John C. Wright's Journal

CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 3 scheduled to be published by Norilana Books in July 2010. The anthology’s literary focus is on the high end, and it is open to the full range of the speculative and fantastic genres.

Hey! And notice that I once again am sharing a table of contents with the legendary Tanith Lee! She and I also shared a table of contents with the publication of SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH.

My lovely and talented wife is at home cooking the Corn Beef and Cabbage to celebrate yet another saint’s day from the Roman Catholic calendar, this one Saint Patrick, who drove the snakes out of Ireland. You see, the sinister conspiracy of Paleopapal Roman Catholicism has its talons in all corners of the globe, and perhaps beyond the circle of Sulva! Just when you think your society is safely secular, Caths leap from their drunken barstools, reeking of incense, garbed in green, ready for another round of Mardi-Gras, making antic jigs, jerking knees and elbows aloft, meanwhile prune-faced hippies with hair and eyes as gray as used dishwater, the same ones who fret colorlessly about imaginary environmental apocalypses, will lecture us Christians on being not fun-loving. But who does not delight in the festive feast celebrated by boiled cabbage?!

And if you want to escape this ever-tightening noose of Papism, whence shall you flee? To the city of Saint Louis? Or Sacramento? San Juan? Santiago? St. Mary’s County, Maryland? Perhaps you can escape by watching the ball game: but Notre Dame is playing! Or listening to jazz: but St. James’ Infirmary is playing! We’re everywhere! Horrible! Take some St. Joseph’s Children aspirin for your headache.

And remember, it is the Puritans, Mormons and Muslims who do not drink! We have a Patron Saint of brewing! Not just one, but a round dozen! Saint Augustine of Hippo, Saint Nicholas of Myra, Saint Barbara, Saint Medard of Noyon, Saint Adrian, Saint Wenceslas, King Gambrinus, Saint Brigid, Saint Boniface of Mainz, Saint Arnold of Metz, St. Arnou of Oudenaarde and St. Arnold of Soissons. St. Arnold of Soissons, by the bye, is the patron saint of Boy Scouts and of Beer — a combination assured to ensure hilarity of spirit no matter in what proportions.

And I am not even halfway done. There is also Saint Cuthbert, who drove the birds away from the barley fields, Saint Florian, who quenched a raging fire with beer, Saint Lawrence and Saint Dorothy, who were tortured to death on cooking spits, and so became patrons not just of cooks, but also brewers.

St. Columbanus is also a patron of brewers. In the 6th Century came upon an assembly of pagans making ready a sacrifice with a large tub filled with beer in their midst, an offer to their god Wodan. St. Columbanus blew upon it, and immediately the vessel burst into splinters with a great noise and all the beer was spilled. He cautioned them that God loved ale, but only when drunk in His name.

Of course, it is Lent, so do not enjoy yourself and mourn your sins. Wipe that smile off your face! Pour ashes on your head. (Okay, well, we giddy Catholics cannot be funloving all the time — that would get wearisome indeed.)

In any case, the wife also has time to write her weekly writing tips column: this one happens to be on how to describe the Visceral Reactions of someone eating Corn Beef and Cabbage. And she has time to take our children to martial arts classes, where they can learn to karate chop joyless gray hippies and their enviro-worries.

Okay, that made even less sense than my normal introductions. Here is the link:
http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/113800.html

The fine fellows over at SFSignal are discussing which was the best cover art for this year.

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2010/03/mind-meld-recent-sffh-book-covers-that-blow-us-away/

I note with pleasure that the TITANS OF CHAOS cover by Scott Fischer attracted applause, as did the PROSPERO LOST cover by Sam Weber.

One odd little anecdote about the first time I saw that gorgeous Scott Fischer cover: The wife and I were at a New York party, to meet the man who would become her literary agent. There were no other paintings displayed, except for this one of a blonde in aviatrix gear and a schoolgirl uniform. I came upon the corner where the easel stood, and stared at it in puzzlement. It looked hauntingly familiar, as if I should recognize it, but I knew I had never seen it before. Then I squinted at the nameplate affixed to the frame. It had my name, and the name of my book.

Thunderstruck with delight, I sought out someone to share my glee. Here was Mr. Black, an acquaintance of many previous convention, whom I seized upon as my target. He is an illustrator, and the husband of the famous Holly Black, whose SPIDERWICK yarn was made into a fine film not so long ago. 

He admired the painting with the appropriate level of admiration. I thought the picture of the girl was pretty, and said so. Actually, what I said was, "Mr. Black, is it wrong, morally wrong, for a man to feel sexual attraction to a purely imaginary character of his own invention? Isn’t that incest?" His wise and considered reply: "Dude! When she looks like that, it ain’t wrong!"

Then he musingly said. "Wonder who the model is? Scott does not live that far from me. Maybe I can visit his house and find out." To which I replied, jaw dropping, "You mean a real life girl looks like that? That’s amazing." To which he replied with a chuckle, "No, what’s astonishing is that I am going to get to meet her, and you’re not!"

I congratulated him on his good fortune, but to this day do not know if there is any sequel. Is there a real Amelia Windrose lookalike out there somewhere? Did Mr. Black ever meet her?

We may never know. Read the remainder of this entry »

The wife just came home from the bookstore, and, as a present, gave me Gene Wolfe’s THE SORCERER’S HOUSE. Mr. Wolfe’s writing is a hit or miss affair with me. Some of his works (ON BLUE’S WATERS, SHADOW OF THE TORTURER) I like without reservation. Some I like and think have a confusing or not-quite-right ending (FREE LIVE FREE, DEVIL IN THE FOREST) . Some I think are just not for me (CASTLEVIEW, THERE ARE DOORS). Nonetheless, he is the only living author I will buy in hardback just on the strength of his name, not willing to wait for the paperback to come out. Persons as different from each other in taste and style as myself and the great Neil Gaiman both admire and magnify Mr. Wolfe.

I have met him at conventions. He does not remember me, but he and I went to mass together. Mr. Wolfe is a fan of G.K. Chesterton.

Inside knowledge: I once asked my editor (who is also Mr. Wolfe’s editor) if he understands Gene Wolfe’s work. Mr. Hartwell gave me an earnest but sheepish look and said, "In this business, you have to make allowances for genius."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3121159/Poet-dead-for-200-years-told-to-pay-TV-licence.html

My comment: Res Ipsa Loquitur. 

I decidednot to eat today. It is not a difficult decision, seeing as how what is being voted on in the halls of power in my nation could turn the stomach of even an indifferent man.

Today they are voting, among other things, whether or not to fund aborticide with my tax dollars. Those dollars represent hours and days of my life I have spent doing useful work, hours I would have rather spent doing something else. They are taking those little bits and pieces of my life work and devoting them to convincing mothers to kill off their own babies in the womb.

Now, I am sure at this point someone is objecting: "But small organisms of the genus homo sapiens growing in the womb are not really people! Not ‘people’ people. A person is only ‘people’ if I say so! If I say otherwise, then they are Untermenschen, merely niggers, not people like us. I mean, in the later stages of development, they might look like babies and do things like feel pain and so on, but they are merely animals. Babies are vermin. Babies are parasites. No mother is supposed to love her child! Mother must destroy their children, and the smaller and more helpless the child is, the more important it is to have the little creature killed! At all costs, the mother must not make an informed decision, and must not see any ultrasound images of the baby growing in her, or else she may form an irrational emotional attachment to what we Brights know to be merely a cluster of cells in motion!"

Well, whether this argument has merit or not, the simple fact of the matter is that in a free country based on toleration of religion it is not desirable to provoke the majority by committing crimes and abominations using public funds that offend their deeply-held and ancient religious beliefs. Would we force Hindus in India to pony up tax dollars to kill their sacred cows? Or use public tax money taken from Mohammedans to fund a program to wipe pig feces on copies of the sacred Koran, lavishly illustrated by pictures of Mohammad? No? We Christians are not shown the same deference this government shows to practitioners of Witchcraft or worshipers of UFO people. Our taxes are being used to pay for killing something (or someone) growing in his mothers womb we (rightly or wrongly) regard to be made in the image and likeness of God.

I have noticed children, when they see a pregnant woman on the street, ask to go up and touch her belly where her baby is, and they smile and giggle as if they are touching something sacred and beautiful. I have overheard the grown-ups nearby ask the mother if she knows the sex of the baby. I have never once heard a child ask to touch the belly of a woman where a ‘fetus’ is growing. I have never once heard a grown up ask the mother if she knows the sex of her ‘fetus.’ No one outside of rhetorical argument uses this term to refer to the baby: properly speaking, the term ‘fetus’ refers to the stage of growth of an organism, not to the species or genus of the organism. The language is fundamentally dishonest, as if we were to claim that an adolescent human being was not a human being because he was a ‘teen.’

I have never understood how a growing organism could have a sex (from the moment of conception, the organism has either XX or XY chromosomes) but somehow lacks membership in Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, or Species.  The male or female offspring of a homo sapiens is male or female, animal father than vegetable, and from the genes one can determine he or she is mammalian, primate, and so on, but humanity is something the mother decides? 

Is the argument that the child is utterly dependent on the mother, and therefore in the mother’s power, ergo the mother has the right to use that power to help or harm the child as she sees fit? The same argument could be made about any prisoner in a camp under the control ofa sadistic guard. Merely having the power to kill does not grant the right to kill.

Or is the argument merely that undeveloped or unintelligent humans, humans who cannot talk and walk upright, are weak and therefore easy prey? Or perhaps the argument is that in the early stages they don’t look enough like us to be human? I could say the same thing about my toothless old grandfather, and if he is senile and bedridden, I could make the same argument about his humanity. A senile old man in a sick bed cannot do a quadratic equation in his head, ergo I can kill him for the inheritance, yes?

The arguments along these lines are too demented to merit serious refutation. Merely repeating what they say, but saying it in honest, non-misleading words, is sufficient to show its true ugliness and inhumanity.

The Church has asked all her loyal sons and daughters to spend this day and prayer and fasting to pray for the opposition of public funding for abortion. The Church makes no comment on the wisdom of using public funds for preempting the health insurance industry: that is a prudential matter left to the conscience of the individual. But abortion, like genocide and eugenics of our parents’ day, like the slavery of our grandparent’s day, is a profound moral issue, where all Christians of any denomination, and all men of good will of any faith, and all honest men whatsoever, must join to oppose with an absolute opposition, or else stand condemned in the eyes of history.

Future generations looking back will condemn us as we condemn the Nazi sympathizers from the 1930’s, who were lulled by a vision of the human race bred like dogs to produce the supermen into cooperating, albeit they did not know, with genocide; or, more apt, as we condemn the Aztecs, whose cruel superstitions stained the stepped pyramids of Mexico with the smoking blood of countless human sacrifices.

Even those of you who hate Christianity, if you love freedom, are invited to join us. The Good Book says that there are some dark spirits that only can be expelled with fasting and prayer: Moloch, who demands the sacrifice of innocent children, is one of them. Even if Moloch is a fable, the spirit, the frame of mind, that regards pregnancy as an expendable nuisance, is not. 

If you have the stomach for it, you can behold what it is we are actually talking about here.

The often imitated but never duplicated Tom Simon (who fights crime under his secret identity as Superversive) holds forth on the issue all legal scholars, historians and political theorists who happen to be fans of JRR Tolkien have often pondered. What is feudalism and how is the political system in Byzantium different from it? What are the parallels between Byzantium and Gondor?

http://superversive.livejournal.com/85354.html

To begin with, Tolkien at various points made both explicit and implicit comparisons of Gondor with Byzantium. The terms ‘North-kingdom’ and ‘South-kingdom’ for Arnor and Gondor are deliberate echoes of the Western and Eastern Roman Empire. In his famous letter to Milton Waldman (Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien no. 131), Tolkien writes:

In the south Gondor rises to a peak of power, almost reflecting Númenor, and then fades slowly to decayed Middle Age, a kind of proud, venerable, but increasingly impotent Byzantium.

In a letter to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer (Letters no. 294), he touches on the historical analogy again:

The progress of the tale ends in what is far more like the re-establishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome than anything that would be devised by a ‘Nordic’.

There are other parallels between later Roman history and the history of Gondor. The story of Eorl the Young and the founding of Rohan is a sort of alternate history of the Goths, somewhat sanitized, and with the bitter tragedy left out. Allow me to set the scene:

In the third century A.D., the Roman Empire fell into a rather bad way. A series of civil wars, which became more or less continuous after the assassination of Alexander Severus in 235, ravaged the economy, depleted the treasury, and depopulated significant areas of the empire. Plague, which had been a recurrent problem since the time of Marcus Aurelius, further reduced the population; and the Romans, who had gradually come to imitate the habit of family limitation that had been de rigueur among the aristocracy since the reign of Augustus, were no longer breeding fast enough to restore their population to its old level. Population and production both went into a serious and prolonged decline.

This author has a very clear description of the writer’s life in an essay here at Science Fiction and Fantasy Novelists.

The money quote:

I thought this was an interesting article, appearing in the Jewish review of books:

http://www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/publications/detail/why-there-is-no-jewish-narnia

The author, Michael Weingrad, reviews two books: THE MAGICIANS by Lev Grossman and THE WATER BETWEEN THE WORLDS by Hagar Yanai, but uses these reviews to discuss a larger question of why there is no Jewish Narnia-type books. There are supernatural stories written by Jews, to be sure, tales of ghosts and magic and metamorphosis (he mentions Kafka) and certainly plenty of top-notch science fiction (he mentions Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg and Stanley Weinbaum). But why no antiquarian high fantasy?

You might by reflex wonder who the heck cares what race or religion an author is, so long as the story is well-told? If that is your reflex, thank your native and conniving stars, because you have a healthy attitude toward race, a melting-pot attitude. But on the other hand, this is the Jewish Review of Books, an article written by a Jew about Jewish writers, reviewing Jewish books written by Jews for Jews, so if you can’t kvetch and kvell about Jews in that forum, where can you?

Besides, the Jews are so accomplished in every other part of the arts and entertainment field, to see any part of the field where they do not predominate, must less are absent, is worthy of comment. 

Read the remainder of this entry »

I have managed to make two more sales, one to the unsinkable Mike Allen, and the other to the well-read and well-liked Jonathan Strahan of the Antipodes.

Just today I saw, read, corrected, and returned the galleys for CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 3. It includes ‘Murder in Metachronopolis’ which is my attempt to do a Keith Laumer DINOSAUR BEACH-ish time-paradox story, which, because it is me writing it, goes into the moral philosophy behind time travel, in addition to gunfights between cataphracts, musketeers and a hard-boiled private eye. I think the private eye gets slapped in the face by the sultry dame in at least two timelines.

Mr. Strahan is putting together ENGINEERING INFINITY, an original hard SF anthology for Solaris Books, due out in 2011. To him I sold ‘Judgment Eve’, a retelling of Byron’s play HEAVEN AND EARTH, which in turn is a retelling of the story of the flood of Noah, but in inimitable Bryonesque fashion, he makes the fallen angels in love with the daughters of Eve the good guys, or, at least, the romantically doom-defiant protagonists. With considerably less poetry that his, I set the story in a post-nanotechnological future, where the star-creatures concern for the Dolphins, who are the legal owners of the Earth, requires they submerge the continents of man in a general deluge, for the benefit of the Dolphins, increasing their real estate.

My question is why other publishers do things the old fashioned way, on paper, and send me corrections on paper, dull and motionless paper which cannot be searched or cut-and-replaced. Whenever an over-zealous politically-correctoid intern marks each and every instance of "he" with "he or she" and changes "Manly" to "Humanly" and changes "A.D." to "C.E." and commits other acts of anti-linguistic atrosity that send me into a Harlanellisonian ire, I must with red pencil, with aching fingers and with tear-weary eyes track down each and every instance of the wickedness done my poor and innocent manuscript, write ‘STET’ in rage-trembling letters.

How long must we endure the tyranny of dead trees? Are we not living in the Third Millenium of the Christian Era? The year 2000 is in the past, compared to us! Did not Ben Bova predict all this things in his prophetic novel CYBERBOOKS (which, ironically, is not available in Kindle)?

In which my beautiful and talented wife finally explains why our children are chubby and manumitted.

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/112604.html

Actually, it is an article on the advantages of writing in the journalistic prose style popularized by Hemingway.

Among science fiction writers,  you will notice that Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke (by many held to be the Big Three of SF) adopt the Hemingway style, and part of their fame in our genre is due to this: it is easy to turn the pages.

In contrast, Roger Zelazny writes in a sparse yet poetical style that reminds one of jazz; Ray Bradbury is likewise rich rather than sparse, but still a master of poetry (see SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES for an example).

A man who should be more famous than he is, Keith Laumer, was also was a master of a brisk, lean, muscular style of writing: he followed in the footsteps of Dashiel Hammet and Raymon Chandler rather than Hemingway.

Jack Vance is at once terse and ornate, and shares an erudite and orotund vocabulary with experimentalist Gene Wolfe, who in turn is a master of authorial voice.

HP Lovecraft wrote in a humorlessly florid purple prose style that sometimes reached real poetry, as in the DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH; E.E. Doc Smith wrote in a style equally purple, but must more brash and less serious–a style which seems uncraftsmanlike until you read someone trying to impersonate it, and then you might realize how much art when into crafting E.E. Smith’s particularly outrageous and fast-moving style.

My favorite author, A.E. van Vogt, wrote in a mix of journalistic and pulpish style, but with a staccato rhythm and a turn of phrase no one can imitate (almost no one (insert modest cough here)).

His method, like all his methods, was at once intellectual and outre: he simply had in every sentence or two an unexpected use of the word meant to emphasize the alien nature of his setting or character, so that, like a steeplechaser, every sentence the reader would have to make a leap of imagination. One example of this was using the words for ordinary objects in extraordinary ways. Here for example is a scene where our harassed main character is alone in the house of a man he thinks is an ordinary Earthman-type gangster.

In a passage like this, the author leaves it up to the reader to imagine what objects are being described by words like ‘videophone’, ‘robot’ and ‘long distance.’

The writings in E.R. Edison’s THE WORM OUROBOROS can only be compared to the gorgeous grit of some fantastic ocean of a world in arcturus, whose beaches of jasper, jade-stone, onyx and mountainous sapphire, sardonyx, emerald, jacinth and rubies red as blood have been beaten by cresting waves of fire into a patterned sand of eye-defeating splendor, where looming demigods and titans tread. The preposterously elevated language there captures the true spirit of fantasy in a way the Hemingway school cannot approach.

But note that the three men most famed in sci-fi are men whose language is almost colorless: the reason why one can find satires of Doc Smith and Jack Vance and even Frank Herbert, but not of Heinlein or Asimov is that their wordsmithing contains no quirks, no personality, nothing for a satirist to impersonate. Gene Wolfe also escapes impersonation, but for the opposite reason: he has never written two books the same way.

The journalistic style, as the name suggests, is like reading a newspaper, or, in dialog, listening to a radio play, usually a snappy one.

Do you notice that no Heinlein character is ever described, except, perhaps the Playboy bunny looks of Star the sexy space-empress from GLORY ROAD. Ben Caxton from STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND: is he Negro or Caucasian? What about Podkayne of Mars from the book of the same name? If you are a fan of STARSHIP TROOPERS you may know that Mr. Rico is Filipino, whereas if you are a fan of the movie the same character is Whitey McWhitebread (I think played by the same actor who played Sparrowhawk of Gont in the Sci-Fi channel’s version of HARRY POTTER AND THE SCHOOL OF EARTHSEA. Not sure. Look alot alike. We are sending someone down to check).

Heinlein can play this trick with reader’s expectations merely because he writes in the journalistic style, he keeps the pages turning and the plot moving, and he trusts the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks.

The advantages of the journalistic style are listed in my wife’s article linked above, but the main advantage is that it keeps the plot moving and keeps the pages turning.

3000 words, and the end of volume one. Wrote thirteen pages tonight. Now all I have to do is go back and rewrite Chapter Three.

I may have something to send to my publisher before Easter.

Part of a continuing discussion. We were discussing a story of mine that a reviewer disliked, and I suspect part of that dislike was because he interpreted the tale as a Christian message praising faith. To my knowledge (and one must consult the Muses for a clear answer) this tale was not Christian message but Stoical message praising skepticism, self-command, courage in the face of death. The symbols used were symbols of Stoic philosophy, since the writer professed Stoicism.

A reader comments: "One thing about Stoic thought is that in many respects it is more like Christian thought than it is like modern thought in general. If the reviewer is unfamiliar with Stoicism then the mistake would not be entirely surprising to me."

Aha! Your thought I fear is true and right. Modern thought is so eager to reject Christ, that it ends up rejecting paganism as well, not to mention logic, philosophy, objectivity, faith, hope, charity, temperance, moderation, fortitude and justice. It rejects everything, and leave us with nothing.

Modern thought is composed, with innumerable minor variations, with two great main streams: the revolt against the Church in the name of Reason, and the revolt against Reason in the name of Nothing. The first revolt we can call, with no violence to the term, Modernism. The second we can call Postmodernism. There may be more accurate uses of these two terms, but for the purposes of this essay, these are correct in denotation and connotation. The sum of these two streams taken together produces an odd, indeed a horrifically ironic, modern movement. Christianity so successfully adopted an explanation of the world and heaven, that the postmoderns find they cannot reject the heaven they loath, the place of mystic revelation, without also rejecting the world, the place of reason. They are left with an abyss, where neither revelation nor reason reach, a place of pure Nietzschean willpower, a void where the meaningless Self is utterly free to shape the meaningless Nothing into whatever form the empty Self desires. This void is fitliest called Hell. As if they cannot burn down the Cathedral without burning down the Academy.

Why should this be? In every bumper sticker slogan pasted to every half-empty brain, in every television show, paperback novel, and quip by Carl Sagan, science is proposed as the enemy of the Church and the victor over her. Why in the world would the pagan idolaters of science smash their own idols in the fury of their iconoclasm totrample our Christian icons?

The short answer is that the scientific worldview is as Christian as the Great Mass of Mozart, as Christian as Michaelangelo’s David, as Christian as Christmas. I submit that the one cannot be degraded and dismissed without degrading and dismissing the other.

Read the remainder of this entry »

I just came across a review (written in May of last year) of ‘One Bright Star to Guide Them’ a short story which continues to be my favorite of anything I have written.

http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/magazines/fsf-2009-04.html

My comment: It is bad form to comment on reviews. An author who does it looks silly. The story must speak for itself or not at all. In this case, however, it is not my story, but my personal beliefs that are being criticized, and the story is merely catching some reflected shrapnel.

I must compliment the reviewer here for being objective enough to notice and warn the reader that it was his own outside knowledge of me which had colored his view of the story. Few, far too few, reviewers are this kind and conscientious.

Would that the reviewer had known just a little more of me, he might have enjoyed the story more. Because it was not written by someone with my current beliefs. If anything, quite the opposite. That story was written years and years before my conversion, back when I was a ferocious and evangelical atheist, and if I have managed so successfully to mimic the art of Susan Cooper or C.S. Lewis or my hated enemies the Xtians as to annoy the reviewer, this is not a bug, it is a feature.

I am not sure to which scene the "pure celebration of blind faith" comment refers. There is, as there is an every children’s fairytale, a scene near the end where the protagonist is asked to do something according to the arbitrary rules of the Perilous Realm, which he does not see the reason for. I have never heard this called "blind faith" before. Usually that term is reserved for Christianity, and not used against fairies.

The main theme of the story is respect for someone who stands firm when the world wants him to conform to a falsehood. Christians talk this way, but, then again, so do Stoics, Communists, Objectivists, and every other non-Conformist in the world. I did not think any reader would actually assume Thomas was going insane, when he had solid evidence (a talking black cat and a magic key that opens any lock) physically present on his person.

There is no Christian allegory in that story (aside from those analogies, I suppose, that could be drawn to any fairy story). ‘One Bright Star to Guide Them’ was a story, written by a Stoic, fundamentally about Stoicism, which is the proposition that a virtuous life is one lived in preparation for death. To be a Stoic is to sacrifice childish, if correct, passions, and replace them with adult reasoning.

The sword you must break and reforge for yourself is Reason; that is why the young take on faith what they later must shatter with skepticism and remake for themselves, painfully, to make the sword their own. The helpful animal that must be slain is the Passions, the instincts, the animal nature, which, even if helpful in use, once sacrificed, returns in a superior form, as a conscience, or as a super-ego. The wee animal even says that it must be slain lest it grow ungovernable and turn on the protagonist. The end of the story, as with almost all fairy tales, is the turning of the seasons, as the child-hero of his own story becomes the Wise Old Man of someone else’s story.

I feared the symbolism was a little heavy-handed. I see that (for this reviewer, at least) it was not.

I would have left a helpful comment to that effect on the website, but there was no obvious place to leave it.

This is the seventh or eighth time ( I have lost track ) of someone reader a Christian message into something non-Christian or even openly anti-Christian that I wrote, but which, because I innocently answered in a public forum some unprovoked questions about my personal and private beliefs (or, to use the technical term, The Truth) have provoked the reader’s suspicions as to an ulterior message.

I am disappointed that the reviewer found the ending to be without emotional depth. This I cannot blame on the reviewer’s admitted bias. I blame it on my lack of craftsmanship: I had hoped to catch on paper the ending I had in my imagination, where my protagonist steps through the magic door and strides the heavens of midnight along the dangerous and comet-haunted path of the milk-white way, his feet bedewed with stars, finding that other and greater tale of which his tale is but a part. I had seen it in my mind as a fanfare of the gods, the silver roar of immortal trumpets, and, for my hero, I saw it as the long overdue coming of age for a man who had not yet put aside childish things, waiting for something not less magical than youth, but more.

Let me hasten to add that I compliment this reviewer not only on his honesty, but his kindness. I am grateful that anyone reads my works, and finds them worthy to comment on.

I say this not from any sense of false modesty, but true gratitude.

When I was young, my dream was to be a science fiction writer. To capture a dream is as difficult as binding the Wolf of Twilight: you need a chain woven of women’s beards and fish’s breath, the roots of mountains and the sinews of a bear, and two other impossible things to capture it: and ingratitude, taking for granted the idea that someone will read what you write, snaps the impossible chain which even the Wolf cannot sever, because it kills the dream.