Today is the day!
The second book in A Tale of Moth and Cobweb, The Green Knight’s Squire Book Two, FEAST OF THE ELFS by John C. Wright, published by Castalia House, is now available.
This is classic fantasy the way you remember it from your youth, true high fantasy in the mode of The Dark is Rising, The Chronicles of Prydain, andThe Once and Future King.
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My eldest son just passed his board of review, and is an Eagle Scout. He is the first in my extended family ever to achieve that rank. 
A guest review by one of our scuzzier yet manlier regular commenters:
Original, compelling, scintillating, ominous, and cool
Being a modest review of John C Wright’s ambitious Count to a Trillion
by ScuzzaMan.CtaT is a work of science fiction. It’s a neatly balanced blend of science and of fiction. Check.
Taking place in the not immediate but not far future, it features as hero one Menelaus Illation Montrose, a Texan mathematician gunslinger who shoots lawyers for fun and profit. Well, two out of three ain’t bad.
Plainly there is some degree of autobiographical wish fulfillment fantasy at work here, but who cannot relate to the desire to shoot lawyers?
M. sets out on a great adventure … *the* great adventure really; space travel to a distant and unusual star. What he finds there, what happens to him there, and on the way there, I will not here reveal, but let me say that it is as surprising and original as anything I have read, and I’ve been reading science fiction for over 40 years, and when I say *reading* I
mean *devouring*.Don’t despair. I’m not going to “counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor” — I’m not that kind of critic. I’m a devoted fan of the genre in general and of this author in particular. But this is the first of Mr Wright’s works I’ve read that is hard core science fiction, and I’m impressed.
It’s a masterful madcap mixture of Jules Verne, of H. G. Welles and Arthur C. Clarke, tossed with some Heinlein and garnished with a strong dash of Mark Twain.
Yes, it really is that good, without being at all derivative.
This is the first of a series of six, so the aliens (yes, Martha, there are aliens) remain ominously aloof as we’re introduced to the hero, to his context, to his enemies within, and to his enduring raison d’etre; his lovely, and Othello-like too well-loved, wife.
No doubt the aliens will feature more prominently later in the series.
One hopes so, for Mr Wright does a sterling job of imagining an alien star-faring race, and then letting the reader catch a tantalizing glimpse of their universe through their eyes, their assumptions, their prejudices. There’s a distinct impression that meeting them is going to be a momentous event.
And finally, in the finest traditions of the novelist’s craft, there’s a cliff-hanger ending, almost but not quite literally, yet it caught me quite by surprise and left me desperately wanting to know what happens next.
If you thirst for rollicking high adventure with a twisted smile and an old-fashioned charm, if you hunger for hard science fiction not overwrought with parochial concerns of the moment, told by a master wordsmith at the height of his powers, then I unreservedly recommend this book.
I hope soon to be able to recommend the series entire. The second episode awaits on my Kindle as I write.
Remember: Original, compelling, scintillating, ominous, and cool.
ScuzzaMan says; five stars.
A reader asks:
“If race and genetics has nothing to do with culture, then where does culture come from?”
I have a friend who believes in astrology. She asks in the same bewildered tone as yours, “If fate and personality traits do not come from the stars, then where do they come from?”
In both cases, the Christian idea that men have free will simply never is brought up. If men have free will, then when they act as a group over generations, passing their lessons along to their children, they freely choose to act as a group, to develop or ignore the habits of life passed on to them. Culture is nothing more than the aggregate name for their habits of life, which their fathers chose to adopt, and they, whether for sound reasons or no, chose to pass along.
The idea of diversity is the idea that men in the aggregate (a culture) cannot be good or wicked, creative or slothful, talented at music, or prone to anarchy, or whatever. Since we would never believe that to be true of an individual man, I do not see why any sane man would even bother to entertain the idea as being true for a group.
On the other hand, the idea that certain men are born with superior qualities that are merely inherited, or that certain cultures are superior not because of the efforts of the men in the culture but due to the magic of their blood, is mere nonsense. With great pain and loss, we of the West expunged this alien and oriental idea from Europe during World War Two.
Anyone so enamored of it, let him move to India, find his place in the caste system, and leave us alone.
I reader whose opinions I do not dismiss has pressed upon me the argument that unchecked immigration of unassimilated immigrants is a danger to the Union, to our way of life, and the West. I entirely agree.
He identifies the horrid but empty concept that goes by the name diversity as the main justification used by those mounting the threat, and, again, I utterly agree.
But then he says that equality, not equality of outcomes, mind you, but the spiritual equality of men before God and the legal equality of men before the Law, is the true source of the danger, the thing that makes diversity possible, perhaps inevitable, and that a society based on equality rather than on race-loyalty is a philosophical experiment as Utopian and doomed as the daydreams of the Communists. He points to the decline and fall of Rome to show the dangers of race mixing and unchecked immigration.
He also, or others of his school of thought, point to the Jews as the source of the insidious scheme to dechristianize the West and to murder all whites by genocide.
With all due respect, I can think of no political stance more worthy of condemnation than this. It is as bad as communism because it is communism, merely with the white race taking the place of the economic class on which all loyalties are meant to be based, and proposing a defensive rather than an aggressive revolution and overthrow of our system of government, culture, virtues, and way of life.
As a Catholic, I cannot place national and local loyalties above their proper rank in the hierarchy. A Catholic must be catholic. Also, since history shows anti-Semites always, sooner or later, turn into Anti-Catholics (see Saint Maximilian Kolbe for details) a lively sense of self preservation, even if the ideas were not illogical in and of themselves, would prompt me to abjure this camp and condemn it.
As for the illogic, no more need be said than that those who favor inequality in civic issues either have the right of free speech, as all free men do, or they do not.
If they employ the right, presumably they are equal to the rest of us who have it. If they are not equal, they either are casting themselves in the lower position in civic matters, in which case they should stand silent, since they have no right to speak; or they seek to silence others, in which case they should look to their guns and sharpen their swords, since that is the gentlest answer merited by any man who holds himself justified in abolishing the liberty and equality of his peers.
That all men are created equal is self-evident. It is tantamount to saying no one is born worthy of a crown or both worthy of a fetters.
Such talk dismissing American liberty has become loud of late, as the memory of World War Two fades, and as the Left uses the school system to remove all honor and glory from the concepts in which the nation is founded.
Let me address my comment to my specific reader, who I fear to be floundering is a seductive but false ideology, whose falsehood is easy to expose:
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Superluminary, Episode 20, THE FEAST OF VAMPIRES, is posted on Patreon:
Episode 20 The Feast of Vampires
In this exciting episode, Aeneas discovers the origin of the Infinithedron, the true meaning of the Cretaceous Extinction, the Silurian Extinction, and discovers the ancient plutonian foe of all life still exists, and waits to rise again.
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A certain idea of late, so dishonest and at the same time so absurd, and absurdly un-American, has fascinated if not possessed the minds of gentlemen whose accomplishments in other fields I honestly admire, I think it only fitting to state as briefly as possible why I reject the idea wholly, in all its parts and applications.
Rather than grope for words myself, I turn to the ready wit and philosophical depth of the Apostle of Common Sense, G.K. Chesterton, who is my brother in spirit if ever I had one.
He wrote the words below in 1922, ninety nine years ago. The sick philosophy I am rejecting and my reasons for the rejection should be clear enough.
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My opinion, in case anyone should ask, is that Donald Trump won the debate against Lester Holt on points, but that on overall appearance and comportment, Trump did not win.
That is, everything Trump said was correct, but how he said it seemed undignified and unbecoming of someone running for high office.
I believe Secretary Clinton was also present to aid Mr. Holt in his debate with Mr. Trump, but her contribution was minimal. Read the remainder of this entry »
Tom Simon has announced his next book: https://bondwine.com/2016/09/25/superversive-coming-soon/
I must say I am looking forward to this eagerly. His last two books of essays were memorable and worthy of many rereads.
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A reader asked me to view the following two hour lecture on geocentrism. He promised me fifty bucks if I was not convinced. I wished I had asked for more. This was painful to sit through.
The man involved, Robert Sungenis, is, to put the matter kindly, a smug and dishonest crackpot without even the zealous honesty the other crackpots, flatearthers and theosophists, tend to radiate.
I was trying to count the number of scientific errors he made, and gave up counting when I realized every statement contained a scientific error but one. (He is correct that the microwave background radiation in space is not symmetrical).
The argument was grossly illogical, merely an assertion that there is a conspiracy theory among scientists to discredit the Bible, and that scientists falsify results and ignore contrary experiments due to personal prejudice.
It haunts and horrifies me that any educated person could be deceived by this man. Robert Sungenis is an uncharismatic version of Professor Harold Hill, the Music Man. Only not as amusing, and without the song and dance.
Here is the lecture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwx7bYEUIF4&ab_channel=LoneStar1776
Fairness requires me to at least list to the points I found unpersausive.
Professor Harold Hill (as I shall call him hereafter) begins with a fifteen minute explanation of his purpose, which is to show that the Earth is the center of the universe in order to undermine the atheist view that the Earth is in an insignificant area of a vast cosmos.
He repeats this several times, and the argument is never made more logically than this: he rejects anything other than a flatly literal interpretation of the Bible as discrediting the whole of the Bible, so that if an ancient writer speaks of the sun rising or the moon setting, this is support for geocentrism.
The problem with Biblical literalism is that it requires a firmament of water above the atmosphere, plants older than the sun, and the presence of unicorns in the wilderness, leviathans in the sea, and God having hands and feet and wings and so on.
As Roman Catholic, I am not bound to affirm that every non-scholarly flatfooted literal reading in translation of every passage of the Bible, taken out of context, means what the non-scholar says. So, to me, the idea that even one Christian lost his faith due to the Copernican theory is absurd (or, rather, that only absurd Christians would find this a challenge to their faith) much less that the orbit of the Earth around the sun is the main reason for loss of Christian faith in the modern day. The Copernican theory was not an issue for Christians until the Evangelical movement springing from the Protestant movement, some hundreds of years after the entire Christian world saw no conflict between astronomy and theology. It is a make believe problem believed neither by honest scientists nor by orthodox Christians.
The fight between faith and reason exists only the narrow minds of atheists who worship science without understanding it and heretics who worship the Bible without understanding it: two brands of idolaters, each a mirror reflection of the other.
As an ex-atheist, I solemnly assure you that not a single atheist, no, not one, would give a flying fig over whether geocentrism were proven true. Earth being in the center of the cosmos does not prove God exists, or even hint as much. How many atheist of your acquaintance fell down and worshiped God when the Big Bang became the standard model?
Lucretius the Roman philosopher and poet was an atheist (or, at least, a man who believed the serene gods never interfered in human affairs) and he believed the geocentric model.
Astronomy is not what makes atheist doubt the witness of the Christians. (More likely, it is our lack of charity and godliness that makes them doubt.)
The medieval writers who put Earth in the center of gravity, where are all the heavy, mundane, mortal, and un-divine material fell, regarded the center of the universe as the bottom, where hell was. The Earth’s surface was the roof of hell. The stars were the palaces of the saints and angels, the important part of the universe. We were the sewer.
And, as writers from Chesterton to Lewis have pointed out, in no sober man does the size of the universe show man to be too small for the concern of God, rather than stand in mute witness to His glory.
Man is indeed small in relation to the universe. For that matter, he is small in relation to the nearest tree.
Arguing that heliocentrism moves man from the central position of God’s love to a forgotten corner of the cosmos is as illogical as arguing that Caesar must be a god but Christ cannot be god, because Caesar was in Rome, adorned in purple, whereas Christ was born in a stinking stable in an obscure frontier of the Empire.
Only someone unfamiliar with (or perhaps an enemy of) both Christian humility and scientific honesty could make such a stupid argument as to claim heliocentrism erodes faith and geocentrism will restore it.
Therefore when Professor Hill says at the outset that his purpose is not to learn science, but to use science to teach about God, salvation and the eternity of the soul, he attempting gross malfeasance, first by identifying a wrong cause of atheism (it is not caused by heliocentrism) and second by identifying a wrong method of Biblical exegesis (expecting science to match tin-eared literalism of those heretics who worship the Bible, not Christ.)
So the introduction gave me the intellectual measure of the man: the question he approaches are above his mental pay grade.
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With some reluctance, I surrender to a reader’s request to place, in one spot easily opened, my series of essays explaining my reasoning that compelled me to accept the Catholic Church as being one, true, apostolic and catholic in nature, and rejecting respectfully the claims of the others.
My reluctance is for the obvious reason that in this late hour of history, when the lamps of the faith are being extinguished one by one, and the whole is rotted and stinking with the open corruption of venal secularists and their perversions combining with heretical and apostate Mohammedans to form a single and insanely violent death cult bent on the destruction of the West and the enslavement of all her children, is the worse moment to stir up old wounds between brothers.
I wish enmity to none of my brethren in Christ, and, as I hope we will meet in heaven, we can lay to rest our petty and odious theological disputes there, when the light of truth shall abolish them. Whoever turns out to have been wrong will laugh and weep, and whoever turns out to be right will be ashamed at his lack of charity, if he failed to love the mislead brother all the more, as he ought to have done.
Nonetheless, truth has its own claim, and I must speak it as best I may, if I may do so without pride:
http://www.scifiwright.com/apologetics/
This long essay is also available by clicking the APOLOGETICS button on the front page of this journal.
We now have a shop at Zazzle. There are collections there with items from the Books of Unexpected Enlightenment, the Prospero’s Children (Daughter) series, Tales of Moth and Cobweb, and the general writings of John C. Wright.
http://www.zazzle.com/wright_stuff_shop
So if you need a nousepad of Mab, a cheerweasel bag, or a clock adorned with the Dark Tower from SOMEWHITHER, here is the place to sate your needs.
Please note that the black and white drawings were penned by yours truly, so if you have ever dreamed of seeing what a sardonic sheep named Gaius or mad English warlock boy named Sigfried or the ever-popular Mephistopheles Prospero (a name far more ominous than he is) look like on mug or mousepad, pillow or T-shirt, now your dreams come true. Read the remainder of this entry »
This is the too-long did not read version of a previous column. I write in in hopes that the many people who have misunderstood my point will understand if earnestly asked.
In the following argument, no claim is being made that inexplicable things are explicable. No claim is being made that the atheist model is wrong. The single claim being made is that the atheist model is inelegant, that is, it is a model that is less parsimonious and less robust than the Christian model.
I said it at least four times in a prior column article, but the concept that a lawyer is only arguing the one point he says he is arguing is confusing to many, so I will repeat it:
I am asking the reader to compare the two models of the universe. I make no arguments as to which is true. I am only talking about (1) what they claim and (2) whether the model requires ad hoc after-the-fact rationalizations to save the appearances. I called these ad hoc ‘epicycles.’
The atheist model either claims that the origin of the universe is a mystery beyond human power to know, or claims it is beyond present human knowledge, or claims that various speculations (spontaneous creation, multiverse, or endless cycles) are the most satisfactory speculations currently available.
The Christian model claims the origin of the universe is known because the originator made it known. The model neatly avoids the logical fallacy of an infinite regression of causes, and the unscientific claims about reverse-entropy, the paradox of multiple universes, or causes arising spontaneously.
And likewise for various other claims about the origin and nature of morality, the origin and nature of aesthetics, of free will, and for historical claims of the causes of the triumph of the Christian Church and of Western Civilization. The atheist explanation of why Christians act as they do does not fit in with the atheist model of human nature, motivation, and behavior, or says it is beyond knowing.
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After a fascinating discussion with Dave ‘Slayer-of-Snowflakes’ Truesdale (the first, but not the last, man to be expelled from a science fiction con for speaking truth to falsehoodlums) He shared a tidbit of history with me, that I would like to pass along.
Mr Truesdale says by way of background:
At the tender age of 24, in April of 1976 my third or fourth con ever was a Minicon. I interviewed a ton of the Giants at that con (and the previous Minicon in 1975) and published the interviews in the original Tangent, which was devoted to articles, book reviews, and interviews. Turns out that one of those interviews was with Leigh Brackett and husband Edmond Hamilton, said interview since verified as the very last one of them both together.
Within a year and a half both of them had passed away. With all
humility I observe that it is regarded as a classic by many. It is quite long but looking back on it now after 40 years it still holds up. The kid lucked out.
http://www.tangentonline.com/interviews-columnsmenu-166/1270
-classic-leigh-brackett-a-edmond-hamilton-interview
My comment: Leigh Brackett, although I never met her, never wrote her a fan letter, has always had a very special place in my heart. Her space-noir adventure stories stand out from the crowd of pulps, and her penning EMPIRE STRIKES BACK should confirm her fame to those who have forgotten that she wrote THE BIG SLEEP screenplay.
But, in my case, her imagination is the first one from which I stole a character and a situation for a RPG game of mine, a villain named Alandur, a vampire, not of blood, but of beauty.
Of Edmund ‘World-wrecker’ Hamilton, I fall mute in admiration. He is like a pagan god to me. A shrine to his work burns forever with votive candles in my imagination. He wrote CAPTAIN FUTURE, ferpetessake! You cannot get more scientifictionary than that.
Superluminary, Episode 19, THE SURRENDER OF SATURN, is posted on Patreon:
Episode 19 The Surrender of Saturn
In this exciting episode, Darius Tell, Lord Pluto, battles with his brother Lord Saturn. Aeneas forces the captured Lord Saturn to use his secret powers to reveal the long-hidden and primordial origins of earthly life that the missing, mad Emperor, Lord Tellus, kept from his family.
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