COUNT TO A JULIAN by John C Wilson — Wait. Who?
Someone tell Barnes & Noble that they have the wrong review posted on their site for my book:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/count-to-a-trillion-john-c-wright/1103614708
Let’s read:
Decades after the world has descended into anarchy, Menelaus Montrose dreams of making it better. He jumps at the chance to escape backward Texas, now an independent country, to participate in a daring expedition to recover antimatter from an alien relic in a nearby stellar system. Montrose’s misguided self-experimentation leaves him comatose for years; when he regains consciousness, he learns his surviving crewmates have used the antimatter to conquer and reshape Earth. They have also left the planet obligated to the alien hierarchy responsible for the antimatter’s creation.
Er… none of that is exactly accurate. It sounds like someone read the dustjacket rather than the book, and got little details wrong. Let us read on!
Wright (Orphans of Chaos) is at his best when he abandons his trite characters and cardboard terrestrial setting to contemplate the Stapledonian implications of a government able to function across the vast expanses of space and time, appealing to readers interested in glimpses of the unfathomable immensities of our universe.
Well, the trite characters and cardboard setting part is right (so maybe the reviewer DID read the book) but the Stapledonian vistas of vastness do not actually occur in this volume; they come up in later sequels. Let us read further!
From the Hugo-winning author of Spin, an exuberant adventure in a post-climate-change America!
In the reign of President Deklan Comstock, a reborn United States is struggling back to prosperity. Over a century after the Efflorescence of Oil, after the Fall of the Cities, after the Plague of Infertility, after the False Tribulation, after the days of the Pious Presidents, the sixty stars and thirteen stripes wave from the plains of Athabaska to the national capital in New York City. In Colorado Springs, the Dominion sees to the nation’s spiritual needs. In Labrador, the Army wages war on the Dutch. America, unified, is rising once again.
Huhn? My book has a fimulwinter caused by Imperial Japanese weather control warfare used to eliminate the germ warfare virus released into the ecosphere by Jihadists; and the world is suffering from an energy abundance, not a droughth. But let us read on!
ROBERT CHARLES WILSON was born in California and lives in Toronto. His novel Spin won the Hugo Award in 2006. He won the Philip K. Dick Award for his debut novel A Hidden Place; Canada’s Aurora Award for Darwinia; and the John W. Campbell Award for The Chronoliths.
I am not now, and rarely have been in the past, Robert Charles Wilson in any of his myriad forms or avatars or incarnations.
True, I trifled briefly with becoming Robert Charles Wilson at one time, but fans of Wilson wrote stiffly worded letters to the TIMES, and in response the Jeddak of New York, Muffy the Lesser Moff Tarkin, secretly ordered the psychosurgical process to be reversed. An experimental submarine called Proteus was miniaturized by the CMDF and introduced into my bloodstream by means of a hypodermic hidden in the tip of one of umbrella-weapons of the master criminal Oswald Cobblepot, and a miniature team of brain surgeons, using an experimental futuristic ray-energy device called a ‘laser’, removed all the stolen Robert Charles Wilson material from my nervous system before the transmogrification and soul-absorption was complete, much to my chagrin. Alas, his fame and talent slipped from my claws! I would have gotten away with it too, had it not been for those meddling kids!
Wait. Didn’t Barnes & Noble just go out of business?
NOTE TO THE HUMOR IMPAIRED: I am just kidding about when the review calls my settings cardboard and my characters trite. Clearly, the reviewer did not read the book! What an egregiousness error! My characters were cardboard and my settings were trite. He had that backward.
I am hoping the legions of sciffy-crazed Robert Charles Wilson fans, in the mistaken belief that he wrote Count to a Trillion will begin an “Preoccupy Wall Street” protest world-wide, or larger (we should include in the rocky inner planets) and force Publisher’s Weekly to retract this scurrilous and outrageous slander and publish a fawning flattering review, calling me an elegant stylist and a true visionary, or something else to trick the unwary into buying my hackwork.
I am sure the Wilson Horde will not be mollified until Publishers Weekly agrees to buy a copy of Julian Comstock IN HARDBACK! (which is the Wilson book here described.)
UPDATE! Showing just a part of the eerie mind-clouding powers I learned from the Ancient One in Tibet, I have arranged so that the inner-system-wide “Occupy Your Idle Time” protests against Publisher’s Weekly by the all-powerful Robert Charles Wilson Empire have encountered success!
Naturally, Publisher’s Weekly was too embarrassed to print a retraction in their own name, so they used the Library Journal instead:
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/book/892102-421/sffantasy_reviews_october_15_2011.html.csp
Wright, John C. Count to a Trillion. Tor. Dec. 2011. c.368p. ISBN 9780765329271. $25.99. SF
Menelaus Montrose, a duelist (“hired gun”), joins a space expedition, eager to decipher a cryptic extraterrestrial artifact called the Monument. After an attempt to bolster his intelligence through forbidden experimentation goes wrong, Montrose awakens from an enforced sleep many years in the future; he finds that his genius, having lifted him to superhuman status, reveals to him the dark meanings of the Monument’s inscriptions. The author of the “Orphans of Chaos trilogy” (Orphans of Chaos; Fugitives of Chaos; Titans of Chaos ) launches a new sf adventure series featuring an unusual and eccentric hero and a world in which economic collapse has led to an ostensibly peaceful utopia. VERDICT 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.
Wonderful ! I wonder if the Internet has any other reviews of a book not slated for release until December. Let us look:
John C Wright stunned with world with his immense talent, but where more stunned by his immense ego and more immense body odor. If he has time to write a trilogy, why doesn’t he have time to write his Mother? Everyone should rush right out and buy a book by Robert Charles Wilson in hardback. — Donna Wright
Hmph. That is from my mother’s home page. It is good that she reads my books. I know at least I have one reliable fan.
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.
