Filed in Last Straw
Archive for October, 2018
Protected: The Last Straw 13: The Non-Characters
Posted October 12, 2018 By John C WrightHoward’s Hyborian Age
Posted October 11, 2018 By John C WrightRobert E. Howard, as many an author fascinated with his world building is wont to do, wrote extensive notes on the years between when the oceans drank Atlantis and the coming of the Aryans.
This he dubbed the Hyborian Age, and it is the setting of his Conan tales. These notes he presented as an essay in The Phantagraph, February 1936, with a brief note affixed before it warning readers not to read to much into it: “Nothing in this article is to be considered as an attempt to advance any theory in opposition to accepted history. It is simply a fictional background for a series of fiction-stories.”
Basically the races and peoples of his Hyborian Age are the prehistoric ancestors of the races we know from the first chapters of our written history: The Stygians are the forefathers of the Egyptians, the Hyrkanians of the Sumerians, the Shemites of the Semites, and so on.
It is a clever conceit. It not only allows the writer the freedom to mix the flavor, look and feel of various historical periods, while slipping the chain of historical fact, the writer also is permitted to make wry comments on any historical event to which he invents a close parallel. He can, for better or worse, also have the event turn out as suits his disposition.
Somewhere in the middle of this history, there is an example of such an example of such a parallel event and its result. In this case, it is far more grim, even disproportionately so, than the real historical event from which the parallel is drawn. One is tempted, despite Howard’s warning words heading his essay, indeed to read too much into the reading.
Here Howard slow the pace of his centuries-per-paragraph history for a detailed anecdote of the singular meeting which produces one of the great wars of his age.
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Loyal to the Destroyers
Posted October 10, 2018 By John C WrightLost on the Last Continent is on hiatus for the month of October. Episodes resume November 7th. In the meanwhile, tales from the Unconquered Earth Sequence, my earliest foray into science fiction, will be posted in this space.
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Loyal to the Destroyers
by
John C Wright
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1. Warden
Jalerat Surat Sangn was loyal to the Djain master-race. He knew this was the case, as evidenced by the fact that the Djain continued to sustain the life given him with gruel and water, and air, and work.
Their immortal wisdom could not be deceived; if he had not been loyal, he would have been ordered to report to the Medical House for recycling.
Yet, at times, he had thoughts and feelings, uncommunicated to anyone, unconfessed even to the Morale Control Sergeants of his phyla and segment, which Jalerat would have been certain were disloyal. Jalerat concluded that he must be loyal, and simply not be aware of it himself. His doubts were a danger of his assignments; the task of investigation required skepticism; skepticism required doubt.
It was in the middle of his sleep-shift when the doubts came again. His collar woke him with a painful electric jolt. Weary, he rose from the narrow metal planks of his bed, and stood at attention, barefoot on the cold stones of the narrow space between the bunks of the dormitory.
The other members of the Surat group of the Sangn segment still lay asleep; Jalerat was called for some special duty.
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Not Tired of Winning LI
Posted October 6, 2018 By John C WrightKavanaugh is confirmed.
The Associated Press reports:
Acrimonious to the end, the battle featured a climactic roll call that was interrupted several times by protesters in the Senate Gallery before Capitol Police removed them.
The vote gave Trump his second appointee to the court, tilting it further to the right and pleasing conservative voters who might have revolted against GOP leaders had Kavanaugh’s nomination flopped.
…
Rep. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, confronting a tough re-election race next month in a state that Trump won in 2016 by a landslide, was the sole Democrat to vote against Kavanaugh.
Note: Manchin actually voted for Kavanaugh. The wishful thinking of the leftwing news peeps through here, perhaps a Fraudian error. I could not find a single conservative news source on a Google search for page after page of results.
Every voting Republican backed [Kavanaugh].
Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, the only Republican to oppose the nominee, voted “present,” offsetting the absence of Kavanaugh supporter Steve Daines of Montana, who was attending his daughter’s wedding. That rare procedural maneuver left Kavanaugh with the same two-vote margin he’d have had if Murkowski and Daines had both voted.
It was the closest roll call to confirm a justice since 1881, when Stanley Matthews was approved by 24-23, according to Senate records.
Those of you who voted for Trump reluctantly, now is the time to burn your “Nevertrump” hats, banners, bassards and bumper-stickers.
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Musical Corner: The Right Books You Read in Childhood
Posted October 6, 2018 By John C WrightHere is “The Ballad Of Fighting” by Vladimir Vysotsky –
Translation by George Tokarev
Enjoy.
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Filed in Only Posting a Link
Demons About to be Exorcised
Posted October 6, 2018 By John C WrightThese quotes are taken from an article by Jennifer Hartline entitled It’s Not Kavanaugh, It’s Roe. Her words are so wise, and cut so deep, I thought it best to amplify them, and to ask my readers to do the same.
Any honest observer has to be repulsed by the histrionics displayed during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. Screaming women raving like lunatics about one thing: abortion-on-demand. At the thought that they may not be able to extinguish the natural results of their sexual encounters, that the child they help create is a human being they are obligated to protect, the pelvic Left becomes absolutely unhinged. Unhinged is even too inadequate a word. It’s like the behavior of demons about to be exorcised.
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Filed in Only Posting a Link, Wisdom
Protected: The Last Straw 12: The Non-Fight Scenes
Posted October 5, 2018 By John C Wright Filed in Last Straw
Conan: Pool of the Black One
Posted October 4, 2018 By John C WrightInto the west, unknown of man,
Ships have sailed since the world began.
Read, if you dare, what Skelos wrote,
With dead hands fumbling his silken coat;
And follow the ships through the wind-blown wrack—
Follow the ships that come not back.
With these eerie, evocative words opens Pool of the Black One, the sixth published Conan tale, first published in Weird Tales, October 1933. Conan did not make the cover, but this image is famous among aficionados of weird illustration, so I hasten to post it here:
I fear that, as I go in publication order through the Conan canon of Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age stories, if I continue to praise each tale as brilliant and original, the reader might begin to suspect that I gush over everything flowing from Howard’s pen uncritically.
But, alas, Howard’s writing continues to be brilliant and original, and my critical eye sees little to criticize. To be sure, there are recurring themes and tropes that repeat from tale to tale, but rather than seeming rote or unoriginal, they gather momentum and weigh, in just the same way, in comedy, if done right, a running joke gets funnier each time it is revisited.
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Go and Redeem Some Younger Man
Posted October 4, 2018 By John C WrightAndrew Klavan’s show is one I always like, but in this one particularly, when he spoke of the change God made in his life, and the pain and effort of climbing, one step at a time, away from his darkness into something better, really struck my heart. I am also a later comer, who had a gray beard before he converted. It is not too late.
I cannot post the visual part of this episode, but listen to his answer to the letter asking him about how to renew your mind after conversion. It starts at 27:39.
You are welcome to watch or heed the rest of the show, of course. It is just the part I wanted to draw to your attention is inside it.
Filed in Only Posting a Link
Larry Correia’s Russian Bot Review of Last Jedi
Posted October 4, 2018 By John C WrightThe esteemed and unconquerable whom the wise and the great in whispered tones revere as ‘The Mountain Who Writes’ whom the vulgar called Larry Correia, International Lord of Hate, has been disturbed in the throes of his muses by idiocy so severe that it registers on the Richter scale. Below is the opening.
By all means, go to his website, read the whole thing, and buy a few more of his books. Language warnings and spoiler warnings, etc.:
http://monsterhunternation.com/2018/10/02/my-russian-bot-review-of-the-last-jedi/the-last-jedi/
Okay, I should be working on the end of Monster Hunter Guardian, but then I saw this dumb ass article, and it absolutely demanded a response. I saw the Last Jedi. I talked about it a little bit on Facebook, but once I started optioning books to Hollywood I quit reviewing movies on my blog. But damn it, this has pushed me too far!
That’s right. Supposedly most of the people who hated The Last Jedi were Russian robots.
And so this was me, thirty seconds after I read that nonsense.
So today, don’t think of me as American novelist Larry Correia. I’m Lavrenty Krasnov, Cossack movie reviewer, who thinks that the Last Jedi was a dumpster fire of suck.
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Filed in Only Posting a Link, Wisdom
Escaping Atheism / Red Pill Religion
Posted October 3, 2018 By John C WrightChanges in schedule force me to visit Max Kolbe monthly rather than weekly, but he and I have a podcast scheduled for tonight, October 3rd, and every first Wednesday of the month hereafter.
Please join us! Here is the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
We will be discussing chivalry, His Honor Judge Kavanaugh, honor, and who knows what else.
Filed in Red Pill Religion
Farthest Man From Earth
Posted October 3, 2018 By John C WrightLost on the Last Continent is on hiatus for the month of October. Episodes resume November 7th. In the meanwhile, tales from the Unconquered Earth Sequence, my earliest foray into science fiction, will be posted in this space.
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Farthest Man From Earth
by
John C Wright
Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Vol. 19 # 4 & 5, No.229-230 (April, 1995)
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Beneath an unearthly dark violet sky, an old man wearing goggles, a rebreather-mask, and a cape, lay on the slope of a mountainside of gold crystal fibers.
He lay on his back, looking upward.
High overhead, vertical streamers of mauve-gray vapor rose up out of the organisms below the mountainside, striping the heavens like a tiger’s hide. A sun the color of roses or old wine hung high in the heavens, surrounded by zones of luminous gas like Saturn’s rings. A dozen moons like daytime stars hovered above the clouds, burning like colored points, too far away to show their disks or crescents.
The sun was 36 Ophiuchus, some twenty-three light years from Earth. The world was the fourteenth out of three dozen planets circling 36 Ophiuchus, about which also orbited gas clouds, swarms of cometary bodies, and the numberless worldlets and rocks of her four asteroid belts.
His practiced eye could find which moving point of light was the orbiting hulk of the starship St. Anselm. For forty years, as boy and man, he had lived aboard that ship, in transit. To do God’s work, he had thought; to be among the first of all mankind to visit an alien civilization. The price of permanent exile from Earth had seemed small then, back when he still believed.
The man was Adam Drake. At the age of sixteen he had signed aboard the star-ship St. Anselm as astrogator and pilot, historian and linguist. He was the first xenolinguist of history, the first man ever to have translated an utterly alien system of symbology. Had it been worth his life?
He tried to lift his head. He saw the mountain. On the summit above him, amid outcroppings of blue-reddish masses (which looked to be boulders, but were not) glinted the dome of the expedition. Seventeen other human beings were living up there; eighteen, if one considered Father Rodriguez to be alive. None were young enough to outlive a forty year return to Earth.
He lifted his head further. The pain was beginning to tremble through his body. Below the dome, above him on the slope, were the aircraft hangers, surrounded by ponds of melted snow which were chemicals mostly not water. As far away as Earth, to him. He would not outlive the return journey.
He tried to rise, and failed. His rebreather-pack hindered his motions, as did the long flowing silver-white cape. He wore the cape because it was daytime. The expedition had, years ago, exhausted its supply of x-ray and ultraviolet ray blocking skin cream.
It seemed a shame that the whiteness of his cape was stained with so much blood. He fell back onto the fibers. The fibers rippled were he fell, ringing.
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Filed in Free Fic
Larry Correia on Brett Kavanaugh
Posted October 2, 2018 By John C WrightLarry Correia, writer without peer, posted a brief statement on a controversial topic. With his permission, I reprint it here: Read the remainder of this entry »
Virago’s Veto
Posted October 2, 2018 By John C WrightThe circus surrounding the nomination of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court continues its weary and grotesque injustices because Senator Flake was confronted in an elevator by a harpy.
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Filed in Musings
Science Fiction, Fantasy, Spirituality
Posted October 2, 2018 By John C WrightPart 1 of the 2-hour stream we did last Sunday. The other part will be uploaded in a few days, where we discuss our conversions to Christ.
