Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth by John C. Wright Page A
Authors: John C. Wright
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types of stories we take for our myths and legends and epics and nursery tales that, in our souls, our dreams are better than our lives. If these dreams come from nowhere and for no purpose, then all dreams are vain, or are opiates, and the unfantasists are right to condemn and eschew them as escapism. They are as right to banish wishful fantasies of Arthurian knights and giant-slaying Jacks and Homeric heroes and shining samurai as they are to scoff at fantastic nightmares of blood-drinking ghosts and haunted cities beneath the sea, monsters in the dark or in the cracks between the ulterior dimensions of timespace.
If the unfantasists are right, there is nothing before the blood of childbirth and after the mud of the grave, and what lies in between is the stingy happiness which the pursuit of meaningless pleasure can find, or vain ambition, or love which is like a drowning couple clinging to each other’s warm bodies in a maelstrom, eager for one last kiss before the storms eat them, and no memory is left.
But if the dreams are echoes of the real primordial disaster that is still reverberating through the cosmos with the fall of Lucifer or the fall of Adam, or if the dreams are whispers through the crack in the prison wall of mortal life from immortal lips outside, then escape is not only our joy, but our duty.
Science fiction looks to the future, or to the extraterrestrial wonders of the present, or to anything odd and above the merely quotidian to inspire and fire our dreams. It requires less faith in the unseen or supernatural than wilder stories told by Shakespeare or Milton or Virgil, because the skeptical imagination cannot be skeptical toward the idea that skeptical inquiry into the roots of nature yields technical and scientific advancements which, by definition, we cannot now, trapped in the present, know. Nor can the scientific curiosity be incurious about the curious things which curiosity might uncover. The very core of science fiction is the certainty that the future is uncertain, that things change, either in progress or regress or both at once, and even the most unimaginative imagination must admit that the future world and extraterrestrial worlds are unimaginable. It offers an escape from the everyday, which even those who hate escapism cannot call escapist.
What is science fiction for? One might as well ask what a window in a jail cell is for, or what a magic mirror in a wizard’s cell is for.
John C. Wright’s Patented One Session Lesson in the Mechanics of Fiction
Here is the John C. Wright patented one-session lesson in the mechanics of how to write fiction.
A word of explanation:
I wrote the following to a friend of mine who is a nonfiction writer of some fame and accomplishment, who was toying with the idea of writing fiction. We batted around some ideas and I have been encouraging (read: pestering) him to take up the project seriously.
He wrote back and said that while putting the logical format to a work of nonfiction was clear enough, he was not big on this artistic and poetical stuff. I took it upon myself to show him the logic behind the stuff that dreams are made of.
So here is what I wrote to provoke him to write, and I share it with any and all comers who wish alike to be writers.
For my part, I am eager to share my trade secrets. I do not fear competition. Unlike every other field, my value as a writer goes up, not down, the more competition I have, because more science fiction writers means more science fiction readers, a larger field, and more money in the field.
So I think everyone should try his hand at writing. I cannot read my own work for pleasure, after all.
__________
Let me try to encourage you. First, get that book I recommended,
Writing The Breakout Novel
by Donald Maass. Second, actually set aside time to write your novel, time when you are not allowed to do anything else or find any other distractions. Sit and stare at the blank page for four hours. The
If the unfantasists are right, there is nothing before the blood of childbirth and after the mud of the grave, and what lies in between is the stingy happiness which the pursuit of meaningless pleasure can find, or vain ambition, or love which is like a drowning couple clinging to each other’s warm bodies in a maelstrom, eager for one last kiss before the storms eat them, and no memory is left.
But if the dreams are echoes of the real primordial disaster that is still reverberating through the cosmos with the fall of Lucifer or the fall of Adam, or if the dreams are whispers through the crack in the prison wall of mortal life from immortal lips outside, then escape is not only our joy, but our duty.
Science fiction looks to the future, or to the extraterrestrial wonders of the present, or to anything odd and above the merely quotidian to inspire and fire our dreams. It requires less faith in the unseen or supernatural than wilder stories told by Shakespeare or Milton or Virgil, because the skeptical imagination cannot be skeptical toward the idea that skeptical inquiry into the roots of nature yields technical and scientific advancements which, by definition, we cannot now, trapped in the present, know. Nor can the scientific curiosity be incurious about the curious things which curiosity might uncover. The very core of science fiction is the certainty that the future is uncertain, that things change, either in progress or regress or both at once, and even the most unimaginative imagination must admit that the future world and extraterrestrial worlds are unimaginable. It offers an escape from the everyday, which even those who hate escapism cannot call escapist.
What is science fiction for? One might as well ask what a window in a jail cell is for, or what a magic mirror in a wizard’s cell is for.
John C. Wright’s Patented One Session Lesson in the Mechanics of Fiction
Here is the John C. Wright patented one-session lesson in the mechanics of how to write fiction.
A word of explanation:
I wrote the following to a friend of mine who is a nonfiction writer of some fame and accomplishment, who was toying with the idea of writing fiction. We batted around some ideas and I have been encouraging (read: pestering) him to take up the project seriously.
He wrote back and said that while putting the logical format to a work of nonfiction was clear enough, he was not big on this artistic and poetical stuff. I took it upon myself to show him the logic behind the stuff that dreams are made of.
So here is what I wrote to provoke him to write, and I share it with any and all comers who wish alike to be writers.
For my part, I am eager to share my trade secrets. I do not fear competition. Unlike every other field, my value as a writer goes up, not down, the more competition I have, because more science fiction writers means more science fiction readers, a larger field, and more money in the field.
So I think everyone should try his hand at writing. I cannot read my own work for pleasure, after all.
__________
Let me try to encourage you. First, get that book I recommended,
Writing The Breakout Novel
by Donald Maass. Second, actually set aside time to write your novel, time when you are not allowed to do anything else or find any other distractions. Sit and stare at the blank page for four hours. The
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