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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 07/24/98 -- Vol. 17, No. 4
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.sfwriter.com/. Lots of authors have
web sites; Rob Sawyer's is one of the best. [-ecl]
===================================================================
2. Tolkien Fans: Monday July 27 at 11PM, WNYC-FM (93.9 in New York)
will be featuring "new music inspired by Tolkien's classic trilogy
"The Lord of the Rings" on their "New Sounds" program. [-ecl]
===================================================================
3. This article is going to be more abstract than some and perhaps
even unpleasant, what evil is and is not. Admittedly more than
usual I am thinking out loud, or more accurately thinking in
writing.
Curiously enough, the Turkey trip was the occasion for some of my
thinking about the nature of evil. This is not a reflection on the
Turks, I hasten to add. But Turkey has often been the battleground
for warring ideologies and where you have warring ideologies, you
have suffering and other people inflicting that suffering.
It is interesting that in the century of the Holocaust--an event of
history which has always figured in my thinking as the greatest
possible evil--evil has become some sort of laughable pseudo-
supernatural concept. One would think that in this century people
would have seen the true nature of evil and would understand it
like they never had in the past. Yet people's understanding of
evil seems to get further from the mark and not closer. Part of
the cause what seems to me to be confusion is that some have
decided, for whatever reason, to personalize evil. Evil is
personified by the Devil, by Lucifer, by Satan. It has gone from
being an abstract concept to a being, if not a person, who can be
easily hated. And to make this personification of evil even more
laughable he is often portrayed with a mustache, a goatee, wearing
a red suit with horns on his head and a tail ending in an
arrowhead. By this point evil looks more like Santa Claus than
like anything having to do with the Holocaust. To me there really
is evil, but it has nothing to do with devils.
To me evil does not come from a supernatural being, it comes from
humans and it is constituted of an abandonment of the belief in
justice for others, humans or otherwise. One might think that it
is an abandonment of empathy, but one can be unjust and even cruel
and still have full empathy and understanding. We think of empathy
and understanding as a preventative of cruelty, but that is really
vanity for the human race. We think that humans with empathy and
understanding cannot be cruel. I happen to think that the
perpetrators of the Holocaust, of any holocaust, actually have a
great deal of empathy for their victims and often have a curiosity
to have more. They just don't let that get in the way of their
selfishness and callousness. I think they have a pretty good idea
of the torment of their victims but don't really care. Did the
operators of death camps not understand what their victims were
going through? Would empathy and understanding have stopped them?
I think they imagined all the horrors that they were visiting onto
people and they did not care. In a sense the acts of people who
really are evil are performed on themselves as much as others
except they can escape the results because it is happening to them
only in their imagination. It is in the callousness and the
selfishness of their acts that the evil really lies.
Incidentally, I personally do not believe in evil without hurting
someone or something, human or animal. One corollary of all this
is that there is no such thing a victimless evil. Some religions
would label things like lustful thought to be evil. To me if there
is no victim there is no evil.
But the question is, why is there evil? I see evil as being done
for three reasons. The first reason is instinct arising out of the
"selfish gene." I think we all have instincts to do that which
will make the most number of genes like the genes that we ourselves
possess. A great deal of human behavior comes out of these
instincts. We may not realize that that is the purpose of our
instincts, but we have them nonetheless. Just as when we eat we
are not really thinking of our body's need for protein, for
carbohydrates, etc. When we eat we usually think no deeper than we
are hungry and it is time to eat. Sometimes we think only that the
food will taste good. But there are deeper biological reasons we
eat that lie below the surface. Similarly, while we do not think
of it, a great deal of human behavior is aimed at protecting our
genes and giving them a chance to reproduce so that they continue.
A white racist who hires a less qualified white man and not a black
man on some level is doing so because he knows the white man
probably has more genes in common with him than the black man.
Strangers or perhaps people isolated by religion, like Jews, are
less likely to carry genes in common than the local population.
Rape can be seen as forcing someone else to help reproduce the
rapists genes, etc. Richard Dawkins put forward the initial
concepts in a book called THE SELFISH GENE and as far as I am
concerned the idea is right on the money.
Then there is the second form. If the Selfish Gene can be seen as
a sort of sub-conscious selfishness, there is also the conscious
level of selfishness. If I dump toxic wastes to save money, I am
doing it for personal gain. I would like to be wealthier and I am
doing it at the expense of others. This is a very simple and
straightforward form of evil.
The third reason for evil to be done is in the name of a religion.
This could be genetically motivated, as we have seen, but it can
also be motivated by ideology. People will kill others if they
think that God or the gods want them to. Generally this is
accompanied by a belief in an afterlife in which they hope to be
rewarded for their action. Their belief is that God controls their
fate and that He will look with favor on them if they just punish
that non-believer. It is sort of kissing up to the metaphysical
Powers that Be.
Now these three forms of evil are actually inter-related. The
first two are similar since one is stealing in large part to
protect one's own genes. By getting more money one has more
opportunity to nurture and protect ones genetic strain and
frequently it is also to give a greater opportunity to reproduce.
Money does that. The second and third forms of evil are also
inter-related. The second is a striving for affluence in this
world; the third is a striving to continue it in the next.
Well, there it is for your consideration, a unified theory of evil
and its causes. Why do I want to analyze and understand the nature
of evil? What is more basic to understanding the world?
===================================================================
4. FACTORING HUMANITY by Robert J. Sawyer (Tor, ISBN 0-312-86458-2,
1998, 350pp, US$23.95) (a book review by Joe Karpierz):
We all know the mantra of real estate: location, location,
location. Robert J. Sawyer has his own mantra: ideas, ideas,
ideas. And this is good, since above all else, science fiction is
the literature of ideas. Well, Sawyer certainly doesn't
shortchange his readers in his latest effort, FACTORING HUMANITY.
FACTORING HUMANITY is a story of first contact. As the story
opens, Earth has been receiving messages from Alpha Centauri A for
ten years. Heather Davis, a professor of psychology at the
University of Toronto, has been attempting to decipher them with
little success. Her estranged husband, Kyle Graves, is working on
a quantum computer project, also with little success, and also at
the University of Toronto. Their marriage turned rocky after their
daughter Mary,committed suicide, and they are currently separated.
The narrative begins with their other daughter, Becky, accusing
Kyle of molesting both her and Mary.
Now that the stage is set, the story takes off. The messages from
Alpha Centauri stop, and Heather eventually discovers the secret to
the alien message. Kyle, working on both the quantum computing
experiment AND another project dealing with the idea of developing
consciousness in a computer (the APE project, for Approximate
Psychological Experiences), is basically just having a tough time
getting by due to Becky's accusations. Matters are made worse when
two different parties come to him concerning his quantum computing
project; one wants him to continue his work but keep it hushed up,
and the other wants to buy his services in order to crack an
encryption code that otherwise would take many lifetimes to crack
due to its complexity (more about this later).
Earlier I talked about an abundance of ideas. How does quantum
computing, psychology, group minds, computer consciousness, Necker
cubes, the nature of consciousness, hypercubes, and the end of
humanity sound? The fun in all of this for me is that I spend a
good portion of the book trying to see how it will all fit
together--just as I did with STARPLEX and FRAMESHIFT. As a matter
of fact, it can be argued that there are TOO many ideas in this
book: couldn't the story have been told with a few fewer loose
ends to tie up? For instance, I mentioned the encryption code that
a consortium wants Kyle to crack. It turns out that whatever is
encoded holds the contents of yet another message from the stars,
received several years earlier. What does that have to do with the
rest of what's going on?
But no, I think these ideas all fit together. I said that this was
a novel of first contact. I guess I lied. It's a novel of
contact, period. Not just with the Centaurs (as our characters
call them), but of contact with ourselves, our families, and
indeed, the whole human race. It's about what we can learn about
ourselves and our fellow man if we just pay attention. So what if
we need a little help getting there? The important part, Sawyer
tells us, is that we do make contact with ourselves and the rest of
humanity in order to make the world a better place.
Do I have any problems with the book? No, not really. There is a
little ground that Sawyer has covered before. He seems to like to
use a couple having relationship troubles as a way to help move
things along (if memory serves, THE TERMINAL EXPERIMENT and
STARPLEX were the same way, though I could be wrong), and many of
his main characters have some ties to Canada, one way or another.
I suppose that's okay, because it is said that you should write
what you know about, and since Sawyer lives in Canada, that
certainly applies. He's also used the first contact thing before,
back in GOLDEN FLEECE, where once again someone is trying to
decipher a message from the stars in much the same manner as
Heather does in FACTORING HUMANITY. But I don't think any of those
things take away from just how good this novel is. They just
strike me as happening a little more often than I'm comfortable
with. Maybe I'm just picking nits because it's fashionable to have
to find something wrong with a book even though it's good. I don't
know.
The upshot is that I feel that this is Sawyer's best novel to date,
certainly better than his last effort, ILLEGAL ALIEN. And it's
gotta be good: it contains the title to the third installment of
the upcoming second trilogy of "Star Wars" movies as well as the
real secret to writing good "Star Trek" episodes.
I think you'll enjoy it. [-jak]
===================================================================
5. FACTORING HUMANITY by Robert J. Sawyer (Tor, ISBN 0-312-86458-2,
1998, 350pp, US$23.95) (a book review by Evelyn C. Leeper):
After the relative simplicity of his last book (ILLEGAL ALIEN),
Sawyer is back to his typical high-density story. A. E. Van Vogt
claimed one show write by having a plot twist every 600 words;
sometimes I think Sawyer has decided to throw in a new idea every
few thousand words. I mean, I would think that deciphering the
messages from our first alien contact and building a machine from
their instructions with the functionality of the machine in
FACTORING HUMANITY would be enough without adding an entire sub-
plot of artificial intelligence, suicides, accusations of abuse,
and repressed/manufactured memories. Yes, they all tie together,
but they make for a very busy novel. (And it's all the busier
because Sawyer keeps his novels to a reasonable length. He doesn't
take a thousand pages to cover all this--he does it in 350. Hang
on to your hats.)
I'm sure I could work up an explanation of how this novel ties in
with Sawyer's Canadian-ness and hence feelings of isolation, etc.
(as Clute did with fellow Canadian Robert Charles Wilson and
DARWINIA), but I don't think that has anything to do with it. I do
think that this does deal with isolation, but on the level that
everyone feels when they are trying to communicate with or
understand someone else. [-ecl]
===================================================================
6. THE MASK OF ZORRO (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: Perhaps the greatest of all
swashbuckling heroes is back on the screen.
The new story offers us not one but two
different Zorros played by Anthony Hopkins and
Antonio Banderas as the mask and cape are
passed to a new generation. THE MASK OF ZORRO
may not all make sense, but it is great to have
a big, brash historical adventure back on the
wide screen. Rating: 7 (0 to 10), +2 (-4 to
+4). Spoiler Warning: some comments about the
plot follow the main review. They could be
spoilers.
I think I qualify as a Zorro fan. When I finally finished the
serial SON OF ZORRO last month I had seen every live-action Zorro
film or serial ever released in the English language. And I am
one-up on even some of the most confirmed Zorro fans, having found
and read THE CURSE OF CAPISTRANO by Johnston McCulley years ago.
[It was nearly impossible to find until its paperback reprint this
year as THE MARK OF ZORRO.] The legend of El Zorro, the Fox, began
when Johnston McCulley's story was serialized in five parts
starting August 9, 1919, in ALL-STORY WEEKLY. In the story the
character of Zorro, dashing outlaw on the side of good hiding
behind the guise of the effete fop, was almost a direct steal from
the Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel, created in 1904. The
following year the story was made into the film THE MARK OF ZORRO
with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. The 1920 film was very faithful to the
novel, but it revealed much sooner who was behind the mask so it
would better show off Fairbanks's talents. Through the years Zorro
has graced several English-language films, serials, and a TV
series. Zorro was the original "Caped Crusader" of American pop
culture and undoubtedly was part of the inspiration for Batman. As
popular as he is in America, he is even more popular abroad and has
been portrayed in an astounding number of Italian, French, Spanish,
and Mexican films. The most recent film version was the 1980
ZORRO, THE GAY BLADE, a strained comedy starring George Hamilton.
Now Tristar Pictures has brought back Zorro in a (mostly) serious
film adventure.
The film THE MASK OF ZORRO might more aptly be called THE RETURN OF
ZORRO. Departing from the canon of the earlier stories Diego de la
Vega (also known as Zorro and played here by Anthony Hopkins) is
captured by an arch-enemy Rafael Montero (Stuart Wilson), the
Spanish Governor. In the process Esperanza, Diego's wife whom both
men loved, is killed. Rafael takes Diego's daughter Elena,
adopting her as his own, and returning to Spain. Twenty years
later the real story begins with Rafael returning to California
where Diego is still imprisoned. Diego escapes and runs into
Alejandro Murrieta (Antonio Banderas), a young man that Diego had
known before his imprisonment. Murrieta has turned into a somewhat
incompetent bandit with a vendetta against Captain Harrison Love
(Matthew Letscher) who happens to be an ally of Montero. Diego
decides not just to befriend this enemy of his enemy, he decides to
make the young man into a new Zorro. Completing the set of
principles is Elena (Catherine Zeta Jones), a grown woman and
returned from Spain to be with Montero, whom she believes to be her
father.
The script for THE MASK OF ZORRO was written by Terry Rossio, Ted
Elliott, and John Eskow, who seem most familiar with the Disney
version of Zorro. At least, when they need to coin new names, they
use Garcia and Bernardo, taken from the Disney version. The score
by James Horner makes heavy use of crisp flamenco rhythms. But
Horner had his work cut out for him to try to match the great
Alfred Newman score of the 1940 film THE MARK OF ZORRO.
Anthony Hopkins proves once again how versatile an actor he is as
Diego de la Vega. He does a decent job playing a dashing swordsman
considerably his junior. It is obvious that he has a double for
some of the most vigorous scenes, but he is apparently doing much
of his own swordplay. Antonio Banderas is to the best of my
knowledge the first Hispanic to play El Zorro on the American
screen. The character Zorro has always been played with some wit,
though a little less might have been more. Catherine Zeta Jones's
Elena has more than sufficient fire for the role. Perhaps the best
scene in the film is a quiet conversation between her and Hopkins.
The film was directed by Martin Campbell, best known for directing
GOLDENEYE.
Perhaps not everything works, as I relate in the spoiler section to
follow. But as a Zorro fan I just know that had they called me in
as a consultant I could have fine-tuned this film to perfection.
There was a lot that bothered me, but I still hope it makes a mint
and we get some more. After all, you just can't have too many
Zorro films, can you? I rate THE MASK OF ZORRO a 7 on the 0 to 10
scale and a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Spoiler... Spoiler... Spoiler... Spoiler...
Some random comments:
There is one very big hole in the plot. Rafael Montero intends to
buy California from Santa Ana in the name of the Spanish
government, but actually for himself. I strongly doubt that Santa
Ana would sell in the first place even to the Spanish. The US-
Mexican War, 1846-8, was fought to force Santa Ana to sell Texas
and other territories to the United States. Santa Ana did not want
to sell off his country. But if Santa Ana agreed to sell
California to Spain, then what? When he discovered the Spanish
government knew nothing about the transaction he would declare the
sale null and void. He would field an army (probably with Don
Rafael's own gold) and retake California. If Don Rafael had had
the strength to defend California he would not have needed the gold
in the first place. If he did not have the strength the fact that
had given Santa Ana some gold and lied about whom he represented
would have amounted to no more than a political contribution.
The climactic explosion would have killed all the laborers, at
least the way the sequence is edited. In most films that would be
a problem. Here I will consider it a nod to the impossible escapes
in the Zorro serials. Another problem with the plot is that at the
end of the film a lot of people know that there is sufficient gold
in California to make mining highly profitable. California would
have had a very different history if that information were public
so early.
But not all my comments will be negative. Usually the scripting of
this sort of film is straightforward and not very subtle. I would
like to point out what I found a clever piece of plotting. It was
going to come down to one man's word against another who Elena's
father was. A lessor script might have left it strictly an
emotional decision. The double coincidence that Diego is here with
such a hatred for her father and that Elena so resembles Esperanza
is just too much coincidence. She might not know who her father
is, but logically Esperanza has to be her mother.
The ending of the McCulley's Zorro was never quite satisfying. He
was to become a wealthy landowner and "raise fat children." There
is something satisfying in having Zorro not go gently into that
good night. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable we have