Greg West:
What kind of a kid were you?

John C. Wright:
Introverted, bookish, rude, irreligious, un-athletic, smart and smart-mouthed: a typical product of popular culture in America.

Greg West:
When you say you were irreligious does this mean you were actively skeptical or simply indifferent and amoral?

John C. Wright:
My moral character has always been sterling. I mean that I was skeptical. For many years I had been an atheist, and a vehement, argumentative, proselytizing atheist at that. I saw no other possible option for belief for a logical thinker. My recent conversion to Christianity was a miracle, prompted by a supernatural revelation, which has satisfied my skepticism in this area, and saved my life. To my surprise, I find that I am still a perfectly logical thinker. I hold that it is insufficient to argue that since human reasoning discovers no evidence of a Divine Being, such a being necessarily does not exist. The proper conclusion is that humans, without the assistance and intervention of a divine being, cannot come to knowledge of Him: a conclusion I think even atheists will allow.

Greg West:
When did this conversion take place?

John C. Wright:
I had a heart attack and was near death. It happened this November just past, late in 2003 AD.

My conversion happened long after I wrote THE GOLDEN AGE, LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS, or ORPHANS OF CHAOS. It was also after I wrote the short story LAST OF ALL SUNS, a story which prompted one editor to ask whether I was a Christian: I was a vehement anti-Christian at the time of that writing, but, like all good authors, I wrote the story according to its own internal logic, and logic demanded an ending more cheerful and supernatural than the world view of a Stoic or a natural philosopher would allow.

Greg West:
What was the nature of this supernatural revelation?

John C. Wright:
That is a strange and private matter. Let us pretend that I was visited by three ghosts, like Scrooge, and, like him, returned from the travail a better man.

Exerpt:

"It is supposed to be a Golden Age after all, the society mankind will enjoy if ever man becomes sane and mature: no doubt they have laws and institutions similar to ours, which they keep as a last resort, should all else fail, the way a wise man packs a first-aid kit before he goes camping. But our society is like a man who is in constant ill health, constantly in the hospital emergency room. To us, the medicine we need to prevent the body politic from dissolving into anarchy is something we must endure every hour of every day. A healthy society, such as only might exist in a future whose moral standard is higher than our own, such distempers would be rare. Men might be wise enough to be glad to avoid even the appearance of pirating another man's ideas, rather than trying to edge as close to the minimum limit as the law allows. Since they life forever, and will never escape each other's censure, never forget a wrong, it would behoove them to settle all difference privately, and before they become inflamed."

The following is an exchange between John C Wright and Rafal Smigrodzki regarding intellectual property laws in the Golden Oecumene and some comments on future standards of morality:

Well, if you are actually wondering what I'd say about this: I had the pleasure of reading Cheryl Morgan's review of me in the online version of EMERALD CITY. I am pleased by her compliments and puzzled by her criticisms. I am disappointed and annoyed by her choice of tone. No one who has not read my book should be fooled into thinking this is a review: it is a trifle of malign character assassination, prompted by reasons unknown to me.

I say "review of me" rather than "review of my book" because Miss Morgan does not distinguish between the two.

It seems I was not sufficiently skilled in hiding my own opinions to prevent them from interfering with Miss Morgan’s enjoyment of the book. However, since there are times where she attributes to me opinions I do not hold, at those times it is not lack of skill in the writer, but a lack of candor in the reader, that is to blame. No one can write so well as to satisfy the narrow-minded.

With the publication of GOLDEN AGE, John C. Wright is introduced to the Science Fiction reading public with his first novel. He has published shorter works in Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine, one of which was selected to appear in Year's Best SF 3 edited by David G. Hartwell for 1997. Two additional novels, PHOENIX EXULTANT (sf) and LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS (fantasy) are due for publication in 2003 by Tor Books.

With the publication in April 2002 of his first novel, The Golden Age: A Romance of the Far Future, John C. Wright has seized the attention of much of the SF world. Reviewers have spoken of him as equivalent to William Gibson and Gene Wolfe in potential importance, and there is substance to these assessments. Grand in imagination, fabulous in its elegance, The Golden Age has an astonishing glamour. Telling of the revolt of Phaethon, an ambitious planetary engineer, against a glorious but complacent utopia hundreds of thousands or millions of years hence, the book applies immense stylistic and philosophical sophistication to the fundamental matter of the space operas of SF's own Golden Age. It is a transcendent planetary romance, a postmodern apotheosis of Jack Vance.

The Golden Transcendence : Or, The Last of the Masquerade
By John C. Wright
Copyright 2003

The Phoenix Exultant : The Golden Age, Volume 2
By John C. Wright
Copyright 2003

The Golden Age
By John C. Wright
Copyright 2003