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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 02/19/99 -- Vol. 17, No. 34
MT Chair/Librarian:
Mark Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-5619 mleeper@lucent.com
HO Chair: John Jetzt MT 2E-530 732-957-5087 jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian: Nick Sauer HO 4F-427 732-949-7076 njs@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist:
Rob Mitchell MT 2E-537 732-957-6330 robmitchell@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-2070 eleeper@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-447-3652 for details. The New Jersey Science Fiction Society
meets irregularly; call 201-652-0534 for details, or check
http://www.interactive.net/~kat/njsfs.html. The Denver Area
Science Fiction Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of
every month at Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
1. Well, guys, it is all starting to happen. As the Millennium
approaches the world is just getting weirder and weirder.
Admittedly, we knew that some of the serious problems we would be
facing at the end of the century would be the stuff of science
fiction. Famine. Nuclear weapons. That sort of thing. But some
of the world is getting to look like some of the more whimsical
pieces also. This one is worthy of an episode of the old "X Minus
One" radio show. For some of you this is going to sound like old
news and for the rest, you are going to think I am crazy. Our
National Security Agency has a new problem, a new threat to the
security of the country. It seems that a potential security hazard
has been found inside their own building. The source of this
hazard is people bringing to work Furbies. Furbies, you may know,
have gone into millions of unsuspecting homes. But they have also
been adopted by adults who have taken them to work. They have gone
to places that would have known better than to let a child in, but
people figure a doll is safe. They are cute little furry dolls
that look a lot like the title characters in GREMLINS. They also
may behave like the title characters in GREMLINS. It seems that
this is sort of a little mechanical pet that is just chock full of
computer chips so that it acts like a child. What all does a Furby
do? The manufacturer is not giving a complete list of its
capabilities. That is the idea. The thing is supposed to be as
unpredictable as a child is. You don't know all the weird things
that a child can do and you are pretty much in the same position
with a Furby. You never know where you stand. If you put two
Furbies together they will start talking with each other in their
own language. Sometimes they sing little duets. Or they may start
discussing you. Or they might discuss something you said. And if
you happen to have said it some place like the NSA it may be
something that was a national secret. Until the Furby heard it.
Now you see why the NSA is scared.
It seems that one of the surprise capabilities of a Furby is to
listen to the world around it and keep mum for a while, but to talk
about it later. They pick up words and use them in their own
conversations. Honest. They have a little recorder on a chip
inside them and they remember a lot of what they hear. And then
later they will repeat what they have heard. Are you starting to
see why the NSA might be very nervous about them? Furbies have
been brought into their building and now have been privy to
national secrets. You would never let a child into such meeting
for fear of what the child might repeat, but nobody thought twice
about letting a little inanimate doll sit in on these meetings.
Well, perhaps it was not so inanimate. Of a memory, a voice, and
discretion, which do you think is the hardest to give a doll? Let
us just say that these fur and metal beasties currently have at
best the lessor part of valor.
Now the big problem is what to do with the Furbies that have been
found in the NSA building. In some cases it will be possible to
know that Furbies know something they should not. I mean when you
hear a toy doll talking about our deployment of operative abroad
you generally know that he is guilty of a security breach. And
being that there are few people to stand up for Furby rights, I
think the openly indiscrete Furby is probably dispatched with the
utmost barbarity. The problem is what do you do about a Furby who
just sits that with an enigmatic smile on its little pelted puss.
Does it know about the assassins we hired in Paraguay for that
all-important job? It may look innocent enough, but can you afford
to take that risk? How do you know that once you release it, it
will not go straight to the newspapers? NSA General Counsel
Stewart Baker told the Washington Post: "Getting them out is going
to be almost harder than getting them in. You'd have to take them
to the basement and sweat them a lot." And who knows what the
circuitry is. Put electrodes on one to get the truth out of it and
you may just change his circuitry. Who knows what it would do if
it wants revenge?
Now raise your hands. How many of you out there figured that by
the end of the century we would have a problem with toy dolls in
the NSA possibly spying and revealing national secrets? I just how
that this guy Baker has them locked up good and tight. How does he
know they won't stage an escape? [-mrl]
===================================================================
2. COSM by Gregory Benford (Avon Books, 1998, ISBN 0-380-97435-5,
HC, 344 pp., $23.00) (book review by Joe Karpierz)
Well, it's nearing Hugo nominations time again, soon to be followed
by the Hugo balloting itself. When the balloting rolls around, I
end up looking at the nominations list only to find out that most
of the books are ones that I've not read. It seems that the tastes
of the typical Hugo nominators and mine just don't agree.
The annual LOCUS "Year in Review" issue arrived at the house last
week. Within it are LOCUS's recommendations for the best in every
Hugo category--their "Recommended Reading List". And again, I look
at the lists, and see that the books that I liked and read are not
among the selections.
Until, I hope, now. LOCUS recommends it highly. I do too. COSM,
by Gregory Benford. Benford draws on his experience as a real life
physicist in coming up with one of the best novels I've read that
were published in 1998. Alicia Butterworth is a UC-Irvine particle
physics professor doing experiments in high energy physics on the
Relatavistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National
Laboratory. The experiment goes wrong (come now, you shouldn't be
surprised at *that*), and there is a massive explosion. As she and
others clear away the rubble, she finds a silver bowling ball
shaped object. Reasoning that it was her experiment, and that the
folks at Brookhaven wouldn't do the right thing, she steals it
away, unbeknownst to them (for the meantime, anyway), back to UCI.
There, she and a couple of her assistants, as well as a professor
from Caltech, Max Jalon, make an amazing discovery: what they have
there is a whole new universe.
The story, then, follows Alicia as she tries to deal with the Cosm,
the publicity it brings, the death of one of the assistants, the
budding romance with Jalon, the legal problems of walking off with
the Cosm, the philosophical ramifications of creating a universe,
and being single and feeling out of touch with her feelings and
emotions. Benford very effectively weaves the human element of the
characters in with the hard science of just what this thing really
is to tell a Really Neat Story. The only problem I had with the
story was that, as much as I like hard sf stories, and hard sf
written by Benford, the physics was a little tough for me to grasp
in some instances.
But that can be dismissed, I think, as one looks deeper into the
implications of just what it means to have created a universe, and,
in Alicia's case, one that seems to behave just like ours.
Brookhaven created another one by attempting to duplicate her
experiments conditions, but the universe created didn't quite
behave the same way. In any case, should we be creating these
things, and what about the life forms within them, if any? Are
*we* living in a Cosm, as it were? Did somebody create our
universe, not God, or god, or gods, but some scientist just like
Alicia in some (un)controlled laboratory experiment? And does that
make that scientist (G)(g)od?
The book comes to, I think, a satisfying and reasonable conclusion.
While after a while that conclusion really was predictable, it made
sense. Read the book, and I think you'll agree.
Actually, read the book, and I hope you'll agree it was terrific.
Now, where's that recommended reading list??? Better get
started.... [-jak]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
Marriage is an arrangement by which two people start
by getting the best out of each other and often end
by getting the worst.
-- Gerard Brenan