Archive for May, 2014

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SF to English Dictionary

Posted May 16, 2014 By John C Wright

This is also a reprint of an article from 2008:

In a previous post, I used some nonstandard terms specific to the genre subculture known as Slandom.

“as thick as a padawan in kemmer trying Rishathra on a Deltan nerf-herder.”

For those of you muggles who cannot grok our Slan L33tspeak, I will provide a translation.

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Contraterrenogenesis

Posted May 16, 2014 By John C Wright

This is a reprint of an article from 2008:

Over at Lorem Ipsum, Jed Hartman observes:

A common problem in fantasy and science fiction stories is drowning the reader in made-up words at the start of the story.

In fantasy, this most often takes the form of a few paragraphs of High Fantasy Names, both of places and people:

It was the seventh day of Rilrak, and Vesnalorm the Mighty, Ess’lor of Nyeang, stood in Yerale Pass by the broad swift-flowing Undh, looking down over Warawe Valley to the golden towers of Soelmwar. “Alas,” thought Vesnalorm; “King Dukeko will die this day at the hands of his brother, Lllarod, and his sister, Ightch, and his cousins Nudah and Worler, if my Knights of Banismos do not act quickly.”

 

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A Sympathetic Review from Vast, Cool, and Unsympathetic

Posted May 15, 2014 By John C Wright

or, Vaster Than They Previously Appeared

Mr. John Markley pays my latest book high praise:

I liked The Judge of Ages quite a bit. The central premise of the entire series is one of the more intriguing ones I’ve run into in recent years, and Wright continues to do interesting things with it. We learn more about some of the post-human inhabitants of the Earth and just what’s happened to reduce the world to its desolate and seemingly uninhabited state, as well as the true nature of Azarchel’s machinations and the scope of Montrose’s response, both of which turn out to be even vaster than they previously appeared.

And I realize that “vaster than they previously appeared” sounds sort of absurd in the context of an 8000-year conflict between supergeniuses where human evolution itself is the battleground and entire sapient species are casualties, but therein lies one of the great strengths of the book and series. Wright throws out interesting ideas with wild abandon, from little details about future technologies or societies to much larger things with important consequences to the entire story or setting, and yet does so in such a way that even bizarre or outrageously grandiose concepts still seem natural and reasonable within the logic of the story. It combines thoughtfully worked out consequences of technologies and other ideas and the constraints of reasonably hard science fiction (there’s no FTL, antigravity, or my personal bugbear, nanotech-as-magic) with the sort of wild exuberance I’d usually associate with old pulp space opera or early Marvel Comics.

(Wright’s writing in general often seems to have this quality, whether he’s doing science fiction or fantasy, where there’s such a proliferation of stuff that the story seems like it ought to either be crushed under its own density or go careening out of control and over the side of a cliff, but doesn’t.)

There are some excellent action scenes, and Wright uses the collision of technologies and biologies from across his future history- powered armored and other relatively conventional science fiction weapons like railguns, a monstrous race of posthumans capable of radically modifying their own biology and ruthlessly optimized for conflict, colossal 22nd-century dueling pistols with bullets that have their own engines and countermeasures and accompanying escorts of smaller defensive bullets, a self-replicating computer system that’s been gnawing at the iron core of the earth long enough to have significant influence on the planet’s magnetic field, among other things- effectively in this regard as well.

I still like Menelaus Montrose a lot as protagonist and viewpoint character. It helps that his odd backstory allows him to serve as a sort of audience surrogate in a very strange world without being ignorant, ineffectual, or bland in the way such characters often are. He’s able to quickly understand and adapt to the bizarre conditions he finds himself in thanks to his augmented intelligence, but his original background is in a society much closer to our own then to its successors. Consequently, he appreciates just how bizarre his world and his own story are (from the perspective of a 21st-centuryish human) in a way most protagonists of far future science fiction do not, without being a bewildered primitive or inept fish out of water. He approaches things with a combination of wry, seemingly detached humor and a very serious sense of purpose, and the mixture works well.

He goes on to say that the opening chapters had weak pacing, a criticism I cannot dispute. But overall he recommends the work in warm tones and says he is eager for the next volume.

(By the bye, let me announce that this next volume is not going to be called CONCUBINE VECTOR after all, nor, after solemn discussions with the publisher, will it be called my preferred title, HARRY POTTER AND THE LUSCIOUS LESBIAN LOVE-SLAVES OF THE VOLUPTUOUS VAMPIRE VIXEN OF VENUS VERSUS GODZILLA OF GOR, but instead will be called ARCHITECT OF AEONS, in reference to the person, or planet, who is the main antagonist in this stretch of the plot.)

Read the whole thing (the whole review, I mean) here.

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Alignment and Realism

Posted May 14, 2014 By John C Wright

As the reader may recall from our last episode:

Alignment in tabletop miniature roleplaying games is a stat that defines the character’s loyalty to a given moral code. The moral codes in a Dungeons and Dragons, and games like it, are meant to be rough and ready, and something a thirteen-year-old boy (the target audience) can grasp and play without difficulty or distraction. Gary Gygax took inspiration from Lord of the Rings by Tolkien and from the Eternal Champion cycle by Michael Moorcock, and decided on a three-by-three matrix of good-neutral-evil by lawful-neutral-chaotic. Other games, especially storytelling games like VAMPIRE THE MASQUERADE or PENDRAGON, meant for an older target audience (fourteen-year-old boys) made the internal moral conflict of the character central to the drama of the game: there the alignment is between honor and dishonor, being a monster or being a man.

The law-versus-chaos spectrum is something Moorcock invented for the admirable purpose of cranking out fairly repetitive action-adventure sword-n-sorcery paperbacks where the angst of our beloved antihero protagonist, the eternally brooding Eternal Champion, never lacks for grist for his woe. It is formula writing, but it is good a good formula, and I personally do not mock it but salute it.

The formula is this: the multiverse is a cosmic war between equally inhuman and unpleasant divinities representing total tyranny and total anarchy. Since victory for either side would be disastrous for mankind, our beloved antihero can always easily be placed in a situation where he must betray one side or the other, betray one ideal or the other, and he can always place the back of his wrist against his forehead and bemoan the fact that he is caught up in an eternal conflict (hence his name) with no meaning and no resolution. Striking this pose is sweet as fresh peaches to the target audience (fourteen-year-old boys) to whom bemoaning the cruelty of life is a newfound pleasure, and they eat it up with cream.

But, upon reflection, lawfulness and anarchy have no innate moral meaning whatever.

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The Wright Perspective: Who is on the Right?

Posted May 14, 2014 By John C Wright

My column for this week at Everyjoe:

http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/05/14/politics/what-is-a-conservative-who-is-on-the-right/

What is a Conservative? Who is on the Right? I am, if these words are used honestly. They are almost never used honestly.

Conservatives are placed to the Right on the traditional Left-to-Right political spectrum. That spectrum groups Whigs and Republicans as well as their enemies the Monarchists and Imperialists on the Right, Conservatives as well as Anarcho-Capitalists, and, worst of all, members of the National Socialists Worker’s Party (Nazis). The traditional spectrum is based on the assumption that enlightenment, change, revolution and progress are the exclusive property of Socialism, and that any opposition to Socialism is rooted in benighted ignorance, folly, reaction, conformity, cowardice and regress.

If we call ourselves “Right,” the unwary are likely to get a confused mental image of a follower of Torquemada, Simon LeGree, Adolf Hitler, George Bush and Gordon Gekko, perhaps with Cotton Mather thrown in. But none of these men have anything in common, except that they represent ideas Progressives hate.

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Interior Illustrations by John C. Wright

Posted May 13, 2014 By John C Wright

In case you wanted to see the interior illustrations for my wife’s latest book, THE UNEXPECTED ENLIGHTENMENT OF RACHEL GRIFFIN, drawn by none other than yours truly, allow me to present three of them here.

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Alignments in Amber

Posted May 13, 2014 By John C Wright

Alignment is the assignment of a rough and ready system of moral standards to tabletop miniature role playing games, mostly used to allow the Moderator to decide what happens if Boromir picks up the One Ring, or when Sturmbannführer Toht or Oberst Dietrich pry open the Ark of the Covenant.

Alignment is also used as the simplest form of roleplaying aid for new players who have never pretended to be someone other than themselves before. Just this last month, I saw my own son, playing a half-orc monk named Chim Pan Zi have to confront the fact that his lawful good character could not break into a building owned by the evil Baron, or even disobey the evil Baron’s evil weapons-confiscation laws. (He gave up his weapons and continued to fight bare handed). The solution he came up with was that Lawful Good members of his order obeyed Good Laws according to the spirit of the law, but Evil Laws only according to the letter, being minimally compliant, and not cooperating with an active evil. I thought that was a pretty sophisticated solution for a fifteen year old to come up with. But the point he, he had to think out how someone with a different worldview and philosophy of life would think.

Once Dungeons and Dragons got the ball rolling on Alignment, several other rules systems made several other clever rules about alignment.

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Reviewer Praise for JUDGE OF AGES

Posted May 13, 2014 By John C Wright

Paul Di Filippo at Locus Online gives my book very high praise indeed.

 

In this installment of his far-future adventure, which blends flavors of Ed Hamilton, Stephen Baxter, Doc Smith, Jack Vance, E. R. Eddison, C. S. Lewis, Jack Williamson and A. E. van Vogt into a unique and generally tasty mélange…

I go must go on to affirm that the novel provides much pleasure. Wright marshals up a big backstory of human evolution that proves to have some secrets we had not known before. The titanic battle scenes are full of mind-boggling super science. The camaraderie among Montrose and his pals evokes Arthurian depths of feeling. Alien psychologies are plumbed, along with Montrose’s old-fashioned, native Texan, dogmatic pureness of intention. And the book’s surprise ending does represent a sea-change of sorts.

Paramount above all is Wright’s lofty fabulism of prose (with some contrasting down-home locutions from Montrose). When one recalls that Wright has recently issued a volume of his stories set in William Hope Hodgson’s baroque Night Land subcreation, some of the roots of Wright’s affinity for Homeric syntax and Shakespearean eloquence becomes more apparent.

There are moments when this book seems poised to fall into a kind of Henry Darger idiolect and private vision … But every time, at the last minute, Wright pulls back from mysticism and private symbology to show us startling philosophical vistas of futurity only he could deliver.

 

Read the whole thing (the review) here. You can also read the whole thing (the book) after you buy it, of course. It makes a great gift for the feast day of Our Lady of Fatima.

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Black Mass Canceled

Posted May 13, 2014 By John C Wright

Let the joyous news be spread:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/05/12/cardinal-sean-malley-expresses-disappointment-harvard-decision-allow-black-mass-campus/tUjYx2817C65LAHousRIeP/story.html

I should mention that I prayed a rosary over this, but the wife prayed all evening.

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An Afterword on the Stormtroopers of Toleration

Posted May 12, 2014 By John C Wright

Last week, I wrote an article for the Intercollegiate Review called Heinlein, Hugos, and Hogwash.

The point of the article was the a certain segment of the science fiction community has taken it upon themselves to police the rest of us for the political correctness of our thoughts. Their preferred tool to do this is peer pressure, sniping, sneering, cavorting, complaining, and being busybodies and public nuisances.

The result has been getting people fired from magazine gigs, disinvited from being guests of honor, or boycotting anthologies that offend arbitrary quotas, urging fandom to vote against Hugo nominees based on the author’s conformity to the peer pressure, or kicking lifetime members out of SFWA for holding uncouth opinions.

I am surprised, but should not be, that an obscure opinion in an obscure journal by an obscure author such as myself would provoke so many loud and hostile reactions. (Maybe it is a slow news day and there is nothing else to fret about.)

Why so vehement a reaction when so my other published opinions of mine, much more controversial, go uncontroverted? I suspect that the witchhunters hate being identified for what they are. Truth is their kryptonite.

I won’t bother linking to them. Overhearing strangers talk about me either in praise or blame bores me, since I am not a fascinating subject to myself, and none of these people know my character or my character flaws.

But I will make one comment, which I hope is telling:

Please note that these various articles critiquing my article do not say, “the witch hunt never happened; we, the socially-aware segment of the science fiction community, are completely forgiving of all personal flaws and differences of opinion, political and personal, between ourselves and Malzberg, Moon, Correia, Card, etc, and we judge their works only on the merit of the writing!”

Instead they say, “But those people he defends really are witches and pariahs! Right-thinking people must have nothing to do with them!”

Which would seem to prove, rather than refute, my point.

If a man should accuse you, my dear slow-witted stormtroopers of love and tolerance, of being unloving and intolerant to the point where you are ostracizing pariahs, and if, in reply to the accusation, your reflex is to declare the accuser to be a pariah and ostracize him, then onlookers are not likely to be convinced the accusation is inaccurate.

Even if everyone I defended were as guilty as sin, a forgiving crowd would have forgiven those sins.

The defense has proven the case for the prosecution. The prosecutions rests.

 

 

 

——————————————-

AN AFTERWORD TO THE AFTERWORD: For those of you interested in following the silly gossip about me:
http://file770.com/?p=16991

My comment: A man whom no one in his right mind would call a bigot, if he asks men to be forgiving of bigots, is called a bigot. Anyone who speaks up for the lepers becomes a leper.  The problem here is that if you are expelled from a small circle, you are not shoved into a closet, but shoved out into a larger world.

The so-called leper colony of science fiction readers interested in well written science fiction work is a wider world than the science fiction readers fascinated with the the follies and paradoxes of political correctness.

I am happy to hear about a good review.

Mr Scalzi has unambiguously denounced a comment purported to be from him left by some gossip (whose business it is to stir up enmity between comrades) attempting to drive a wedge between us.

I will never doubt him again! He and I still need to overcome the Pluto-Haters. The Mi-Go are depending on us.

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Reviewer Praise for Awake in the Night

Posted May 12, 2014 By John C Wright

Here is a review AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/brief-no-spoilers-review-of-john-c.html

 

No spoilers.

I bought this novella having seen the recommendation from Adam Greenwood:

http://www.jrganymede.com/2014/04/14/awake-in-the-night-land

I fully agree that this is a really, really good book; indeed it is good in a way and at a level that I found almost bewildering. The level of the thing seems to be far above me – I was just aghast at the way the story kept twisting and reversing, again and again and again, yet with a complete sureness of touch and cohesion.

I have already said that, simply as prose, it is as original and high in quality as anything I’ve come across written by authors of the past couple of generations; the plotting is, if anything, even better.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/the-prose-artistry-of-john-c-wright.html

Having said all this, I am not sure whether I got it all, indeed I am sure I didn’t. Without being in the slightest pretentious (in the way that Henry James, James Joyce or Samuel Becket – and innumerable lesser modernists – are so often pretentious; I mean that sense of deliberately trying to impress the reader with a conviction of the authors’ cleverness) I am nonetheless sure that JCW’s mind, specifically his fiction-writing persona inclusive of whatever inspirations effectual, is operating at a level considerably beyond mine.

The Roman Catholic church is fortunate in having someone as advocate of his quality – and indeed the whole nature of this fiction strikes me as the best kind of product of this most intellectually-sophisticated of Christian denominations.

Another element, which I would not regard as typically Catholic, but which I found profoundly resonant, was the general idea that the salvation was a thing that involved a man and wife, together. This seemed to come from the author’s heart and spoke to my own heart as an ideal, and indeed as a kind of ultimate or eventual existential necessity: that we are each individually, as man or woman, complementary half-persons, even at best.

I did not feel the book was anything so formal as an allegory, certainly there was no point-by-point correspondence going on – but without doubt there is an important and deliberate Christian relevance. This is a picture of the human condition in its essence. Indeed, it is the kind of book a Christian can and should learn from; and which may produce un-named stirrings and yearnings in the breast of a non-Christian.

I only finished the book today – so these are first impressions. What will be interesting will be to see and to feel how my ideas and evaluations develop over time, and (presumably) re-readings.

Awake in the Night Final

My comment:

My natural modesty forbids me from making a comment, except to say that the story was just not that good when I wrote it.

Maybe the editor changed it when I was not looking or something, or Titania, the beautiful and terrifying Queen of Elfland with the lightest brush of her charming wand.

I suppose you do not believe the Queen of Elfland theory, dear reader, but there is a strange alchemy to writing which this writer, at least, does not understand, and a stranger alchemy to reading. It is like walking into dreams.

———————————————————

Note: I have a sort-of declaration of interest to make here: Mr Charlton is a penpal of mine, and he knows me to be an admirer of his thought and work, and, besides, just to be sure, I commanded my human-ape hybrid minions, the Apeloids of Skull Island, connect a mind-control parasite from Starro the Conqueror to his nervous system and forced Mr Charlton, shrieking and weeping, his muscles locked and rigid, to watch while his trembling pen-hand against his will wrote this review.

Bruce Starro
He assures me he would have written the same thing had I not done that, but then my beautiful but evil daughter, the Princess Pingping the Unmerciful, helped him to escape from the Experiment Pits, so I am not sure what to believe. According to my last good report, he was shot down while fleeing on a hawkman rocketcycle, by my cyborg Pterodactyls in close pursuit, to crash somewhere in the rocky mountainscape known as The Haunted Labyrinth of Death. There is rumored to be an entryway into a freakish underground world ruled by dinosaurs and the longlost descendants of the serpent man of Atlantis. I am wise enough not to discredit these old tales. However, since I killed the insolent ornithopter pilot who was making the report, who claimed it was impossible for Charlton to suvive, I do not exactly know whether he yet lives to threaten my global ambitions. I will be seeking volunteers from among the gladiators on Death Row to enter the Labyrinth to search. That cannot go badly.

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Alignment

Posted May 12, 2014 By John C Wright

I’ve always been mildly puzzled, and, because I am a geek, mildly annoyed, by the ‘Alignments’ in Dungeons and Dragons.

For those of you who never played Dungeons and Dragons, I gaze with covetousness upon your good sense spending time outdoors or playing chess or collecting stamps or something clearly more useful to God and man. But I have to explain that when you invent a character to play in this game, you are asked to assign him an alignment.

Gary Gygax, the co-inventor of the game, establishes nine alignments: Lawful Good, Lawful Neutral, Lawful Evil, Neutral Good, True Neutral, Neutral Evil, Chaotic Good, Chaotic Neutral, and Chaotic Evil.

Good basically means being altruistic and helpful to others, and Evil basically means being selfish and cruel and Objectivist. Lawful means obeying the letter of the law whether it is just or unjust, and Chaotic means anything from being free-spirited to being an anarchist to being insane.

Lawful Good are paladins and white knights; Lawful Evil are Nazis in snappy uniforms; Chaotic Good are loveable rogues like Robin Hood or Han Solo; Chaotic Evil is the Joker from Batman.

The first thing to notice about alignments is that Gygax is trying to stuff into his game the moral quality from legends and stories ranging from tales of Arthur or Charlemagne to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and also stuff in the amoral quality from Moorcock’s Eternal Champion cycle.

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Books We Cannot Read Only Once

Posted May 12, 2014 By John C Wright

The fine fellows over at SfSignal ask the following question:

There are books we read once. There are books we re-read. And then there are the books that we wear out our copy because we devour it again and again. The books we have to buy a copy for ourselves immediately upon lending out our copy because we’re sure we will never see it again–or just want to make sure we have it on hand. What are some of these genre books for you? Why do you go back to them again and again?

My answer:

The primary purpose of nonfiction books is either to give us facts, give us insights based on facts, or to persuade or urge us into some course of action based on that insight. But the primary purpose of fiction is to slake the thirst we have for the magical waters which flow from worlds beyond the dry and bitter world of facts, to drink, to bathe, to be cleansed, to be refreshed, and to emerge shining from the baptism of the imagination to return to the dry wasteland of the factual world washed and prepared for battle. Science fiction and Fantasy form the deeper waters which carry us farther from the shore of this wasteland, and therefore provide deeper springs from which, through the imagination, to irrigate it.

Hence, those books which call a reader again and again to its wellsprings must be those which have particular power to restore what the factual world does not give him. By seeing what books never lose the power to refresh him, you can see what he most craves and yet which the world most fails to provide him.

Science Fiction is a refreshing drink when you look around at the world, and you see some bad and ancient institution, and you think: that will never change. It is also a shocking splash of cold water in the face when you look at some good we take for granted and think: that will never change. Read the remainder of this entry »

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An Observation on the Disposition of Spiritual Enemies

Posted May 9, 2014 By John C Wright

Three times so far in my career I have been the subject of what Orwell describes as the Two-Minute Hate. By this I mean, an attempt, usually by a small and pathetic number of people pretending to be a grand and great number of people, indulging in the Internet equivalent of a shrieking contest apparently directed at me, or some imaginary version of me they have conjured in their fevered brains for that purpose. It is booing.

Always this is accompanied by swearing, giggling, hissing, cavorting, evil dances, gibberish, monkey-antics, blather, blither, halfwitticisms, and all fashion of juvenile eccentricism that is self-humiliation if not self-parody. Sometimes this is accompanied by threats of boycott from people who are not customers, but who do not seem cognizant that one must be a customer to be a boycotter. (And I am not sure the wares I sell would be comprehensible to minds unable to grasp the idea that one must be a customer before one can cease being a customer.)

While they are certainly free to boo, it is the timing of the spasms of gibberish that betrays the true nature of those who indulge in this odd pasttime.

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Goedel and Panphysicalism

Posted May 9, 2014 By John C Wright

And now a moment for arid philosophy! Because I know my readers don’t want me just to talk about Space Princesses!

If materialism is true, that the universe is like a machine with programming or like a system of logical statements one following from the next as in geometry. There is nothing in the universe which is not defined, determined, or caused by anything other than a material cause. Hence the chains of cause and effect in the universe are exactly parallel to the logical formal causes of a machine following its programming or a system of logical statements following their assumptions. This means that everything, everything, everything in the universe is exactly the same as a line of code in a computer program, a set of cogs in a clockwork, a set of proofs in a system of geometry.

By Goedel’s argument, there is no set of proofs in a system of geometry which is both universal and determined. Determined means you can tell whether it is true or false. Universal means that all proofs in the set of proofs are proved.

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