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GREEN KNIGHT’S SQUIRE and the Greydanus Occult Glamor Rating

Posted January 29, 2016 By John C Wright

Congratulate me, for the first draft of my latest book, GREEN KNIGHT’S SQUIRE, was finished last night.

It is my first attempt at a juvenile, and tells the story of Gilberec Moth, a sixteen year old from North Carolina, who is unpopular with students and administrators alike because he tells the truth fights for the weak, but does not inform on his fellow students. He also can understand the speech of birds and beasts. He is expelled for fighting, and must find honest work. At the advice of his dog, Ruff, he decides to become a knight.

Even though there is really not that much call for knighthood in the modern age. He follows the dog into the woods, and far from the fields we know.

He finds a one-eyed bear and a mermaid, and an elfin feast, an Arthurian monster and a monstrous saint. He enters places on the globe forgotten to normal men, unseen by satellites and mapmakers, and not a small spot either, but whole citadels, cities, mountains taller than Everest, a third hemisphere. In this untouched, hidden continents are skies where passenger pigeons still fly, plains where American Indians still hunt, jungles where Aztecs still sacrifice, and battlefields where elfish knights adorned in glory fight over which misfortunes to impose on their slaves and cattle, mankind.

And I just wrote the last word of the curtain line last night. Pop the corks and blow the horns!

Now, the first thing to ponder, of course, is the question any Christian fantasy writer must sooner or later encounter: Whether the portrayal of magic powers in his fantasy tale step over the bounds into glorifying occultism?

At one time, I held it to be absurd to worry about the portrayal of magic in books like Lord of the Rings. I thought only that fretful Christians with too much time on their hands, the kind who worry about whether Dungeons and Dragons is satanic, held such knuckledheaded ideas. But then my mind changed (and grew knuckleheaded) in college I met not one but several practicing neo-pagans, modern witches, who listed Tolkien’s work as their primary inspiration for an interest in the supernatural, which led to an interest in manipulating the supernatural by any means that presented themselves, that is, occultism.

To me, it matters not one whit whether occultism actually was real or all elaborate self delusion: worshiping devils and bowing to pagan gods in return for health and happiness, victory in battle or good crops is not so bad, but when you start asking for money and power, revenge on your enemies, curses and diseases, and even the alleged ‘white witches’ who seek only the good of others are reduced to a grinding hatred for their foes and hearts hard and pitiless, that is very bad, and that is precisely where the road of witchcraft lures.

I am not here arguing the point; I am speaking from experience. I have seen people, friends of mine including my closest, who are a good and kindhearted as any man alive, on an instant turn into sniggering, swaggering, sneering bundles of paranoia, malice and malignancy in a fashion that looks like demonic possession; and this is due (as far as I can tell) in their dabbling in occult forces they think they understand, but don’t. It is freaky.

It is also immensely stupid, like watching the intern pick up radium in her hand without donning gloves or protective goggles.

Nonetheless, the abuse of the imagination should not lead to the banning of the imagination, but to its healthy and proper use.

We exiles from Eden know as if by instinct that the material world is not all that there is, and the span between life and death is not the whole story, or, rather, a story of grinding fury, futility, mocking irony and final despair. If it is the whole story, it is senseless, absurd, and ugly. For the Exiles to dream of the realms where glory and power arising, singing, in the vales of endless light is no more contemptible than a muddy soldier in a foxhole clutching the photo of his fiancée, seeking comfort in the image of his true love to whom he will one day return.

To extend the metaphor, if the captain sees some soldiers carrying a picture of a girlfriend, allowed by army regulations, and others carrying a Playboy centerfold that is clearly pornography and against regs, he has to make  judgment about pinup girl photos of Betty Grable or Rita Hayworth.

To do this he has to list the ways in which the first case is like or unlike the second, and if it is too like the second case, it falls into the rules applied to the second case.

Now, those puritans who would throw out the girlfriend’s picture along with the Playboy bunny, be off with you. I need not hear your argument and will not.

There are Christians who eschew Wizard of Oz and Disney’s Tinkerbell for the same reason the monstrous Cromwell banned Christmas and burned violins and smashed stained glass windows.

Anyone who would throw away Narnia for fear of the occult is throwing away a book that saved more souls than their sour rigorism ever did. I am not giving up my Christmas Tree and not given up my D&D. You may, if this forms a particular temptation to you, you give them up, but not everyone need be teetotalers just because you cannot hold your wine.

For the rest of us, there has to be a judgment made between the harmless use of magic as a metaphor for real miracles and the harmful use of magic as a lure toward the occult.

So what are the two cases when it comes to fantasy magic?

Miracles display the power over nature Adam before the fall knew in Eden, and which prophets and martyrs are allowed in crucial moments to display. Occultism is the false promise by devils to give man such powers for the sake of accomplishing those evil works one dare not carry to heaven in prayer. Lucifer promises he will grant your will for filthy, mundane, and shameful things the magician would not dare insult the Virgin to grant.

Miracles in fairy stories are like the blessings of the fairy godmother in Cinderella. The theme of that story is the same as in the Magnificat, the Canticle of Mary: He hath put down the mighty from their seat : and hath exalted the humble and meek.

The fairy godmother is a childhood stand-in for the real Mother Mary in the same way that Santa Claus is a stand-in for the real Saint Nicholas, patron of Mariners and protector of children.

Such stand-ins are less prone to mislead the misleadable if certain fences or hedges are placed about the way magic is portrayed in fantasy stories.

The critic and apologist Steven D. Greydanus, in his essay ‘Harry Potter vs. Gandalf’ (http://decentfilms.com/articles/magic), identifies seven possible hedges that serve to divide the magic of fantasy from occultism. Here is the summary by Tom Simon, whom I quote to provide me with an excuse to link to his excellent essay ‘A Taste for Magic’ http://bondwine.com/2008/04/29/the-taste-for-magic/

  1. The pursuit of magic as a safe and lawful occupation is restricted to wholly imaginary realms, unconnected with our own world.
  2. The existence of magic is an openly known reality of which the inhabitants of those worlds are as aware as we are of rocket science.
  3. The pursuit of magic is confined to supporting characters, not the protagonists.
  4. The author includes cautionary threads in which exposure to magical forces proves to be a corrupting influence on the protagonists.
  5. Magical powers occur naturally only to characters who are not in fact human beings.
  6. Magic is the safe and lawful occupation of characters who embody a certain wizard archetype — white-haired old men with beards and robes and staffs, etc.
  7. The author gives no narrative space to the process by which magicians acquire their powers. Although study may be assumed as part of the back story, the wizard appears as a finished product with powers in place, and the reader is not in encouraged to dwell on the process of acquiring prowess in magic.

I am going to add my own hedge 8 beneath this: does the magic in the story act or feel like what real occultism does or pretends to do? Is the character turning to a magician to learn the outcome of a business deal, buy a love potion, lay a curse on a foe? Does the magic involve a rituals mocking of real Roman rites, including bad Latin, and mystic passes, calls and responses, mockeries of baptism or anointing and so on? Does the magic involve open or implied supplications to demons or dark powers, or is it just a superpower or psychic power like the Mind Meld of a Vulcan or Supergirl’s ability to fly, which might as well be a hitherto undiscovered branch of science and technology? Because if the wizard is an adventurer who throws fire from magic wand like a gunfighter blasting away with a sixshooter, in the fashion of Harry Dresden, this is about as occultic as the magic ring of the Green Lantern, which is to say, not at all.

So, the whole world from pole to pole is no doubt breathless and dazed and suffering stomach cramps of wonder and astonishment over the question of how my unpublished manuscript that no one has read lines up with this rather haphazard list of hedges against occultism. Well, gasp with brain-dazzled wonder no more!

Some very mild spoilers are below, but no one has read this manuscript, so it does not matter. Let us step through the list.

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The Windrose of Political Heresy

Posted January 29, 2016 By John C Wright

I once proposed a two dimensional political spectrum with orthodox Christianity, otherwise known as the truth, at the center of the x-axis and y-axis like  a lighthouse, and concentric rings issuing outward to show the distance from orthodox thought. In each direction the dominant thought of that direction eventually displaces Christian thought, and ends in nihilism, the philosophical posture that there is no truth known or knowable to man.

  • South is chivalry. In that direction is nationalist monarchy and Protestantism, the hierarchy of the old order of throne and altar, national churches and the divine right of kings, and far south the sultan or caliph who is both church and state together, and Caesar is worshiped as divine, not Christ;
  • North is the pragmatic and individualistic ‘classical liberalism’ of the conservative which severs church from state, and far north is deism, cynicism, libertarianism and selfishness, where   individualism and human rights are worshiped as divine, not Christ;
  • East is ideology, which is the attempt to replace religion with a secular philosophy. Here is the zealous spirit of the reformer, and far to the east is the communist, and Christ is hated as a rival to the Utopia;
  • West is mysticism, which is the attempt to divorce reason from religion and leave only an esoteric sentiment. The theosophists who would do away with government altogether are here, mystics and New Age spiritualists, and far west is the Gnostics who deny Christ in favor of their own personal claim to divinity.

Each one is an reaction to (or an overreaction to) the abuses or lapses of the previous. The abuses (real or not) of the Medieval Church led to a rise of national monarchs, as in England and Germany, who assumed clerical and spiritual powers, leading to Puritanism; the overreach of the national churches led to the classical liberalism and separation of church and state embodied in the Enlightenment, which is pragmatism and worldly practicality, devolving to cynicism; those weary of cynics wanted something deeper in life, but sought it in pursuit of secular utopias, and sought mystical union not with God but with the collective spirit of Marxism; the bloody failures and broken promises of Marxism led next to a rejection of worldliness, but not back to any true faith, but just to a vague and directionless paganism, bogus copies of eastern faiths, and a fashionable belief in theosophy and claptrap. This mysticism at its core is antinomian, and seeks to undermine whatever is the norm in law or morality.

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The Swift Test

Posted January 29, 2016 By John C Wright

I propose a new psychological test based on which race of satirical characters from GULLIVER’S TRAVELS one might be:

  • Lilliputian — petty and vicious
  • Brobdingnagian — magnanimous but contemptuous of mankind
  • Laputan — clumsy, dazed and impractical intellectual, fearful of comets and other unreal problems, often cuckolded
  • Balnibarbi — even more impractical intellectuals, wasteful, fussy, perhaps insane, but always frantic to follow the latest fad or fashion
  • Luggnagg — Respects the past, listens to the wisdom of honored dead
  • Struldbrugs– Typical Leftist: seeks an earthly eternity or utopia, but lives in misery
  • Japanese — Tramples the cross
  • Houyhnhnm — logical, remorselessly rational
  • Yahoo — poop-flinging brute
  • Englishmen — all of the above, but worse and not as funny

The test is that you place yourself on the island where you think you best fit, and then your friends secretly vote and say where you actually fit.

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Darwin and Genesis

Posted January 29, 2016 By John C Wright

Back when I was an atheist, I was had in my arsenal, well polished from use, every argument that could be mustered against theism, and particularly against Christianity.

There were two arguments I never bothered with, both because they are illogical, that is, they cannot be formed into a properly formatted syllogism.

The first is the argument that when compared with a universe designed by a benevolent and omnipotent God, our own universe is too disorderly to have been designed. This is the atheist equivalent of the theist argument from design, and suffers from the same flaw. Since we have no other universes to which to compare our own universe, the crucial evidence that ours is either more orderly or less, that is, the evidence on which the argument turns for its persuasive force, is missing. You may, if you wish, speculate that universes not created by God would be more orderly or less orderly than this one which we inhabit, but such speculation is not supported by observed evidence. So this is an argument I never brandished as an atheist.

Please note that I make no comment about related arguments, such as whether there is evil in the universe, or whether evidence of purpose or ‘teleology’ in the organs of organisms implies a designer. Those can be properly formatted, and cannot be dismissed summarily by any honest thinker.

A second argument which rusted in the arsenal was the argument that since Man evolved from the Ape who was Darwin’s grandfather, therefore God does not exist. This is an argument akin to saying that since Zeus does not exist, therefore God does not exist. It is simply a misreading of the Christian claim. The Christians claim their God is simple, omnipotent, eternal, spiritual, omnipotent, the source of all being and the end of all being. He is not merely a local or limited phenomenon, nor is he the author of only a single chapter of the book of history, but of all of it.

The atheist argument that Darwin is true therefore a boneheadedly literal reading of the first two chapters of Genesis is false does not prove Genesis is false. It proves that boneheads should be kept away from interpreting the Bible.

Since the boneheadedly literal meaning of the first chapter of Genesis contradicts the boneheadedly literal meaning of the second chapter, even when I was an atheist, I said it was a safer bet to throw out the boneheads than throw out the Bible. An atheist who only plucks the lowhanging fruit of criticizing the nonstandard, nonauthoritative, and overly literal interpretation of Genesis will not sharpen his sword nor hone his wits, nor will he do his position any honor.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Western civilization and our literature, Genesis One says trees and grass are older than the sun, and that evening and morning came and went before the sun was made, and that animals are older than man, all men being created at once directly from his word, whereas Genesis Two says man is older than animals,and all men descend from one man, only one of whom was directly created from the dirt.

Note to boneheads: this is not what the passages mean, this is only what they say when interpreted with a boneheaded overly literal interpretation.

If I say “sorrow is the sunset of my heart” it is merely boneheadedness to point out that the heart is merely an organ that pumps blood whereas sorrow is seated in the nervous system, or to say that the earth rotates but the sun is still, therefore no such thing as sunrise really exists. No one but a bonehead will go into a phrenzy trying to explain that the heart, because it is connected to the nervous system, actually is a seat of emotion, or that sunrise, when seen from Earth’s surface, according to the laws of relativity, does indeed make the sun move and rise. Normal and sane people who know how language works can tell the difference between a falsehood and a figure of speech.

Now, some wellmeaning souls mean to forestall the alleged conflict between religion and science by attempting to reconcile the Biblical account of spiritual creation with the scientific account of the physical order of the physical universe, two things that, in my mind, are unrelated. Such persons invent parallels between the Big Bang and the Fiat Lux, or talk about how the early earth was swathed in an eternal cloud barrier that made it so that the sun did not come out until the fourth day of creation, or somesuch.

All a waste of words. Myself, I do not see how it detracts one iota from the wisdom or honesty of God Almighty if Moses thought the word was flat and that the sky was like a tent with an ocean overhead.

Who says our ideas about the physical universe are any closer to the truth? We could be at the early part of the prologue of the scientific revolution, not near the last act.

The whole problem with this approach of trying to shoehorn Biblical meanings into a modern scientific worldview is that the modern scientific worldview has a shorter lifespan than the fourscore and ten a healthy human can live.

The Space Age began and ended in my lifetime; the Atomic Age in my fathers’, and my grandfather was before the 1919 solar eclipse provided the first observational proof of Einstein’s theory of relativity. My greatgrandfather is older than the publication of Darwin’s revolutionary theory.

Modern people are parochial. They tend not to realize that the latest word of modern science lasts no longer than the latest word in women’s fashion. If the Bible is chained to an interpretation saying that ‘Let There Be Light’ refers to the Big Bang, what becomes of faith when scientists in our children’s generation discover that the Steady State theory was correct after all, and there never was a Big Bang?

What do Biblical scholars who busily reconciled Genesis with Darwin do once Darwin is thrown on the same ash heap of exploded scientific models as phlogiston and geocentrism and phrenology?

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Superversive Guest Post: Theologic License

Posted January 28, 2016 By John C Wright

The guest post this week over at the Superversive site is Theologic License by Matthew Schmidt (http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2016/01/27/superversive-blog-guest-post-where-religion-and-fantasy-meet/):

The problem of mixing speculative fiction with actual religion has existed since the first time Og told a ghost story around the cave’s fire, and, having returned to hunting the next day, wondered what ghosts meant for the Great Spirit. Whatever Og’s conclusion was has been lost to time, but we see it again more recently (relatively speaking) in The Divine Comedy. In the depths of Hell, Dante comes across Odysseus, who is eternally punished for attempting to reach Purgatory by the sole effort of humans. What exactly the presence of Odysseus implied for the panoply of feuding Greek divinities of the Iliad and the Odyssey, in the further reality of the True Divine, is not considered.

But while Og needed only entertain his tribesmen for a few minutes, and Dante used Odysseus as a symbol of the inadequacy of mortal powers, the modern speculative fiction author does not get off so easily.
The questions for the fantasy author have plagued the genre since Tolkien. They arrive like rubberneckers at the world’s construction site, incessantly pestering the author. If there is a fictional pantheon, are those gods “real?” Are they angelic like the Valar of Valinor, or noble beings like the Overcyns of Skai? Or are they mere frauds as Tash—a safe choice, but then Tash actually appears at the end of the Chronicles of Narnia and the issues are immediately raised. Add magic and ethical issues enter immediately, and whole essays have been written on the topic (see the excellent one by Tom Simon.)

The science fiction author can only avoid the same questions with sufficiently hard science and sufficient planning ahead. (Be sure to put three or so bishops on your generation ship to avoid issues of apostolic succession.) Reach for any other ingredient—time travel, artificial intelligence, or worse yet, extraterrestrial life—and now you have some irritating theological question, one that will devour your creative energies like a black hole.

And avoiding that singularity is the key. In my experience as a writer, attempting to write any kind of speculative fiction while staying behind every jot and tittle of established theology is futile. Fear of writing heretical ideas will do more damage to your writing than actually writing something theologically inaccurate….

Read the whole thing.

(http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2016/01/27/superversive-blog-guest-post-where-religion-and-fantasy-meet/)

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The Great Charter of the Daughters

Posted January 27, 2016 By John C Wright

News from our leftwing friends in Denmark:

A 17-year-old girl who was physically and sexually attacked in Sønderborg will herself face charges for using pepper spray to fend off her assailant.

The teenager told police that she was attacked in central Sønderborg on Wednesday at around 10pm by a dark-skinned English-speaking man. She said the man knocked her to the ground and then unbuttoned her pants and attempted to undress her.
The girl was able to save herself from further assault by using pepper spray on the attacker, but now she may be the one who ends up in legal trouble.
“It is illegal to possess and use pepper spray, so she will likely be charged for that,” local police spokesman Knud Kirsten told TV Syd.
The case has sparked a backlash among some Danes who point to increasing reports of sexual harassment in Sønderborg and other Danish cities at the same time that police say they are stretched too thin to properly carry out their duties.
Numerous readers wrote in the comments section on TV Syd’s story about the incident that they would be willing to pay the girl’s fine, which will most likely be 500 kroner.
The man who attacked the 17-year-old fled from the scene and has not been charged.

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The Lamps Go Out

Posted January 23, 2016 By John C Wright

St Elijah’s monastery stood on the outskirts of Mosul for 1,400 years, the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq.

It was been razed to the ground by the Islamic State:

“Bulldozers, heavy equipment, sledgehammers, possibly explosives turned those stone walls into this field of gray-white dust. They destroyed it completely,” [Stephen Wood] said from his Colorado offices.

On the other side of the world, in his office in exile, in Erbil, Iraq, Catholic priest Rev. Paul Thabit Habib, 39, stared in disbelief at the before- and after- images.

“Our Christian history in Mosul is being barbarically leveled,” he said in Arabic

Let us not forget who the enemy is: one philosophy and one alone in the West has made us unable to recognize an enemy when he strikes us, made us unwilling to fight in self defense or defense of the innocent, and made us eager to cover up a decade of rapes rather than accuse a Muslim ring of crime, made witnesses unwilling to report suspicious activity by gunmen or high-jackers for fear of being seen as racist, and, in a word, made the entire West yearn for suicide, and not a painless suicide either.

I called it a philosophy. It is in truth a psychopathology, an insane inability to look truth in the face. It is the revolt against reason, the rebellion against reality, the desecration of beauty and the mutiny against God.

It is secular humanism.

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On the Sexual Nature of Man

Posted January 22, 2016 By John C Wright

Here below is a long essay I wrote back in 2009 under the general title Apologia Pro Opere Sui. I have recently come across both foe and false friend misrepresenting my conclusions in this matter, either through malice or negligence. To leave all such unwary tongues without excuse, I here reprint it again. Let there be no speculation and no falsehoods about what position I hold.

*   *   *

As a faithful Roman Catholic who was an atheist for all his adult life (and most of his childhood) I occupy an interesting position in the ongoing debates concerning the social turmoil caused by sexual unchastity, particularly that unchaste practice which issues forth from what is delicately called same-sex attraction.

One is tempted automatically to assume that atheists should support or ought to support the sexually liberated position that declares all sexual acts licit between two or more consenting adult partners in their right wits. One is tempted to assume that no rational grounds to condemn sexual libertinism exist, aside from the dogmas and supernatural reasoning of Christian theology.

This temptation must be resisted at all costs, since not only is it untrue, it is foolish, for the drives the conversation out of the realm of natural and logical reasons to avoid sexual immorality and into the realm of the supernatural and theological. Once the issue is falsely labeled as a theological one, it is falsely libeled as an issue where all discussion is offlimits for being a personal matter of irrational faith, then the topic is ejected forthwith from the public forum.

Allow me, then, to give a personal account of how it was that I, resting only on my human reason and with no particle of loyalty to or faith in any theological speculations (which, at the time, I frankly dismissed as egregious and base superstition), was drawn step by step against my will and very much against my inclinations away from the comfortable libertine and libertarian opinions of my youth to the conclusion that the sex act is licit only within marriage, that unchastity is illicit, and that unnatural sexual acts are illicit as well as unnatural.

There are perfectly natural and worldly reasons for a rational atheist to support the Christian position on sexual morality. The following argument shows that the Christian position is the only logical position to hold, given the realities of human nature.

One a personal level, I did not change my conclusions about sexual morality because I became a Christian. The cause and effect was the other way. After cold logic lead me to the conclusions that the only logical position to hold just so happened to be the one held by my (at that time) hated enemies the Christians, I began to look at their egregious and base superstition with a less hostile gaze.

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Farewell to David Hartwell from his Wife

Posted January 22, 2016 By John C Wright

This is from the pen of Kathryn Cramer, wife of David Hartwell. The words below are hers, not mine.

Til Death Did Us Part
I just awoke from this horrible dream that David Hartwell, my husband, had fallen down the stairs and died. And now that I am fully awake, it is still true, and I am still a widow.

It is something that cannot be true. It is as though one of the seasons, or one of the directions, up or down, has died. It lacks grammatical sense. Winter cannot die. Up cannot die. David cannot die. He just is.

A few days ago, I was sitting where I am sitting now and I heard a big crash and I ran down the hall yelling “David, are you OK?” And he said yes, he was OK, and the big scary noise was just that he had dropped one of the of Globe Werneke barrister bookcase sections that he was carrying up the stairs from the basement. He added that though he had dropped it, the glass of the door didn’t break. I went back to my book and coffee.

That day, or the next, he noticed that on Facebook he could no longer see my new posts. I spent an hour or so trying to troubleshoot this without success. It was really bothering him. I assured him that I had not blocked him or put him on some kind of restricted list.

FacebookInvisibilty

The idiom to “lose” one’s husband has in the past seemed to me so euphemistic, but I feel it’s reality right now. It’s like I’ve lost my car keys or my wallet. He’s here somewhere, if I just look for him. He’s got to be here.

Fourteen years ago when Peleg, our favorite cat, had stroke and died abruptly on the basement floor when David and our (then) young son Peter were out running errands, our other cat (who had seen the corpse) spent all day frantically searching for him. I feel like that now.

His car is in my driveway. His books are in my basement. His jacket is over one of my dining room chairs. His glasses and cell phone are on my coffee table. There is a paper bag from the wine store next to the mail on the table containing the ginger brandy he just bought for our trip down to the city to take Liz see the Night Vale live show this weekend. The brandy is a bribe for me so I will sit and talk with him.

He’s here. He’s got to be here.

There are arcing skid marks from his hiking boots on the wood-panelled wall of my staircase. His blood is on the steps. There is a brown stain on the blue carpet at the bottom of the steps. There are unfamiliar bits of debris—velcro things—left behind by the EMTs. He is not here. He will never be here again. This is impossible. It makes no sense.

Tuesday, I had taken Peter to an appointment in Plattsburgh and afterwards we had stopped at Tractor Supply to buy chicken supplies for my baby chicks, and then we had stopped in at Michael’s, the art supply store, to get a few things for Peter to take back to college for his second semester.

My cell phone rang. My daughter said, “Daddy fell down the stars. He’s hurt. A book case fell on him.” I told her to call 911. She said the EMTs were already there. She put my friend Shira, one of the EMTs, on the phone. Shira said, “I need to ask you a question. Does David have a DNR order in place?”

“NO!” I said in a voice that was much too loud.

My friend Heather texted me moments later that she had heard about an accident at my house over the police scanner. Should she go there? Yes, I texted back. Please go take care of Elizabeth. I’m 45 minutes away.

David and I had been working on what’s called a collaborative divorce for about four years, and had worked a lot of things out. (We are still married.) I was expecting to be able to live down the street from my good friend David—at just the right distance—for the next twenty years. His house is in the center of town overlooking the lake. Mine is at the orchard with a view of the Adirondacks.

And instead he has had the audacity to die.

Tuesday, at 3:53 PM, he texted me Now at Orchard with Liz. … Moving some bookcase units.

Liz was making herself lunch. She heard a horrible crash. David had lost his balance and fallen down the stairs backwards from the top step. He was sprawled on the steps snoring and bleeding out one of his ears. There was a Globe Wernike section on top of him.

An artery in his brain had blown out, causing a massive brain bleed. He never regained consciousness. The glass of the door didn’t break.

While I was at the hospital yesterday signing dreadful papers, Heather and her husband Jason and the kids took down the Christmas tree. Heather washed all the dishes.

David, the living room is all clean and vacuumed. You can come home now. Please.

Come home. We miss you.

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Farewell to David Hartwell from a Friend

Posted January 21, 2016 By John C Wright

This is from the pen of Andy Duncan, award-wining writer who talked to Mr.Hartwell but yesterday. The words below are his, not mine.

David G. Hartwell and I talked on the phone for about an hour Tuesday afternoon, between 3 and 4, Eastern time. I was returning his call. Once our small business was done, the conversation roamed free.

David talked about the coming snowstorm and that day’s fuel-oil purchase and the pending sale of the house and how he looked forward to our having dinner at ICFA — where we met, 20 years ago, when I was an unpublished grad student, and David introduced himself to me in a hallway and thanked me for writing a paper on C.M. Kornbluth, and invited me to send it to The New York Review of Science Fiction, and welcomed me to the party.

On the phone Tuesday afternoon, David also talked about his family: Kathryn’s health, Peter’s schooling, Liz’s lunch.

“There’s pasta if you’re hungry,” he yelled when Liz got home from school in mid-call, “or pickles, if you just want a snack. I’ll be off the phone in a minute.”

Twenty minutes later, he still was talking, about science fiction: not the writing, not the industry, but the community. He told firsthand anecdotes about Campbell, Delany, Merril, Russ, Sturgeon.

He said Lester del Rey bought him a drink, after one contentious panel, because Lester loved newcomers who could tell Lester he was wrong, and back it up with evidence.

He said his friend Philip K. Dick, like any other chronically ill person, sometimes required hospitalization, but in between episodes (in other words, mostly) was a brilliant thinker, a loving dad, a sane and solid citizen of the field.

“I love telling 50-year-old gossip,” David said, and I replied, “May we still be telling it 50 years from now.” He said, “Indeed!” and kept going.

Like many other small towns, David said, postwar science fiction could be insular, clannish and deplorably tolerant of wrongdoing, but mostly and more importantly, it could be remarkably tolerant — even welcoming — of eccentricity, of divergence from the norm.

Even in the mid-20th century, David continued, science fiction was a haven for gay and bi and trans people, for people in open marriages or triads or even more complex domestic scenarios, for people with physical and mental disabilities, for shameless exhibitionists and unapologetic recluses, for anarchists and socialists and Birchers and libertarians and Weathermen and CIA operatives, for cosplayers and gamers and creative anachronists and people who crafted wholly spurious biographies for themselves that were accepted and therefore became sort of true, for channelers and Scientologists and orthodox Jews and pre-Vatican II Catholics and Mormons and New Agers and heretics and atheists and freethinkers, for Ph.D.’s and autodidacts, for writers of COBOL and speakers of Esperanto, for Forteans and CSICOPs, for astronomers and astrologers, for psychics and physicists, for basically anyone who was smart and passionate and willing to pitch in somewhere— though talent certainly helped, and curiosity, and a zeal for argument, and a sense of humor.

“I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation,” David said, at the end, and I agreed, and we pledged to continue it, wherever and however we could.

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Filed in Fancies, Personal

David Geddes Hartwell, 1941-2016

Posted January 20, 2016 By John C Wright

Here are memorial comments on the passing of Mr. Hartwell by two of the most prestigious and well-known editors in the field.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden

To call our relationship “complicated” is to understate the case. We were friends. We were also editors working the same patch—him older and more eminent, me younger and more energetic. (“Younger and more energetic”, those were the days.) Back in the impossibly-long-ago mid-to-late ‘80s, Teresa and I worked on his poetry magazine, and we helped dream up his journal of SF criticism and quit it three issues after. (I named it/and/designed the masthead.) He declined to hire me as his assistant at Arbor House, saying that Terry Carr had told him “Don’t hire that guy, he’ll just get promoted in six months and you’ll need an assistant again.” Thanks, Terry. In a more recent century, he and I co-edited a pretty good reprint anthology.

Teresa and I first got to know him in the early 1980s, when he was attending tons of conventions on the Timescape / Simon & Schuster dime. When our friend-in-fandom Paul Williams sat us down in Seattle and explained to us how we needed to work in SF publishing—and how to do that— step one was that I should wind up at the 1983 ABA (the thing now called BEA ) in Dallas. Which I did, crashing on David’s floor, spending days in the crush meeting publishing folks. Evenings, I hung back and watched as David and Paul invented the Philip K. Dick Society and planned Dick’s wildly successful posthumous Hollywood career. All of which came to pass. Clearly here was a magician, albeit a crafty, subtle, and not always trustworthy one. Like all the best.

Over the years at Tor we had occasions to want to drop-kick him out a 14th floor window—and occasions to be gobsmacked by his utter brilliance. He was a true believer in the intellectual and emotional power of fantasy and science fiction. He was our field’s most consequential editor since John W. Campbell.

He is gone. It’s like a mountain range is gone, or nitrogen, or a verb tense. We can’t believe it. David. Goodbye.

Gardner Dozois

As many of you probably know by now, David G. Hartwell, one of the most important and influential SF and fantasy editors of the 20th and 21st Centuries, is dying from a brain bleed, and may even be already dead by the time you read these words (he was last reported to be on a respirator, being evaluated for brain death, but the doctors hold out no hope for his survival).

David and I were born in the same hospital, Salem Hospital in Salem, Massachusetts, a few years apart, but didn’t actually meet until 1970, when I moved to New York City, and David was the smart, energetic, and ambitious editor of Berkley Books. He bought my first two novels there, and in the decades since, even though we were sometimes rivals, with dueling Best of the Year anthology series, he never wavered in his support for my career, and he has been one of my closest friends in SF fandom and professional circles for almost fifty years.

David loved science fiction with a pure passionate love that never wavered. It was one of the things that held us together. We didn’t always agree by any means, but we could always talk about science fiction together, sometimes for hours. I can’t even begin to count how many lunches and dinners and long sessions spent sitting around in a bar in some convention hotel we spent doing so, or how many conventions would boil down to one last room party at three or four o’ clock in the morning, with the last people awake at the convention being me and David and John Douglas and maybe Susan Casper or Ginjer Buchanan or Judith Weiss or Pat Cadigan or Michael Swanwick or a few other people, all still laughing and talking (and arguing, passionately) about science fiction, sometimes until the sky outside the hotel-room window had grayed with dawn.

David had an immense influence on the development of science fiction over the last almost fifty years, not just by the books he bought and edited and championed, or by the writers he mentored and developed, but in dozens of other ways, probably more than will ever be realized. Without David having been there, there’s no way that science fiction as a genre looks anything remotely like what it looks like today. Without him, it would have been much the poorer place. His loss is a heavy and grievous one, not just for science fiction, but for all who knew and loved him.

Rest In Peace, David, whenever they let you go.

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Filed in Announcement, Personal

Prayers Needed

Posted January 20, 2016 By John C Wright

My friend, partner, editor, and the man who discovered me and launched my career, Mr. David Hartwell of Tor Books, needs your prayers. His wife, Kathryn Kramer, write this note on Facebook:

Late this afternoon David [Hartwell] had a massive brain bleed from which he is not expected to recover.

He is a kindhearted, friendly and thoroughly professional man, and one of the top names in the field. He is also very dear to me, so this is a grievous blow.

Saint John, pray for us.

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Filed in Announcement, Prayer Request

From the Gospel of the Evil Legion of Evil

Posted January 18, 2016 By John C Wright

The Hugos are months and months away, but the Morlocks are already stirring.

The World Fantasy Award is removing the bust of HP Lovecraft as its award not due to any shortcomings of the author or his influence on the genre.

HPL is being unpersonned for thoughtcrimes detected in his private letters and unpublished writings.

Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is the first fantasy book I ever bought, perhaps the first fantasy story I ever read, and this was back when Ballatine was still putting out its Adult Fantasy series edited by Lin Carter. I can recite the opening paragraph from memory.

So, the Morlocks, instead of taking warning, have redoubled their efforts to vomit on us, spit on our beloved genre, and puke on the brilliant and daring pioneer science fiction writers whom they have never read.

Lovecraft had mental health issues. They are picking on a man who suffered from a neurological disease. They are also picking on one of their own: a humanist, a secularist, an atheist, a man who thought society was made of arbitrary mores and moral choices, and there was no ultimate meaning in the universe.

The fashionable thing for intellectuals to think in those days was that Darwinian evolution proved the inequality of races; the fashionable thing to think these days is not to think so, or indeed, not to think at all. But the science has not changed, only the fashions. Both are unscientific cult-beliefs of the cult of secular humanism. Both are dogmas from the Church of Christhatred. Both are different vectors of the fatalist-collectivist disease that Christendom has always rejected.

But facts do not sway the Thought Police of SocJus. Morlocks laugh their barbaric, harsh, ungainly laughter at facts. Appeals to justice and fairness they greet with dull, slow stares of open-mouthed incomprehension

They will never cease to abuse, demean, and insult us, and desecrate everything we love, and to slander and libel us with mouth-frothingly stupid and freakishly counterproductive lies.

So, you had your chance with the Sad Puppies, Oh hypocrites, sons of vipers, Social-justice propagandists, socialists, christophobes, Morlocks and morons. You decided to call a Spaniard, a Spanish woman, a Red Indian, and perfectly harmless and nice political moderate married to a Black wife White Supremacists and Woman-haters, and pretend that we did not mean anything we said.

But we meant it.

From the pen of Vile Faceless Minion 6306:

Woe! Woe to you, trufen and CHORFs, pedophiles! For you barricade fandom from readers. You neither enter into enjoyment, nor allow wrongfun to be had by others. Woe to you, SJWs and pedophiles, you waterlogged kindling and fagots unsuitable for the fire! You travel across sea and land to make a single convention, but won’t set foot on a treadmill. You leer likewise at your betters and the children abandoned to your care, and hope to drag us both to Hell.

Woe to you, blind authorities, who say, ‘If anyone likes a book, it is nothing, but if any book wins a gold plastic rocket, it is worthy of honor!’ You blind swine! For which is greater, the plastic rocket or the book that has made the rocket sacred? And you say, ‘If anyone swears by the author, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the rigged award the author receives, the author is worthy of acknowledgement.’ You blind transhumans! For which is greater, the rigged award or the author who makes the award possible?

Woe to you, trufen and CHORFs, pedophiles! For you want fellowship and safe space and acceptance, and have neglected the weightier matters of fandom: justice and mercy and childhood. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a right-wing nut but swallowing the children!

Woe to you, trufen and CHORFs, pedophiles! For you wear a tuxedo one night a year, but inside are full of greed, cruelty and self-indulgence.You blind Toad! First clean out your rotten heart, then put on the penguin suit.

Woe to you, trufen and CHORFs, pedophiles! For you are like Jeff Dahmer’s freezer, which outwardly appears normal and functional, but within are the tortured corpses of all your victims. So you also outwardly appear to earn a rocket the right way, but within your greed has overtaken you.

Woe to you, trufen and CHORFs, pedophiles! For you give awards out like candy, and you memorialize your giants, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of Asimov, we would not have taken part with them in the groping of victims.’ Thus you witness against yourselves that you are the children of those who raped children. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers. You monsters, you repugnant worms, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?

By appealing to the mercy of the Vile Faceless Minions?

We have no mercy to give.

An eternity in Hell is your best alternative.

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Filed in Puppy Sadness Syndrome

From the Pen of Brad Torgersen

Posted January 16, 2016 By John C Wright

I heard this from our Puppy Pack leader from last year, the inestimable Brad Togersen. He represents the moderate wing of the Resistance. His words on the ongoing retaliations that followed:

what I’ve noticed (so far, for my part) is that certain small-time authors and certain small-time presses haven’t been shy about chinning me off.

I had one small press dump me from an anthology, despite a contract, after several other authors made a fuss. And I recently had one author walk off an anthology I am in; the editor stuck to his guns, and I was never asked to leave. So there is definitely a radioactivity taking place, against me, among some of my open-minded, caring, compassionate, ever-so-tolerant friends in the field.

It’s disappointing, but not unexpected. I knew (in April) that I was finished among the SF/F cognoscenti. Once the cries of racism (and
worse) began, with a full-court-press slander-laden media smear, it was
obvious that my betters in the field were evicting me permanently from
polite society.

Frankly, after long reflection, I welcome it. I’ve never felt more sure
of myself — of what I want to say, and what I want to do — in this business.

I had a wonderfully candid exchange with Orson Scott Card, who went down
this road (himself) a long time ago. Science Fiction *desperately* needs its conservative and libertarian voices. Speaking loudly, and proudly, unafraid of the liberal mob. Taking the arrows in the chest plate, then brushing them off, standing back up, and growling, “Is that all you’ve got?”

They (the cognoscenti) will never love us. We don’t need their permission.

We just need to tell the truth.

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Filed in Puppy Sadness Syndrome

Dialog with Amazing Stories

Posted January 16, 2016 By John C Wright

Forgive the length of this post. I wanted to present to my readers the situations of the ongoing peace negotiations between me, as the Grand Inquisitor of the Evil League of Evil, and a puppy kicker whose name I happen not to recognize. He is the editor of Amazing Stories, and, at the time of this writing, has posted two issues.

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Filed in Announcement, Puppy Sadness Syndrome
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