…looks like this: nearly seven thousand words dedicated to the principle that MENS IS MENS AND WOMENS IS WOMENS AND NE’ER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET.
Oh wait, did I say seven thousand words? Because I actually meant ten thousand – no, wait, thirteen – oh my god we’re at eighteen now and apparently it turns out that the civil rights movement in the United States was a “Republican movement” and that the NRA helped arm blacks and the Nazis were in fact leftists and so forth.
Really, it’s a stream of utter drivel from a whiny fedora-wearing jackass who hasn’t gotten over the fact that he was publicly and rightly mocked for his homophobic bullshittery and who wears his persecution complex like a badge of honour – a longwinded, bloated, eighteen-thousand-words-and-counting badge of honour, remarkable only in its immensity.
Still, if nothing else, this serves as a valuable object lesson: when you read this (well, if you can get through the entirety of it; it’s a joyless slog, all self-congratulation and abuse of no doubt multiple thesauri), you can take solace in the fact that this is a man who is, in fact, a professional writer, and who is living proof that a writing career has much more to do with work ethic than it does innate talent.
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What makes it even weirder is that the first sentence could open an essay with a radically different point.
I didn’t get all the way through it. I tried, then realized there were better things to do and did those instead.
Wow after the first couple paragraphs I though the writer was going for parody. Sadly it turned into very bad writing and I had to stop.
I haven’t heard too many vigorous western left wing defences of Marxist-Leninist or Maoist Communism in a good while. He seems to think modern liberals are Jean Paul Sartre. Someone should tell him that Sartre has been dead for 30 years, and pretty well discredited as a political figure for a while before that.
I haven’t read John C. Wright’s fiction, but people I know who have say that he’s got a fertile imagination and vivid prose as long as he keeps off his DANGER: BEES IN THE CEREBELLUM buttons. Unfortunately, he keeps installing new buttons and it might be too late to read any of his work without being aware of the vast oceans of raving flowing underneath.
I could only make it as far as the title in the URL before I knew this was a must-miss. Still, 18,000 words proves that he’s definitely owning his shitheadedness.
I have attempted to read this. I think I know what reading The King In Yellow is like. I can’t even call it bad. It’s too fundamentally wrong for that.
Um, the Civil Rights movement WAS a Republican Party movement until Nixon shifted the GOP agenda more in line with Bible-Belt white racists. Lincoln was Republican, for crissake.
I made it as far as “the female spirit can’t use logic” before my amusement was overwhelmed by FUUUUUUUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU and I had to stop. What a doucheturd.
I bet he’s wrestled the Soviet-trained python in his cockpit PLENTY of times though. OH SNAP
I gave up really early when I realized that each paragraph I’d read to that point was, in fact, a single run-on sentence.
IN THE WEAK UTOPIAN FUTURE OF THE GOLDEN AGE
THE ENTIRE HOMOPHOBIC, SULKING, SELF-IMPORTANT MRA MOVEMENT
WILL BE COMPOSED OF JUST ONE MAN
“WRIGHT”
But I’m pissed off that he’s got the license to write a sequel to Van Vogt’s Null-A novel.
@ChrisPV
The more I read the more I became convinced that not only are there no paragraphs or sentence breaks, but even the spaces in-between words were lies. Mere artifacts of bad CSS and/or HTML formatting.
Each essay is actually a single run-on-word in a language unspoken for the millions of years the lost sex of humanity has lain dormant beneath the earth. There in the darkness, where they await the True Sun to Rise and clear away the weaker sexes that currently delude themselves to be earth’s current “owners”.
@Shawn: The anti-slavery movement was a “Republican movement”, most definitely. The civil rights movement of the 40s-60s was not a “Republican movement” — it involved both Northern Democrats and Northern Republicans, and was substantially led by Democratic presidents. Mr. Wright seems to think liberals had nothing to do with it, which is demonstrably a lie.
This is a popular Republican meme that suggests that the lines between the Democratic and Republican parties are still fixed as they were in 1860, and ignores that the GOP now represents pretty much the whole of Dixie.
The “fedora-wearing-ness” of this writer is never more apparent than when he talks about the “impulse to stab [his] rivals through eye and into the brain pan with [his] sword cane.”
EDIT: The fact that I read/skimmed his first post only to arrive at the lines “Ah, but that is a question for my next essay. Space does not permit I answer here” is infuriating.
That…that was just bizarre. He equates “Pride and Prejudice”, a novel written in Regency England in the early 1800’s with pulp novels and science fiction written in the 1940’s? And all that drivel about He-Men and Superman saving Lois, and…and…Oh God.
I do hope that he is wearing his spats and combed his side-whiskers this morning, while being brought tea by his valet.
Are we SURE this guy isn’t Dave Sim?
Got as far as “sword-cane ”
I’m out.
Yeah, I loved his books when I first read them. I loved them a lot, even though occasionally I’d get this niggling worry about some casually made comment. (Does he really think environmentalists are as bad a mass murderers?) There’s a lot of fun, mildly kinky stuff which I enjoyed until I noticed a certain uniformity that made me wonder if he actually thought that all women wanted to be submissive to men.
Then I went to his blog, which was an equal mixture of really fascinating stuff, and really, really offensive stuff, and thus my heart was shattered.
Dang right ‘Never the Twain Shall Meet’. Samuel Clemens would kick his ass for most of that stuff.
I stopped at “no one asks if characters are feminine enough”, nothing that came after was going to be any good.
Read the part about how he resisted the impulse to stab his rivals in the eye, and how we could be trained to either acknowledge or avoid these impulses. Earlier, he mentioned that he had a natural inclination for being kind to children with large eyes. Following that train of logic, if he went against this impulse, he would become nasty to large-eyed kids.
Is it wrong of me to think that if left to his own devices, he would go around stabbing rival Manga protagonists in direct defiance to the Comics Code?
I’m of the opinion that Wright is a great writer…and a terrible person. His previous foray into homophobic asshattery actually inspired the creation of a group called The Outer Alliance, dedicated to promoting LGBTQ issues in SF and Fantasy.
I wish he would stop talking out loud, and just stick to writing stories. Sigh.
The National Socialist German Workers’ Party started out looking leftish, if the light was bad and you squinted just right. Which is why you had the Night of the Long Knives, to get rid of Rohm and the other people who still took the Socialist part seriously.
I skimmed all four parts. Anyone who spells Superman’s home planet as “Kripton” instantly loses all credibility.
You know, I like a good fedora. It’s a functional, useful hat. It keeps the rain off in the winter and autumn, and the sun off in the summer. It really pisses me off every time some knuckle-dragging moron pushes my functional hat of choice just a little father into the realm of douche-wear.
Eddleman’s issue with that essay is the misspelling of a fictional planet. Great Scott, I love the Internet.
That is a pretty egregious misspelling though, especially from a science fiction writer. Doesn’t he know his chemistry?
It’s sad to watch what happens to people who really believe in all that “masculine virtues” hogswallop when they discover that they’re quite gifted as science fiction authors or chartered accountants or the like. On come the fedoras and the pointed references to sword canes, all to bolster the pretense that their role in a world run along the lines they suggest wouldn’t be somewhere between punching bag and eunuch.
Sisyphus – I like fedoras too, though mostly for aesthetic reasons.
It’s kind of a weird feeling that I would now feel nervous wearing my favorite anachronistic crossdressing accessory, that I wore back in high-school out of “I dress how I want and I don’t care what you think” defiance. I don’t know if it’s just because I was braver in high school or because I don’t mind jerks thinking I’m a queer weirdo (which is both true and cool) but I’d be hurt by people I might otherwise get along with mistaking me for a misogynistic asshat.
MGK, are you counting his post (made in the middle of all this) about what a horrible tool the Bechdel Test is as part of that 18,000 words? That’s nearly 1,800 more words devoted to defending women’s identity being (literally) all about the men in their lives.
Is this the guy the SFWA kicked out recently, or was that a different misogynist pinhead?
I’ve been…unfortunate enough to hear Wright’s insanity in the past and it is truly unpleasant. But does this twit not realize anyone can look up the 88th congress that passed the Civil Rights Act? The Democrats didn’t just have a majority, they had a supermajority in the senate! The idea the Civil Rights movement was a ‘conservative’ one and spearheaded by noble Republicans is such an attempt at co-opting it. It’s absurd
@Sisyphus: The fedora is irredeemably douche-wear now. If clothes could talk, the popped collar would look at the fedora and shake its head in disappointment, chiding the fedora to be less douche.
…”unman a Benedict with her wit” – this person needs to read my undergraduate paper on how Beatrice was able to beat Benedict at his own game with “manly” wit. Beatrice is consistently masculine apart from duelling with weapons. There is nothing sweet or coy about her wit.
And I’m with Tales to Enrage. I would love a discussion of how Strong Female Characters aren’t a fantastic measure of feminism. But who bloody cares if the characters are “masculine” or “feminine”? We have an overabundance of perfectly traditionally-coded stories. It’s an entirely uninteresting point. (Just as “strong” females who are simply weapons-proficient are becoming dull.)
That characters can be strong, interesting characters without being macho is a good point. That such characters ought to be female, opposite macho males, is a load of utter crap which would have made Chaucer’s Wife of Bath laugh for days.
@Michael P.: Different guy. You’re thinking of Theodore Beale a.k.a. Vox Day.
Guys if you read only one part of this, read part 4 because that is when this thing absolutely Hulks out into utter craziness.
Want to read a mercifully short example of this guy’s lunacy? I quoted him a while back when he basically said that the key to writing great science fiction is to be Catholic. I am not making this up.
@Andrew: I wish you hadn’t said that; more, I wish I hadn’t gone on to the comments. Never can I recall seeing my beloved C.S. Lewis used for such vicious, petty ends.
(Lewis, at least, understood that Tradition has its flaws, that the Left has its virtues, and that his own sense of sex and gender relationships was warped and unreliable. Oh, and that Tradition is not a monolith with consistent virtues from ancient Israel to ancient Greece to ancient Rome to medieval Western Christendom to Queen Victoria’s Britain to Norman Rockwell America. I wish more of Lewis’s “fans” could understand these things.)
This section would be an amazing proof that “strong” female characters are not inherently feminist, though. Possibly should be bookmarked toward that end. “Look at what this smug gender essentialist says! See how women punching things fails to gain his respect or, indeed, make him rethink his feelings about either women or art in the least?”
@Jaquandor: Clearly, the guy has not read enough Mormon science fiction.
And now I have to hunt down Terry Pratchett science fiction so I can say authoritatively, rather than speculate, that a quality of sheer wonder, amazement, and joie de vivre saturates the highlights of his science fiction as it does the highlights of his fantasy. I defy anyone to read Pratchett and say that any kind of religious faith could possibly improve his ability to see and rejoice in humanity or the fantastic world in which we dwell.
Dear heavens, Wright, you are neither Chesterton nor Tolkien reborn.
There is a lot I could comment on, but rather than make an essay I think I’ll focus on the example in part two where he cites Valley of the Wind as examples of strong female characters.
“One example: when the princess Nausicaa commands her men to don their gas masks and they do not obey she does not shoot one of them in the leg, she takes off her own gas mask, provoking their concern for her, hence loyalty, hence they then listen to her. This is feminine in approach.”
Counterpoint.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newburgh_Conspiracy
One example: When George Washington was trying to persuade the officers of the Continental Army against trying to demand from Congress, by force or the threat of it, the pay they were owed and they were unswayed he did not shoot one of them in the leg. To read a letter he put on his spectacles, provoking their concern for him, hence loyalty, hence they then listened to him.
So the example he cited for a good strong feminine character in time of war is her acting like George Washington. Rather than shooting someone in the leg.
JMyers, I salute both your persistence in reading that far, and your erudition in citing such a extraordinarily poignant counterexample.
@Kirala: Pratchett’s two early SF works are “Strata” (a sort-of riff on Ringworld) and “Dark Side of the Sun”.
While not quite as polished as some of his best Discworld stuff, they’re both extremely readable, and I think they stand up very well with the rest of his work. And as far as the actual point, I’d say you’re right. “Dark Side of the Sun” in particular is fantastic.
Also, if you read them, you’ll find out why The Broken Drum was called that, before it became The Mended Drum.
Also also, one could convincingly argue that his juvenile series Truckers is SF, and those books have just as much depth of feeling and wonderment at humanity as any of his adult novels.
For more “lunatic Wright”, check out his predictions for the next fifty years. We’re sure not making a lot of progress toward his belief that homosexuality will be reclassified as a mental disease!
Ah, Pratchett! The fedora is saved. If you’re going to call Sir Terry a douche, then you’re going to have to back it up a bit.
His more recent fiction has included the Long Earth stuff. The first is pretty decent science fiction. It’s certainly not as gritty as some, but I think it has more weight, in a certain sense that the childhood wish-fulfillment of Ender’s Game for example. It’s light on the science, but it’s great on the fiction. I’ve yet to read the Long War.
Did…did he actually use the word “Mohammedan” in that link Jaquandor posted? Words fail.
Dafuq did I just read? :-/
@JMeyers: … Wow. Not only do you raise an entirely excellent point, but he seriously thinks a “masculine” approach to command involves shooting disobedient subordinates? That’s not being strong or macho, that’s being Darth Vader.
(Allowing, for a moment, that the hogwash about “masculine” and “feminine” approaches to command has any validity at all, a more reasonable “masculine” approach to dealing with insubordination would presumably be to simply shout the offenders down. Rather than, you know, assaulting someone and taking a presumably useful soldier out of action because you’ve just injured their leg, probably badly enough for them to have difficulty standing on it.)
“Did…did he actually use the word “Mohammedan” in that link Jaquandor posted? Words fail.”
It’s pretty minor compared to everything else on display but it looks like he’s also a climate change denier too. So that’s misogyny, homophobia, climate change denial…I feel like all we’re missing is some holocaust denial and we’ve won some sort of stupid asshole bingo.
So… Dave Sim: less crazy by comparison?
And the fedora thing can probably be traced to this Ask MetaFilter post in which someone who’s a bit of a poser (who can’t understand why he isn’t a huge hit with the ladies) mentions that he “sports” one. If you are in fact wearing a fedora on account of the weather, then it’s not an affectation, necessarily. (I’m contemplating investing in a decent Panama hat to avoid burning on top when it’s sunny.) If, on the other hand, you wear one inside, for your author photo, or some other non-practical reason, then yes, you’re a poser.
I met him and his wife – SF author L. Jagi Lamplighter – at Worldcon 2009. Very pleasant people, although our conversation was primarily about the Flintstones and lasted for about 4 minutes.
I’ve never read his fiction but there’s a lot of difference between writing fiction and non, let alone between writing fiction to sell and venting on your blog. So no, I think the style of the rant says nothing about whether he can write fiction (I gather from some of the comments it says quite a bit about his women characters)
Regardless of which, I deleted him off my list of books-to-get-to-someday.