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Andy Robertson reviews ‘Awake in the Night Land’

Posted October 8, 2015 By John C Wright

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND by John C Wright: a review

 About thirteen years ago, I started a little website.

*****

My wife was only a few years dead then, and she still visited me from time to time.  I would wake up in a bed full of her warmth and musk, and feel her sleeping just beside me.  I would turn over and  kiss her, and she would whisper love sleepily.  I would get up and go to wash my face, and go back to the bedroom to kiss her awake.  Then I would really wake up.

My daughters would come to the door-gates of their rooms,  holding up their arms and saying daddy, and I’d pick one up and snuggle her and take her downstairs to where their grandmother had breakfast ready, then go back upstairs for the other, then grab a bacon sandwich and a mug of coffee and walk down to the train station and go to work.  They waved from the windows till I was out of sight.  I’d come home late and just have time to kiss them goodnight.

It was along hard day until they let me telecommute, and I suddenly had a lot of spare time.

*****

There was a man who had a beautiful young wife.
She died, and he dreamed of meeting her again, at the end of time, when the Sun was dead.

*****
I had always been fascinated by the book.  The Final Arcology of mankind, Earth’s Last Citadel, surrounded by an entire universe that had been taken over by Hell.  I wanted to read more stories set in that Land, and now I had the time to do something and a little bit of spare money, I took advice.  I was a subeditor for INTERZONE back then in its glory days, and I had Dave Pringle to explain the legal side of buying fiction to display online.

I set rates and contacted Ranlan.com and waited for stories to come in.  Meanwhile I started the trimmings. Essays.  A gallery of book covers.  Then a little step up: Stephen Fabian’s terrific paintings of the Watchers, illustrations for the 1973 edition of THE DREAM OF X, the abbreviated version of THE NIGHT LAND Hodgson published in the US to keep the copyright.   I was careful to pay Fabian for his work, for these pictures are surely the first example of someone actually adding to the original NIGHT LAND, adding something that will always be connected to it from now on.                        .

Look at them. They do not so much illustrate the story as form a collateral theme.

And quite quickly we got our first story, “An Exhalation of Butterflies” by Nigel Atkinson.  This was its basic idea.    Every so often, as a gesture of defiance, the Redoubt turns the production of its Underground Fields over to the creation of  butterflies.  They’re kept on ice for a  few years to build up numbers and then they are all hatched  and sucked up by  the ventilation  system of the Redoubt and ejected Out into the Night.   No practical reason.  Just a gigantic  Fuck You to the forces in the Night and the horror and the darkness.

I thought it was brilliant.  Dave took it for INTERZONE, and I put it online next month.

I tried my own hand and wrote “EATER“.  It was the story of a female Seer, telepathically surveying the Land, who is taken over and used to invade the Redoubt.   The invasion fails and she dies burned body and soul by the  Redoubt defense systems.   It’s a reasonably good tale, and Dave accepted it to run in INTERZONE, and Gardner Dozois gave it a tick mark in his year’s best recommended.  There is nothing special about it, except it was the first time in my life I had ever tried to write a piece of fiction.

The dark, looming, images of the Land had made such an impact on me.  When I started to write stories set in that world, it was as if I remembered a life I had lived in that society, with its prim manners overlaying iron values and its dauntless courage.   I didn’t need to make anything up. I just watched it happen.

Brett Davidson sent me a story from New Zealand with a background that complemented  and extended my own, and I found the person who would be my principle creative partner.   For years we’ve batted ideas back and forth by email late at night.   Other writers joined us and mostly took their lead from Brett and I.   We were building a shared world but one so rich and vivid felt as if we were were discovering something that already existed.  I don’t think I’ve ever had such fun ((while vertical)) in my life.

And then I got a new submission, from John C Wright, which was quite apart from all the other Night Land tales.

I’d written a fusion of  Hodgson’s vision with cutting-edge science, and tried to evoke a credible Redoubt culture, a culture that might really last ten million years.   Therefore my Redoubt was a society of strict moral codes, an actual functional and enforced marriage contract, strong kinship bonds, and sharply differentiated complementary behavior of men and women. ((It strikes me only now that this is mistaken by some readers for archaism. But of course  it isn’t.  It’s futurism.  Or just realism. No society without these values or something like them can survive more than a couple of generations.))  And I’d written of a society rich in technical and scientific knowledge, including as unremarked givens such familiar SF tropes as nanotechnology, cyborgisation, and Artificial Intelligence.   I had some fun integrating these into Hodgson’s “scientific” formulation of reincarnation and psychic predation.

I had done my best to reinterpret the  Night Land as science fiction, and other writers had followed me.   But  John’s story followed his own dreams.

His character names were derived from classical Greek, not generic IndoEuropean sememes. The manners of the society were likewise closely modeled on the ancient pagans. Dozois has called this an air of distanced antiquity, and it works well, but I repeat it’s distinctly different from my own, which is not antique at all. His was not a technically sophisticated society and seemed not to have a scientific attitude to the alien Land that surrounded it. It ran off rote technology and was ignorant of the workings of much of the machinery it depended on. It was doomed and dwindling and dark and candle-lit, a tumbledown place with a hint of Ghormenghast to it. (I know John will hate that comparison, and I apologize). The story was one of childhood friendship, rivalry, disaster and rescue. The writing style was, incidentally, brilliant.

I bought it and published it in our first hardcopy anthology, ENDLESS LOVE. It got into Dozois’ BEST SF and several other yearly anthologies and created a minor sensation. There are still places where the first taste of Hodgson’s work a casual reader will get is the translation of “Awake in the Night” in that year’s Dozois, and the story is an entry drug not only for THE NIGHT LAND but for Hodgson himself and all his work. This was a story which Hodgson might have written if he had been a more gifted weaver of words. John remarked to me at one point that he was surprised at the story’s popularity. I think we both understood that despite its author’s talent, the real power resided in the way it had stayed faithful to Hodgson’s own visions, without elaborating them too much. The whole world could now see and share Hodgson’s original Night Land. They were seeing it through John’s eyes, not mine, but that didn’t matter to me.   This was what I had set the NightLand website up for.

*****
I expected a whole series of tales from John set in his version of The Night Land, but his next story was a radical departure from anything that he or any of the rest of us had ever done. It surpassed not only Hodgson’s talents but, damn it, Lovecraft’s. When I read “Awake in the Night” I felt some envy, but when the ms for “The Last of All Suns” crossed my inbox I felt something like awe.

It’s almost impossible to describe this story without employing spoilers, because there is nothing else like it to compare it to or to hint that it is like. Baldly, then: the universe is in its final contraction, falling back on itself into a massive black hole, the last of all suns. In one sliver of it, life remains: a gigantic starship, millions of years old . On board this Starship,ruling it, are the great powers and forces of the Night, who have been victorious not only in the Night Land they turned Earth into but throughout the cosmos.

To oppose them on the ship there are a scattering of human escapees, their bodies artificially regrown from some ancient recording, their souls compelled to one final reincarnation for unknown reasons. The oldest is a Neanderthal, or something similar. The youngest is an inhabitant of the Last Redoubt. Yet it is now so very much later than even the Last Age of the Redoubt that the entire time span from the earliest to the latest lives of these reincarnated ones is like the blink of an eye at the start of a long, dark, night.

And now what can I say? How can I possibly describe what happens next?  Even if I could, I would probably have to go beyond what is allowable in a review.  As I said, this story is unique.  I can’t describe its plot as “like” anything else.  I’d have to go through it section by section, practically retell it.

Yet certain things can be said.  For example, I can tell you that when these resurrectees talk to each other, their language automatically translated  by some mental trick, their concepts of the universe are so diverse that only method they have to communicate with each other is to employ the metalanguage of myth.  And yet this works, and Wright’s genius effortlessly makes it credible to the reader that it would work.  By selectively recounting the foundational myths of their diverse societies, they are able to discuss their situation, plan their actions, and the plot is rapidly and convincingly advanced.

One recalls the marvelous passage in Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out Of Time” which lists the enormous range of human societies the Great Race of Yith has plucked its time-swapped prisoners’ minds from.  The dialogue in this story is the sort of language those time-stolen scribes would have had to employ to talk to each other.  And Wright drops a few hints that let us know that “The Shadow Out Of Time” is exactly the ur-SF story he is drawing from here.   Wright excels Lovecraft – Lovecraft  – by this enormous margin; he does not merely list the societies his characters have been plucked from; he gives us their dialog, word for word, and effortlessly makes it believable.

And this is only one tiny facet of a story that integrates THE NIGHT LAND with THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND and goes on to swallow the modern mythos of Lovecraft and Stapledon and most of the GraecoRoman foundational myths of Western society.  And modern physics, as easy as an after-dinner mint.

Finally it comes down to this. In place of a soulless mathematical Episode of Inflation or the mindless flutings of Azathoth, Wright gives us  cosmos that is founded on the pattern of eternal love between man and woman.  And he does it convincingly.  He does it without breaking a sweat or drawing an extra breath.

*****
There was a man who had a beautiful young wife.

She died, and he dreamed of meeting her again, at the end of time, when the Sun was dead.

*****
I am not that man. That man was a fiction. I know death is merely the end, there is no reincarnation, that her presence in my bed was merely dream, and we shall never meet again in any age or realm or dimension,  not hand in hand looking out from the battlements of the Last Redoubt of Man nor anywhere else.

So how can I write about Eternal Love? Is love a laughable delusion, or is it the only real thing? I’m quite an old man now, suddenly and cripplingly ill, but it seems only yesterday that she was in my arms and our lips and hands were always reuniting.  I understand human sociobiology, I took the red pill decades ago, without the help of the Internet.    I understand what they call Game nowadays. I’ve read and admired its accurate application, I respect people who truly are using this to strengthen marriage, but the bloggers with their bedpost  scores and their flag counts are children fighting for bottles of fizzy drink. Love is another dimension. Love is the only thing stronger than death. And I’m writing this as a man who has lost his loved one and might meet death quite soon.

I don’t “believe” in love.  I know.

*****
It’s odd that the one flaw in this, John’s best story, is the portrayal of the Mirdath-figure, the multi-souled narrator’s eternal mate. The story rings like fine bronze when the men from different aeons resurrected in the death starship speak to each other: but it klunks juat a tiny bit whenever she pops up her eager-sex-partner-and-ideal-mother head. Surely the eternal female would in most of her incarnations be an ordinary unexceptional woman only made special by love? But I’m not going to fuss about this.

There is nothing like this story, nothing like it, anywhere else. It is incomparable.

*****
John sent us two more stories. They are both good stories, but I’m going to end this review with only brief mentions of them.

“The Cry of the Night hound” concerns a doomed attempt to domesticate these monsters, and were it not for Wright’s ever-beautiful prose and his moving portrayal of his Redoubt society in  (temporary) decay, it might be judged rather improbable.

“Silence of the Night” is a mad,fractured episode that must come from a time close to the Fall.   I think it does not work too well, though the beautiful writing and imagery carries it through.

I don’t know if Wright has written himself out, and said all he has to say about the Night Land. Maybe he has. Maybe not.  (But if you have, I have a theme for you, John, that I think you’ll like, that might rekindle your interest, that might produce something as good as “The Last Of All Suns”. I really do. But I gave it to another writer who has first dibs on it, and he’s doing nothing. If he gives it up, you’ll hear from me.)

Anyhow. I messed up the marketing of “The Last Of All Suns”, and the story fell into an obscurity from which I hope this new edition will rescue it. Now it’s been republished by professionals, along with Wright’s other three Night Land tales, I hope it sells a million copies.

*****
A final word.

Did the stuff about my wife with which I stared this review strikes you as forced, unreal?   Probably.  But it was in fact the simple literal truth.  I really did experience that, many times, though I have no doubt it was merely a dream.

Perhaps I could have made this review more plausible by leaving it out, even though it was the truth?  Indeed I could have.   And perhaps in the same way I could have made this review more effective, more believable, by being less effusive, by toning down my praise a bit.  Perhaps I could have.  But I’m not going to do that.   If you doubt my word, doubt away.  But truth is truth, and I don’t see why I should dodge it just to convince you. Buy this book, read the stories, read especially “the Last of all Suns”, and whatever you think about me after reading this review, when you have read the book you will know that every word of praise I give it here is the truth.

– Andy Robertson

 

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Narcissus reviews ‘Awake in the Night Land’

Posted October 8, 2015 By John C Wright

http://camwyn.dreamwidth.org/1104473.html

Naturally, as a gentleman, I can only express gratitude that my stories are being read at all, anywhere, by anyone, and it would ill behoove me to take that for granted.

I hope I am allowed to raise a mild if polite objection that one should read any story for the sake of the story being told, and not as a Rorschach inkblot used only as an excuse to express one’s own self-absorbed political-sexual obsessions.

Any tale is ill used when used as the looking glass of Narcissus.

Certain of the critiques here are valid, others less so. The reviewer finds my use of names and situations taken from Greek myth to be distracting, for example, because I do not vary the meaning from the original. This is a legitimate difference of judgment, and I defer to the tastes of the reader.

On the other hand, the point and meaning of the scene where something called ‘the new learning’ introduces a theory of the origins of the world which the readers know is false but the characters do not is completely lost on this reviewer. The point is that the men of that era do not know for certain men of our era ever existed, so vast is the depth of time. The point is not to make a sly comment on the modern controversy of young-earth creationism versus Darwinism, which, by the bye, is not a controversy where I side with the young-earth creationists. (Setting a story countless tens of millions of years in the future would be an odd choice indeed to serve as a vehicle to make a rhetorical point that the cosmos is six thousand years old.)

More to the matter, the reviewer here was trying so hard to find some anti-feminist thought-crime in my retelling of the Antigone myth, that she was forced to conclude that Antigone was an insignificant character.

Since, as we have noted above, I did not change the meaning of the original story, in effect the reviewer is arguing that Antigone is not a major character in the Antigone myth.

Similar mental gymnastic distortions are undertaken to find other female characters to be insignificant: Hellenore, for example, is insignificant because the story is told in flashback. Why Elsie, the mother of the human race in the final story, the girl who basically saves the universe, is insignificant eludes me. Having invented bogus reasons for claiming major characters are not major, the reviewer clucks her tongue at me for not having a sufficient quota of major female characters.

There is some slippery mathematics involved to minimize the number of female characters, so that a complaint could be lodged that there were not enough. It is roughly a third of the speaking roles.

I suppose I should be thankful that I was not taken to task for failing to portray a full quota of neuro-atypical Mohammedans, one-handed Lithuanians, blind Eskimos, and lefthanded hermaphrodite Zulus.

Also, that women in Hodgson’s background, a book published in 1912, were not permitted to expose themselves to such indescribably spiritual and physical dangers as would make swift suicide preferable was cause from some cawing and coughing from this reviewer.

Perhaps persons who cannot imagine cultures different from our own, in aeons and on planets remote from our own, with political and social opinions remote from our own, should not read science fiction at all.

Let this serve as a warning to those with ears to hear: political correctness is like eating the food of the elves, which spoils the tongue for any earthly fare. One’s enjoyment of innocent pleasures is lost, and one sees with the eyes of a troll, to whom fair is foul and foul is fair, once one views all things through the myopic lens of political correctness. It robs you of pleasure and gives you nothing in return.

 

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Lauds for SOMEWHITHER

Posted August 14, 2015 By John C Wright

Reviewer praise for SOMEWHITHER:

Perhaps my only criticism of this book is that these two characters are reminiscent of each other with the bravado and inventive cursing. At first another aspect of this book was putting me off regarding an extended sequence involving escape. Later I realized how necessary this sequence of this book was to the plot involving a Calvinistic world that is a deterministic nightmare.

Again I am amazed by how inventive he is with plot ideas. There are several here where a competent author could take just one of them to make a good book.

As a lover of SF and Fantasy, along with being both a geek and a Catholic, there are not many books that bring satisfaction on the geeky Catholic level. There are tons of geeky references in the book and I think I caught on to most of them, but doubt I caught them all. This was part of the playfulness of the book. …

… I enjoyed this book immensely and like every start in a new series eagerly await the next book.

Still I feel kind of like I had shoplifted this book since the Kindle price was only $4.99. Just doesn’t seem right considering how much enjoyment I got.

My comment: I am happy to be “shoplifting” under such circumstances: I get paid more than twice my cut of the take had the reader bought this book in hardback.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/happycatholicbookshelf/2015/07/book-review-somewhither-a-tale-of-the-unwithering-realm/

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Origin of IRON CHAMBER OF MEMORY

Posted July 31, 2015 By John C Wright

This month I have not had a day-job, and so for the first time have had enough free time to work like a full time writer.

This is the novel I have been waiting eleven and a half years to write. I wrote the manuscript in five weeks, and spent a week polishing and revising.

I sent it off to Castalia House this Monday, so keep your fingers crossed for me. (I have also begun a new project for Castalia House called MOTHS AND COBWEBS, a juvenile, which I will describe in a later post.)

iron chamber

The novel is called IRON CHAMBER OF MEMORY.

The story idea came to me during the month of December in 2003, just a few days after my rather dramatic conversion from total Christ-hating atheism to total fidelity. I was recovering from major surgery, and still had one foot, so to speak, in the spirit world.

This story idea came to me in one moment, complete, perfect, in immense detail. I dragged myself out of bed to spend one afternoon writing the outline down in one go from start to finish.

Nothing like this has ever happened to me before, and nothing since.

I often speak of writing as if I am taking dictation from the muse. Usually I am exaggerating a little, or being a little modest. Here I am not. It is as if some other spirit than mine contrived this story, and all I have done is write it down.

The thing was eerie. There are certain ideas and themes in it which are quite a bit like other things I have written. An amnesiac hero trying to discover who he really is, for example, appears in nearly everything I write.

I can also see where the basic ideas come from: that there is a room in a house where whenever the protagonist enters, he remembers he is in love with a woman who also loves him, but only inside that chamber, and nowhere else. The conceit is taken from the deservedly obscure novel A HAUNTED WOMAN by David Lindsay. I say it is deserved obscure because Mr Lindsay did not exercise his full range of his powerful imagination here, and did not explore the several odd but logical ramifications of the idea.

But there are other themes here utterly unlike my usual fare, and other ideas I know not whence they came.

The only element I added was the setting. Originally, I meant it to be set in Oxford, England, at Magdalen College, but I since discovered a small channel island called Sercq or Sark, called a Dark Sky island, and, until 2008, the last still-functioning feudal  fief in Europe.

The small and beautiful manor house of the Lord of the island, Le Seigneurie, I had to make into something huge and haunted as Gormenghast, and I add a frankly impossible old growth forest which could not fit on the tiny real island; but aside from these indignities of poetic license, the strangest details in the story are the ones taken from life, and these are the least likely to be believed. I did not make up that Sark is a Dark Sky island, once invaded by a Nuclear Scientist, nor that the language spoken there has never been written down.

The overall vision encompassed in the story is strange, and I am not sure if it counts as science fiction or magical realism or mainstream or what it is. Not only is the narrator unreliable, reality is unreliable.

Part of it is a love story, part of it is a story of treason and revenge, part of it is hallucinatory, and part, the best part, is a metaphysical thriller after the fashion of Charles Williams, where the mystery is not who murdered whom, but what is ultimate reality.

Let me favor you, dear reader, with the opening scene:

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Reviewer Praise for TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN

Posted July 30, 2015 By John C Wright

A rather nice review:

http://carlos-carrasco.livejournal.com/1348.html

If you have never understood the attraction that science fiction has for so many of us, Mr. Wright’s essays might just explain it to you. If you are already a fan, you will love his analysis of the genre, its voices and various visions for various tomorrows. While it was pretty heady in places, the writing was never dense and certainly never dull.

Quite the contrary, it was laugh-out-loud funny in many places. My favorite case in point would be the essay, “The Desolation of Tolkien.” It is Mr. Wright’s eviscerating critique of the second Hobbit movie and in reading it I finally found the peace which that cinematic act of vandalism robbed from me. I laughed so hard reading his review of the film that every shadow that movie had darkened my soul with was exorcised from me forever.

[…]

Mr. Wright gives us an Eagles of Manwe-eye view of the battlefield and the forces arrayed on it, his descriptions delivered through the delightfully adroit juggling of Snow White and Aristotle, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gender Theory, transhumanism, the Gnosticism of Arthur C Clarke, the hedonism and patriotism of Robert Heinlein, the historicism of Isaac Asimov, Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, this-ism and that-ism and the glorious Catholicism which answers them all.
Mr. Wright’s love of the genre is evident on every page of the book and you might just find it to be contagious.

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More Reviewer Praise for SOMEWHITHER

Posted July 14, 2015 By John C Wright

From the pen of Russel Newquist

http://russellnewquist.com/2015/07/somewhither-book-review/

I don’t recall the exact scene described here from the book – although it’s very possible that he was, in fact, describing several scenes in the book mashed into one description. But the short version of my review is this: the book is exactly as awesome as that description makes it sound. In other words, if that description is right up your alley, you will love this book. If that description doesn’t do it for you… this is not the book for you.

Fortunately I am right smack in the target audience of this book, to the point that when I read that post I showed it to my wife and said, “I’m buying this book the day it comes out.” I didn’t quite make that, because they stealth released it on me last week. But when I realized on Sunday afternoon that it was out, I literally turned off the show that I was watching, ordered it, and started reading.

The opening chapter of this book was amazing, and can be read for free on Mr. Wright’s blog. If you enjoy that… well, you’re going to get a lot more of it. This book is a giant blast of crazy, and in the best possible way. I recommend it highly.

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Reviewer Praise for SOMEWHITHER

Posted July 14, 2015 By John C Wright

From the pen of Benjamin Wheeler.

Read the whole thing here: https://millennialking.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/review-somewhither-by-john-c-wright/

This book is almost the perfect book. I want the deep philosophical questions, the damsels in distress, the sword fights. I was getting frustrated when Ilya was having trouble getting through the various troubles in his way. Not in the bad way, but rather, just a sort of ‘Come oooonnn, maaaann!” sorta deal. Towards the end, especially at the Fated Weapons Armory, he starts to get it, and the book improves greatly in terms of the Main Character department.

A great read, a great thinking piece and great villains in one package to benefit of all. We are not slaves when we do good! So buy the book!

PS. Should Castalia House put out a hardcover as they did with Awake in the Night Land, I would buy it in an Instant!

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Reviewer Praise for THE GOLDEN AGE

Posted June 29, 2015 By John C Wright

A rather favorable review:

http://www.rachelneumeier.com/2015/06/23/recent-reading-the-golden-age-trilogy-by-john-c-wright/

Here is one remark about the ideal reader which I thought worthy of note:

The ideal reader: In order to be engaged by this trilogy, I think the reader has to enjoy complicated, ornate, nonstandard settings; technological extrapolation; and exposition. I think plot readers are going to like it better than character readers.

I think that readers who particularly enjoy Kim Stanley Robinson should give The Golden Age trilogy a try. Robinson is the better writer – in particularly, a lot of his description and exposition reads like poetry – but then, Robinson is an outstanding writer who’s been at it a lot longer.

This trilogy also makes me think of stories like Ringworld by Larry Niven and the Gaian trilogy by John Varley. I would also actually be very curious to know what readers who love Ancillary Justice would make of The Golden Age trilogy, because despite the differences between the two works, in some ways I think they are doing similar things.

If you’ve read The Golden Age, what else would you consider similar?

Now I need to read The Player of Games to compare that utopia with this one …

My comment:

Ironically, the first review I ever received as a professional writer was from someone who vehemently and viscerally disliked the very same passage this reviewer mentions as the one that engaged her sympathy and attention, namely, the gentle bickering of man and (almost) wife.

I have not had the pleasure of reading ANCILLARY JUSTICE, but I have read PLAYER OF GAMES, and did see some of the parallels and polar opposites with that most imaginative of works.  The approach toward what constitutes a utopia is very different indeed.

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Reviewer Praise for TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN

Posted June 16, 2015 By John C Wright

A robot named Stobor makes this observation on File 770 (http://file770.com/?p=23180&cpage=1#comment-285609)

Then there were the “Transhuman and Subhuman” essays. Admittedly, they aren’t stories, but in that case, being “hit over the head” doesn’t properly describe the experience. Rather, reading the author’s extremely non-mainstream views felt like being at ground zero of a nuclear explosion after being dosed with anthrax and sprayed with nerve gas.

I can think of no finer compliment. You may purchase this fine work, described with such glowing if not fulsome terms of praise, here: http://www.amazon.com/Transhuman-Subhuman-Essays-Science-Fiction-ebook/dp/B00K4D7LO6

By ‘non-mainstream’ of course, this reviewer, who is a Morlock of AD 802701, means that the views agree with what all normal Americans, all sober Christians and all faithful Catholics have known, lived and believed for two thousand years, and what all healthy men of ordinary and non-perverse tastes have known, lived and believed since before the dawn of recorded history.

Whereas I disagree with what is fashionable with an inbred, insular cult of degenerate cannibal troglodytes for this fashion season, and no more.

Sir, you lost my sympathy long before that rocket scientist who landed a robot on a speeding comet was mocked for wearing a Hawaiian shirt showing sexy action-hero girls. But I want to mention it again to show how far from the mainstream of human life, of Western civilization, of Christianity, and of humanity you have drifted. Read the remainder of this entry »

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Beale v Sandifer

Posted June 11, 2015 By John C Wright

Here is a transcript of am unexpectedly polite mutual interview between my publisher Mr Beale, whom the Elves name Vox Day, and the orcs of the Dull-Eyed Land call Morgothrond the Voxinator, and a satanist named Mr Sandifer.

They each agreed to discuss one book the other finds terrible. I am curious whether anyone aside from myself agrees the debate has a clear winner, and who that was.

I note particularly each instance where Mr Sandifer will read directly from the text of ‘One Bright Star to Guide Them’ and then offer an interpretation directly and diametrically opposed to what the text says.

Again, I noted when Mr Sandifer’s criticism applied to plot elements, characterization, or craft (nearly none) as opposed to his personal allergic reaction to Christianity, which is nowhere explicitly advocated, or even mentioned, in the tale (nearly the whole).

He particularly dwells for an undue time on a monologue by the villain Richard, under the claim that real occultists do not actually perform the make believe rituals made up for my make believe story. Since the monologue is merely elements taken from Shaw and Nietzsche thrown together with the sacraments of the modern Democrat Party, namely, aborticide and fornication, I suspect Mr Sandifer’s offense comes mainly from the clarity of the looking glass: He is Richard.

I note also that he lambasts the tale for its Christian apologetic message, apparently without knowing that this story, in its first and short form, was written by an atheist. I penned it about the same time as LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS, and it has the same theme; I did not erenow think the theme was hidden or indirect. Indeed, I recall fretting over how unsubtle I was.

But each reader reads a different tale, and the wise writer knows least of all men what his story means. Readers see the face of the story; writers see the mask from the concave side, and sees the joints and wires which makes the lips and eyelids of the mask to move.

Below are the opening remarks, enough to give the alert reader a taste of the difference in the mental caliber of the two men.

The full transcript is here: http://www.philipsandifer.com/2015/06/the-vox-day-interview-transcript.html

The original audio is here: http://pexlives.libsyn.com/pex-lives-and-eruditorum-press-presents-the-vox-day-interview

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JCW on ERB

Posted May 18, 2015 By John C Wright

If you want to read some essays on the master of adventure, Edgar Rice Burroughs, including one humble contribution from yours truly, today is your lucky day:

http://www.amazon.com/Edgar-Rice-Burroughs-Master-Storytelling/dp/1511941138/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1431627173&sr=1-9

Charles A Madison is the editor.

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Reviewer Praise for ARCHITECT OF AEONS

Posted May 14, 2015 By John C Wright

Reviewer Dave Hallquest gives the nod of approval to my latest humble offering: Against vast worlds of intellect, what can mortal man do? 

http://superversivesf.com/2015/05/10/architect-aeons-review/

John Wright takes on a fantastic ride though time and space, showing us wonders and terrors. My principle issue is the one I often have with John Wright’s work: I wanted to see more of the wonders so briefly glimpsed and passed, shining for but a moment and then gone.

Always leave them wanting more.

And there is more to come: VINDICATION OF MAN is on the editor’s desk at the time of this writing, and as soon as I am done writing this sentence, I am going back to writing COUNT TO INFINITY, since, at the time of this writing, it is time for me to continue writing.

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Reviewer Scorn for One Bright Star, Plural of Helen, etc

Posted May 2, 2015 By John C Wright

A reviewer is disappointed in my efforts:

http://secritcrush.livejournal.com/tag/pathetic%20puppies

In Wright’s hands Queequeeg remains firmly a noble savage with no depth of characterization at all. One person of color in the story and that’s what Wright goes for. That’s how the Pathetic puppies increase diversity.

Diversity, eh?

Discuss.

ADDENDUM: a reader brings to my attention links to a review site whose disappointment is markedly less. He asked whether both sites read the material, or only one?

http://superversivesf.com/2015/05/01/hugo-nominee-review-transhuman-and-subhuman-part-i-transhuman-and-subhuman/

http://superversivesf.com/2015/04/18/review-of-plural-of-helen-of-troy/

http://superversivesf.com/2015/04/17/one-bright-star-a-review/

Can you go back again? The warm spring dawn and summer days of childhood leave us behind, leaving memories of the fantastic and wondrous. In their wake the coming chill of autumn adulthood the world seems a stark and unfriendly place, a grim, gray world with no place for the fairy tales and wonder of childhood. Darker magics, things of greed and ambition lurk, and the answers that seemed so bright and simple to the young are denied the wizened eye.

“One Bright Star” the the tale of a man called back to duty to fight against supernatural evil: though not in the bright fairy-lands of his childhood, but in the gray streets of modern London. It contains hope, loss, wonder, despair and glory. It is the perfect fairy tale and I heartily recommend it.

 

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Spoileriffic Reviewer Praise for ARCHITECT OF AEONS

Posted May 1, 2015 By John C Wright

A review by Ben Wheeler: https://millennialking.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/architect-of-the-aeons-intelligence-unbound-and-unrestrained/

Mr Wheeler describes this discussion of my book as “A dark carnival of spoilers” and he gives away the surprise ending, the surprise middle, and the surprise opening, not to mention the surprise in Chapter Three, so I very strongly urge and recommend that no one read this review until he has read the book.

I am very pleased that a reader likes the self same scenes I liked in the book, and, to be frank, saw the same weaknesses and rough spots I saw. Better yet, he is asking the very questions your humble but subtle author wants him to ask, as a setup for the follow through in VINDICATION OF MAN, the next volume.

But his overall recommendation is this:

It was worth the read and the buy.

 

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HMS Mangled Treasure: The Rescue of Mr. Spaghetti

Posted April 29, 2015 By John C Wright

My charming and talented wife has an announcement and a bit of a boast.

Whenever an authoress gets the cover illo of a magazine, her street cred among authors goes up, and she regains lost sanity points (SAN) lowered during the creative writing process or accidentally viewing a shoggoth. Those are the rules both in the CALL OF CTHULHU role playing game, and in the writing profession. Making the cover is good juju:

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