#john c. wright

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

floooo

(I keep running into John C. Wright on the internet, it's amazing)

[rosecorcoranwrites]

by John C. Wright

I’m not a fan of the Hobbit movies, but I’m glad they exist because without them, this amazing review wouldn’t exist either. 

[humanoidhistory]

John Harris cover art for Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright.

[feotakahari]

The World You Need

I used to say that people create the Jesus they need most, imagining their personal Jesus as a reflection of themselves with all their flaws reframed and justified as virtues. I’d like to take it a step farther--people create the world they need most, even if it takes them their whole lifetimes.

Take John C. Wright, a very smart, very arrogant writer who thinks the only possible reason you could disagree with him is that you haven’t read as many books as him. He used to be a strident atheist, and while this gave him plenty of opportunities to be smug, it still felt like he had the capacity to see and understand things about the world that weren’t exactly how he wanted them to be. Then he had a stroke, started hearing the “voice of Jesus” in his head, and redoubled his fervency as a Catholic. He’s found new life and vigor in ranting about how gay people and feminists are ruining the world by going against the will of God, because he now has the ultimate authority to appeal to and the ultimate book to point to when he wants to claim he’s more learned than you. I’m not saying Catholicism is bad, but it was both bad for and necessary to Wright, because it gave him free reign to be what his worst impulses always inclined him towards being.

Or take Tatsuya Ishida, who used to be an offensive but empathetic chronicler of society’s dropouts. His comic Sinfest always carried the feeling that there was something fundamentally wrong with society, and a strong implication that this wrongness related to sex, hedonism, and selfishness. However, he was never able to clearly label the problem, so he was never able to blame or ostracize anyone for it. His characters remained lovable even at their lowest points, and they were beginning to form support networks and develop into decent people. Then he discovered feminism, and suddenly his entire comic was about ways in which men dehumanize women. Every issue was reframed in terms of men’s sexism and selfishness, and any attempt at nuance was rejected as a trick to undermine and manipulate women. Feminism let Ishida believe in a world that had an understandable, fixable problem, and if that single problem was too simple to cover the whole world, then the world could simply shrink to fit his understanding. Again, I’m not saying feminism is bad, but it was bad for Ishida, because it gave him what he’d always wanted.

This post was inspired by an article about past-life regression, written by an author who didn’t believe but clearly wanted to. She talked at length about her personal anxieties that could be quelled by the belief in lives before and after this one, and she almost made it sound compelling to set aside the world you know and embrace the world you need. But I can’t help but wonder, if she chose to see what she wanted, are there things she would then become unable to see? And what would that mean for the people around her, if in some way they were part of the unseen?

[danbensen]

Giants of Pangea by John C. Wright

- Sometimes I just gotta read another of John C. Wright’s pulpy candy bars. In this one (second of a series), Colonel Preston Lost, soldier, millionaire, ace pilot, and daring outdoorsman, continues to nearly get killed in all the ways a man can die on a far-future super-continent inhabited by post-human mutants, god-tech artifacts, and dinosaurs.

Read the full review and more in my June Newsletter: https://danielmbensen.substack.com/p/uncle-cheech

[danbensen]

Cat Burglar of the Constellations by John C. Wright - This is the third book of the Starquest Series and it goes down like popcorn. Maybe buffalo wings. It’s tighter and more consistent than book two, and does a better job of weaving the big plot arcs around the central story (about a jewel heist). Risking a spoiler: a whole sequence of events I thought was a flashback to the distant past…wasn’t! Awesome.

Read the other reviews in my May newsletter:

[danbensen]

Review: Space Pirates of Andromeda by John C. Wright

Silliness with a grander scale and deeper meaning

Athos Lone is the son of a pair of resistance fighters (one royal, the other a scalawag) who joined a wandering mystic to help overthrow an evil, interstellar empire. Okay, you got it. Except this couple had more kids than just the one.

To avenge his brother’s muder, Athos joined the government force tasked with hunting space pirates. We join him on the job as he breaks into a ship, The Devil’s Delight, with the aid of his ultra-tech space-cloak, his myth-tech lion's mask, and his courageous, heroic nature.

Wright plays his usual trick of packing an epic trilogy's worth of detail into the backstory, of which very little appears on the page. There was a robot in a top hat and a winged pirate queen, but we don't get to hang out with them because we're mostly on that ship with Athos.

To be fair, Wright dumps so much punishment on his protagonist that we spend most of our mental energy wondering how the boy's going make it out of this one. Athos escapes one deadly challenge by diving into another, solving past mysteries and uncovering larger conspiracies as he goes, sometimes with supernatural aid.

read on

[danbensen]

from my Patreon

All Men Dream of Earthwomen and Other Aeons by John C. Wright - a rich and generous stew of stories, tied together by a theme of transhumanism and its downsides. My favorite story is "The Last Report on Unit Twenty-Two," where I think that theme shines brightest. Imagine an asteroid-mining cyborg with a cloned human brain, sculpting interplanetary rock into little copies of itself: babies it is incapable of having.