SF Signal is a commercial science fiction portal/blog which holds regular socalled Mind Melts, where they asks several science fiction writers their opinion on some topic or other. Usually these are mildly diverting but no more than that, as everybody struggles to say something original to questions like “which difficult science fiction books would you recommend”, but sometimes it goes wrong and they invite John C. Wright to participate. It’s not just that he’s a Libertarian-Catholic wingnut with a persecution complex the size of Jupiter, but that he’s so unbelievably pompous. For example:
World of Null-A was savaged by science fiction’s earliest and best known professional critic of the genre, Damon Knight, who pushed the work into undeserved obscurity, perhaps because he preferred the type of works written, or, rather, committed, by poseurs and artistes such as I mention with scorn above. Mr. Knight dismissed the paradigm-shifting technique of plot-weaving as mere sleight of hand. But perhaps it not as easy as it looks to juggle all the pieces of a jigsaw in midair, forming one picture to the reader, and then, by flipping one more bit of the puzzle into view, to both change the whole picture of what has gone before, and have the picture make sense; and then to do it again. The scientific process itself is nothing other than this juggling of jigsawwork to create successively more elegant and accurate pictures of the cosmos: to dismiss it in art is to overlook it’s significance in life. Others have attempted the Vanvogtian style of paradigm-shifting, either successfully, as with The Paradox Men by Charles L. Harness, or unsuccessfully, as with Mr. Knight’s own deservedly forgotten Beyond the Barrier, a work that serves as a living reminder that those who cannot perform a tricky technique of art at even an apprentice level should not mock it as a mere trick.
Nails on chalkboard.