Beyond good and bad

The Bloggerblaster reviews AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND:

Moments ago I finished Awake in the Night Land by John C. Wright.

As I sit to give you my thoughts on it…  the first thing that comes to
mind is a question.   How does one review… or critique…  something
like this?  I am unfit.

One does not critique the great works of literature.  One appreciates
them.  You define good and bad by them.  Good and bad do not apply to
them….

I would offer some advice to the reader.  Read with patience.  Each
story builds upon the last.  You will have questions and frustrations as
you go.  Keep going. The struggle of the climb improves the view from
the top. 

One theme that keeps reoccurring in reviews is how the book forces them think about it afterwards. To me, that is one of the hallmarks of greatness in literature; one of Maupassant’s haunting stories, his best, in my opinion, once left me staring at the ceiling for nearly an hour.

It may strike you that this isn’t how we usually talk about one of my books, or one of Tom’s books, or one of Larry’s books. It’s not how we talk about the books we publish. It’s not how we talk about the award-winning stuff, be the awards merited or unmerited. This is one of those rare occasions when one discovers, much to one’s surprise, that one has stumbled upon genuine and timeless greatness concerning the observation of the human condition.

The book’s one four-star reviewer declared he only gives out five stars to Shakespeare… then thought about it and gave the book five stars anyway. If you’ve read my book reviews, you know I tend to grade on the severe side, I rarely give out anything above an 8/10, and yet, I don’t hesitate to tell you that this book rates 10/10. If you believe me, then read it. And if you don’t believe me, then read it and afterwards tell us precisely where and how you believe it somehow falls short.

An appeal to reinstall Firefox

I was asked to reconsider my position on uninstalling Mozilla products and refusing to use them in the future:

You are probably here because you have been advised to consider reinstalling Firefox. You may, in fact, have uninstalled Firefox as a result of a recent campaign protesting either Brendan Eich’s being appointed CEO of Mozilla, or his supposedly being fired or forced by Mozilla to resign from that position as a result of a donation he made in favor of proposition 8. Brendan Eich did, in fact, resign; however, he did was not fired or forced to resign by Mozilla. Mozilla does not discriminate based on an individual’s personal political or religious beliefs. If you have been told otherwise, I encourage you to evaluate the evidence for yourself. First of all, I would like to point you to Mozilla’s official FAQ on Brendan’s resignation. I realize that some people will insist that this is just a cover story and that he was really forced to resign, in spite of whatever Mozilla may say to the contrary. So I would like to share some additional corroborating evidence. There are many inside sources who corroborate this, but the one I find particularly credible and compelling is Gervase Markham. He is in a unique position as an outspoken Christian and supporter of traditional marriage who works at Mozilla. Gerv has stated that he has it from sources he trusts that Brendan did step down of his own accord and was not forced out. You can read his full statement on his blog. Finally, I want to remind you of what Mozilla, and Firefox, truly stands for.

If you are still not convinced, I’d like you to consider one more thing. Consider for a moment, the possibility that Brendan really did step down of his own accord and is not interested in coming back. What more can Mozilla possibly do that would persuade you? Is there any further evidence that would change your mind? It makes sense to treat them with a good faith presumption of truthfulness unless and until there is evidence to the contrary. Why? Because if your mind can not be changed by anything, then they may as well ignore you anyway. There are always people who cannot be swayed by reason or any amount of evidence. Since their minds can’t be changed anyway, we all might as well ignore them and focus on those who can be persuaded by reason. If you are not open to any reasonable evidence, then you make yourself irrelevant to the debate. Don’t be do that. Evaluate the evidence fairly, and when in doubt, treat others with a good faith presumption of truthfulness. Then if evidence persuades you to change your position, it will mean something.

I read this. I read Markham’s piece. I have evaluated the evidence and I am fully informed concerning the relevant facts. And my answer is a staunch and resounding no. I reject Mozilla. I reject what it now stands for.

I am aware Eich stepped down of his own accord. I am aware he was not fired, that his resignation was not demanded by the Mozilla Board, and that fewer than 10 Mozilla employees publicly demanded his resignation.

I am also aware that Mozilla’s executive chairwoman Mitchell Baker issued this official statement on April 3rd: “Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it. We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves. We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast
enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry.
We must do better.”

For what is she apologizing, precisely? To whom is she apologizing?

I am aware that Mozilla claims to “support equality for all.” This is a blatant lie on multiple levels. Mozilla might as reasonably proclaim that it supports unicorns for all or a chicken in every pot. Mozilla clearly does not support the Constitutional right of free association or the right of free speech on the part of those harboring views it considers incompatible with its mission statement.

I am aware that “Mozilla Supports LGBT Equality”. I don’t and I will not support any organization that claims to do so.

I am aware that Mozilla has ignored tens of thousands of negative comments from current and former Firefox users and has refused to provide any statement in response to them. I am also aware that it responded quickly and publicly to a much smaller amount of criticism that threatened much less damage to the corporation.

A supporter of the move to ostracize and oust Brandon Eich declared: “I do think that any individual is free to choose to resign their own job
or otherwise not conduct business with someone whom they know has taken
an action that they consider unjust.” I agree. That is precisely why I no longer want anything to do with Mozilla and I continue to recommend that everyone #uninstallfirefox.

Prior to the #uninstallfirefox campaign began, Mozilla Firefox represented 34 percent of the total pageviews here. That percentage is currently down to 20 percent, so based on last year’s traffic, Mozilla can expect to lose at least 1,835,637 pageviews from the readers here on this site alone, in addition to the pageviews those readers generate on all other sites and whatever pageviews my household machines generate on an annual basis.

The destruction of Damien Walter

First the massive tetsubo that is Larry Correia responds to the scurrilous libels of SF wannabe Damien Walter in The Guardian:

[M]y name showed up as the poster child for hate mongery and villainy in the Guardian (a liberal tabloid that passes for a major newspaper in Britain). I’ve been in a lot of American news things but this was a first for me, so on Friday afternoon I had to discuss with my fans on Facebook what I should put on my new business cards. We finally decided on Larry F. Correia, International Lord of Hate. Almost went with The Hatemaster because of the 70’s super villain vibe, but that looks too much like The Hamster when you’re reading fast.

So here is the article written by Damian Walter. It turns out that Tom Kratman knew him back when Asimov’s had a forum, and remembered him as a shrill little libprog, and that if Damian was at the Guardian a village somewhere in England was missing their idiot.

Somebody else told me that Damian is an “aspiring” author, and that he’d recently been given a grant by the British government to write a novel. I have no idea if this is true, and don’t care enough to look it up, but man, if it is… your government actually pays people to write novels? BWA HA HA HAW! Holy shit. As an actual novelist, that’s funny. And I thought my government was stupid.

Unlike Damian, I’m not a huge pussy, so I will include the link to the thing that I’m about to insult.

There is more. There is considerably more. Go, thou, and read. And laugh. Then, when Mr. Correia was done abusing the corpse of Mr. Walter’s aspiring career, the elegant rapier that is John C. Wright filleted the bloody chunks:

I was reading Larry Correia’s blog, Monster Hunter Nation. In today’s episode, he has been subject to a ritual shaming by the Guardian so-called newspaper of some country our ancestors left long ago when we got sick of their dandified addiction to petty tyranny, and came here to be free men.

The mewling cravens and castrati were left behind. By some odd miracle, no doubt involving arts forbidden by the Catholic Church, they reproduced and swelled in numbers, and, after Churchill was voted out of office, they outbred the remaining homo sapiens, and overspread the sceptred isle, so green and fair, once called Our Lady’s Dowry.

Not to worry! All that made England decent, fine and free survives in America.

How badly have the dross devolved? A simian named Mr. Damian Walter takes up his pen in his quadrumanous left foot to savage the indomitable Mr. Correia. I read this sentence:

Somebody else told me that Damian is an “aspiring” author, and that he’d recently been given a grant by the British government to write a novel.

A grant?

A grant?!

A GRANT?!!

Can you imagine the sheer effrontery it requires for someone who grovels for pity-pennies to address a real man, a man who works for a living, and upbraid him in his chosen field of endeavor?

Mr. Correia quit his day job, friends. He supports himself entirely by his pen, which by any account, is a frail narrow pillar for all by the most accomplished wordsmiths.

The simian creature does not write in his non-work hours, as do I, he is a beggar. An aspiring beggar. Nay, let me insult no beggar. The creature is not an honest beggar. Honest beggars asks and accept only alms freely given.

There is, of course, more. There is considerably more. Read, and then spare a moment of pity for the wretched creature so publicly humiliated. The painful thing for the libelous Mr. Walter is not that he has managed to draw the scorn of two of the best and most successful writers in the SF/F genre, but that the expression of that scorn makes for considerably better reading than anything he is ever likely to write, with or without the funding of the British government.

A rare alignment

Will wonders never cease? I actually concur with Paul Krugman for once:

Four years ago Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, abruptly canceled America’s biggest and arguably most important infrastructure project, a desperately needed new rail tunnel under the Hudson River. Count me among those who blame his presidential ambitions, and believe that he was trying to curry favor with the government- and public-transit-hating Republican base.

Even as one tunnel was being canceled, however, another was nearing completion, as Spread Networks finished boring its way through the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania. Spread’s tunnel was not, however, intended to carry passengers, or even freight; it was for a fiber-optic cable that would shave three milliseconds — three-thousandths of a second — off communication time between the futures markets of Chicago and the stock markets of New York. And the fact that this tunnel was built while the rail tunnel wasn’t tells you a lot about what’s wrong with America today.

Who cares about three milliseconds? The answer is, high-frequency traders, who make money by buying or selling stock a tiny fraction of a second faster than other players. Not surprisingly, Michael Lewis starts his best-selling new book “Flash Boys,” a polemic against high-frequency trading, with the story of the Spread Networks tunnel. But the real moral of the tunnel tale is independent of Mr. Lewis’s polemic.

Think about it. You may or may not buy Mr. Lewis’s depiction of the high-frequency types as villains and those trying to thwart them as heroes. (If you ask me, there are no good guys in this story.) But either way, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to save three milliseconds looks like a huge waste. And that’s part of a much broader picture, in which society is devoting an ever-growing share of its resources to financial wheeling and dealing, while getting little or nothing in return.

The financial sector is nothing but a gigantic, money-sucking tick on the US economy. None – I repeat – NONE of the claimed benefits it supposedly provides as “the lubricating oil of capitalism” are worth even one-tenth the present cost of the financial sector. There will be no recovery, there CAN be no recovery under the twin burdens of the federal and the financial sectors, which presently account for 48 percent of the outstanding debt in the American economy.

The willfully thick Blue wall

One thing that has always annoyed me about the Hollywood portrayal of police departments, and is something that I mock in passing in the QUANTUM MORTIS series, is the way in which we are supposed to believe that police departments seriously frown upon individual police violating procedures and skirting the law. Is there a single Hollywood cop who hasn’t had to turn in his badge and his gun at one point or another? Or hasn’t been suspended from his job?

The reality is that police are statistically more likely to have sex with a prostitute on duty than to arrest one, are more likely to murder someone and get away with it than be caught and charged with the crime, and are only at the risk of losing their jobs if they violate the code of silence and upset the local police union.

Los Angeles police officers tampered with voice recording equipment in dozens of patrol cars in an effort to avoid being monitored while on duty, according to records and interviews.

An inspection by Los Angeles Police Department investigators found about half of the estimated 80 cars in one South L.A. patrol division were missing antennas, which help capture what officers say in the field. The antennas in at least 10 more cars in nearby divisions had also been removed.

LAPD Chief Charlie Beck and other top officials learned of the problem last summer but chose not to investigate which officers were responsible. Rather, the officials issued warnings against continued meddling and put checks in place to account for antennas at the start and end of each patrol shift.

The police chief simply “chose not to investigate” a series of obvious crimes committed by numerous police officers. It’s totally predictable, so why do we so seldom see that in the movies?

On the cover

Jartstar shares his thoughts about how he went about creating the cover for AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND:

Awake in the Night Land is one of the finest stories I have ever read, and when I was given the opportunity to design a cover for it I was elated. After presenting a series of thumbnails to Mr. Wright with series of different styles and ideas, he chose a straight forward image with the focal point being The Last Redoubt.

The challenge was representing a towering, ancient, rusting structure surrounded by a dead and sunless sky encircled by ruins and a wasteland. If the lighting was accurate to the real world and the story it would consist of a silhouetted triangular shape with a dim red glowing horizon and a few bright spots of magma here and there. This would make for a thoroughly uninteresting image which certainly would not work for a book cover. Using some artistic license I brightened up the concept and made a dramatic, disconcerting red sky with the light of the Redoubt fighting against the creeping black around it. 

I certainly hope my version of the Redoubt has done justice to it as described in the story, but more importantly, it should reflect the power of Wright’s superb work. This question of my success can only be answered by the wayfarers who are willing to enter into the dark of the Night Lands and find their way out again.

On John C. Wright’s Journal, Pinlighter asked about the shape of the pyramid:

It’s certainly an effective cover, – I’ll go beyond that, a beautiful
cover – but the Redoubt is clearly described in THE NIGHT LAND as being a
Pyramid without terraces or steps like that, but looking more like the
traditional (Egyptian) pyramid, smoothly tapering to a point. I am
curious as to your motives for not showing it like that. 

VD replies: The change to a more Mayan-style pyramid was my call. As you can see in the thumbs, the original plan was to go by the book. But the simple geometric shape just looked too plain and boring, especially for a central element that was featured so prominently on the cover. So, chalk it down to artistic liberty, in much the same way that the Watcher’s heads are fully exposed rather than on their sides with their faces half-buried as in the text. It’s certainly desirable to get the details right, but not at the expense of making a cover visually tedious. I think Jartstar did a very good job of conveying the ominous spirit of the Night Lands while also expressing its core message of human hope in a visually arresting image; to see it in more detail, just click on the cover.

Mailvox: the psychic undercurrent

Anonymous Conservative notices that everyone’s antennae are twitching these days:

Something difficult to pin down is activating amygdalae. It’s telling everyone’s brain that bad is coming, and everyone is trying to assuage those amygdalae, to turn off all the uncomfortable warning alarms they are producing in their brains. Conservatives buy up guns and canned goods to ease the stress level and lower the warning level by preparing. Liberals, deep down know the collapse is the end for them, so the only way to assuage their amygdalae is to retreat even deeper into the bubbles of denial that are producing our problems the begin with. Part of that denial is sending anyone who doesn’t tell them the future is happy far, far away, so they won’t have to think about it.

What Vox asks is the most fascinating question of our time. How can it be that our bellies are full, we are bombarded with endless, professionally produced propaganda telling us everything is fine, and yet deep within us, we all feel like the cattle on an island that head for high ground hours before the tsunami, that nobody knew was coming, hits? How complex is our biology that we connect with our world on such a deep subconscious level that we can’t be tricked by professional liars with nearly limitless resources and a death grip on every major media? How bad is the coming mess, that we can’t be blinded to it?

And why is it in nature, when the tsunami is coming, no cattle insist on telling all the others that now is the best possible time to go swimming, but in our supposedly more advanced species, we have idiots telling us that if we only double down on the debt spending, print a little more currency, and debauch our culture sexually a little more, everything will get better, because a collapse is impossible?

Of course, some are more sensitive than others. I’ve more or less felt this way since 1999, and not due to Y2K either. Or at least not directly; my concern then was that it would be used as the same sort of excuse that 9/11 was two years later.

Remember, it’s not paranoia when they actually are out to undermine the foundations of your civilization. If only we actually had a Last Redoubt to which we could safely retreat from the rising tide of abhumanity.

Larry Corriea drops the bomb

On behalf of Mr. John C. Wright and encourages his vast horde of heavily armed readers to divert a little of their ammo money towards a copy of AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND:

Many of you already know John for being an awesome sci-fi writer. Personally, I found him because of his blog. Like me, John is an out of the closet conservative. Only where I am
blunt and sometimes crude, John is eloquent and intellectual. I’m a
tetsubo. John is a rapier. I’ve got a lot of respect for his writing,
and I don’t say this lightly but I really do believe he is our modern
C.S. Lewis….

Right now it is sitting at: Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,504 Paid in Kindle Store

I want to bump that up higher because I think
John is a great writer and a voice of reason in the wilderness. So
please tell your friends, repost this on your FB or Twitter or whatever
you are in to.

Read the rest at Monster Hunter Nation.

A review of AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND

As part of Night Land Day, I asked Andy Robertson, who founded The Night Land site and first published the novellas there, to share his thoughts on the new book. He went one better and explained both how the site developed as well as his initial reaction to John C. Wright’s forays into the Night Lands, now collected in AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND:

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
anthlogies 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.

Read the whole thing at The Night Land.

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND

As you can imagine, we are proud, pleased, delighted, and deeply honored to announce Castalia House’s publication of AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND by John C. Wright. It is, quite simply, one of the best books I have ever had the privilege of reading. If you peruse the Reading Lists on the right sidebar, you can see that I have read a considerable number of SF/F works considered to be of high quality in the last five years alone. So, you can be confident that I know whereof I speak, and I am not exaggerating in the slightest, when I tell you that AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND will be one of the best books you read this year if you have the courage to enter one of the most daunting realms in literature.

It is not an easy book to categorize. Part anthology, part novel, AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND consists of four novellas that are tied together in one vast story spanning five million years. It is a masterful combination of three literary subgenres, SF, Fantasy, and Horror. It is set in the world first created in an obscure novel published in 1912 and yet it is far more original than the vast majority of SF/F published in the last fifty years. It is remorselessly grim story set in a more inhumanly horrific environment than anything you are likely to imagine, and yet it is an uplifting tribute to the unquenchable human spirit.

It is monstrous and glorious and ghastly and magnificent.

Consider the reactions of the early reviewers:

  • “The Last of All Suns” may be the best SF novella I have ever read. I am not kidding.
  • Every now and then someone comes along who not only can say things
    nicely, but can say _important_ things nicely. That somebody, in the
    modern age, is John C. Wright. 
  • He projects an atmosphere of hope amid the vast emptiness of a dead world.
  • Set millions of years in the future the story and
    setting can really only be compared to the worst nightmares of
    Lovecraft. I cannot stress enough, read this book! If you like
    Lovecraft, the darkest visions of Stephen King, or the visions of H.R.
    Giger you will love this book. If you like science fiction especially
    the ‘Dying Earth’ genre of Jack Vance, Leigh Brackett, Michael Moorcock,
    you will love this book. If you’ve never heard of those authors or those books, read this book.

I have written a number of books. Never once have I said to you, my readers, “you must read this book”. That is because I have never written a book like this one. There are a very small number of books of which I would say “you must read this book”: The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis. The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. Watership Down by Richard Adams.

There were also others that came close, books that I enjoyed very much indeed, but did not quite justify the assertion. Embassytown by China Mieville. Cryptonomicon and Anathem by Neal Stephenson. A Game of Thrones by George Martin. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. Dune by Frank Herbert.

I will tell you now that if you appreciate excellent books, then you must read this one. I cannot imagine you will regret it.

As a child, I was much struck by the quote of the reviewer for The Times in his review of Watership Down: “I announce with trembling pleasure the appearance of a great story.” But I am not so much trembling with pleasure as shaking my head in awe as I announce the appearance of a story that may sit on the shelves in the mighty company of the aforementioned books without feeling shame.

In addition to the Amazon links provided above, Awake in the Night Land is also available in epub format at Smashwords.