I expect that I will keep repeating myself on this subject occasionally, until I get a reality check that will tell me if I am alone in believing John C Wright, author of The Golden Age and The Phoenix Exultant is the hottest new author since Brin hit the scene.
When I first read Startide Rising I was struck and amazed by the "alieness" of his aliens. In Wrights books I am similarly struck by the "alieness" of his far future human descendents. Some of the territory has been previously covered by other writers, but Wright manages to make all things new and expands upon subjects with surprising insight. I don't usually research writers I've found, but Wright is a special case for me and the results of the search produced some interesting results. >From an interview with John C Wright: http://www.sfsite.com/05a/jcw127.htm I went to St. John's College in Annapolis, which is the home of the "Great Books" program. There are no tests and no grades at that school, and no lecture classes. There is never a time when the student is not allowed to speak. There are no secondary texts; we do not read some blowhard second-guessing what the geniuses of history thought; we read the geniuses in the original. We read the Great Books of Western Literature in chronological order, from Homer and Aristotle, through Hobbes and Shakespeare, Newton and Pascal, to Freud and the Federalist Papers. By graduation, the student knows Greek and Latin grammar, logic, and rhetoric, geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, and music. I can tell you what such an education does for you. You are like a man with a memory in a land of amnesiacs. All the sophomoric ideas presently being preached from the pulpits of the pundits, all the clever policies of clever politicians: it has all been done before. All their errors were refuted long, long ago. Aristotle debunked Marx two thousand years before Marx put pen to paper. The Twentieth Century A.D. might have been spared a great deal of grief and bloodshed, had she remembered the Fifth Century B.C. And: First, it is pusillanimous to write of small things when one can write of great. The abyss of time holds wonders too large to fit inside one small world, or the narrow confines of one cramped century. Science Fiction is meant to tell us traveler's tales of places and aeons men cannot reach, but imagination can. Second, it was a challenge I saw too few authors these days attempting to face. If one is going to write about the future, it might as well be the farthest future that can be dreamed. I am a space opera writer. Perhaps I am the last of my kind. I like large themes, thunder, fury, and wonder. Why blow up a city when you can blow up a world? Why launch a starship one kilometer long, when you can launch a super-starship a thousand kilometers long? Why build space armor out of carbon-steel when you can built it out of adamantium? And here is the first chapter of The Golden Age: http://www.sff.net/people/john-c-wright/golden-age-chapter-one.html xponent Post-Singularity Adventure Maru rob _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
