John C. Wright's Journal

From http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=31279

The quote below is from a review of Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin by Francis Spufford a book about the history of technology and society. It’s about six engineering projects that have taken place in Britain since WWII. The projects range from rockets through Concorde to computer games, cell phones, and the Human Genome Project.

Two famous figures in the science fiction world are mentioned in this anecdote:

Since they are British, I assume "pissed" in the sentence above means intoxicated with spirits, not intoxicated with anger.

My comment: Myself, I see no evidence that any new tool has transformed anyone’s "awareness" — a phrase I notice has mystical rather than scientific implications.

Like the debate between G.K. Chesterton and H.G. Wells about the wisdom of a scientifically-organized eugenic socialist utopia, history has once again come down on theside of the writer the intelligentsia dismiss as an irrational religious obscurantist, and history has debunked, even humiliated, the faddish optimism of the writers whose zealous idolatry of science is regarded by the intelligentsia as rational and progressive. I am frankly puzzled why worshipers at the altar of progress regard their worship as scientific, when real scientific thought consists, not of enthusiasm, but measured skepticism, detailed observation, and experimentation under conditions that control the variables. 

I know of no one who regards G.K. Chesterton as the great prophet of the modern age, even though he saw and described the ills of the modern world decades, or a century, in advance; but I often here the foresight of H.G. Wells lauded. We see in operation the reverse Cassandra effect, where the more completely exploded a man’s predictions are, the less skeptically his devotees regard his oracles.

By way of Kokorognosis:

Gladly: below the cut is the cover art for my book TITANS OF CHAOS, which I use for my wallpaper.
The art is by Scott Fisher, who outperformed even his considerable skills.
The main character, Amelia Windrose, was one I also drew many sketches of — I have a whole notebook at home full of them — was drawn here by Mr. Fisher, who never saw or heard rumor of this notebook, and who nonetheless drew the same features I did for the character.
Odd, no?
It is both (1) an advertisement to anyone peering over my shoulder at my computer, and (2) a pretty picture of a pretty girl for whom I feel both (a) the fatherly pride of creation, since I invented her, and, antithetically, (b) the innocent philogynous admiration of a fanboy, for whom most science fiction covers featuring attractive space princesses in postures of ecstasy are drawn. Read the remainder of this entry »

Lorna Dueck from Listen Up TV  (a Canadian Christian news program) interviewed me for her television show. This is an episode where Robert J. Sawyer, a real science fiction writer, is also being interviewed. They asked me some softball questions, and I bunted them. Smooth a pie. I did it over my lunch hour at a little church just down the street, so my talking head should have a nice altar and stained glass window behind me.

I do not know when or where the program will be aired.I wore my hat, so my hat will get some air time, and my Saint Justin-Martyr medal, which I used to flash secret messages in Morse Code to my Jesuit ‘handler’ working for MI-13, which the Anglocatholic secret service branch devoted to hunting Nazi vampires created by Nordic necromancy after World War II.

Fortunately, the young atomic rocketeers of the Space Rocket Galileo, led by Dr. Cargraves, uncovered the Nazi base on the dark side of the moon, where the Nazis had learned the secrets of reviving the undead from the Macrobe-led technocrat-sorcerers of Sulva.

Dr. Cargraves, after a desperate flight from the insect-guards of the Grand Lunar, entered the mysterious blue area of the moon, where the ruined city of the Inhumanoids is located, fell in love with Nah-ee-lah the Moon Maid, and, with her help, recovered his rocketship from space vampire Nazi hands, and flew back to Earth.

In secret consultation with the Pope, and with Antonio Barberini the Younger the Commander in Chief of the Papal armies hidden in the hollow core of the Earth since the days of Julius II (FOOTNOTE: fortunately, the Borgia Popes were able to find and exploit the secret volcanic vents under Aetna leading to Pelludicar, the interior world, long before the Puritan adventurer Solomon Kane discovered them, so that the Interior Lands were drawn into the orbit of the Holy League, and are firmly anti-Cromwell) it has been decided to return to the moon and perform an mass-excorcism of that entire heavenly sphere. This should have the beneficial side effect of robbing thewerewolves of Iceland of their extra powers they get when the moon is full.

Unfortunately the rocket-planes were supposed to have parts made by General Motors, and now that GM is going to be run by the same addlepated bureaucrats who run Amtrack, we doubt the parts will be available. We are negotiating with the Disney Corporation — you all know that the rides in Tomorrowland are just props to cover up the real workind spaceport Disney erected in Florida in the 1950’s, right? — to see if they can supply us, and the Science Patrol of Japan (who are coming along) with a fleet of longrange moonrockets. 

When I get more information I will tell you. Not about the Nazi vampire hunting. That is strictly hush-hush. About the Listen Up TV show.

NOTE ADDED LATER: Dark Horse Comics, who evidently (all of them) grew up reading the same high octane pulp I did have produced a comic book that sounds like it came from what I described above: Werewolves on the Moon fighting Vampires . American werewolves, no less.  I kid you not. http://www.darkhorse.com/Comics/16-275/Werewolves-on-the-Moon-Versus-Vampires-1

The Childlike Empress (or someone who looks like her) takes me to task for my condemnation of James Joyce’s ULYSSES. Here are the comments in full:

This is a book review by Theodore Dalrymple, a man of letter of no mean accomplishment. I reprint it here in full, without comment, except to say that his sentiments are remarkably similar to my own, despite our difference of faith. If you have not read Theodore Dalrymple before, you are in for a treat: in him, the old virtues of essayist and epigrammist and student of human nature live again, an avatism from a more cultured and learned age now lost.

What the New Atheists Don’t See
To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.
Autumn 2007

The British parliament’s first avowedly atheist member, Charles Bradlaugh, would stride into public meetings in the 1880s, take out his pocket watch, and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds. God bided his time, but got Bradlaugh in the end. A slightly later atheist, Bertrand Russell, was once asked what he would do if it proved that he was mistaken and if he met his maker in the hereafter. He would demand to know, Russell replied with all the high-pitched fervor of his pedantry, why God had not made the evidence of his existence plainer and more irrefutable. And Samuel Beckett came up with a memorable line: “God doesn’t exist—the bastard!”

Beckett’s wonderful outburst of disappointed rage suggests that it is not as easy as one might suppose to rid oneself of the notion of God. (Perhaps this is the time to declare that I am not myself a believer.) At the very least, Beckett’s line implies that God’s existence would solve some kind of problem—actually, a profound one: the transcendent purpose of human existence. Few of us, especially as we grow older, are entirely comfortable with the idea that life is full of sound and fury but signifies nothing. However much philosophers tell us that it is illogical to fear death, and that at worst it is only the process of dying that we should fear, people still fear death as much as ever. In like fashion, however many times philosophers say that it is up to us ourselves, and to no one else, to find the meaning of life, we continue to long for a transcendent purpose immanent in existence itself, independent of our own wills. To tell us that we should not feel this longing is a bit like telling someone in the first flush of love that the object of his affections is not worthy of them. The heart hath its reasons that reason knows not of.

Of course, men—that is to say, some men—have denied this truth ever since the Enlightenment, and have sought to find a way of life based entirely on reason. Far as I am from decrying reason, the attempt leads at best to Gradgrind and at worst to Stalin. Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man’s mental or moral economy.

The search for the pure guiding light of reason, uncontaminated by human passion or metaphysical principles that go beyond all possible evidence, continues, however; and recently, an epidemic rash of books has declared success, at least if success consists of having slain the inveterate enemy of reason, namely religion. The philosophers Daniel Dennett, A. C. Grayling, Michel Onfray, and Sam Harris, biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens have all written books roundly condemning religion and its works. Evidently, there is a tide in the affairs, if not of men, at least of authors.

The curious thing about these books is that the authors often appear to think that they are saying something new and brave. They imagine themselves to be like the intrepid explorer Sir Richard Burton, who in 1853 disguised himself as a Muslim merchant, went to Mecca, and then wrote a book about his unprecedented feat. The public appears to agree, for the neo-atheist books have sold by the hundred thousand. Yet with the possible exception of Dennett’s, they advance no argument that I, the village atheist, could not have made by the age of 14 (Saint Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence gave me the greatest difficulty, but I had taken Hume to heart on the weakness of the argument from design).

Read the remainder of this entry »

One duty an honest man, especially one who brags he is a philosopher, dare not shirk is to admit he is wrong with the humility of a philosopher when proven wrong.  In a posting today, I expressed misgivings about letting my kids read all about Lavender Dumbledore.

The reader deiseach heroically steps forth to drive away the harpies of error preying on my feast of thought.

My comment: 

Well, who am I to argue with the Catechism? I owe Rowling an apology. She is not an agent of the darkness at all, but of the light, since she is showing both the harm that disordered appetites can cause, and displays clearly the correct and moral duty of a man suffering such disorder, which is to be chaste.

I must laugh at myself, and not because I am funny, but because I am wrong.

"I am so, so glad to know that my loathing for Ulysses is not because I am uncultured Philistine. I, perhaps, made it slightly farther than you, searching for the brilliance I was told lay inside, but if I did, it was not by much."

Philistine? The problem is that I am a philistine, and proud of it. I read an enjoy Pulp rubbish like THE SHADOW and DOC SAVAGE and children’s books like HARRY POTTER and THE HOBBIT, not to mention comics by Alexander Raymond and Jack ‘King’ Kirby. I enjoy popular action-adventure garbage like Homer’s ODYSSEY and patriotic pro-Roman propaganda like Virgil’ AENEID, and horrific Jack Chick godbotherer Xtian tracks like Milton’ PARADISE LOST. I am impressed with pagan filth like HYPERION by Keats and historically inaccurate drivel like IDYLLS OF THE KING by Tennyson. I also great the classics of great literature like Asimov’s FOUNDATION series and Heinlein’s STARSHIP TROOPERS.

However, all these trashy penny dreadful books I read, popular both my highbrow and lowbrow alike, have one thing in common. They have plot, character, drama, and moral purpose, and some even brush the heights of beauty with outstretched wing.

After Nietzsche killed God in an under-reported Deicide somewhere in the mid-1800’s, however, the intellectuals and thinkers of the West turned away from everything wholesome, normal and good, and erected new and shocking idols to whatever was tasteless, meaningless, anti-heroic, and antinomian. ULYSSES by James Joyce is their paramount written work, even as NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE is their paramount work in the visual arts. The point of their art is what that eminent modern thinker, Dr. Frost of the National Institute of Controlled Experimentation, would call ‘Objectification’. The point of their art is to replace the natural human passions and appetites, which we have because we live on earth and yearn for heaven, for those which would obtain if we lived in hell and yearned for deeper hell: in poetry, clamor; in music, cacophony; in painting, smears; in novels, neurosis; in philosophy, unreason; and in all things, vice.

The real philistines took over the holy land, ejected the chosen people, and declared their worthless garbage to be wonders of wonders, and declared all the good and normal and wholesome works of art and literature to be populist trash unfit for their rarefied consumption: and they call us philistines and cowards, for not adoring their crude ugliness.

The reality is that we common folk with common tastes, we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. The literati of the elite world of literature, they are Pharisees, and no doubt when on the Judgment Day comes to the world of art, the Nine Muses of the Hippocrene will cast them into Tartarus, where there will be wailing and the gnashing of teeth.

The secret of the modern age, and the key to understanding the modern intellectual clime, is merely to realize that the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

These works of modern so called art are called art because and precisely because they are the opposite of art: they are insolent trash. They are deliberately ugly, deliberately untruthful, deliberately vicious. They are philistines at their most philistine, because they, not us, they, cannot appreciate what is beautiful, true, and virtuous in art …. or in life.

In a recent post I expressed reservations about reading Harry Potter to my children, since JK Rolwing decided to betray my trust in her by publicly announcing that Albus Dumbledore, one of the best and most beloved characters in the book, suffered from homosexuality. Those who point out either that Dumbledore never acts on his impulses in the book, or that the affection for Grisenwald (or whatever his name was) was not portrayed sympathetically miss the point entirely, so entirely that the fall into the trap set by Rowling. The point of her comment was not to show that homosexuality is admirable — even the most ardent pervertarians rarely say that — the point is to show that homosexuals are nice and normal people, and that therefore to condemn their vices is intolerant.

The devil need not convince you wrong is right; he need only convince you wrong is not as wrong as it at first seemed. He need only convince you that you can not and dare not condemn the sin lest the sinner also be condemned.

A concerned readers asks: 

"What exactly are you saying here? We should not read books with gay characters? We should not read books where gay characters are admirable, honorable, or couragous. They can be included as long as they are villians? What?"

Here is what I am saying.

I want my children to grow up knowing right from wrong. Chastity is right: sexual perversion is wrong. Homosexuality is a sexual perversion, ergo wrong. My mission in life as a father is to tell them it is wrong, but also to train their passions so that they habitually reject it as a vice. The primary tool to train the passions is the imagination: children learn virtues through stories.

Now then, arrayed against me are those who call themselves the Enlightened. I call them the Armies of Darkness. Their mission in life is to corrupt my children, to teach my children that I am wrong, and to train the passions of my children so that my children habitually recoil from making any judgments about virtue and vice, which, in effect, encourages vice. Their mission is to make vice seem normal– To make evil seem good.

The primary tool, nay, the only tool, that the Armies of Darkness can use is the imagination. No slave of darkness is  bold enough to actually debate the issue on a rational ground: those who attemptto debate it merely indulge in name-calling. Hence, debate is not a tool they can use for their goal.

The tool they use is the imagination: all that need be done to achieve the goal is to take some loathsome perversion, such as homosexuality, and to connect it, no matter how tentatively, to some beloved or amusing character.

Read the remainder of this entry »

Here is the review I wrote for Joyce’s ULYSSES:

Dear readers, let me propose to you a simple test. Below are three quotes from Ulysses by James Joyce, and a fourth written by a computer program with no human editing, merely random words strung together without sense. You tell me which is which:

1. Slowly I dream of flying. I observe turnpikes and streets studded with bushes. Coldly my soaring widens my awareness. To guide myself I determinedly start to kill my pleasure during the time that hours and miliseconds pass away. Aid me in this and soaring is formidable, do not and singing is unhinged.

2. Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.

3. Pat is a waiter who waits while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. He waits while you wait. Hee hee. A waiter is he. Hee hee hee hee. He waits while you wait. While you wait if you wait he will wait while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. Hoh. Wait while you wait.

4. yes I think he made them a bit firmer sucking them like that so long be made me thirsty t1tties he calls them I had to laugh yes this one anyhow stiff the n1pple gets for the least thing Ill get him to keep that up and Ill take those eggs beaten up with marsala fatten them out for him what are all those veins and things curious the way its made 2 the same in case of twins theyre supposed to represent beauty placed up there like those statues in the museum one of them pretending to hide it with her hand are they so beautiful of course compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf

*

(It should be noted that this is the third time I have posted a review containing a quote from the book: the automatic filter which blocks out obscenity will not allow me to post my prior review here, because it contained a direct quote. That should tell the discerning reader something about this book.)

What Science Fiction & Fantasy books would you read to children?

This is kind of a hard question to answer because the boundaries of the genre called Science Fiction simply does not apply to the kind of books children tend to like.

For example, is ON BEYOND ZEBRA by Dr. Seuss a science fiction story? It has a conceit more imaginative than anything I have read outside the pages of VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by Lindsay: namely, what if there were an additional alphabet, an undiscovered alphabet, beyond the boundaries of the alphabet we know. The idea is just as whimsical and imaginative as the conceit for Scott Westefeld’s MIDNIGHTERS, which asks what if there were an additional hour hidden in the crack of midnight that only certain people could enter. For that matter, how is the conceit of HORTON HEARS A WHO all that different from GIRL IN THE GOLDEN ATOM by Ray Cummings?

DOCTOR DOLITTLE’S ADVENTURES by Hugh Lofting or TREASURE ISLAND by Robert Louis Stephenson are equally beloved children’s books, even though, if we were to define SFF strictly, the veterinarian who speaks to animals is a fantasy element, his flight to the moon is a science fiction element, whereas a one-legged pirate seeking buried treasure has nothing science-fictional about it.

For children, all stories are stories, and the spice of fantasy flavors all of them. A tale about a runaway boy and an escaped slave rafting down the wide Mississippi is no less fantastic or romantic than a tale about a hobbit being hired as a burglar by a throng of dwarfs and trooping off toward the Lonely Mountain.

Read the remainder of this entry »

Remember all those people of "alternate sexual orientation" who not only assured us that normalizing sodomy would not lead to normalization of other perversions, they grew rigid and white-faced with outrage at the suggestion that one perversion encouraged other perversions, and they took it as a deadly insult that their sexual malfunction would be called perversion at all?

They told us that slippery slope arguments are innately bogus. They told us that courts of law never operate by precedent. They told us that the conscience never operates by logic, such that if you undermine the reason for condemning a given sin, you also undermine the reason for condemning any other sin of the like genre. Remember all those discussions?

Remember when we all changed the English Language, and adopted comically elliptical euphemisms to avoid giving offense to those who take offense at plain truth plainly spoken?

Remember how every loud-mouthed politically-correct Tolerance Nazi repeated in robotlike unison that it was impossible that homosex marriage would lead to further erosion of sexual norms?

Well, this article suggests that there is a slippery slope involved. I cannot vouch for this article, since I cannot find the referenced language in the legislation. Read it and make your own judgment.

Here is quote from the article:

During floor debate on H.R. 1913, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) admitted that this so-called "hate crimes" bill will protect the 30 mostly bizarre sexual orientations listed by the American Psychiatric Association. […]

"The term sexual orientation," this proposed amendment said, "as used in this act, or any amendments made by this act, does not include apotemnophilia, asphyxophilia, autogynephilia, coprophilia, exhibitionism, fetishism, frotteurism, gerontosexuality, incest, kleptophilia, klismaphilia, necrophilia, partialism, pedophilia, sexual masochism, sexual sadism, telephone scatalogia, toucherism, transgenderism, transsexual, transvestite, transvestic fetishism, urophilia, voyeurism, or zoophilia."…

This is serious business. Mr. Speaker, we can’t legislate love, but we can legislate against hate. This legislation may not rid us of the intolerance and prejudices that continue to taint our society, but it will provide an added deterrent to those for whom these feelings manifest themselves into acts of violence. They will be fully aware that, should they commit a hate crime, there will be no lenience and they will not slip through the cracks of the American legal system.

Further, passage of this Hate Crimes bill will increase public education and awareness and encourage Americans to report hate crimes that all too often are silent.

The article explains some of the terms:

• Apotemnophilia is the erotic interest in being or looking like an amputee.
• Asphyxophilia is a sexual practice, of arranging to produce asphyxiation during sex.
• Necrophilia is the sexual attraction to corpses.
• Pedophilia is the sexual attraction to minors
• Telephone scatalogia -The love of making obscene phone calls.
• Zoophilia -Also known as bestiality

Read the remainder of this entry »

I am going to Balticon — the Baltimore Science Fiction convention with my lovely wife, world famous authoress L. Jagi Lamplighter, who in our house is called She Who Must Be Obeyed. To be held Memorial Day Weekend May 22-25, 2009 At Marriott’s Hunt Valley Inn, Baltimore, MD.

Click her for a Pic of L. Jagi Lamplighter!

The new Star Trek movie is not just good, it is excellent. I say this with the full authority of someone whose entirely life was based on Mr. Spock, a fictional character from an imaginary planet. I say this as a man who not only saw "The Questor Tapes" but also "Genesis II" and "Planet Earth". I am a Star Trek fan of the first caliber. I was prepared to dislike and over-react to every minor deviation from the established canon of Holy Saint Roddenberry.

No dislike and no overreaction is needed. The film is good, perhaps great. It is the best version of Star Trek since, well, Star Trek, and I would say the second best of the Trek films, ranked one notch below WRATH OF KHAN.

I will write a review in the near future. Until then, let me merely add one more pair of hands to applaud what turned out to be a very, very pleasant surprise.

From a review by Nialmor of the WATCHMAN funnybook, oops, I mean Graphic Novel  Read the whole thing here.

My comment: Anyone who mentions both Chesterton and The Shadow in the same paragraph has won my favor, and therefore shall be made one of my ministers and granted way-cool ninja-jedi Mind Control powers, once my dirigible planet enters the solar system from the transplutonian darknesss. Perhaps I will make him master of Australia, and wed him to my beautiful but evil daughter, Princess Aura. 

Mark Shea has written about some contemporary Catholic Science Fictioneers, and mentions yours truly.

The article is here. I like this paragraph.

The paragraph which was about my favorite topic, me, was this one:

Original thinker? I suppose if we define the term ‘originality’ to mean that I know good places from which to steal myideas, well, yes.

But winsome? Me? I am not even sure what that word means.

Let me fly to my dictionary:

Hm. Let me look farther: