@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @@@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @
@ @@@@@ @@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @
@ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 10/17/97 -- Vol. 16, No. 16
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 2D-536 732-957-6330 rlmitchell1@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
201-933-2724 for details. The New Jersey Science Fiction Society
meets on the third Saturday of every month in Belleville; call
201-432-5965 for details. 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. URL of the week: http://www.sff.net/people/Jim.Morrow/. James
Morrow home page. [-ecl]
===================================================================
2. Before I take a point of view, particularly if it is one of
these things that just about everybody knows and agrees on, I
occasionally like to play this little game with myself. I am a
lawyer and I am arguing for the opposite point of view. I am being
the Devil's Advocate. Now I grew up in the nuclear era. Everybody
lived under the Sword of Damocles of nuclear weapons. I went
through the old "duck and cover" exercises in grade school. Like
everybody else I hated nuclear weapons. But I play the Devil's
Advocate role with nuclear weapons and I am not sure they have been
the curse that we all think of them as being. In fact my best
arguments have been in favor of nuclear weapons. So I am not
telling the reader what to believe, but I would like to list some
of the arguments in favor.
The first shock argument is that using nuclear weapons against the
Japanese was like a slap in the face to someone hysterical. It
shook them out of a mindset that was hurting them. These days you
hear arguments all sorts of ways but I think the best arguments say
that the Japanese would have kept fighting until a lot more were
dead than were killed by the bombings. The bombings were a slap in
the face to say you will not win and you will destroy yourself
playing out the game. In a way the bombings may have even given
the Japanese an honorable way out of the war, but I am convinced
that more Japanese survived the war because of the bombing and it
left more latitude for friendship between the two countries since
there were not hundreds of thousands killed on both sides. So this
adds up to saying the admittedly weird statement if taken out of
context that Japan ended better off because of the bombings.
Then nuclear weapons remained around convincing us that if we fight
too much with the communists we could be in for some real trouble
in the form of nuclear retaliation. There probably would have been
another world war over something like the Soviets grabbing Hungary
or us doing something that angered them. There was not because it
was all played out with nuclear weapons that never were used.
Again nuclear weapons probably saved lives, this time perhaps in
the millions.
And certainly our standard of living is better because countries
have not had to field huge armies. Nuclear weapons have meant that
people have not had to disrupt their lives for national defense.
Nuclear weapons have slowed our movement to biological and chemical
weapons. We have not needed them because we have had nuclear
weapons. And frankly they are a lot scarier. One of the nice
things about a nuclear bomb is that it is not subtle. You see that
mushroom cloud and you have a really good idea that somebody had it
in for you. Now look at biological warfare. If you and most the
people you know come down with a cold that just gets worse and
worse, and soon your whole country is debilitated, at what point do
you decide you have been attacked? But of course if you develop
such a germ, there is always the danger that the news will get out
and you will be threatened with nuclear weapons.
Finally there is this nice discovery that if you actually use
nukes, it will trigger nuclear winter. It is a weapon you dare not
use because it is as destructive to the person wielding it as it is
to the person attacked.
I am not telling anyone that they should love nuclear weapons. I
am not even saying that I have decided that they were a good thing,
though admittedly I am starting to lean that way. But I do think
it is worth looking at the possibility that they have gotten a bad
rap. I think there are good arguments that the world is better off
for their presence. The causes of World War I to me have always
looked like a sort of immaturity on the part of nations. It was
nations acting a lot like children. Nuclear weapons have taught
the lesson that major powers cannot behave like children. And we
all may be better off for the lesson. [-mrl]
===================================================================
3. The following is a comment by member Jeanette Walker:
Mark,
I was reading your entry in MT Void on the discounts at Barnes &
Noble. This is a program which resulted from a revamping of
Lucent's purchasing policies, which was negotiated with the help of
the Global Library Network. It is a program which should be
available to any Lucent employee anywhere. It should appear in
B&N's computers, so any employee encountering any problem should
ask B&N to check their records.
This program offers a 20% discount off of list price. This is about
10% more than is usually discounted. But if you see a B&N sign
offering more than 20% off, it is probably better to leave your
badge in your pocket and get the better deal.
To the best of my knowledge, AT&T has made no such arrangements
with any book vendor. [-jfw]
===================================================================
4. SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: Only in the casting does SEVEN YEARS
IN TIBET reveal itself as a very Western
production. While the basic plot is very
reminiscent of SHOGUN--each story is about a
European who finds himself in an exotic and
incomprehensible Asian land, eventually
becoming the confidante of the ruler and a pawn
in politics of momentous events--the setting is
endlessly fascinating and director Jean-Jacques
Annaud creates an entire world of the past
caught in the wheels of changing time. Rating:
+2 (-4 to +4), 7 (0 to 10)
For millennia Tibet has been protected from intrusion by the
tallest guards in the world, the Himalayan Mountains. There in the
7th Century A.D. a culture all but unremembered first mixed with
Chinese culture. Until relatively recent history it was a culture
that was so isolated that it could go its own way and not be very
much influenced by any other culture in the world. SEVEN YEARS IN
TIBET tells the true story of two Austrian climbers who happened to
be in Tibet during its years of fastest change, probably the only
Europeans in the country at the time.
In Austria of 1939 lives Heinrich Harrer (played by Brad Pitt), a
world-renowned Olympic athlete, a member of the Nazi Party as a
matter of style, and a totally selfish boy-man. He abandons his
pregnant wife--who is nearly due to give birth--over her objection
and he goes on a four-month climbing expedition in the Himalayas.
His first shock is to discover that the expedition will be led by
an awkward-looking climber, Peter Aufschnaiter (David Thewlis).
Harrer determines to undermine the ungainly man's authority and to
make himself the star of the expedition for the press. His little
battle only gets him into trouble, first of the sides of the
mountain to be climbed, then when war breaks out in Europe the
troop of climbers are captured by the British in India and
imprisoned in a POW camp. Harrer fights a two-front war against
the British imprisoning him and against Aufschnaiter's authority.
Eventually Harrer and Aufschnaiter escape from the camp, lead the
British a chase through India, and flee across the border into
Tibet, a country officially closed to foreigners. The two lie
their way into the capital city of Lhasa, a beautiful mountainside
city forbidden to any non-Tibetans. After some time there dealing
with the bureaucracy of monks, Harrer is given counsel with the
Dalai Lama. The great lama, still a young boy, finds he likes the
brash German. Harrer becomes a friend, confidant, and teacher to
the boy. The warm relationship between the two forms the core of
the film. But their relationship is cut off when the country is
virtually stolen by invading Chinese Communist troops.
There has been discussion on whether this was a good role for Brad
Pitt or not. As the supercilious Heinrich who finds his humanity
by loving Tibet, Pitt was fairly believable. I had the feeling
that if I had never seen him before I would not have thought twice
about whether this part was right for him. In fact associations
with previous films were about the only thing that got in the way
of the credibility of the story. We have people like Victor Wong
of THE JOY LUCK CLUB and BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA; Mako of CONAN
THE BARBARIAN; and B. D. Wong, whom we saw around the incubator in
JURASSIC PARK and flitting around in FATHER OF THE BRIDE. It
almost makes the film seem less Asian to see these actors present.
David Thewlis has turned in one good performance after another over
the last four years since he stood out in Mike Leigh's NAKED. The
Dalai Lama, played by three boys of varying age, seems not so much
a font of wisdom as an unending source of simple straightforward
curiosity, mostly about Western culture. Jetsun Pema, who plays
the Dalai Lama's mother is in reality the Dalai Lama's sister. The
film is directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, who directed THE NAME OF
THE ROSE and THE BEAR. As with the former, the setting is main
attraction of the film.
One disappoint of the film is that the actual time covered in Tibet
is shortened by a long introductory section. The screenplay by
Becky Johnston spends nearly half of the film just getting Harrer
and Aufschnaiter to Lhasa so that the story from that point forward
seems rushed. Most of the adventure, however, is in the first
hour, with some harrowing scenes of mountain climbing. The stories
of escapes, bound by the truth, seem almost cliched. John Williams
spices the score with eerie Tibetan music. I rate the film a +2 on
the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
===================================================================
5. LOOKING FOR THE MAHDI by N. Lee Wood (Ace, ISBN 0-441-00450-4,
1997 (1996c), 337pp, US$5.99) (aA book review by Evelyn C. Leeper):
This book is not without flaws, but it did keep me up until 3 AM to
finish it, so I guess that serves as a recommendation.
Kahlili bint Munadi Sulaiman is a television journalist. She
covered a war in Khuruchabja (not unlike the war in Iraq, from the
description), and now finds herself involved in escorting John
Halton to Khuruchabja. But neither are what they appear: Sulaiman
is also K. B. Sulaiman, male journalist (because frankly, there was
no way a woman could cover a war in a Muslim fundamentalist
country), and Halton is a fabricant. And besides the issue of
gender, there is also the layer of deception and concealment
inherent in the television journalism business: the newscasters are
just "bubble-heads" repeating the words fed to them and nothing is
what it seems. Given that the whole Middle East situation in real
life and in the book seems tied up with identity in strange ways, I
am sure that this emphasis on multiple and hidden identities is not
accidental. (I might quibble that "Khuruchabja" sounds more
Central Asian than Middle Eastern, but let it pass.) If you
question whether Sulaiman could carry off her disguise, consider
Linda Hunt in the film THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY.
Halton is also trying to conceal his identity. Fabricants are not
entirely popular, even with heavy government regulation. This
regulation, by the way, is one of my two major complaints. LOOKING
FOR THE MAHDI was obviously written before the recent cloning
announcements, but even then reproductive technology had gone far
enough that the sorts of definitions of "human" used here would
never have been accepted.
Wood thinks through this whole issue of concealment more than most.
Her characters need to acquire more than just the clothing and the
hair cuts, they need to think and react the way their false egos
would. They do not always succeed. One of the things that makes
the story ring true is that they are not perfect at it. They make
mistakes. Things happen beyond their control. And they have to
deal with it.
Wood focuses primarily on intra-Muslim strife, and maybe because
both (all?) sides are Muslim, she seems to avoid the stereotypes
and extremes that so many writers fall into when they have the
Muslims all on one side as inhuman monsters bent on destroying
Western civilization. My only other complaint is the ending--I
find Wood's "solution" to the Middle East situation unlikely, to
say the least.
I haven't read Wood's first novel (FARADAY'S ORPHANS), but after
reading LOOKING FOR THE MAHDI, I will be looking for that one as
well. Wood is an author to watch and LOOKING FOR THE MAHDI is a
book to read. [-ecl]
===================================================================
6. FOREVER PEACE by Joe Haldeman (Ace, ISBN 0-441-00406-7, 1997,
326pp, US$21.95) (a book review by Evelyn C. Leeper):
One, this is not a sequel to THE FOREVER WAR. Two, the title of
this is FOREVER PEACE, not THE FOREVER PEACE.
Haldeman has claimed that FOREVER PEACE is part of a triptych of
thematically connected novels containing THE FOREVER WAR and 1968.
This is true, but only to the extent that they are all about war
and what makes us fight and kill each other. And while the idea of
FOREVER PEACE is that there may be a way to end the killing, most
of it is devoted to descriptions of battles and attacks and
killing.
One problem is that the pacing is off. We spend half the novel
following Julian Class, the operator of a "soldierboy"--basically a
remote-controlled robot soldier. Then suddenly within a few pages,
we find out that there is something happening that can destroy the
universe, and that there is a way to convert humanity to a non-
aggressive state. Another problem is that while the first plot
twist is moderately believable, the second I found completely
unconvincing. All the problems that are introduced are solved with
a wave of the hand. It's as if we have a solution to world hunger
that involves getting to Proxima Centauri in an hour, and then on
the next page someone says, "Oh, by the way, we just discovered how
to travel faster than light." (And while we're at it, Haldeman
also postulates the miracle of nanotechnology, which can provide
for all material needs.) Another problem (at least for me) was the
foreshadowing, where you would read some first-person narrative
from Julian, and then a third-person omniscient would break in to
say, "But Julian had no way of knowing how wrong he was, " or some
such.
But FOREVER PEACE is still worth reading. Haldeman is at his best
when he is describing everyday life in the "permanent war footing"
of the future, with all its restrictions and "acceptable" dangers.
If THE FOREVER WAR was the Vietnam War transposed to the future,
then FOREVER PEACE is Nicaragua, Kuwait, and Oklahoma City. It's a
world full of security precautions that don't work, but which are
followed because they make people feel better. (Exactly what
purpose does showing a picture ID serve when you fly somewhere
now?) It's a world of elaborate rules of friendship based on who
gets paid what, and when, and how. (And haven't you heard of
someone picking up a dinner check by explaining that they can claim
it as a business expense?) One of the aspects of science fiction I
like is the way it looks at the near-future and consequences of our
current politico-economic situation. Had Haldeman just written
about nanotechnology and the war between the haves and the have-
nots, it would have been far more satisfying. As it was, there was
too much going on here for any one thread to be given sufficient
space.
As I said, I think FOREVER PEACE is worth reading, though not for
the plot so much as for the setting. The obvious comparison will
be to THE FOREVER WAR, and it doesn't stand up to that--but then,
that is very high standard. [-ecl]
===================================================================
7. STARLIGHT 1 edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Tor, ISBN 0-312-
86215-6, 1996, 316pp, US$13.95) (a book review by Evelyn C.
Leeper):
Two Hugo nominees out of twelve stories--not a bad percentage for
an original anthology. (And this anthology undoubtedly contributed
to Nielsen Hayden's own Hugo nomination as Best Professional
Editor.) And it's not a theme anthology. This is not "Science
Fiction Stories Set in the Interior of Stars" or "Fantasy Stories
About Light." It's just good science fiction and fantasy.
Everyone seems to be comparing this to such series as Terry Carr's
"Universe" or Damon Knight's "Orbit," but in my opinion it's too
soon to tell. I will say that this is a very auspicious start.
The first story in STARLIGHT 1 is "The Dead" by Michael Swanwick;
the last is "The Cost to Be Wise" by Maureen McHugh. Traditional
anthology wisdom is to start with your strongest story, and end
with your second strongest. Nielsen Hayden is certainly in
agreement with the readers here--these were the two stories
nominated for the Hugo Award. But don't ignore the stories in the
middle, or you'll miss some excellent works.
For example, "Mengele's Jew" by Carter Scholz is a unique
combination of quantum mechanics and the Holocaust. "The Weighing
of Ayre" by Gregory Feeley is a science fiction story of the
seventeenth century. Jane Yolen has "Sister Emily's Lightship,"
the second "Emily-Dickinson-and-the-space-aliens" story of the year
(and in my opinion, the better of the two). John M. Ford's
"Erase/Record/Play" is written in the rather unusual form of a
playscript, and reminds me in some ways of the plays of Vaclav
Havel. It is subtitled "A Drama for Print," though it wouldn't
surprise me to see this performed at some point. In fact, I
wouldn't object if the folks at Boskone who do theatrical
performances each year decided to do this one. (Consider that a
hint.)
I won't list every story, but I will recommend that you go out and
get this book and discover them for yourself. I'm looking forward
to the second volume. [-ecl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
All politics are based on the indifference
of the majority.
-- James Reston