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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 5/1/98 -- Vol. 16, No. 44
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 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. URL of the week:
http://www.sff.net/people/frantsdecandido/urban.htm. The home page
for URBAN NIGHTMARES, reviewed later in this issue. Includes the
history of the book, the text of the introduction, and links to
many of the contributors' home pages. [-ecl]
===================================================================
2. I was reading my cereal box this morning. That is pretty safe.
They don't get too many postmodern writers to write on boxes of
cereal. In fact I have often wondered who does actually write the
text for boxes of cereal. It requires a whole different writing
style. For one thing I think you really have to know your
adjectives. Words like "light," "crispy," and "nutlike" have to
come readily to the pen when writing the text that goes on a box of
cereal. But the one thing that I found missing was "Free Inside."
Now when I was a kid the best thing to see on a box was "Free
Inside." I grew up in the Golden Age of Free Inside. You don't
get great premiums inside boxes of cereal any more. I am not sure
you get any toys in cereal boxes. I remember when Quaker Puffed
Wheat and Quaker Puffed Rice actually gave away deeds to land in
the Yukon inside boxes of their cereal. You probably think I am
joking here, but they really did. That was when they sponsored
SGT. PRESTON OF THE YUKON. They must have bought up a chunk of
land, divided it up into something like square-inch parcels, had
legal deeds printed up, and gave them away in cereal. At one time
I owned three or four parcels of land in the Yukon. And it worked.
I suddenly got really interested in Sgt. Preston and his lead dog
King. After all, that was my property he was protecting. At least
it was out there someplace. Maybe someday I would find it and
build on it. Though a gumdrop was about all I would have been able
to place on it. Just to see my land I would have to trespass on
land owned by about 37 other one-time little cereal eaters.
Thinking about it, I am sure by now somehow that someone else has
gotten ownership of the land, but at one point it was mine. It was
so small that if it was all in one place I could hide it with my
hand. But it was mine and I owned it. That was the best Free
Inside ever.
What are some of the other classics? I guess I remember this stuff
pretty well because this is what it took to form me. You really
needed something to get you through the day back then. You have to
remember that back then a Saturday morning was about as long as
three and a half of our days. And children have a lot more energy
to dissipate than adults do. They have good muscles, but much less
mass than adults do. The square-cube law says that little kids are
going to have much higher muscle to mass ratio than we do. I
remember wondering why adults just wanted to sit around at the end
of a day, and now I know it is because they are pushing around all
the mass of an adult body. Perhaps children would be more pleasant
and also healthier if we put weights on their arms and legs. But
when I was small you could not just shut down all that energy and
just sit and watch SKY KING or CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT. You needed
something to do with your hands to dissipate excess energy. That's
what Free Insides were good for. Well, the Yukon deed might not be
so good. What kind of a kid would sit down and read the fine print
during WINKY DINK? (Okay, WINKY DINK was Sunday morning.)
Probably it was just the ones who grew into lawyers. No, for
Saturday morning TV shows I recommend a little toy rocket launcher
that came free inside something like Nabisco Honey Wheats.
Basically it had a catch mechanism and a spring. You put the
little missile on it and it clicked in place, then you pressed the
catch and it fired. That one was particularly memorable since it
was an action toy. Sometimes you just got little toy plane models
of real planes. Somebody at the cereal company must have served in
World War II and remembered his days of plane spotting.
I have heard people say that you got decoder rings and glow in the
dark rings in cereal. I think you had to send away for those with
a proof of purchase. I think you could get a little submarine
powered by baking powder in a box of cereal, but the frogmen that
went to the surface and then dived again, also powered by baking
powder, were a send-away offer. In any case, I will take a further
walk down this maudlin Memory Lane next week. [-mrl]
===================================================================
3. URBAN NIGHTMARES edited by Josepha Sherman and Keith A.
DeCandido (Baen, ISBN 0-671-87851-4, 1997, 278pp, US$5.99) (a book
review by Evelyn C. Leeper):
The problem with theme anthologies is, well, the theme.
I mean, if I'm reading a story in a general anthology, or in a
magazine, and the point of the story is that the main character is
a vampire, then the author can tell me that when s/he wants to.
But if I'm reading a vampire anthology ... well, you get the idea.
So here we have an anthology based on urban legends. These are all
those things that you've heard somewhere that happened to "a friend
of a friend." In fact, these are so common that they even have a
Usenet group (alt.legends.urban) and a whole set of abbreviations
(e.g., FOAF). So if you're reading a story in this anthology in
which a fur coat is involved, and you know anything about urban
legends, you *know* snakes will start appearing in the coat.
Because of this, the authors pretty much have to tell you early on
which UL (urban legend, not Underwriters Laboratory!) they are
working with, and then do something original with it. This is not
unlike what was done with the "Fairy Tale" series of books, so it
is possible.
And of course the problem is exacerbated by my position as a
reviewer--I need to read this book in some reasonable period of
time. Marketing being what it is, mass-market books tend to
disappear after a few months. If I read a story a week, this book
will be long-gone before you can read the review. (There are
twenty-five stories, an unusually high number. The longest story
is sixteen pages long. In fact, the biography section is longer
than some of the stories.)
Even making allowances for all this, I think *four* prosthetic arm
stories and *four* alligators/crocodiles- in-the-sewers in one
anthology is a bit much (though I did like the literary allusions
in Bill Crider's piece).
If you are familiar with all the urban legends referenced here, and
like bizarre twists on them, you will probably like this book. But
if you don't know what "The Hook" is, or find a whole sequence of
twists on them more repetitious, you should skip this book. (Me, I
find the psychology of the urban legend interesting, but don't see
them as a great literary source.) [-ecl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance
of the law is not punished.
-- Jeremy Bentham