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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 07/17/98 -- Vol. 17, No. 3
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. URL of the week:
http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/postmodern. You always wanted
to be a literary critic, but never have the time? Now you can use
this generator to produce postmoderist essays in half the time it
takes the average critic to write one. :-) [-ecl]
===================================================================
2. I was asked recently if I was going to talk Turkey in the
notice. My Turkey log is online off of my home page, but not
everybody wants to slog through that. I might as well bring some
of the high points into the notice.
Actually I keep hearing good things about the Turks from unexpected
sources. The author of the Lonely Planet Tour Book assumes that
most of the negatives we hear about the Turks are pure propaganda.
A classic case must be the whole affair of the Midnight Express.
Some of you may have seen the film about a man caught smuggling
drugs out of Turkey and thrown into a Turkish prison. There things
were so bad when he woke in the morning he would find cockroaches
in his mouth. It was not very nice. Eventually he found out about
a super-secret escape route dubbed The Midnight Express which he
used to get his freedom. At least that is what the book and film
said. Supposedly the true story is somewhat at variance.
Even the guy whom the book was about and who really was imprisoned
in a Turkish prison says that the account in the book and film,
which he did not write, was exaggerated and is unfair to the
Turkish government. He was not put in a maximum security prison,
it was a minimum security prison. But here comes the kicker. In
actual fact it would appear to be a toss-up who is more
enthusiastic about having Americans in Turkish prisons, the
imprisoned American or the Turkish government. The difference is
(or at least was) the Turkish government would actually do
something about it.
The title "Midnight Express" sounds like a train. In fact it
actually does refer to a train, exactly what it sounds like. The
Turkish government did not want the expense and hassle of keeping
Americans in their prisons. So they put the Americans in a minimum
security prison that had the Midnight Express stopping in its
prison yard. Turks and Americans alike could hop the train and
escape the prison. But a Turk who escaped by the train would end
up an escaped Turkish criminal in Greece without a passport. Take
it from me, this is not a good thing to be. You are far better off
staying in a Turkish minimum security prison. For Americans it is
a different story. They could hop a train and would end up in
Turkey without passports. They would be arrested and would have to
apply to the United States Consulate for new passports. The next
thing they would see would probably be the Statue of Liberty. It
was a clever trick on the part of the Turkish government. And if
the Americans were too dumb to figure out that there was an escape
route, I mean after all they were dumb enough to get caught
smuggling drugs in Turkey, it was arranged that the guards would
explain the escape route to them, sort of on the sly.
It was an escape route for Americans and was absolutely pointless
for a Turk to use. And for the Turks it had the added benefit of
making the Americans the responsibility of their good friends, the
Greeks.
In this way the Turkish government could look like it was trying to
punish the Americans, PLEASING THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT, but did not
have to be strict. The book and movie MIDNIGHT EXPRESS was really
mostly propaganda in America's drug war. At least that is what the
author of the Lonely Planet book thinks. People will believe just
about anything bad about the Turks. They have their faults, but I
found them a friendly and accommodating people, miles better than
their reputation.
By the way I am not saying that Turkish prisons are actually
pleasure domes. I have no doubt that Turkish prisons are bad.
Whether they are as bad as Mexican prisons or Argentinean prisons
is a question for experts, I don't know. Any poor country is not
going to have very good prisons. The question is who gets put
there. And who gets out. [-mrl]
===================================================================
3. DARWINIA by Robert Charles Wilson (Tor, ISBN 0-312-86038-2,
1998, 320pp, US$22.95) (a book review by Evelyn C. Leeper):
In S. M. Stirling's ISLAND IN THE SEA OF TIME, the island of
Nantucket is hurled back to the Bronze Age via a mysterious
"Event." In Greg Bear's DINOSAUR SUMMER, the lost plateau of Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle's LOST WORLD is real. In Robert Charles
Wilson's previous book, MYSTERIUM, our history took a different
course and Gnosticism prevailed. DARWINIA seems to be a
combination of parts of all four, but ends up very different from
all of them.
In 1912, the "Miracle" happens, and Europe as we know (knew) it
vanishes, replaced by a primeval continent with virtually identical
geography and geology, but different plant and animal life.
Apparently it is from a timeline where evolution took a different
path. As a result, the history of the world is very different from
that point on. (For starters, it's hard to have a World War based
in Europe when all the inhabitants of Europe no longer exist.).
Guilford Law signs up with the Finch Expedition to explore the
neo-Europe, or Darwinia, as it is called. (This leads to some
confusion, as the term "Darwinian evolution" refers specifically to
the evolution of the life-forms on Darwinia, not evolution as
described by Charles Darwin.) Not only does the expedition run
into various dangers (natural and man-made), but several members
are haunted by strange dreams that we recognize as being related to
their possible lives in our timeline, and Law gradually becomes
aware that the struggle is not merely global, but cosmic.
However, this is not so much an alternate history as an analysis of
what might cause an alternate history, because in addition to
everything else, this is connected somehow with the Archive, a
record of all history created by the far future. Wilson uses
interludes to try to explain this, but it is such a departure from
the main action (at least at the beginning) that it feels very
jarring--which is probably the idea. Even though the basic
situation is mysterious, the reader *thinks* she understands
somewhat what is going on and then Wilson pulls the rug out.
John Clute seems to feel that DARWINIA (along with Wilson's other
work) expresses Wilson's feeling of "apartness" that comes from
Wilson's being Canadian. While there is a sense of apartness and
isolation, I think it is more universal than Clute perceives it as
being. There is also a thread reminiscent of Harry Turtledove's
BETWEEN THE RIVERS and its echoes of Jaynes's bicameral mind. I
realize at this point that it sounds as though DARWINIA is a real
hodge-podge, but it isn't. Wilson has taken several themes that
have appeared elsewhere recently, but woven them into a tapestry
all his own. I definitely recommend DARWINIA. [-ecl]
===================================================================
4. ANTARCTICA by Kim Stanley Robinson (Bantam, ISBN 0-553-10063-7,
1998, 508pp, US$24.95) (a book review by Evelyn C. Leeper):
Robinson is certainly best known for his "Mars" series (RE MARS,
GREEN MARS, BLUE MARS). ANTARTICA reads like WHITE MARS. It has
what seemed like even more expository lumps, nay, expository
*mountains*, about geology et al. And the only hint that this
attempt to get us all to live a more ecologically sustainable
lifestyle might not be paradisical is a passing reference to three
attempts at single- child families in China, a plan that sounds
good in theory but has turned out to be quite otherwise in
practice. (Robinson's character who refers to this seems to think
it was a good thing; Robinson's opinion is of course unknown.)
If Robinson is not the leading "ecological science fiction" writer
these days, I must be really out of touch with the field. But even
though I agree with his goals (or what I think his goals are), I am
starting to find his didacticism wearing. To be fair, he does not
draw obvious villains, intent on killing all the whales or some
such and hang the consequences. But the parade of scientists and
just plain folks who get to stand up and "speechify" about their
philosophies is not what I am looking for in a novel.
The most interesting part of ANTARTICA, in fact, was the recounting
of the early exploration of the continent and the people involved
in that. Here Robinson's long expository passages didn't bother
me, maybe because the explorers had more personality than mountains
and glaciers. At least with them I felt I was reading a story
rather than a textbook.
If you liked the "Mars" trilogy, you will almost definitely like
ANTARTICA. But if you preferred the sparser, earlier Robinson, and
were hoping for a return to that style, this will be a
disappointment.
[Though the copyright date listed in the book is 1998, the book was
actually published in Britain in 1997.] [-ecl]
===================================================================
5. COOL RESEARCH -- Bell Labs scientists have a warm spot in their
hearts for one of the coldest regions on earth, Antarctica, and
they've had it for decades. Bell Labs scientists have been
conducting upper atmosphere research in Antarctica with test
magnetometers since the early 1970s.
Louis Lanzerotti is one Bell Labs researcher familiar with ongoing
experiments there, and is particularly interested in rapid changes
in the Earth's magnetic fields. The research provides information
on changes in the space environment around Earth and on how these
changes can affect radio frequency and satellite communications.
As a distinguished member of technical staff in the Physical
Science and Engineering Division at Bell Labs, his pioneering work
has earned him acclaim and a unique honor -- a mountain has been
named for him. Although Lanzerotti has visited the icy plains of
Antarctica, he confesses that he has never seen his mountain, which
rises more than 5,000 feet above a region known as Ellsworth Land.
The latest research effort involves the use of Bell Labs
instrumentation to measure changes in Earth's magnetic fields at
six automatic geophysical observatories, a collaborative effort
with five U.S. universities and the Tohoku University in Japan.
Other Bell Labs research, led by Gregory Wright, is focused on
understanding star formation using the Antarctic Submillimeter
Telescope and Remote Observatory to map gaseous carbon in our
galaxy. He has been involved in designing the telescope, and on
other projects related to measuring cosmic microwave background
radiation.
Lucent's connections to the South Polar regions go beyond research;
we're also doing business there. Lucent's Argentina Team recently
sold and installed telecommunications equipment in Antarctica,
including a DEFINITY system to one customer and cellular telephony
devices, to CTI Movil, which will be used by the Marambio Air Force
Base. While forging new developments in other countries around the
world, Lucent is continuing its ongoing attachment to the cold
continent. ["Lucent Technologies Today," 10 July 1998, Greg Schwab]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
A tremendous number of people in America have to
work very hard at something that bores them. Even
a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office
every day, not because he likes it but because he
can't think of anything else to do.
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