details.

• Religious taboos prevented medical dissection of bodies

  Katherine Park’s book on late medieval dissection

• The medieval burning of witches.

  Medieval canon law officially did not believe in witches. There were very occasional individual witch trials in the Middle Ages, but the persecution of witches only became a mass phenomenon from around 1500. The height of persecution was in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries … article; resources.

• The feudal system.

  Depending on how strictly it is defined, the feudal system, in the sense of a hierarchical system of property-based legal obligations between lords and vassals, is a later invention. This is argued in S. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals (reviews). However, it is true that there was a manorial system or generalised protection racket, something like the "feudal system" of popular imagination.

• The Renaissance.

  The thesis that there was a rebirth of learning in Europe in or around the fifteenth century, after a thousand years of darkness, is too diffuse to admit of clear agreement or disagreement. Nevertheless, the claim that the "Renaissance" is almost entirely a beat-up, put about by a gang of anti-Catholic art historians, has much to be said for it. See `The Renaissance myth’.

• There’s more … and yet more …
• A book, Regine Pernoud’s Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths tackles a number at once … review.

In other news, Spiderman saves a little boy. I am not making this up. Here is the story:

The only reason why I am not a huge fan of THE MATRIX, is that, the week before I saw it, I saw another film that had much the same themes, (what if life was not what it seemed, merely a huge deception?)  only without the glaring plot-holes called DARK CITY. The contrast was too sharp for me, so the minor flaws in THE MATRIX seemed major. But despite that, I recognize it was a Way Cool movie with a look to it, a camera technique, that everyone remembers and every action film copied, including WATCHMEN.

Now I read a rather, uh, interesting take on THE MATRIX by someone called The Last Psychiatrist. His analysis: the popularity of the film was due to the daydream appeal of discovering that you, too, may secretly one day be the superman! He seems to think this is a new idea, rather than the oldest daydream in comics and science fiction. When John Carter, clean-limbed fighting man of Virginia is teleported at death to the planet Mars, and finds himself not only telepathic, but stronger than any native Martian, I am sure it is a daydream shared by every disappointed Southern planter after the Civil War, who went out West to hunt gold and fight Indians.

Here is a quote from the Last Psychiatrist:

Jack Kirby once did a comic book version of the famous (famous among geeks) science-fiction surrealist spy thriller THE PRISONER.

More info here: http://www.twomorrows.com/kirby/articles/11prisoner.html

and here: http://datajunkie.blogspot.com/2006/03/you-are-number-6.html

I had heard about Kirby’s short-lived 2001 SPACE ODYSSEY from a review by Fabio Paolo Barbieri (his review is here) and I regret that I have not yet got my hands on a copy — if it can be found anywhere — of this work. But the Prisoner exist only as a fragment in a few out of print Kirby Collections.

Illos Below the Cut…

Rather then commenting on the continued decline and fall of the American Republic, let me mention the last few movies I saw.

On DVD I saw:
City of Ember — a well done sci fi mystery of two children discovering the secret of how to escape from their buried world of eternal darkness. There were one or two movie elements added, not in the original book, meant to heighten drama, but which I thought  unnecessary, or even foolish. Despite this, the mystery was gripping and the characters delightful.

I am a little surprised this did not do better in the theaters. The science fiction premise was simple enough that even a muggle could grasp it, and who cannot root for the main characters who have never seen the open sky, seeking to escape a dying underground city?  As a metaphor for everything from the fearless scientific investigation of the world, to youthful awakening, to maturity to rebellion against soft oppression,  to a spiritual awakening, it strikes a deep cord.

Cinderella Man — Every father or would-be father should see this film, especially the scenes where the father tells his son stealing is wrong, even if you go hungry, and where it is shown how a man pays his debts. Based on a true story, a prizefight so famous that even I had heard of it, the drama is gripping, and the message more pertient now than ever. If you liked the film Seabiscut, you’ll like this. Stars Russel Crowe, so rent this and rent Master and Commander at the same time, and make an all Crowe weekend of it.

High School Musical 3 — Sorry highbrow guys, but I just love me this Disney hoofers. It shocks me that Hollywood cannot make a film with half the energy and charm of his low-budget made-for-TV song and dance flick.

5000 Fingers of Dr. T — Maybe the weirdest little thing I’d ever seen on the silver screen. In a dream a child is kidnapped into a concentration camp (surrounded by electrified barbed wire) run by an evil piano teacher bent on world conquest. After the piano teacher has a duel of hypnotic whammies with the plumber, the piano teacher (who has his own physics lab) orders the plumber disintegrated atom by atom. Meanwhile the plumber falls in love with the kid’s mom whom the piano teacher has used his hypnotic powers to place in a trance. The kid and the plumber are thrown into a dungeon inhabited by all the abducted musicians of the world, and must escape with the aid of an atomic — a very atomic — music-fixing bottle. The happy fingers beanies must be seen to be believed. The only live action movie ever made by Dr. Suess, who also did the set direction.

Singin’ in the Rain — The best comic musical piece ever is Donald O’Connor singing Make ’em Laugh. My three sons (ten, eight, and five) made me rewind that scene and play it over and over. Cameo by the leggy Cyd Charisse.

[Trivia time! In the "Would You" number, Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) is dubbing the voice of Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) because Lina’s voice is shrill and screechy. However, it’s not Reynolds who is really speaking, it’s Jean Hagen herself, who actually had a beautiful deep, rich voice. So you have Jean Hagen dubbing Debbie Reynolds dubbing Jean Hagen.]

While it does not count as a movie, I also recent re-watched the last few episodes of Avatar, the Last Airbender, which is almost Miyazaki-like in its depth, well-done kinetic motion, character development, lush animation style, charm and humor. It is almost impossible in SFF to portray an alien world that seems both exotic and comfortably familiar, but the writers and illustrators of Avatar found a way to do it.

Also saw the first two episodes of BBC’s Upstairs Downstairs starring Jean Marsh. Very impressive for a television production. Next time someone tells you we have a class society in America, show then this little gem of a series, so they can see what class societies are like, and what must be done to maintain order and discipline within them. The scene where the new maid’s name is arbitrarily changed by the mistress of the house should make the point clearly enough.

But in the theater I saw:

Gran Torino — hysterically funny in places, moving, deep and human in others. Not the ending you’d expect. For once, the Priest character in the film is not an ax-murderer. If you are squeamish about heading a LOT of racial slurs, this one is not for you.

Slumdog Millionaire — the only film that won an Academy Award in the last five years which actually earned it. Well worth seeing. The brilliant concept here is that a boy from the slums, who knows nothing, just happens — by providence, or fate, or Karma, or coincidence — to know the answers to the increasingly difficult questions of a ‘You Want to Be a Millionaire’ gameshow. Questioned by the police (who think he is cheating)the youth reveals the details of his sometimes bittersweat, funny yet often horrid past, and the girl who appears as a bright thread in the dark tapestry of his life, a thread he has lost and seeks, somehow, to pick up again. Soon we realize that more than merely a million dollars is at stake.

As of the time of this writing, Treasury Secretary Geithner is asking Congress to hand over another trillion dollars of taxpayer money for additional economic stimulus. A trillion is a thousand billion. When added to the national debt already assumed during the first 60 days of the current administration, the sum is beyond imagination. If printed up in one hundred dollar bills, this would circle the planet thirty times. It is equal to the national debt of all the presidents from George Washington to George W Bush COMBINED. Which means that, if we had to pay once more for the continental railway, the national highway system, the New Deal, the Great Society programs, the moonshot, the Civil War, two world wars, and the Cold War all over again, we could do so with this amount of money and have some left over to spend on buying Alaska from Russia again. Added to what we have already spend, the current trillion of dead comes to over three trillion dollars.

You will never pay down this debt; your children will never pay down this debt; your grandchildren will never pay down this debt. Living under the crushing burden of this debt, your children and grandchildren can look forward to economic conditions created by high taxes, hyperinflation, and the exclusion of private sector borrowing from credit markets, since the Federal Debt will absorb that market.

And, no I am not outraged, or even interested, in the bonuses paid to AIG officers, except, perhaps, a clinical interest in seeing what happens when a once-great nation passes from a mere neurotic aversion to facts and truth, to full-bore psychotic break with reality.

It might be an interest course assignment for  a law student to count the number of Constitutional provisions and Blackstonian legal principles of Anglo-American law a penal tax on specific individuals might offend, when the individual not only broke no law, but did only what their contractual oblations demanded.

That the stimulus package originally contained an (perhaps an unconstitutional, certainly tortous) provision to prevent the payment of bonuses, which language was removed before the bill was signed, merely add insult to folly. That neither the drafters of the bill nor the President who signed it read the bill before its passage adds comedy to insult to folly. The legal precident involved is that the majority in Congress, bound by nothing but their own corrupt will, shall henchforth have the power to take any property, real or personal, in confescation, of any persons of whom they disapprove, for any reason, or no reason.

Let me quote Mark Stein: 

Let me quote John Hinderaker;

Wells Fargo didn’t want any TARP money, but the government forced it to take more than $5 billion worth, so Wells Fargo employees who receive bonuses would be subject to Pelosi’s proposed tax. Say you’re a teller at Wells Fargo and you’re married to a lawyer who makes $250,000 this year. You get a $10,000 bonus for your good work during 2008. The government steals it all (90 percent federal plus 8.5 percent state plus, unless it’s included in the 90 percent, 3 percent Medicare). That is simply insane.

Since he wrote those words, the House passed the measure. I don’t know if it has gone to the Senate yet.

I finally got around to reading this HG Wells’ classic THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON. It is a short book and in the public domain, so it is easy to get a hold of, and easy to read.

We have entered the Second Age of Science Fiction. In the First Age, all science fiction was fiction, and the future was a blank page. In the Second Age, the page is overwritten with real events, none of which were correctly expected. Science Fiction of the Second Age carries with it a long history of discarded prophecies, what are called “retrofutures”, were we can look back and see what were our grandfathers’ meditations (literal or figurative) about their future. These are not exactly alternate history, nor do they fit the old definition of science fiction as fiction set in a possible future. The mood most likely provoked by old science fiction is one of nostalgia, melancholy facing the past, which, ironically, is the precise opposite of the mood they were meant to provoke, wonder facing the future. Reading Orwell’s NINETEEN-EIGHTY FOUR is simply a different experience for an audience circa 1948, when the Labour Party was in the ascendant in England, as opposed to 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.

THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON was published in 1901, six decades before the real moon landing, and I read it in 2009, four decades after the last moon landing. The tale was not scientifically feasible even when written, nor, to be fair, was it meant to be: it was a figurative rather than literal mediation on the future.

The plot consists of failed businessman Bedford, who is staying in the country, hiding from creditors, trying to write a play. He meets absentminded scientist Cavor, who is developing a metal, Cavorite, an alloy of helium, that blocks all gravity waves, nullifying the attraction of Earth. The two contrive a glass sphere fitted with venetian blinds of the material, which allows them to cut off Earthly gravity while allowing Lunar gravity to attract them.

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An ongoing discussion. Necoras  is arguing in favor of performing human experiments on death row inmates. In reply to a pointed question, he write this: 

My comments:

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An interesting article on National Review Online about His Holiness Pope Benedict’s visit to Africa, and the (as expected) public displays of ignorance by the mainstream press on the matter. Ignoring everything but the particular object of their obsession, the mainstream press dismisses the Holy Father as being unrealistic and out of touch when it comes to the Church teaching on condom use. The argument is that people must have sex under any and all conditions, even at the risk of their lives, and their behavior cannot be modified; and furthermore that condoms prevent the spread of AIDS. (Both claims are false-to-facts, even simpleminded, but the reality-based community congratulates themselves on being rational, progressive and scientific about the matter.)

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YzJlNzBiNWRlM2IyYzFjZThjNmUwOTcyN2JlZWI0NTY=

One interesting point made here, and notunrelated to an earlier conversation in this space, is that many Africans do not want to use condoms to hinder the spread of AIDS because — wait for it — they are married polygamists trying to get their wives pregnant. In other words, they are not engaging in what the Progressives call ‘sex’ (because when they use the word they mean seeking sexual gratification with a short term partner). They are engaging in what sane people call ‘sex’ (because when we use that we, are engaging in the act of sexual reproduction aiming at, or at least open to, sexual reproduction).

Hm. Let us see what Merlin the Magician says about what Progressives call sex: 

oscillon has an interesting question. We are discussing the morality of embryonic stem cell research:

I will make this as clear as I can.

Harvesting human babies, even small ones, for medical research cheapens human life. Allowing anyone to make a profit, or find it in their self-interest, in an act which cheapens human life is imprudent.

It is a question of incentives. Abortion mills, Planned Parenthood and so on, are not charity organizations. They make a profit from their acts. They buy houses and send their kids to college and so on. It is in their best interest to continue the practice of infanticide, and to expand the practice. The Abortionists have become a faction and a politic power in their own right, and influenced the laws and customs of this nation.

So, here. This stem cell research is worthless, scientifically speaking, or at least not as promising as non-destructive stem cell research. Allowing embryo stem cell research will create a faction with a monetary self-interest in continuing the practice, and expanding it.

This is true even if the primary practice of in-vitro fertilization cannot be stopped.

I will grant you the question but not the conclusion. If I lived in a society that produced mass graves of innocent corpses, I would, as a civilized man, as a Christian, demand the bodies be decently buried and decently treated with respect. The argument would be the same as I use here: namely, that it is imprudent to create an incentive aimed at further dehumanization of the human race. Treating corpses as a raw material is the same as permitting cannibalism on the ground that it is unthrifty to let good meat go to waste. Once we start plowing the dead into the ground as fertilizer, once we stop treating the dead with respect, once we treat human beings as raw materials, it creates a faction with a powerful incentive ever further to erode the bulwark of laws and customs surrounding human dignity. Once that bulwark is down, the weak are livestock for the strong. 

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President Obama read the wrong speech from the teleprompter during St. Patrick’s day meeting with Irish Prime Minister Cowen, including the line thanking President Obama.

Story is here.

Oddly enough, no video of the event is available.