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

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:

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.