Annnnnd...Still Goin'!

[handful_ofdust]

1,130 words added, two more sections of Twelve hooked up; grantedly, the second of the two was already mainly written, though it did need tweaking to fall in line with Chapter Eleven's legacy. Which just means I have very little excuse for not continuing on until I run headlong into a wall, or whatever--

On the disappointment front, meanwhile: While nothing John C. Wright posts about...uh, anything, pretty much...amazes me anymore, cucumberseed's comments to tithenai's post ON Wright's most recent whackadoo hate-speech did re-direct me back to Dan Simmons' unfortunate "Message from the Future" (http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2006_04.htm), in which he (or his unreliable narrator, if you want to be pleasant about it) informs us that because we happy liberals of today aren't "hard" enough to advocate proactive genocide, our children's children will all end up as enslaved, pariah dhimmis living in Eurabia. As ever: Good to know.

At the time I first tripped across it, I dismissed this weirdness as being simply one more variety of post-9/11 nuttery, the same sort of scarily naive, inflammatory crap I saw amply demonstrated the day of, from people who at least had the excuse of having just watched the Towers come down. But it's still disappointing, especially coming from a man I still consider one of the greatest living writers in my chosen field (not to mention a man who was once very nice to me way back when, that one WHC in Denver).

In better news: Stereogirl is out of surgery, and apparently feeling much better. I should probably write to her, instead.

Amended to add: 570 words more, taking me well into the top of section three. And now the new stuff begins.

Comments

[benet.livejournal.com]

It shocked me more coming from Dan Simmons because that was so out of nowhere.

From Card's fiction I had picked up a lot of cues that he and I were coming from very different places, politically - he wrote with approval of the strongman who ends wars by winning them all in Songmaster, and in many, many places he clearly approves of communities which are held together by a coerced religious consensus. Similarly with Wright, who started out as a hardcore Objectivist, and then converted to Christianity, which one might think would soften his views, but no - apparently he views the Gospel as yet another buffet table at which he can find reasons to consider people beyond the pale and undeserving of human treatment. It simply adds a "tough love" gloss to the same old libertarian kindness-is-just-coddling-the-weak hoo-ha. All this is front and centre in his books (which, full disclosure, I still enjoy).

But from Simmons it kinda seemed like a bolt from the blue! He's always seemed like a centrist, more or less, at one with a general consensus on liberal democracy which includes due process, racial equality and freedom of religion; hardly a barnstorming radical but not someone you'd expect to find suddenly haranguing you about how some race or creed was a Menace to Civilization.

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

"Similarly with Wright, who started out as a hardcore Objectivist, and then converted to Christianity"

Curiously, this does not surprise me in the least. Cf. David Horowitz, who simply traded one set of extreme views for another. People who do this are, from what I can tell, simply interested in an absolute -- whatever the form that absolute may take.

I should dig out my old essay about "might makes wrong" sometime and repost it.

[benet.livejournal.com]

Yeah, no, that's very true. If you strongly desire to divide humanity into the worthy and the unworthy, with yourself firmly on the right side, then that's what you'll do with whatever belief system happens to seem most appealing to you at any given time.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Someone on another thread pointed out that while this particular bit of fiction doesn't exactly work as SF, it certainly could be branded as "horror". Just...not very good horror. In that it's the sort of "hey, my soapbox, let me show u it" horror which would get his ass bounced outright from most markets, even if they weren't also taken aback by its blatant racism/sectarianism. (If he wasn't Dan Simmons, that is.;))