Archive for October, 2013

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Protected: Fooled by Heinlein for 40 years (Golden Oldie)

Posted October 30, 2013 By John C Wright

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Birthday of the World by Ursula K. LeGuin (Greatest Hit)

Posted October 30, 2013 By John C Wright

Here below is a post from my first book review published in my journal. I have had no free time to write my normal Friday article; I thought any new readers might be curious about this Greatest Hit from ten years past. This was written when I was an atheist, by the bye.

Book Review–Birthday of the World by Ursula K. LeGuin

Posted on March 13, 2003 by John C Wright

I am a fan of Ursula K. LeGuin; I read her Earthsea books back when they were the only books that had dragons on the covers. I also enjoyed her LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS immensely, and have always like the stories in her Hainish Ekumen background. Hence, I am disappointed when she uses her work as a platform for preaching against the institution of marriage.

In BIRTHDAY OF THE WORLD, the romantic and marital customs of the worlds of her Hainish Ekumen are explored in a series of short tales. On one planet, marriage is dismissed as a type of wicked magic; on another, marriage is always a foursome of two homosexual and two heterosexual relationships. On yet another planet, men and women hire loveless gigolos to stud them for reproduction, and seek love and romance only in lesbian unions. Far from being ecumenical, the customs of the Ekuman worlds have a monotonous provincialism to them: unromantic, unchaste, unfaithful, and, in a word, unrealistic.

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Happy Birthday to Me!

Posted October 24, 2013 By John C Wright

I had a very nice birthday, thank you for asking. My youngest read Dr Seuss’ HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU, after which he very solemnly told me that he wished he could do for me what they do in Katroo.

I appreciate the sentiment, but if I calculate this correctly, in Katroo you end up with fifty hippo-heimers, baskets of orchids that smell of licorice, a pet that is tallest of allest, and a time telling fish large as a killer whale, requiring one to jump into the nearest large body of water rather than look at a small chronometer strapped to one’s wrist or affixed to a buttonhole by fine chain (which is as I have always done). Also, the illustration seems to promise a high fatality rate among the clippers and cloppers nipping and nopping at the blossoms, as they chop off the branches on which they stand.

So I am Fifty-Two today, and still in debt. If you, dear reader, which to bestow a birthday present, please do the following: go immediately to my beautiful and talented wife’s Amazon page here http://www.amazon.com/L.-Jagi-Lamplighter/e/B0028OGMLM and hit the LIKE button.

To my loyal fan ( you know who you are!) please do not fret that my beard is gray and my head is bald. In my heart, I am still full of zest and vim! No, that is false. In my heart, I have been a gray-souled and bitter cynic, crooked and hoary as Vainamoinen since I was thirteen. It is only as I grow old that my outward shape matches my inner age.

I calculate I have enough time left on Earth to write about another thirty books, that is assuming, of course, that I write a book a year, and live for another thirty years, and muse continues to visit me. This last factor is one over which I have no control.

The advantage of being a writer as opposed to a more physically demanding job (such as a professional daredevil who wrestles burning alligators while flung from an airplane in the stratosphere, or a professional robot-fighter) is that I should be able to continue at my preferred craft up until the moment when they bury me.
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I’ve Got a Secret

Posted October 24, 2013 By John C Wright

It is amazing what you can find on the Internet. My cousin Yvonne brought this to the attention of my brother Stephen, and I thought I would share this with you.

Can you guess the secret?

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The Muse of Exterminator Novels

Posted October 21, 2013 By John C Wright

From another interview with Gaiman, The Gods of the Funny Books
An Interview with Neil Gaiman and Rachel Pollack. I came across this:

POLLACK: An amazing thing about Blake is that while he’d tell people that his work was dictated to him by angels, he was a conscious artist working an reworking his material. People who don’t understand how that’s possible don’t understand what art is about. I was reading an interview once in one of those Soldier of Fortune magazines with one of these guys that writes those series books, like Exterminator 28. The guy was saying that he didn’t feel like it’s him writing, but that something writes thought him. And I thought, bloody hell, it’s a universal experience. Here’s this hack churning our incredibly trite work, who has that same experience of a spirit writing his story for him. It has nothing to do with it being high art or low art or popular art or esoteric art.

GAIMAN: People forget there are muses for the Exterminator novels. She’s working just as hard as the muses for poetry or comic books.

POLLACK: That’d be a great idea for a story.

My comment: I notice that it is Polloack who expresses surprise that the hacks and potboilersmiths among us are visited by the muses, and Gaiman, who is much more democratic in spirit, points out that the gods visit the meek and foolish and low as well as the high and great and wise. If the goddess of love afflicts men as wise as Merlin and Solomon as well as fools like me, or the terrible war god slays the humblest private as well as kings, which should the muses love only elites? Homer’s muse on silent wings visited some rustic fiddler composing a Clerihew after she saw Homer nodding, no doubt.

 

 

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Neil Gaiman: The Future Depends on Libraries

Posted October 21, 2013 By John C Wright

A man after my own heart has written an article (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming) well worth the reading and pondering:

The world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different.

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

It’s simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

And while we’re on the subject, I’d like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it’s a bad thing. As if “escapist” fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.

If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn’t you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.

As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

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Bill Whittle’s AURORA

Posted October 18, 2013 By John C Wright

If you are like me, you would pay good money to see a realistic, hard-as-diamonds hard SF story made into a movie.

It is called AURORA: The Free Frontier. It sounds like a cross between a Ben Bova story and a Bob Heinlein yarn with a bit of Arthur C. Clarke thrown in for realism. It has not been made yet, but listen to him pitch the idea.
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Superman at 75

Posted October 17, 2013 By John C Wright

You may have seen this animated short elsewhere, but if not, enjoy.

I was pleased to see how many references I recognized, including the mechanical monsters from the Max Fleischer cartoon where Superman first developed x-ray vision.
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Starvation and Socialism

Posted October 17, 2013 By John C Wright

Stephen J asks:

there’s only so happy I can be about the fizzling of the population bomb because as much as it is due to human ingenuity finding ways to feed and manage greater numbers, it has also, I think, been tragically contributed to by widespread contraception and abortion. The number I typically hear cited by pro-life advocates is forty million people lost to abortion alone, just in the States, in the forty years since Roe vs. Wade; expand that to the world, and include not just the deaths of abortion but the lives prevented by contraception in the eighty years since Lambeth and the sixty years since the Pill, and I have to wonder if indeed Ehrlich would have been closer to the mark if none of those things had ever happened. (Which is by no means an argument for those things and I don’t want to make it one, which is precisely why I find that whole train of thought so upsetting.)

Am I overestimating the effect of these evils? Or underestimating even yet both Providence and human ingenuity? I would be very happy to be told that both Planned Parenthood and Ehrlich can be wrong.

Answer: Yes. Both are not only wrong, and dead wrong, both have done incalculable harm to so many people that even the sufferings of hell will hardly atone for it. Would there be a One Child Policy in China (which made my daughter an orphan, thank you very much, so I have a personal reason to hate it) were it not for scaremonger Ehrlich and his nonsense?

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Malthus at the Movies

Posted October 17, 2013 By John C Wright

An excellent article on the folly of overpopulation fears (h/t to CAEI):

http://thefederalist.com/2013/09/26/malthus-at-the-movies/

Here is a sample:

The Population Bomb Fizzles

But a funny thing happened on the way to the apocalypse. Instead of running out of natural resources, they got cheaper. Population growth led to economic growth, not economic collapse. In the 1966 novel on which Soylent Green was based, earth’s population in the year 2022 has reached the staggering level of… seven billion. In other words, the book actually underestimated world population growth. Yet from 1961 to 2007, the food supply increased 27 percent per person, despite world population growing from 3.6 to 6.7 billion.

The real problem with the panicked predictions of Soylent Green and The Population Bomb was a failure of imagination combined with a lack of faith in the creativity and resilience of humanity. Predictions of imminent resource exhaustion based on currently known supplies is the equivalent of going to your local supermarket, calculating that there is only enough food there to last a couple of weeks, and concluding that we should see mass starvation by the end of the month. The math behind the calculations might be fine, but the inability to take into account human adaptability makes them nearly worthless.

Ehrlich’s strongest critic was the economist Julian Simon, and Ehrlich proved to be enough of gambler to make a public bet with Simon. In 1980, Simon argued that, contra Ehrlich’s doomsaying, commodities would become more plentiful and cheaper over the next decade. As Simon saw things, it was a mistake to think of natural resources as finite materials in the ground. Throughout most of history, having oil on your land was kind of a nuisance. It’s black and sticky and wasn’t good for much of anything. It’s only when people figured out some valuable use for oil that it became a natural resource. Human ingenuity, therefore, is the ultimate resource. More people means not just more consumers, but more problem solvers.

In 1990, Ehrlich was forced to admit his predictions were wrong and mailed Simon a check for losing the bet. You’d think that realizing mass starvation was not inevitable would have been a relief, but Ehrlich was hardly a gracious loser. If someone had to die in order to prove scarcity and overpopulation were legitimate concerns, Ehrlich had an idea about who that might be. Five years after losing his bet, he would tell the Wall Street Journal, “If Simon disappeared from the face of the Earth, that would be great for humanity.”

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Rachel Griffin on Kindle! Unexpected Enlightenment Day is HERE!

Posted October 17, 2013 By John C Wright

Let sound the horns and brazen trumpets! The greatest book OF ALL TIME AND SPACE is finally available! Mortgage your homes and sell your children to gypsies to raise the available funds! Engage in a mad buying spree brought on by eating Twinkies! Throw thrift to the four winds in a gesture of heedless abandon and bravado!

http://www.amazon.com/Unexpected-Enlightenment-Rachel-Griffin-ebook/dp/B00FY1RSXC

L. Jagi Lamplighter, a fantastic new voice and a fabulous new world in the YA market! Rachel Griffin is a hero who never gives up! I cheered her all the way!
—Faith Hunter, author of the Skinwalker series

Rachel Griffin wants to know everything. As a freshman at Roanoke Academy for the Sorcerous Arts, she has been granted to opportunity to study both mundane and magical subjects.

But even her perfect recollection of every book she has ever read does not help her when she finds a strange statue in the forest—a statue of a woman with wings. Nowhere—neither in the arcane tomes of the Wise, nor in the dictionary and encyclopedia of the non-magic-using Unwary—can she find mention of such a creature.

What could it be? And why are the statue’s wings missing when she returns?

When someone tries to kill a fellow student, Rachel soon realizes that, in the same way her World of the Wise hides from mundane folk, there is another, more secret world hiding from everyone—which her perfect recall allows her to remember. Her need to know everything drives her to investigate.

Rushing forward where others fear to tread, Rachel finds herself beset by wraiths, magical pranks, homework, a Raven said to bring the doom of worlds, love’s first blush, and at least one fire-breathing teacher.

Curiosity might kill a cat, but nothing stops Rachel Griffin!

The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin, a plucky band of children join forces to fight evil, despite the best efforts of incompetent adults, at a school for wizards. YA fiction really doesn’t get better than that.
—Jonathan Moeller, author of The Ghosts series

Rachel Griffin is curious, eager and smart, and ready to begin her new life at Roanoke Academy for the Sorcerous Arts, but she didn’t expect to be faced with a mystery as soon as she got there. Fortunately she’s up to the task.  Take all the best of the classic girl detective, throw in a good dose of magic and surround it all with entertaining, likeable friends and an intriguing conundrum, and you’ll have The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin, a thrilling adventure tailor-made for the folks who’ve been missing Harry Potter,  Exciting, fantastical events draw readers into Rachel’s world and solid storytelling keeps them there.
—Misty Massey, author of Mad Kestrel

Please buy my wife’s book or I will cry. I did the interior pictures.
—John C. Wright, pathetic guy with no sense of dignity, author of Golden Orphans of a Trillion of Everness. Read the remainder of this entry »

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It’s off!

Posted October 17, 2013 By John C Wright

Cross your fingers and hope they buy it. Tor books, my esteemed publisher, has just been sent THE CONCUBINE VECTOR, the fourth (but not the final) volume in my COUNT TO THE ESCHATON sequence.

I wonder what the cover art will eventually look like for the Eschaton sequence? Hmmm….

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GRAY LENSMAN by E.E. Doc Smith.

Posted October 16, 2013 By John C Wright

We continue down memory lane to the far future of galactic and intergalactic war, if there are any of you old enough to remember 1939 (the same year Superman came out), This essay will continue the format of my previous essay, where I speak a little bit about the book in question, and then rant about some unrelated topic, such as bimetallism or the Caledonian war.

Most second books, especially those in a multivolume series, suffer from a certain set of understandable defects: the characters no longer enjoy the freshness of having been recently introduced, the plot must grow out of the previous book but at the same time go in a new direction, and the antagonist is either a new villain, in which case the reader has no emotional investment in booing him, or is an old villain, in which case the reader has already seen him defeated once, which makes him less able to inspire fear.

Usually the second book is weaker than the first; in this case, it is stronger. Indeed, I will be bold enough to say that if it were not for GRAY LENSMAN and its sequels the first book, GALACTIC PATROL, would have been largely forgotten. That is, more largely forgotten.

E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith handles all these problems with an adroitness so skillful and yet so understated that it might not be noticed at first, and so clever that it is frankly astonishing that no other writer has copied these solutions.

 

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GUEST POST: With Great Art Comes Great Responsibility

Posted October 14, 2013 By John C Wright

One of my readers answered my question about the true and the beautiful in words so clear and sentiments so true that I thought it best to reprint them here. Consider this to be a guest essay:

 For some reason I could not log in to comment on the Magnificat post. I did want to draw your attention to Charles Murray’s book Human Accomplishment from 2003. In this book Dr. Murray goes through an extremely rigorous statistical analysis of the importance of various historical figures in the most important areas of human endeavor: Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Physics, Mathematics, Medicine, Technology, Combined Sciences, Chinese Philosophy, Indian Philosophy, Western Philosophy, Western Music, Chinese Painting, Japanese Art, Western Art, Arabic Literature, Chinese Literature, Indian Literature, Japanese Literature, and Western Literature.

In all cases he found that human beings accomplish more when they have a cultural and personal sense of higher goods. That the formulations of the schoolmen: *Unum, Bonum, Verum, et* *Pulchrum* is correct. Keeping in mind that Dr. Murray is an agnostic at best, and I believe he is an atheist, it is a powerful admission against interest. Indeed when discussing these issues in interviews and in lectures Murray becomes visibly uncomfortable when the subject comes up. He knows that his own particular lack of faith is borrowing from a greater patrimony, and does not personally replenish the well. To his credit, he is aware of it, and honest enough that he is uncomfortable about it and it’s implications.

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The Epic of Space

Posted October 14, 2013 By John C Wright

The following are the words of E.E. Doc Smith describing the writing of his Lensman books. I found it on a corner of the Internet, and I know not if it is still in copyright. If anyone objects I will take it down. Until then, I hope you find it as fascinating as did I:

The Epic of Space

How do I write a space story? The question is simple and straightforward enough. The answer, however, is not; since it involves many factors.

What do I, as a reader, like to read? Campbell, de Camp, Heinlein, Leinster, Lovecraft, Merritt, Moore, Starzl, Taine, van Vogt, Weinbaum, Williamson-all of these rate high in my book. Each has written more than one tremendous story. They cover the field of fantastic fiction, from pure weird to pure science fiction. While very different, each from all the others, they have many things in common, two of which are of interest here.

First, they all put themselves into their work. John Kenton is Abraham Merritt; Jirel of Joiry is Catherine Moore.

Second, each writes-or wrote -between the lines, so that one reading is not enough to discover what is really there. Two are necessary-three and four are often-times highly rewarding. Indeed, there are certain stories which I still re-read, every year or so, with undiminished pleasure.

Consider Merritt, for instance. He wrote four stories “The Ship of Ishtar,” “The Moon Pool,” “The Snake Mother,” and “Dwellers in the Mirage”-which will be immortal. A ten-year-old child can read them and thrill at the exciting adventurous surface stories. A poet can read them over and over for their feeling and imagery. A philologist can study them for their perfection of wording and phraseology. And yet, underlying each of them, there is a bedrock foundation of philosophy, the magnificence of which simply cannot be absorbed at one sitting.

In this connection, how many of you have read, word by word, the ascent to the Bower of Bel, in “The Ship of Ishtar?” Those who have not, have missed one of the most sublime passages in literature. And yet a friend of mine told me that he had skipped “that stuff.” It was too dry!

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