Mr. Wright has, if you will excuse the pun, let the black cat out of the bag with regards to the next work of his that Castalia House will be publishing. Regrettably, he has been manfully resisting the best efforts of our editors to keep his fanciful flights of highfalutin prose in check.
A previous version of One Bright Star to Guide Them appeared in F&SF in their 2009 April-May, but at the editor’s suggestion, I made some changes. The daring idea of the the text being entirely rewritten to eliminate all male and female pronouns, and a scene where the heroine wishes her husband were a dinosaur and fantasizes about him in graphic sexual detail, as well making each character have a nonbinary sexual orientation, like Leehallfae, but without any imagination or point, were all contemplated as possibilities, but in the end the editor forced me to write a story that had a beginning, middle and end, so I will not be able to win any prestigious awards, or get a government grant to not write a novel.
(However, in retaliation against my editor, I wrote a story without a beginning, middle and end — at least not in that order, and not with only one ending — and sold it to him as CITY BEYOND TIME. Hoo hah!! On sale now!)
You see what we are forced to deal with here on a daily basis. Thank you to the volunteers, we now have a sufficient number. However, if you haven’t read CITY BEYOND TIME yet, which is indeed on sale now, you need not take my word for why you should, but need only peruse the reviews for more convincing explanations.
“Best of Wright I have read. “This is the third book of John C. Wright I have read this year. I was introduced to Wright’s writing with his book “Awake in the Nightland,” published by Castalia House. The second was “Count to a Trillion,” published by Tor. This third book, “City Beyond Time,” is published by Castalia House…. The writing is tremendous.”
“Buy this before your future self comes back to make you. There are a lot of time travel books out there, the best and enduring being ones that examine questions of why or how or who. John C Wright has done what I’ve never seen before and examined time travel by “ought”; only with questions far deeper than just “ought you kill baby Hitler?” If you’re a scifi/fantasy fan you owe it to yourself to check out this collection.”
CITY BEYOND TIME is, without question, one of the best SF books published this year. It is clever, original, and fantastic in every sense of the word. And yet, in my opinion, it isn’t even one of the two best John C. Wright books we will publish this year.