I have had the honor to be interviewed by the NC Register:
http://www.ncregister.com/blog/astagnaro/an-interview-with-catholic-sci-fi-author-john-c.-wright
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A reader with the large-souled name of Mahasamatman writes a new blurb for my latest upcoming book, COUNT TO INFINITY:
“You loved the epic and mind-blowing finale in *The Architect of Aeons.* You shivered in ecstasy as its even more epic and mind-blowing continuation, *The Vindication of Man,* surpassed all expectation. Now your constituent atoms will burst apart in joy, forming a short-lived but highly dangerous cloud of plasma that will burn down your house, as *Count to Infinity* brings ANOTHER SPECTACULAR CONCLUSION to John C. Wright’s hard space princess opera about Texans fighting Nazis on the Moon.”
My comment: I am trying to think of other stories starring moon Nazis, and the only one I can come up with is IRON SKY and ROCKET SHIP GALILEO. Unless THE MOONBEAST by A.E. van Vogt counts. Can anyone think of any others?
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Superluminary, Episode 46 The Absolute Weapon, is posted on Patreon:
Episode 46 The Absolute Weapon
In this exciting episode, Mars battles the invisible, timewarp-protected, death-energy-radiating meteor swarms of mountain-sized myriad undead plunging into the poisoned seas of Second Earth, while Aeneas unwillingly flees.
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For those of you cruelly left hanging at the cliffhanger ending of VINDICATION OF MAN, here is Chapter One of COUNT TO INFINITY. Which also ends in a cliffhanger:
— PART ELEVEN: The Edge of Orion —
CHAPTER ONE: The Cataclysmic Variable in Canes Venatici
1. The Ghost
AD 92000 to 95500
He was dead, that was sure; but not entirely, and not permanently.
When awareness fled and all activity ceased, it could have been called sleep or hibernation. But he had been in those two states of being before, frequently, and for long periods, and this was something more still, more silent, less like life than that.
When awareness returned, Menelaus Illation Montrose was a pattern of leptons distributed throughout a featureless lump of gray metal falling through darkness and nothingness. He had neither hands, nor head, nor heart, intestines or eyes.
Nor did he have engines, fuel, reserve energy, or motive power, and the sails had been three fourths torn away. Had they been wholly torn away, as his assassin had planned, he would have been well and truly dead by now, dead beyond recovery or revival.
Instead, the sails absorbed enough ambient starlight to allow him, every three or four hundred years, for three or four minutes, to wake. Chemical energy reserves woven into the gray lump of the ship’s mass were sufficient to energize a cubic foot of his outer hull, stir it to motion, and form lenses and antennae to take measurements. It annoyed him that he had a perfect memory, since even the comforting routine of noting in the log the progress of his endless, weightless fall through unhorizoned, infinite space was denied him.
His velocity, relative to the tiny speck of Sol (lost somewhere in the stars of Piscus Austinus) was very near the speed of light.
In three thousand years of flight, even the nearer stars changed position against the unmoving backdrop of farther stars only over centuries. There is no vertical nor horizontal in space, no weight, no sensation of motion.
Free fall is falling; in a way, it is infinite descent. And yet, in another way, at even the most immense velocity, when there is nothing against which to compare it, it seemed perfectly motionless. Montrose was both plunging down an unending drop, and was utterly still.
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A fan wrote me this morning and told me my book was on sale for pre-order on Amazon. This is the first time I’ve seen the cover art.
Count to Infinity is now available for pre-order.
From the publisher’s description:
The spectacular conclusion to the thought-provoking hard SF Eschaton Sequence, exploring future history and human evolution.
An epic space opera finale worthy of the scope and wonder of The Eschaton Sequence: Menelaus Montrose is locked in a final battle of wits, bullets, and posthuman intelligence with Ximen del Azarchel for the fate of humanity in the far future.
The alien monstrosities of Ain at long last are revealed, their hidden past laid bare, along with the reason for their brutal treatment of Man and all the species seeded throughout the galaxy. And they have still one more secret that could upend everything Montrose has fought for and lived so long to achieve.
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Jagi here:
The Conservative Libertarian Fiction Alliance are winding down their Book of the Year contest.
Currently, Iron Chamber of Memory is in third place.
I had really hoped Iron Chamber would do well, because it is not eligible for the Dragon this year, due to the cut-off days for the Dragon Awards. It is such an amazing book, with such an unusual history to it. But…alas.
Of course, it’s up against a number of excellent books!
Still, here’s the link, if anyone hasn’t voted yet: CLFA Book of the Year
Every age has its peccadilloes. In the modern age, blatantly to deny the obvious is our most obvious dishonesty. We live in the era of the unreal.
I can only offer, as an observation, what the passage of decades and the observation of the doings of modern men from my viewpoint, first from a law office, and later from the bullpen of a newspaper, have taught me. More proof than that is beyond my power to give: I can but point at the sight. You must look for yourself, and see.
What I observed is that modern men routinely would deny the undeniable, ignoring clear and evident dangers to life and liberty; while at the same time and in the same spirit, cower and shriek like Chicken Little at utterly imaginary and unreal threats.
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I thought some of my readers (especially those who are part of the Awesome Pulp Revival) might be interested in this:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/autarch/heroic-fantasy-and-barbarian-conquerors-collection
The new Autarch Kickstarter has launched. Just as pulp fantasy fiction is taking the SFF community by storm, Autarch is tackling those same genres with its tabletop books.
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Superluminary, Episode 45 The Archvampires of Space, is posted on Patreon:
Episode 45 The Archvampires of Space
In this exciting episode, a rash decision by Aeneas leads the World Armada of Man into combat at giant, super-hot star Wolf-Rayet 102. Calamity results.
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The Hill reports
Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized, while the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely.
My comment: never have I heard such good news.
As a man who worked, not for one bankrupt news organization, but for two, the knowledge that part of my meager paycheck went to fund my competators, and to spread lies and propoganda, was a thorn in my eye for all the years of my adult life.
Add to this that Big Bird and all his horrid crew will now have to beg for money from corporate sponsers, or even (gasp!) work for his goshdarned pay like an honest avian.
Add to this that so-called works of art like Piss Christ will not be paid for by money that would otherwise go to pay for bread to feed my children, so that the blasphemous enemy of muse and man alike who calls himself an artist will also be thrown into the marketplace to earn his keep or to starve. (Judging from the alleged quality of the alleged work, my money is on starve.)
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Some anime are stronger doing the “awesome” thing than doing the “that makes perfect sense and flows out of the preceding events in a clear and logical fashion” thing.
Here is the theme song from an anime called Gurren Lagann. I recommend it to anyone who likes big action that gets bigger and bigger. The show is about mining, quantum mechanics, true love, and breaking open the sky.
(A word of warning: I had frankly forgotten how tasteless the over-the-top boob humor, buttocks humor, and unfunny flaming drag-queen humor there was in the show. So, your mileage, as they say, may vary.)
My comment: Do the impossible! See the invisible!
Part of the lyrics for “Libera me” part :
Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna in die illa tremenda;
quando coeli movendi sunt et terra:
dum veneris judicare saeclum per ignem.
Tremens factus sum ego et timeo, dum discussio venerit atque ventura irae, quando coeli movendi sunt et terra.
Which means:
Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death on that awful day;
when the heavens and the earth shall be moved;
when you will come to judge the world by fire.
I tremble, and I fear the judgment and the wrath to come, when the heavens and the earth shall be moved.
Lest I be accused of shortchanging you, here is a version of the song with the operatic hymn not edited out:
The Last Crusade is the eternal war against all Hellish things. The visible parts of the war, fought with sword or spear, bullet or bomb, are but sorties of a larger siege that is fought, oddly enough, with prose and poem, with spirit and prayer.
One matter where the Last Crusade must plant a banner around which to rally is what seems at first to be minor. The matter is courtesy.
But it leads to a deeper matter, perhaps the deepest: because the question of courtesy leads to the question of the role of reason among rational creatures.
Courtesy is a deeper thing than it seems. Please note the unrelenting resolve, over a period of years, during which the Enemy has branded all formalism, good manners, and good breeding to be either absurd, or unwelcome, or even sinister. If a man prefers you call him by your last name, this is regarded as standoffish and pompous. If a man prefers not to hear gutter language, blasphemies and scatological Anglosaxonism, he is unfriendly, unrealistic, and perhaps a hypocrite. If a gentleman holds a door for a lady, or a man refuses to strike a woman in the face, he is a sinister oppressor, and an enemy of women.
All these ideas are blatantly absurd. The Left has convinced the world that courtesy is rude.
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Live chat — 3 to 5pm EST
We will be discussing the Superversive Book List–what qualifies and what does not.
SuperversiveSF Live Roundtable
(Posted by Jagi)
This installment gives us the opportunity to look at the best magazine covers of all time, by which I mean the Astounding Stories covers from the Campbellian Golden Age. There should be a fair number of short stories a well read SF reader will recognize from this collection of classics.
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The beautiful and talented Mrs. Wright points out what is wrong with the whole approach of ‘modernizing’ Disney’s Belle in the live action remake of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.
http://superversivesf.com/2017/03/14/ruining-beauty/
