John C. Wright's Journal

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.

Read the remainder of this entry »

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.

Read the remainder of this entry »

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.
Read the remainder of this entry »

Susan Boyle, 47, sings for Britains Got Talent. Note the reaction of the judges, the look in their eyes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

You never know what someone may have inside.

Meredith L. Patterson ( ) asks some tough questions, to which I give silly answers. Somewhere in here, though, I am sure I am making some sort of point.

Back in this post, I said that I like to call myself a suffragette. I think any woman who owns a firearm should have the right to vote and own property in her own name. I might even be willing to extend the franchise to unarmed women, if they owned land, knew a trade, or owned property.

"What of unarmed men who own no land or property and do not know a trade?"

Disenfranchise them! Who wants landless, tradeless panhandlers exercising the soveriegn power of the ballot over their neighbors? And if they are gunless, they form no credible threat when the State takes away their voting rights! Ho-Hah! Non-gun-owning men should of course be allowed an exception, and be allowed to vote if they own a sword or know kung-fu. I do not want to disenfranchise my friends who are blackbelts or SCA members. Also bowhunters. I ain’t taking no vote away from Chuck Norris or Ted Nugent.

Read the remainder of this entry »

From Nasa

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/04/14/space.hand/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

Read the remainder of this entry »

Two comments on an ongoing discussion, one from Belriose, one from Jackaroonie:

Belriose  asks: "The link on your logic that I’m missing since the beginning is why a society who doesn’t emphasize the difference between sexes leads to depravation, sexual degeneration and child murdering. You were establishing that correlation, were you not?"

At last, a question I can follow! (Keep in mind that, since I am an intellectual and a philosopher, really basic and obvious questions pass me by. I am not sure what you are asking unless you make it painfully clear. Sorry, but that is the way I’ve wired my brain to work: we call this ‘Socratic Cluelessness’.)

Read the remainder of this entry »

Here is a quote from John Nolte, the ‘Dirty Harry’ of conservative film: 

Myself, I have a similar feeling about science fiction books. My certain words or phrases which instantly earn my goodwill include Null-A, Princess, Mars, Demon-Prince, Dying Earth, Autarch, Lensman, Skylark, Tom Swift ( as in "Tom Swift and His Technoatomic Whateveroscope"), Lucky Starr and (insert name of astronomical body here), Harry Potter and (as in "Harry Potter and the Lavender Warlock"), Pirate (or, better yet, "Space Pirate"), Ranger, Patrol (or, better yet, Galactic Patrol),  Women (when the context involved space-women) or better yet, Amazon, Foundation, and any adjective involving large magnitudes as Infinite, Infinity, Eternal, Eternity, Endless, Neverness.

Nearly anything can be made to sound way cool merely by putting "of Mars" after it (as in Princess of, Gods of, Warlord of, Master-Mind of, A Fighting Man of, of even Thuvia, Maid of). Likewise, nearly anything can be made to sound slightly perverted merely by putting "of Gor" after it (as in Love Slave of, Sex Slave of, Slave slave of, Sexy Love Slave of, Attractive Barbarian Girl in Skimpy Leopardskin Bikini of, Pouty Schoolgirl of, Lonley Lesbian NIght-Nurse of).

Likewise, anything with the name Fu Manchu in it, automatically sounds sinister. Try it yourself! Merely add "Fu Manchu" to your title, and see if the book does not throb with oriental meance. For example, a famous book by Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, sounds much more creepy when titled, The Wine of Fu Manchu, or even The Dandelion of Fu Manchu.

Retitling my books, then: 

• The Golden Age of Fu Manchu (not bad) 
• The Phoenix of Mars (so-so) 
• Harry Potter and the Golden Transcendence (I’d buy it)
• Orphans of Mars (sounds good)
• Fugitive Schoolgirls of Gor (hm. that might have been a better title at thato)
• Titans of Chaos (well, this is already a nice sounding title)
• Last Guardian of the Dying Earth
• Lensmen of Everness
• Null-A Continuum (already has one of the goodwill words in it)
• Galactic Patrol of Fu Manchu versus Skylark DuQuesne and the Space Pirates of the Second Foundation. (forthcoming)

Belriose seems to have a question about the eternal war between the sexes, but I cannot parse her (or his, or its — on the web One Never Knows, Do One?) meaning. This is part of an ongoing discussion that began here.

Belriose says: "I already asked: I wonder why you seem to assume that everything that doesn’t fulfill the traditional roles is necesarly bad and devoided of the virtues of the old conceptions about romance or family."

This is not a question, but a rhetorical statement. I made no comments about ‘everything’ nor did I say it was ‘necessarily’ bad. A thing can be bad contingently; or it can have good and bad elements, where the bad outweighs the good.

What I said was this. Here is the whole passage, so you can read it in context.

"I confess I am the mere opposite of a feminist. I think men and women are different, and viva la difference. One difference between men and women is that men seek mates by pursuing them, and women seek mates by alluring them. This means that, even if we were, or could be taught to be, the same, men and women should differentiate and exaggerate masculine and feminine characteristics, for purposes of cold Darwinian calculation, even if not for fun. (As a minor example, when women dress distinctively from men, the dress itself becomes a feminine symbol, a poetic symbol, whereas if both sexes dress uniformly, the only way to allure a mate is for a woman to show her cleavage, or some other crass way to emphasize the sexual difference. It seems a paradox, but by being less feminine, the women is placed in a false position of having to be more crudely sexual to work the same allure.) Another difference, which is as much psychological as physical, is that men are more violent and more prone to violence. A related difference is that men can rape women and women cannot rape men. This means women should be armed, and drilled in the use of arms."

Now, picking this apart, it consists of one statement of fact (men and women are different) one observation from experience (men seek mates by pursuit, women by allure) and one conclusion which contains a value judgment (this means that sexual differences should be exaggerated, if not for reasons of ‘fun’ then also for reasons of Darwinian calculation). Obviously this value judgment need not apply to monks, eunuchs, or unisexual feminists, nor any one else who, for whatever reason, eschews sex and romance, or does not enjoy it. It does not apply to Albrecht the Nibelung, for example.

Read the remainder of this entry »

(ht to  ) Want to be the first kid on your block to read all the swell stories in our Jack Vance tribute anthology, SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH??

Well, here’s your chance. Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist is doing it again, offering up an Advanced Reading Copy of the gorgeous Subterranean Press edition, illustrated by Tom Kidd.

To check out the details of the contest, go to:

http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/2009/04/win-advance-reading-copy-of-songs-of.html

Good luck. And remember, cheaters will be blasted with the Excellent Prismatic Spray.

Someone asked which Blackstone I was quoting for my definition. This is from COMMENTARIES, Book Four (Public Wrongs) Chapter XV (Of Offenses Against the Person of Individuals) sections III.

I quote it here in full because of the inherent interest in the subject. One can trace the evolution of the elements of the crime of rape away from a property crime against the father of the victim to a crime against the victim herself. The term ‘civil law’ is a term of art, and refers to the Roman law.

III. A THIRD OFFENCE, against the female part also of his majesty’s subjects, but attended with greater aggravation than that of forcible marriage, is the crime of rape, raptus mulierum, or the carnal knowledge of a woman forcibly and against her will. This, by the Jewish law, was punished with death in case the damsel was betrothed to another man; and in case she was not betrothed, then a heavy fine of fifty shekels was to be paid to the damsel’s father, and she was to be the wife of the ravisher all the days of his life, without that power of divorce which was in general permitted by the Mosaic law.

The civil law punishes the crime of ravishment with death and confiscation of goods; under which it includes both the offence of forcible abduction, or taking away a woman from her friends, of which we last spoke; and also the present offence of forcibly dishonouring them; either of which without the other is in that law sufficient to constitute a capital crime. Read the remainder of this entry »

Belriose remarks:

"I just don’t see why you seem to assumme that feminity [sic] is the top value that always a man is looking for in a woman."

Top value? Perhaps not. A value? Certainly.

Read the remainder of this entry »