Only Posting a Link!
John Derbyshire, monger of gloom, over at National Review Online, is talking about Howard Philips Lovecraft.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzBhMTg4YzA0ZDUyYTc5ODNmYmY0YTBhNzNmYWYzZjM=
There follows several other related posts discussing, for example, HPL’s religious (or nonreligious) political and economic beliefs.
My comment: I note this as an odd cultural artifact. You must realize my formative years were BSW (Before STAR WARS) and in the culture of my youth science fiction was an outcast literature, read only by hooded lamplight in dismal smuggler’s caves far from where the prying lamps of civilization and propriety might spy. I recall serious discussions among us that no fantasy movie could ever be made, on the grounds that no one wanted to watch half-naked barbarians cleaving skulls, or see an elf by moonlight in Lothlorien. Movies, in the Jimmy Carter years, were all grim and depressing.
That a literate scholar, such as C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien, might read or write the stuff was astonishing, albeit allowed on the grounds that it was for children, and perhaps instructive — all the more astonishing was that, while being universally dismissed as mere ‘Buck Rogers junk’ there were writers (and I am thinking of John W. Campbell Jr., Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov) who took seriously the idea that science fiction was meant to be sober, literate, serious, and transformative, it was propaganda (I mean that in the religious sense of the word–the literature to propogate the faith) for belief in technical progress. The message was: The Stars Are Yours! Go Up, Young Man! (I seem to recall that the only book I have seen in recent years firmly in this Campbellian tradition was Victor Koman’s KINGS OF THE HIGH FRONTIER. Are only Libertarians still believers in progress?) — but outside the SF ghetto, the scorn of the muggles for sciffy was universal. Harlequin romances had more cachet.
And now SF is mainstream. It is part of the culture, so that even conservative political commentators read and remark on writers who never published outside the pulp pages of Farnsworth Wright’s WEIRD TALES.
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.
