LAMENT OF PROMETHEUS by John C Wright

John C Wright is one of my favorite contemporary science fiction and fantasy authors. I know, mine and everyone else's, right? And in fact I was late to the party—my interest in SFF had been on hiatus awhile when Wright made his splash debut with his marvelous GOLDEN AGE trilogy at the beginning of the century. In the past five years I've been following his new work while I try to catch up on his early productions, and there seems no danger I'll ever run out of the Wright stuff.

I appreciate about Wright that he brings to his work a broad and deep knowledge of the classics and the ideas that inform western civilization. His intellectual heft is not to be carried away by today's welter of fad ideas, and his stories, full of invention and imagery, deliver the entertainment and wonder that we miss in the dreary Leftist preachments packaged as stories that we get from the Big Five publishers nowadays.

Earlier this year Mr. Wright published a book-length essay that examined a classic of early twentieth century fantasy, one that has received accolades and appreciation in spite of its being particularly difficult to understand—or perhaps because of its very difficulty. I wrote a short review of John C Wright’s long review. Here it is.

I read David Lindsay’s remarkable VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920) long ago, on C S Lewis’s recommendation that it was one of the most evocative fantasies ever written. Thought-provoking it was. I kept returning to memorable parts and occasional complete rereads ever since. The odyssey of Lindsay’s protagonist Maskull takes him through a wild progression of philosophies of life, each seeming like a final explanation of the bizarre world of Tormance until the next one upends it; in reading it I felt bewildered and fascinated, but baffled as to what, if anything, Lindsay was getting at. Perhaps, I supposed, the point was that the world we live in comes with no manual of instructions, and that acting without guidance is the human condition. The imagery and adventures were amazing, anyway.

So I left it, a strange and wonderful book but without any deeper discernible plan than a succession of remarkable episodes, until I read John C Wright’s excellent book-length essay on it. Mr. Wright has evidently also been haunted by Lindsay’s fantastic imagination for many years, but has also brought to it deep scholarship and hard work. His LAMENT OF PROMETHEUS lays out a convincing explanation of how VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS does have a specific point of view, and how every part of the book contributes to an organic whole.

This book gave me a new and clearer understanding of a compelling but obscure classic. I recommend it to anyone who, like me before reading Wright’s essay, admires VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS without understanding it.