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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 07/21/00 -- Vol. 19, No. 3
Chair/Librarian: Mark Leeper, 732-817-5619, mleeper@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper, 732-332-6218, eleeper@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist: Rob Mitchell, robmitchell@lucent.com
HO Chair Emeritus: John Jetzt, jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian Emeritus: Nick Sauer, njs@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
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 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. Last week we were talking about people who are very adventurous
around new foods in restaurants, I am calling them accepters, and
some who are not, rejecters.
A distinction should be drawn between rejection for aesthetic
reasons and rejection for ethical reasons. In Belgium I relished
an opportunity to eat horse steak and actually found it quite
enjoyable. On the other hand I probably would balk at going to
China and eating dog. The eating of insects I probably would
reject for aesthetic reasons. The presence of insects is for most
American a real rejecter. Most of us do not like to think about
when we drink orange juice some tiny percentage of what are
consuming is almost inevitably insect parts. Most Americans have a
strong aversion to insects when it comes to anything dealing with
diets. If ants have so much as walked on a cracker most Americans
will reject it, yet somehow honey which is actually produced in the
mouths of insects is considered an acceptable food product. In
this article I am not talking about ethical (or even sanitary)
rejection.
I find that the US has a large number of people who are accepters.
At least in the spectrum of accepting and rejecting they are out
toward the accepting edge. Acceptors tend to be a low percentage
of our society, but probably are actually higher than other
cultures.
In some ways for me cuisine is something I can share with a foreign
culture. I may not walk a mile in their boots, but I can make of
meal of their dish. One of the reasons I anxiously visited
Thailand was to share the cuisine. It is for me unthinkable to
visit a country and not participate in the cuisine. This is less
true among food rejecters. In the early eighties when I visited
China it was in a tour group that was in large part retirees. One
woman had brought with her a suitcase of snack crackers and instant
soup. Several of the people on the trip discovered glumly that
they would be eating Chinese food for several weeks. This is not
the Chinese food that we have in restaurants. The Chinese economy
did not have the distribution of spices that would require. It was
a poor cousin cuisine that the Chinese Communist economy could
support. On this trip some people who were rejecters were forced
to eat the local Chinese cuisine and discovered quite to their
surprise that they enjoyed it. Certainly cuisine is for me a non-
threatening part of a foreign culture. It is something I can share
with the locals.
I would be curious to know how long it was after Chinese were
brought to this country for menial tasks before native-born
Americans were sampling the Chinese food. I was rather surprised
to discover near Monument Valley Utah restaurants selling Navajo
cuisine. They were fairly rare and hard to find. A dish they
called Navajo Taco. It was much like a large Mexican Taco but that
it had fried bread rather than fried tortilla. Perhaps the cuisine
is a little too close to Mexican to take off on its own. Still it
would be nice if American Indian cuisine would be "discovered."
Few people in this country are more deserving of a financial
success.
Next week we will extend restaurantology and this question of
accepters and rejecters to restaurant franchises. [-mrl]
===================================================================
2. A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY by Vernor Vinge (1999 Tor, Science Fiction
Book Club edition, 606pp, ISBN 0-312-85683-0) (a book review by Joe
Karpierz):
Vernor Vinge's last novel, A FIRE UPON THE DEEP, was the co-Hugo
winner in 1993 with Connie Willis's DOOMSDAY BOOK. His current
novel, A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY, while not as good as the last, is
quite enthralling, and the best of the Hugo nominees that I have
read.
DEEPNESS is a prequel of sorts to A FIRE UPON THE DEEP, mostly in
that it takes place 30,000 years prior to FIRE in the same
universe. It also has at least one character in common, that being
Pham Nuwen (I had to skim through FIRE to find that--after all, I
hadn't read FIRE in seven years). The Qeng Ho are Traders, and
they are mounting an expedition to the OnOff star, a star that is
dark for 200 years in a 230-year cycle. The inhabitants of the
planet Arachna, the Spiders, sleep underground in Deepnesses during
the Dark, when all the atmosphere freezes and the planet's surface
is unlivable. The Qeng Ho think that the Spiders are not native to
Arachna, that they are descendents of some ancient star-faring
race. They think that the Spiders have forgotten their heritage,
and the Qeng Ho want to find evidence of those ancestors, thinking
that there may be technological treasures beyond their wildest
dreams awaiting them.
However, there is another faction also coming to the OnOff star at
the same time--the Emergents. They are looking for the same thing,
only they are a bit nastier about their means. The Qeng Ho and
Emergents arrive at the OnOff star at the same time, and strike a
deal to cooperate to mine the planet for its secrets. However, the
Emergents are a little less scrupulous than the Qeng Ho, and ambush
the Traders. The Qeng Ho fight back, and mutual annihilation is
almost the result. Tomas Nau, the leader of the Emergents, forges
what looks like a cooperative effort to survive and still get the
treasure, but in reality things are much worse than that. The
Emergents have Focus, a drug that causes the infected person, the
"Focused," to do just that: Focus in on his or her area of
expertise to the exclusion of all else. Focused people are needed
in preparation for meeting the Spiders. For example, there is a
need to understand how the Spiders communicate, so anyone with
Translator skills is Focused to work on that only.
The Spiders have a rich culture. Every thirty years they prepare
for the Dark, and after the Dark they rebuild their civilization.
By the mores of the culture, children are only born near the end of
a Brightness. Any thing else is considered a perversion. However,
their technology is not as advanced as the humans. The Brightness
period that takes place during the time of the novel is supposed to
be one of great advancement.
The novel is blessed with a wealth of interesting characters, both
human and Spider. Up in orbit around Arachna, Emergents Tomas Nau
and Ritser Brughel make for contrasting and yet evil villains, and
the Focused Anne Reynolt carries a secret within her that drives
her non-Focused ambitions. Qeng Ho Ezr Vinh and Pham Nuwen work
behind the scenes to free everyone from the Emergents and Focused
slavery. Ezr Vinh's love for Focused Trixia Bonsol is Focused in
its own way. Qiwi Lin Lisolet is the young Qeng Ho girl suckered
in by smooth talking Tomas Nau. On the Spider side of the story,
Sherkaner Underhill is the crazed genius who comes up with the idea
to end the current war on Arachna by staying awake through the Dark
to attack the enemy's camp and destroy it. Victory Smith is the
military leader whom he marries, and together their strengths lead
the Spiders through the most volatile and technological advanced
Brightness ever seen. Their offspring, intentionally bred as
perversions by their parents, are charming and add to the story in
their own, surprising way.
This is a hugely rich story. There are no lulls in the story
anywhere that I can tell. There is a lot going on all the time,
and I was never bored. This is a hard science space opera with
plenty of techie, cool things to keep any science nut happy. So,
what's my only beef? Welllllllll, only a minor point that I have
with just about any SF book these days. The sense of wonder that I
got with A FIRE UPON THE DEEP is not here in this book. So, that's
why it's a minor point; I just don't get that sense of wonder much
any more. I think the last time I got it was in THE TIME SHIPS,
the sequel to THE TIME MACHINE that Stephen Baxter wrote a few
years ago.
So, this is a very good book, and gets my number one vote for this
year's Hugo Award for Best Novel of 1999.
And for the reader who is saying, "But what about Neal Stephenson's
CRYPTONOMICON?" Well, I have to be honest--I've never read a Neal
Stephenson book that I liked. I have little enough time in my life
as it is without reading a massive novel that I'm predisposed to
dislike. I know that's not fair, but that's the way it goes. I'm
not reading it, I'm not reviewing it, and I'm not giving it a vote
on the Hugo Ballot this year. That's my story, and I'm sticking by
it.
'Til later.... [-jak]
Mark Leeper
HO 1K-644 732-817-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.
-- Laurence J. Peter