Dan Simmons, Whateverism, and the Little Big Brothers
Dan Simmons is one of the most talented authors writing today. The man’s muse spans all time and space, and touches the core of the human heart. If you are a science fiction fan, and you have not read HYPERION, fate has cheated you.
Likewise for FALL OF HYPERION, ENDYMION and RISE OF ENDYMION. I hold Gene Wolfe in higher esteem, and CS Lewis, and Professor Tolkein, but, honestly not many others.
HYPERION is Canterbury Tales in space, where, in a magnificant flourish of auctorial skill, each story is told in a different voice as a different genre: a hardboiled detective tale of murder and intrigue; a heartbreaking story of a desperate father seeks a cure for daughter who grows younger day by day, forgetting her life; a melancholy tale of a poet who has lost his talent; and so on.
The threads of the different lives, different narratives, gather into a single cable as the pilgrims visit the mysterious Time Tombs, haunted by a deadly, silvery entity known only as The Shrike. All this, and starships grown from redwood trees as well.
And how the author turns this into a meditation on the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis displays a mastery of the writer’s art I wish I could imitate.
Dan Simmons is currently being hectored and scolded by the Usual Suspects because he was unimpressed at the public spectacle of leftwing termagants manipulating and abusing a mentally ill young girl into standing up before the UN to throw a temper tantrum.
He uttered wrongthink, and all the little Big Brothers decide to play the game of cancel culture.
If you wish to know the details, I provide a link below to Larry Correia’s blog, where I learned of the debacle, and he has further links.
I would like any patron of mine, if ever my words have pleased you, gentle sir or madam, to stand up and spend a banknote or two to oppose this economic blackmail by the Harpies of Toleration. This is also an excuse to laud Mr. Simmons, whose writings I have not previously, with sufficient verve and volume, lauded.
Hat Tip to MONSTER HUNTER NATION
If you are Audible member, please be aware there is a $6.95 audio book sale on, and Hyperion is on the sale list.
My comment:
For the record, I confess I was similarly unimpressed by the recent sight of public child abuse and publicity stunt.
I should mention I have children with a similar diagnosis. The affliction, among other things, renders the mind inflexible, so that discovering one has been deceived is far more traumatic to someone on the spectrum that it would be for us. Large crowds, fulsome flattery, stressful situations, are all likewise more difficult to handle. I use the term child abuse not as an exaggeration here.
It seems we need a sixteen year old with Aspergers to tell us that the sole solution to the terrifying crisis of world-ending whateverism is totalitarian socialism.
We must act now, without time for thought or debate, or catastrophic global ice age nuclear winter sea level ozone acide rain cooling holes will render all polar bears extinct and cause mass starvation in India by the far future year of 1990. Paul “Population Bomb” Erlich predicted it: how can he be wrong?
In 2008, Al Gore predicted the ice caps would be melted in ten years. Fortunately, that is also in the distant future of negative one, so we need not compare the prediction against reality. Because the ice caps grew.
Since the wee little shrill activist being used as a sock puppet by cynical manipulators of mass media did not promote nuclear power, all honest men can rightly dismiss the message as bogus. No one, and I solemnly and absolutely mean no one at all , who honestly thought the world would end in ten years due to greenhouse gas emmissions due to fossil fuel use would eschew any power supply which generates no gas emissions at all, no matter what the collateral risks or drawbacks.
But we are all bad people if we do not beg our betters for chains. We have robbed a young girl of her childhood.
There is no polite response fit for mixed company a gentleman can utter.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
October 1, 2019 @ 8:00 pm
