Reviewer Praise for COUNT TO A TRILLION
An unexpectedly good review here
http://www.graspingforthewind.com/2011/11/01/book-review-count-to-a-trillion-by-john-c-wright/
The free market, which no doubt promotes many good and peaceful human virtues, as diligence and thrift, also unfortunately discourages humility among hucksters. My financial interests make me unwilling to contradict a reviewer when he has overpraised me. (It is possible that I judge my own work with a jaundiced eye, albeit I doubt it.)
Wright’s writing is clear and crisp. He wastes no effort on excessive introspection. This is a novel of mankind’s reaching for the stars, of political upheaval, of a man in search of something outside himself. Though the narrative follows Menelaus, it is told from a third-person limited perspective, so that we only know what Menelaus knows. It is this choice, I think, that keeps the novel so entertaining, as each and every chapter is revelatory, just as it is for the character.
Count to a Trillion mostly concerns itself with internecine strife on one-world government Earth and between Menelaus and those he trusts. Yet it is an external threat that causes this strife in the first place. The ending is left open-ended about the ultimate fate of humanity, and I for one am eager to discover which of the two fates the narrative presents will be humanity’s ultimate destiny. There are lots of ways it could go, especially in light of the ending. This is the genius of the writing. John C. Wright takes the reader on an epic ride, but leaves you hanging just enough that you cannot help but crave more.
I have not been surprised by nor enjoyed a science fiction novel this much in years. Wright grabs you by the intellect and shakes some classic scifi entertainment into it. Count to a Trillion is highly recommended reading.
Clear and crisp? My writing? The words orotund and Miltonesque are one which spring to mind with more pellucid accuracy — but, no matter. Any praise due the work will be passed with joy along to the heavenly muses who inspired it, and the craftsman who but wrought it will say no more. I take credit only for the flaws.
I confess I grin in glee at this part:
Those more scientific than me will need to asses the validity of the theorems and logical decision making Wright voices through Menelaus and let me know if these are real or created only for the purpose of the novel. Wright’s logical mind and clear writing make it seem real for the uninitiated, but I cannot attest to how truly “hard” his science is.
Ah, dear reader, if my homework is good enough and my technoblab patter is convincing enough that you cannot see the seam where I depart from real science fact and lure you by slow unnoticed steps into science fantasy, my art as a stage magician of words has worked its trick. I did do my homework for this book: like Dan Brown, I hereby assert that, while the work is fiction, the groups, rituals, and locations are all real, including the dwarf star V886 Centauri, with its core of degenerate diamond, and the globular cluster at M3, with its curious orbit around the galactic core.
Here is a snippet from the Kirkus Review, who were apparently less enchanted by the stagecraft, but, still not without a kind word:
Spectacularly clever, sometimes, in weaving together cutting edge speculation along the outer fringes of known science, but more often grindingly didactic, with no narrative flow and three genius protagonists all unpleasantly cold and unsympathetic: a case of everybody knowing everything but nobody knowing anything. Highly impressive but indigestible: something like a vastly promising first draft that needed a lot more work.
Grindingly didactic, I will with stone-faced honesty admit, even admire, as an apt description to any work of mine. But unpleasantly cold and unsympathetic? My roguish and charming Del Azarchel, my outrageous over-the-top Meany of Greater Texas, my elfin and wickedly sly Rania?
Ouch, and alack! Where are the stern angels of my stoicism to bring their iron shields to my aid, and ward my wounded pride! Where, now, the philosophical temper all disciples of that Socrates who drank hemlock dry-eyed and with no ill word to the Athenians of blame?
It is sometimes dismaying to see how far short of the author’s hope the seed of his imagination planted by his words thus unfolds so sickly and with such dun leaves in the soil of the imagination of a reader. I am tempted to blame the soil, but since that is outside my province, I can only blame the seed.
But, looking on the bright side, he does call it spectacularly clever and highly impressive. These are not easy words to wring from the august lips of Kirkus Reviews.
Finally, this is from Library Journal:
An elegant stylist and a true visionary, Wright will delight hard sf fans with his exuberance, while his characters and plot keep the action fast and furious.
I think this is overpraise, but I will quell modesty with a gruff and manly nod of gratitude for the compliment.
So Kirkus read a book with no narrative flow while Library Journal read one with fast and furious plot action.
I have no opinion on that point myself: I am like the actor on the stage cannot see the play because he is in the play. I can see the wings and the stage machinery, and from up here all the props look flat, and all the clothing looks like costuming, and all the lines sound like lines. The actor therefore sees illusion, because his eyes are in the wrong place. What the audience sees is the truth.
Let me say that these poor reviewers, by the nature of the publication business, and the size of the manuscripts which can be published and shelved in bookstores, are required to review what is basically the first fourth or fifth fragment of the story I am telling.
This is like asking an art critic to examine to top one quarter of the Mona Lisa, or the left one fifth of Davinci’s Last Supper. (“Well, I think the portrayal of Saint Bartholomew reaching for the butter with his knife is well executed, not to mention symbolically expressive of his martyrdom. I am curious to see in the next installment whose head is connected to the shoulder of the Beloved Disciple. The hair on the left side is somewhat flat in execution.”)
No matter how good or poor my plotting was, neither the one who praised it nor the the one who dispraised it sees where it is leading or can really tell if the pacing is sound, but neither can they reserve judgment, or else they will not serve their readers — who read reviews to find out about the execution of the book, the theme, the characters, the plot.
And science fiction readers, of course, have even higher standards, for not only all these elements must be well executed, but the science must be sound, and the infodumps explaining the science must be entertaining and incorporated into the work with seeming, er, grindingly didactic. Haughty academics who dismiss our genre writing as juvenile will be forgotten, and the Coleopterous race which shall supplant mankind 14000 years hence will be studying our fantastic fiction with awe, well aware of how difficult it is to craft well.
If you want to see someone who did an infodump really well, reread the scene in HAVE SPACE SUIT WILL TRAVEL where Kip describes the features of his space suit. The lecture slides into the adventure so easily that you have to pinch yourself and take yourself out of the story to notice how it does not take you out of the story.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
