Creator Ineffabilis

Posted October 4, 2024 By John C Wright

“O Ineffable Creator, who, from the treasures of Your wisdom, have established three hierarchies of angels, have arrayed them in marvelous order above the fiery heavens, and have marshaled the regions of the universe with such artful skill. You are proclaimed the true font of light and wisdom, and the primal origin raised high beyond all things.

Pour forth a ray of Your brightness into the darkened places of my mind; disperse from my soul the twofold darkness into which I was born: sin and ignorance.

You make eloquent the tongues of infants. Refine my speech and pour forth upon my lips the goodness of Your blessing.

Grant to me keenness of mind, capacity to remember, skill in learning, subtlety to interpret, and eloquence in speech.

May You guide the beginning of my work, direct its progress, and bring it to completion, You who are true God and true Man, who live and reign, world without end.

Amen.”

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Prayer Request

Posted October 3, 2024 By John C Wright
A prayer request from a longtime reader:
A friend of mine knows this 7-year-old who could really use a miracle, his name is Moises, his doctors had advised for him to be aborted, his health is in poor condition and his family is running out of medical options to support him. 
The family is asking God for a miracle by way of Bl. Luisa Piccarreta, praying the attached prayer every day in October and asking for a miracle on Moises’ behalf.
Any prayers that could be sent on Moises behalf would be greatly appreciated
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The Phoenix Exultant Ep. 28: The Handiwork of the Gods

Posted October 2, 2024 By John C Wright

From THE PHOENIX EXULTANT, vol. II of my debut trilogy. 

In the far future, where men are as gods, living lives of perfect peace and prosperity, Phaethon of Rhadamanthus discovers all memory of his lifework has been hidden from him. For he is the engineer of the sole starship his civilization has ever produced: the mighty, majestic, and immense Phoenix Exultant. She is a ship to conquer the stars.

But such ambition is outlawed in utopia. Phaethon is a pariah, exiled mentally and physically, denuded of possessions, and cast down among outcasts. His life is sought by sinister agents of the Silent Oecumene: an apocalyptic menace none but he dares see. For in a world where mind or memory can be edited at will, what is truth?

The Phoenix Exultant Ep. 28: The Handiwork of the Gods

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STARQUEST: Space Pirates of Andromeda

Posted September 30, 2024 By John C Wright

After a hiatus of many years, John C Wright has a new book, the first volume an ongoing series, available for preorder.

https://www.amazon.com/Starquest-Space-Pirates-Andromeda-12th-ebook/dp/B0DGYX8QPR

Space Opera must be Great! Gallant! Gigantic! Grandiose!
This tale told by a Grandmaster vows to return the glory that was lost!
Remember the days gone by, when science fiction was fun?
Now new hope is here!
If you are weary of weak, wan, woke and wasted works, your wait is ended!
Here is an epic, as grand as any tale of old — here you will hear wonders told!

Of course there is a Space Princess, and Space Pirates galore, and an Evil Galactic Empire.
Of course there is a super-weapon known only as the Great Eye of Darkness!
Here meet Athos Lone, Ace of Star Patrol, in his one-man mission of vengeance!
The Ancient Mariner, like an iron ghost, when slain, seems to rise again!
The mysterious spymaster called Nightshadow walks in dark worlds but serves the light!
An Imperial Deathtrooper must reverse his loyalties, and fight his own clone-brothers!

Fate has set these unlikely heroes against the Four Dark Overlords.
An utmost evil the unwary galaxy thinks long dead!
Can Darkness fail and Light prevail?
Read On! For All True Tales are but Part of a Greater!

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Any of my dear readers familiar with the modern state of the field, if you have advice on how to spread the word, boost the signal, and tell the fun-starved spaceoperaless world that relief is on the way, and the great tradition of Pulp Wonder-tales is about to be revived, please give your humble author your advice and good counsel.

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To Crowdfund Backers of STARQUEST

Posted September 27, 2024 By John C Wright

Friends, we have been trying to contact backers from our list to send out rewards for backers of STARQUEST, now that publication date grows nigh.

Unfortunately, some of the emails are blocked or discontinued.

If you see this message, and you are a backer, and you have not heard from us, please write. If we owe you something, and have not heard from us, please let us know:

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Quotes from DARKNESS AND LIGHT by Olaf Stapledon

Posted September 26, 2024 By John C Wright

This is a reprint of a column from 2011.

First, a word of background. I was clearing out old files, and came across this oddity: my own annotations and comments on a manuscript.

DARKNESS AND LIGHT by Olaf Stapledon was a novel I enjoyed, at least somewhat, in my youth, and I was favorably impressed with Olaf Stapledon’s breadth of imagination.

Rereading it with adult eyes, I am appalled.

This book was written in 1942, during the Second World War. It consists of a tale with no characters and no plot: or, rather, all mankind is the character, and all future history to the end of man or the abolition of man is the plot. With his characteristic Stapledonian gigantism and grandeur, the author escorts us down immensities, centuries and millennia flying past in a paragraph.

This is instead a history book of two fictional histories of the future, two branches of the time stream, one leading to darkness, and the other to light. As best I know, it is the first science fictional presentation of the theme of parallel and alternate timelines.

To my mind, Olaf Stapledon is nearly as inventive as HG Wells: galactic empires, dirigible planets, cosmic evolution, superhumanity, artificial elements, disembodied brains, and other basic science fiction tropes are his inventions. And yet he is rarely brought to mind as one of the founding giants of science fiction: Perhaps that is because his ideas were rarely brought to the public through radio or motion picture. There is no Orson Wells or George Pal that dramatized LAST AND FIRST MEN, or ODD JOHN, or SIRIUS before the ears and eyes of the general public.

The Narrator is an unidentified man of our era perceiving these things in a vision, perhaps the same man who performs a similar ‘framing sequence’ function in STARMAKER by the same author.

For the purposes of savaging him in this commentary, I called him ‘Olaf.’ Whether the opinions of Olaf the Narrator are the same as those of Olaf Stapledon the Author, I leave to wiser heads than mine.

Second, a word of explanation:

Any reader taken aback by the venom of my comments must understand that mine is akin to the fury of a fanboy scorned, of whom it is said Hell hath no Fury. Olaf Stapledon, if I may use the embarrassing metaphor, was a childhood crush of mine, an author beloved of my imagination.

But when I read him back then, in the innocence of youth, the political references sailed lightly over my head. Now that I am taller, they slap me in the face.

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The Phoenix Exultant Ep. 27: The Noetic Reading

Posted September 25, 2024 By John C Wright

From THE PHOENIX EXULTANT, vol. II of my debut trilogy. 

In the far future, where men are as gods, living lives of perfect peace and prosperity, Phaethon of Rhadamanthus discovers all memory of his lifework has been hidden from him. For he is the engineer of the sole starship his civilization has ever produced: the mighty, majestic, and immense Phoenix Exultant. She is a ship to conquer the stars.

But such ambition is outlawed in utopia. Phaethon is a pariah, exiled mentally and physically, denuded of possessions, and cast down among outcasts. His life is sought by sinister agents of the Silent Oecumene: an apocalyptic menace none but he dares see. For in a world where mind or memory can be edited at will, what is truth?

The Phoenix Exultant Ep. 27: The Noetic Reading

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Eternally Year Zero

Posted September 24, 2024 By John C Wright

For the poor deceived and self-deceived souls of the Left, it is always Year Zero, that is, the first year of the Revolution. All past history and tradition is rejected with disgust, all knowledge and learning painfully accumulated over centuries.

Current knowledge of the facts of reality is rejected as well — we are, as one fuddle headed politician so repetitively put it recently, “unburdened by what has been.”

As soon as we abolish history, civilization, economics, and reality, Utopia descends from the clouds adorned as a bride for her wedding, and Eden is restored.

Such is the delusion of the Progressive. In reality, the path to Progressive paradise is paved with skulls.

Old leaders are guillotined, law books and churches burned, kulak farmers starved to death, intellectuals sent to toil and die on state-run communal farms without tools. Anyone with eyeglasses is killed.  All monuments are torn down, all stained-glass windows smashed, all flags are burned, all crosses trampled.

The Revolution is freed from the past! The calendar restarts at Year Zero.

The Year Zero mentality is rooted in optimism, in malingering, and in the need for amnesia.

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Eternal Ingratitude

Posted September 20, 2024 By John C Wright

Part of an ongoing discussion. A reader with the singular and egressive name of Exit Only asks why no descendants of Union soldier families, who suffered so egregiously in warring to abolish slavery, are included in discussions of reparations.

He asks: “Where is the gratitude, for those who gave the last full measure of their devotion?”

Ingratitude is the hallmark of any cult whose slogans were forged in hell.

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Affirmative Racism

Posted September 19, 2024 By John C Wright

The Left continues to gaslight the unwary with the claim that systemic racism exists in the United States.

In reality the United States is the least racist nation in all of human history, and the only nation who ever sacrificed the sons of one race in war to free the sons of another race. (N.B.: The British actions against the Near East and Far East to extinguish the international slave trade were no less noble and brave, but did not rise to the level of open war.)

Racism properly so called is the political philosophy holding one race innately and irredeemably inferior to another, so that laws and customs promoting the humiliation, subjugation, slavery or extermination of that race are permitted, perhaps obligatory.

Does racism still exist in America?

To answer, we need but observe three points.

(1) The supply is insufficient for the demand. There is not enough racism in America to support the Race-hustle Industry.

Because of the lack of real racism, innocent and ordinary activities, such as hiring men on the basis of merit, which inevitably must lead to a numerical disparity in any field, will be condemned as racist. (Unless the field is athletics, where a racial disparity favoring the black race over the whites or yellows is unadmitted and unnoticed.)

Because of the lack of real racism, it must be manufactured. Each and every race-hate crime reported in the national news in a decade has been a hoax. See for example, Jussie Smollett, Covington Catholic, the Duke lacrosse team, plus a dozen or so “noose” hoaxes, starting with Bubba Wallace, and, most famous of all, the overdose of George Floyd.

(2) If institutions, such as colleges, allow one race to have rooms, dormitories, associations, cafeterias, fraternities, graduation ceremonies, and so on, segregated to exclude another race, but this second race may not even ask for the same privilege, the race allowed to segregate the other is the privileged race.

(3) In culture where one race is privileged over another, members of the under-privileged race will attempt to pass for members of the privileged race, in order to avail themselves of the privileges thereof.

On this point, one can determine which race is privileged by seeing who is attempting to pass for whom. See, for example, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Rachel Dolezal.

If a mulatto attempts to pass as White, it is because he perceives Whiteness to afford him some privilege or advantage. If he attempts to pass as Black, it is because he perceives privilege or advantage to rest with that race. See, for example, one Barry Soetoro, later Barack Hussein Obama.

Laws and customs meant to establish the inferiority of one race to another do exist, albeit at the moment only to the degree of humiliating that race, and awarding special privileges to another in terms of academic admission, hiring quotas, and government contract preferences.

One race is allowed to express race pride, but another is not, nor can they form clubs, groups, or associations meant to promote and protect their race.

For example, there is no Nation Association for the Advancement of Uncolored People.

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The Phoenix Exultant Ep. 26: May the Best Bride Win

Posted September 19, 2024 By John C Wright

Sorry, this is a day late.

From THE PHOENIX EXULTANT, vol. II of my debut trilogy. 

In the far future, where men are as gods, living lives of perfect peace and prosperity, Phaethon of Rhadamanthus discovers all memory of his lifework has been hidden from him. For he is the engineer of the sole starship his civilization has ever produced: the mighty, majestic, and immense Phoenix Exultant. She is a ship to conquer the stars.

But such ambition is outlawed in utopia. Phaethon is a pariah, exiled mentally and physically, denuded of possessions, and cast down among outcasts. His life is sought by sinister agents of the Silent Oecumene: an apocalyptic menace none but he dares see. For in a world where mind or memory can be edited at will, what is truth?

The Phoenix Exultant Ep. 26: May the Best Bride Win

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Am I Racist?

Posted September 17, 2024 By John C Wright

This is astonishing. Out of 500 some odd audience reviews, a perfect score. Not a single establishment reviewer has reviewed it. Not one.

I have not seen the film, and make no further comment. The shame of the reviewers who have sold their souls to the establishment needs no remark from me.

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The Haiku of Theology

Posted September 17, 2024 By John C Wright

I attempted to compress a theological argument into four posts on Twitter, within the character limit.  Tell me whether the argument holds:

The observation that reality is real, that only symbols reflecting realty can be true or false is accurate. However, this does not address the central argument: why any thought reflects reality?

The human faculty of reason either a tool with an aim (to truthfully reflect reality) or not. If not, reason is aimless, hence untrustworthy. If aimless, reason does not “fail” when irrational, nor “succeed” when rational. Failure and success only apply to tools working or not.

If human reason is aimless, it is untrustworthy for any and all reasoning, including this.

But if human reason is a tool with an innate aim, then the including the faculty of reason in human nature is deliberate. A tool implies a toolmaker. An aim implies an aimer. If our nature is of deliberate design, man was created by an intelligent creator: ergo God.

QED.

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Postscript: Our own Stephen J takes up the challenge of actually penning a haiku of seventeen syllables to carry our syllogism.

If Reason knows Truth,
then Truth is Reason’s Purpose–
If Purpose, then God.

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Opera Moment

Posted September 12, 2024 By John C Wright

Polovtsian Dances from Borodin’s Prince Igor:

Rare is a ballet with an operatic interlude. You may be familiar with this melody from the Broadway showtune ‘Strangers in Paradise’.

Fly away on wings of wind
To native lands, our native song,
To there, where we sang you freely,
Where we were so carefree with you.
There, under sultry skies,
With bliss the air is full,
There, to the whisper of the sea,
mountains doze in the clouds.
There, the sun shines so brightly,
Bathing native mountains in color.
In the meadows, roses bloom luxuriously,
And nightingales sing in the green forests;
And sweet grape grows.
There is more carefree for you, song
… And so fly away there!

The words, even in translation, are poignant with melancholy, and conjure the magic of Asian steppes.

The second dance (at 3.41) takes a darker turn:
Sing to the Glory of the Khan! SING!
Praise the power of the Khan! GLORY!
Glory to the Khan! Be Glorious our Khan!
His glory matches the sun! KHAN!
None match the glory of the Khan! NONE!

The woman’s choir chimes in:
The Khan’s slaves, the Khan’s slave, praise the Khan

The Khan then sings to Prince Igor:
Behold the beautiful slaves from distant coasts
See what beautiful slaves from the Caspian seas?
Say, to me, my friend, a single word
I will bestow to you the one you wish

The male choir repeats:

Sing to the Glory of the Khan! SING!
(&c)

Those of you raised on the fantasy paperbacks and planetary romances of my generation, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, Robert E Howard, and such, will recognize the oriental splendor and cruelty, but may not know all these things were once as mainstream, once as much a part of fine art, as the sorcery of Prospero, or the witches of Macbeth, the gods, nymphs and satyrs of Virgil and Homer.

If you wondered at the odd popularity of Slave Leia in cosplay, based on a single scene in STAR WARS, keep in mind how many Conan tales, pirate stories, oriental adventures, and, yes, operas like this, that scene followed. The wormlike crimelord Jabba the Hutt was not Al Capone. The Chicago gangster kept no harem of chained dancing girls. No; Jabba the Hutt was a barbaric Khan.

There was a time, before the Great War, before Darwin and Marx, when splendor and wonder were not relegated to the nursery, or published only in cheap pulp disdained as popular.

There are some in this day attempting a renaissance of the high aesthetic preserve from the ancient and medieval world by the pulps, trampled by the crass materialism of socialist and godless editors in our fathers’ day. Entertainment is weary of the Gnostic world-hatred called Woke, the bitter tales of bitter people.

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The Phoenix Exultant Ep. 25:  The Sword of the Leviathan

Posted September 11, 2024 By John C Wright

From THE PHOENIX EXULTANT, vol. II of my debut trilogy. 

In the far future, where men are as gods, living lives of perfect peace and prosperity, Phaethon of Rhadamanthus discovers all memory of his lifework has been hidden from him. For he is the engineer of the sole starship his civilization has ever produced: the mighty, majestic, and immense Phoenix Exultant. She is a ship to conquer the stars.

But such ambition is outlawed in utopia. Phaethon is a pariah, exiled mentally and physically, denuded of possessions, and cast down among outcasts. His life is sought by sinister agents of the Silent Oecumene: an apocalyptic menace none but he dares see. For in a world where mind or memory can be edited at will, what is truth?

The Phoenix Exultant Ep. 25:  The Sword of the Leviathan

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