John C. Wright's Journal

I am back home, safe and sound and recovering as well as can be expected. Thank you for your prayers and good wishes: More things are wrought by prayer / Than this world dreams of

John had his appendix out on Sunday. The doctor decided to keep him one last night, but he’s doing very well. He’s up and walking around and in a cheerful mood.

Thank you all for your prayers. They mean a great deal to us. Many things went surprisingly smoothly, and we really felt that God’s Hand was upon us.

Hey Folks,

John is in the hospital. He should be home by Tuesday.

Prayers are welcome!

Jagi

Golly. I thought ANGELS AND DEMONS by Dan Brown would turn out to be just an ordinary run-of-the-mill Catholic-bashing hate-fest. But, no, the whoppers told strain credulity. Do people actually know that little about history? It seems that they do.

Here is what I picked up here and here.

Brown claims: Copernicus was murdered by the Catholic Church.
Fact: Copernicus died quietly in bed at age 70 from a stroke, and his research was supported by Church officials; he even dedicated his masterwork to the Pope.

Brown claims: “Antimatter is the ultimate energy source. It releases energy with 100% efficiency.”
Fact: CERN, the lab which plays an important role in his story, actually debunked this claim on their website: “The inefficiency of antimatter production is enormous: you get only a tenth of a billion of the invested energy back.”

Brown claims: Churchill was a “staunch Catholic.”
Fact: Any history buff could tell you that Churchill wasn’t Catholic, he was Anglican; nor was he particularly religious. The only things Churchill was staunch about were cigars, whiskey, and defending the British Empire.

Brown claims: Pope Urban VII banished Bernini’s famous statue The Ecstasy of St. Teresa “to some obscure chapel across town” because it was too racy for the Vatican.
Fact: The statue was actually commissioned by Cardinal Cornaro specifically for the Cornaro Chapel (Brown’s “obscure chapel”). Moreover, the sculpture was completed in 1652 — eight years after Urban’s death.

Brown claims: Bernini and famed scientist Galileo were members of the Illuminati.
Fact: The Illuminati was founded in Bavaria in 1776. Bernini died in 1680, while Galileo died in 1642 — more than a century before the Illuminati were first formed.

The idea that Copernicus was murdered by the Church is just too stupid for words. I mean, I have a pretty low threshold when it comes to Illuminati fiction. I love that ‘secret-history’ stuff.

I am not a hard sell. If you want to put in your book that Atlantis was a superhightech civilization destroyed by the extra-dimensional Eddorians in order to thwart Arisian attempts to breed mankind to create the Kwisatz Haderach, child of the Lens and the father of the race that will rule the Sevagram, I will suspend my disbelief like it was bouyant with helium.

You want to establish that a race of robots hidden in a secret base in Mount Ararat has been guiding human history since the time of Enoch, I am your man.

You want to say the Freemasons (who built the temple of Solomon) are the archenemies of the Slavemasons (who build the Great Pyramid of Cheops) have been fighting a duel to place or remove feng-shui-significant stonehenge, monuments, and Cathedrals at goethermal accupuncture points across Europe, Asia and the New World since the Bronze Age, and that all major wars and architectural firms are under their control, and involved in a secret aeons-old Cold War to prevent the telluric current from destroying this world as unwise abuses of the geomancy of the canals of Mars did that remote, dying world? Sure!

Shiwan Khan is actually a time-travelling alien from planet Mongo, granted eternal youth by the powers of alchemy, and he long ago replaced the royal family of England with Life-Model-Decoys which he controls with the ten magic rings he found in the wreckage of a spaceship from planet Maklu IV? Why not?

Lord Byron was a vampire? You would have to pay me money not to believe that.

Queen Elizabeth ran of coven of witches whose stormcrafty drowned the Aramda of Philip of Spain, after he had secretly adopted the practice of mass human sacrifice from his wife who was secretly an Aztec princess in order to gain magical control of an entire hemisphere’s worth of demon-cursed Mexican gold? Not only possible, but likely!

The entire Middle Ages is an elaborate fraud perpetrated by the Roman Empire, which never fell but simply went into hiding once Virgil the Magician discovered the tunnels leading to Pellucidar in the Hollow Earth? Seems reasonable to me!!

The US Congress killed and replaced by shape-changing seals from the Dreamlands who talk like movie pirates? Brother, I wrote it!

But the Catholic Church MURDERED Copurnicus? Oh, my aching back. He was a churchman himself: why not simply order him to recant his findings?

This is from my "not posted yet" backlog of journal articles. Unfortunately, I sometimes forget to remove pieces from the log once they are posted, so if this is a repeat of an earlier post, I hope you don’t mind seeing it again.

What SF would you recommend to a non-SF reader?

This is a question I can answer from experience. Back during the Oil Embargo days of the Carter Administration, my mother, hardly a science fiction reader, asked her geeky son (me) for books to read while she waited for hours in the long gas lines. I deliberately chose books I thought a non-SF reader could appreciate.

And what is it that a non-SF reader appreciates? They appreciate the same things we like, but the Muggles have no taste for flat out weirdness, and no fondness for hard SF techno-talk.

Science Fiction is basically the genre that delivers those two things: a sense that the world is seriously weird beneath its commonplace exterior, or that the future will be, and a sense that the things once thought impossible, like space rockets, are technically feasible. The first kind of science fiction is like that penned by A.E. van Vogt; the second is like that penned by Arthur C. Clark. Neither are good for the first time reader.

So what did I lend to my mother that she liked? While my mother’s tastes cannot necessarily stand for all Muggles, I can tell you what about each book I recommended made it open to thereader not familiar with the standard tropes and gimmicks and assumptions of the SF world:

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Here is an article by Jim Manzi, printed in the online version of National Review. I reproduce the whole thing here, without comment. Draw your own conclusions:

Against Waterboarding [Jim Manzi]

I do not believe that the United States should have a policy of using waterboarding to extract information from captured combatants in the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Let me explain why.

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The fine folks over at SfSignal asked a number of SFF-fans (or "Slans" as we call ourselves) (including professional writers–just because you write the stuff does not mean you stop reading it) the following question:

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2009/04/mind-meld-gods-by-the-bushel/

"Its simply common sense."

Perhaps it is common sense to say that when the state commands and the people resist, there will be bloodshed, but at that point, it seems to me that religion drops out of the equation as a variable, unless you are saying religion has more power to resist government oppression than secular ideologies — if that is your point, I would tend to agree.

It seems to me equally common sense to say that Nazism and Communism are new fashions of barbarism, whose point was to dismantle civilized institutions, and subordinate everything from marriage to the marketplace to the state, and to undo the uniquely Christian notion (found in no other era and no other land aside from Christian ones) of separation of church and state, rendering only what is due Caesar to Caesar. When Christianity departs, so also departs civil liberties: the postchristian socialists of Europe are not known for small and unobtrusive government.
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Dirigibletrance asks whether the short story “One Bright Star to Guide Them” takes place in the same background universe, or "Evernverse" as LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS?

I don’t know, but I do not see why it could not. In general, the way to see whether or not two books might take place in the same background, (what we professionals call “The Planetary Question”) is to explain positive evidence, such as when two stories are sharing the same names and events, and to explain away possible negative evidence, such when two stories contain as clearly incompatible events or characters or laws of nature.  For example, much as we would all like for Blackie DuQuesne to go to planet Lyrane IX and obtain the power of the Melasnikov ‘s  Black Lensmen corps, nonetheless Blackie comes from the Skylark universe, where the Seaton’s serendipitous discovery of the cupric total conversion space-drive disproves Einsteinian  Relativity, whereas the Lensman universe has Einsteinian relativity, but found that inertialess matter was not subject to the Lorenz transformation. These two cannot co-exist, so they cannot be part of the same background universe, unless the continuum occupied by Seaton and DuQuesne were reached by hyperspatial tube by the Eddorians, or the continuum occupied by Civilization reached by Fourth Dimensional Gizmo by the Skylarkers.

In this case, the question of whether “One Bright Star” exists in the Evernessverse is an interesting one: The set up of the worlds or world involved sounds similar. The themes of the stories and the laws of nature in the magic system sound the same. But to answer thoroughly would require following up obscure clues and thinking about it.

Instead, I will send Randolf Carter down into the basement to check. Maybe someone just wrote the answer down somewhere, among all those musty old papers left by my grandfather Melchizedech Faustus Wright, the arctic explorer, were stored after he died screaming in the Innsmouth insane asylum. I will stay up here in the solarium, where it is safe, watching the sunset and sipping tea. He and I will remain in communication over telephone.

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Matthew Wuertz has read the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for April-May 2009. He singles out my story for particular praise.

http://matthewwuertz.blogspot.com/2009/03/fantasy-science-fiction-aprilmay-2009.html

My comment: I cannot be modest when it comes to this one. I love this story. I hope "One Bright Star to Guide Them" wins an award. It is my favorite short piece of anything I’ve done. Have any of you read it?

Let me follow up my previous post by arguing that CHILDHOOD’S END by Arthur C. Clarke has a Gnostic attitude toward God, and I mean one God in particular. Gnostics are not heretics of Buddhism, Zen, Taoism, Shinto or Hinduism, after all, but of Christianity.

That the good guys in CHILDHOODS END look like cartoon Devils has already been mentioned in my previous post. Gnostics love the idea that good guys are bad guys, and bad are good: one Gnostic sect, for example, are Cainites, who think Cain was right to kill Abel. That the good Devils lead mankind out of their false world into the Pleroma, where we are all gods, has already been mentioned, albeit in Clarke’s book, the godhead is called ‘The Galactic Overmind’ — as if that change in terminology would fool anyone. The earth is not remade into a new world, as St. John of Patmos holds, but is destroyed by hidden fire, the arson of an abandoned prison, as Valintinus holds.

Gnostics take as their prime dogma the idea that the world as we know it is a deception, and that God is the Deceiver, that matter is evil, the human body a trap. In a science fiction setting, God cannot come onstage as a supernatural being and shown to be a liar, since science fiction properly so called stays within the bounds of the natural setting. (Any supernatural events, telepathy or reincarnation, are explained away as being psionic or superhightech in an SFF background, phenomena as subject to natural laws as biology or ballistics, not noumenal reality.) In a supernatural setting you can kill God, and throw Him into Tartarus. In a natural setting you can destroy His lies, but there is no Him.

Hence, in a natural setting the religion of the Magisterium can be shown to be false, and their evil attempts to destroy our daemons of free will by incision can be condemned. If an alethiometer is not ready to hand, maybe an alien gizmo provided by space devils will do instead.

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SPOILERS BELOW. I discuss the meaning of several books by C.S. Lewis, Arthur C. Clarke and H.G. Wells, and the books cannot be discussed without a discussion of their surprise endings. You Have Been Warned.

I am reading (but have not finished) a book by Doris T. Myers called C.S. LEWIS IN CONTEXT, where the authoress advances the argument that C.S. Lewis, in his fiction writing, addressed a central preoccupation of the European intelligentsia after the culture-wide disillusionment and loss of spiritual strength ushered in by the decimation of the Great War (World War I). That preoccupation was with language and its relation to reality. The pre-War consensus was that words had meaning, and were shaped by the ideals and ideas which these words embodied: a word was an incarnation of a real idea. The post-War consensus was that words were a side-effect of mechanical actions in the nervous system, having no meaning in and of themselves: the modernists idea is that there are no ideas, only Madison Avenue manipulations of linguistic machinery to attempt to influence your thinking machinery.

While I side with Aristotle in most things, when it comes to language, I am a Platonist. If the truths discovered by mathematics are not objective in every sense of the word—things whose reality depends not on the observer but on itself for its truth—then with word “truth” has no reality. And, if the word “truth” has no reality, than neither can the statement “the word ‘truth’ has no reality”‘have any reality.

The conclusions and opinions of C.S. Lewis in these matters can be discerned in his nonfiction essay, THE ABOLITION OF MAN, and also in his fictionalization of that essay, THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH; and an acute reader will notice the way language is used in PRELENDRA and OUT FROM THE SILENT PLANET, in the scenes of the temptation of the Green Lady of Venus, or the deposition of Weston by the Eldil, with accompanying translation from English into the True Speech.

Doris T. Myers also advances the proposition that Lewis represents a serious contribution to the science fiction field, augmenting mere adventure stories into tales with a serious moral point and philosophical reflection.

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A certain kind reader with my best interests are heart (whose name I withhold out of courtesy) accuses me of being pompous and proud when I condemn political correctness. I agree I am proud — and I agree that pride is a damned sin — but this does not mean political correctness is not a damned lie. I had best write him a serious, polite, and earnest reply:

* * *

Dear Kind Reader With My Best Interests at Heart, obviously you are a maroon. How long have you been stranded on the Isle of Goof, population, You?

* * *

Hmm. That seems a little harsh, even for the Internet. Maybe I can reword my salutation so as to hide my boiling, poisonous, stinging nettle-patch of ire beneath a Guy Fawkes-like mask of seeming courtesy. Remember to smile!

Trying again:

* * *

Dear Kind Reader With My Best Interests at Heart, obviously it is not being corrected that offends me, as when I make an error of grammar, or fact, or manners; it is being "corrected" as in "political correction" that offends me, as it should offend all honest men.

When a liar tells a truthful man that it is bad manners, as well as a lie, to tell the truth, that is not only a lie, and bad manners, it is offensive. It is offensive in and of itself, even when spoken to a placid and phlegmatic disposition who does not get offended. It is an offense against the Truth, an objective offense, even if no person suffers the subjective emotional sensation of feeling offended.

Now, you take offense at the fact I said I took offense, and so now you wish to correct my character flaws. (This is a Herculean labor on your part, akin to cleaning the Augean Stables. Good luck.) 

While there is nothing wrong with helping me with my character flaws in and of itself, you put me at a disadvantage in two ways.

First, By changing the subject to talk about me, rather than talk about the topic at hand, you put me in the uncomfortable position of having to talk about myself, a topic I find dreadfully boring.

Second, I am also at a disadvantage because I only dimly guess the content of my own thoughts via first-hand immediate perception, whereas you (since you are evidently a mind-reader with 20-20 telepathy) can uncover all my hidden thoughts with the clarity of he Who Searcheth Hearts on Judgment Day. Obviously, your source of information about my character is better than mine.

I can only reply by disparaging your character. Because of all this, you and I have added a layer of low comedy to the proceedings. Here is a sum up of the dialog in which we are currently engaged:

Me (dressed like John the Baptist in a hairy shirt): "Generation of vipers! I condemn thy self-righteousness!"

You: "That comment is itself self-righteous! You are being self-righteous!"

Me (thumping my chest self-righteously): "I am not being self-righteous! YOU are being self-righteous by calling me self-righteous! It is self-righteous to call someone self-righteous!"

You: "Aha! You did it again! You just called me self-righteous! It is self-righteous to say that it is self-righteous to call someone self-righteous!"

Me (waving a bloody shirt): "Aha! But now you did it a second time! It is self-righteous to say that it is self-righteous to say that it is self-righteous to call someone self-righteous! Besides, I hate hypocrites…"

You: "But you are guilty of the very hypocrisy you condemn! That makes you a hypocrite! It is hypocrisy to accuse someone of hypocrisy when you practice hypocrisy yourself!"

Me (puffing myself up like a frog): "But you just accused me of hypocrisy! Outrageous! Only a hypocrite accuses a hypocrite of hypocrisy! It’s hypocritical! Only a Sith talks in absolutes!"

You: "I cannot believe you just accused me of hypocrisy for accusing you of hypocrisy for condemning hypocrisy! That is so self-righteous of you! And what was that about the Sith? Wasn’t that an absolute statement?"

Me (shouting you down): "Absolutely not! Gahh! It’s no use talking to you! You are not even listening to what I said!"

You: "Obviously I am listening to what you said! Anyone who heard me could tell I was listening carefully! Only if you were not listening could you say I was not listening!"

Me (sticking my fingers in my ears): "Ridiculous! Only someone who was not listening to me would say I was not listening because I said you were not listening!! If you are going to talk like that, I am simply not going to listen!!! LALALA I AM NOT LISTENING!!! As another example, Phillip Pullman is the Antichrist. Hear me, ye generation of vipers! For it is written in the Book of the Apocalypse of St. Jack: ‘Lo! And the Beast with Ten Horns Shall taketh upeth his inkhorn of ininquity to write a Children’s Book trilogy; and a trilogy shalt be the Children’s Book; verily, the number of the trilogy shall be three. And by this sign shall ye know it: behold, the Film version shall sucketh like a Hoover vacuum cleaner on hyperdrive.‘ "

You: "Wait! Who is talking about Pullman?? You are changing the subject!"

Me (changing the subject): "No, when you bring up the subject of whether or not I am changing the subject, YOU are changing the subject!"

Et cetera et ad Nauseam.

Argumentum ad hominem is an informal logical error because it does not address the merits of the argument being made. It attacks the honesty of the speaker rather than the honesty of his argument. To discover that Pythagoras is proud does not allow us to conclude that a square erected on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is unequal to the sum of the areas of squares constructed on the two remaining sides. It shifts the ground of argument to a determination of character, which is hearsay difficult to judge, rather than a consideration of evidence and reasoning, which is public and which anyone can judge.

The credibility of the speaker is only at issue when he is holding himself forth as an expert witness or an authority, when he is asking you to take him on faith, whereupon his claim to be an authority is validly open to question and cross examination. When a person is presenting an argument which asks you to subject his claims to your own candid judgment, no claim to be an authority is being made.

Therefore to say someone is pompous, proud, self-righteous, or a hypocrite neither adds credibility to his argument nor subtracts from it.

How could this be real? It looks like something from a TV show.

Well, I now see the invention of gunpowder may have been a mistake. Back to swords, everyone. Start practicing.

Someone sent me a perfectly polite and reasonable comment. I have decided to both to go postal and get medieval all over it, which, I suppose, means I am going to go get the towncrier on his comment, as a town crier is what we had in the Middle Ages instead of postmen. Hm.

Well, without even the slightest hint of fairness to the original comment, I use it as a flimsy excuse to vent about political correctness, which is something that has been bothering me of late. If my reaction seems totally disproportionate to the rather mild cause, that is it is disproportionate. I am here admittedly galloping headlong off-topic.

I am aware of that, and I do not care. In fact, I regard with particular hatred attempts to change the language to sooth the imaginary hurt feelings of various mascots of the political Left. Unless you can tell me, off the top of your head and without looking it up, the name in any Eskimo dialect for a Virginian, I suggest your concern for their concern for our names for them is illegitimate, particularly where no English speaker knows the meaning of the insult. (None, that is, but I: it refers to them as eaters of raw fish, a slight against their relative poverty).

Besides, what could be more insulting to me that to have the Eskimos refer to themselves as ‘the People’? What does that make me? A non-people?

But it would be immature to the point of insanity for me to pretend I am insulted by the mere existence of a word in their language. Likewise, here. Insult requires intent.

I ask any and all reader please to not make corrections of this type again. They offend me. They deeply offend me.
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