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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 12/22/00 -- Vol. 19, No. 25
Chair/Librarian: Mark Leeper, 732-817-5619, mleeper@avaya.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper, 732-332-6218, eleeper@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist: Rob Mitchell, robmitchell@avaya.com
HO Chair Emeritus: John Jetzt, jetzt@avaya.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. For those of you who track such things and want to save a little
money on the second most overpriced common stationary item,
calendars, I pass along the following information. The year 2001
is a non-leap-year starting on a Monday. The most recent identical
year was 1990 if you want to recycle an old calendar. If not, you
can, as you can any year, use May of the previous year for January.
Then about mid- to late January you can get a new calendar at a
half or a quarter of what they cost now. (The most overpriced
common stationary item is the greeting card.) [-mrl]
===================================================================
2. On a weekly basis I check out the new entries listed for on-line
books at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/new.html. These
are books that are free for the downloading. Mostly they are older
books whose copyright has run out. Frequently they are books of
some interest to me like the memoirs of Confederate guerrilla John
Singleton Mosby or an account of some explorer. They have some
fantasy like an on-line copy of THE MOON POOL by A. Merritt, for
example. The URLs listed at the end of this article specialize in
fantastical texts available free. In a recent week the new entry
puzzled me. The book was a 1908 short novel THE SMOKY GOD: A
VOYAGE TO THE INNER WORLD. The first thing I thought of was that
was some sort of metaphysical claptrap. Though there was some
chance the title implied that it was an adventure story about going
to some underground civilization. Another of my likes is early
proto-science-fiction. This could be some novel along the lines of
JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. Around the turn of the century
there was an audience for lost race stories. These were adventures
where people set out to explore some mysterious unknown part of the
world and found a lost race of people dating back to the Egyptians
or something similar. Perhaps the best known writer of lost race
stories was H. Rider Haggard, and the best known lost race story
was probably his SHE.
The author of THE SMOKY GOD: A VOYAGE TO THE INNER WORLD was Willis
George Emerson. I looked up the phrase "The Smoky God" and Emerson
in a search engine and found entries that listed him were some sort
of hollow-earth society. That was good news and bad news. It
really did concern some sort of inner world, but it also suggested
the book might be some sort of pseudo-scientific tract that was
intended to be taken seriously. I looked at the page and found
that THE SMOKY GOD was recommended side-by-side with AT THE EARTH'S
CORE by Edgar Rice Burroughs. That was all it took to satisfy me
that it was intended to be in fun and not to convince me of the
society's weird theories. I went to
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=3007 and
downloaded a copy. When I got a copy I looked up THE SMOKY GOD in
Sam Moskowitz's history of early science fiction EXPLORERS OF THE
INFINITE. He missed this one. Even the fairly complete Donald H.
Tuck's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION missed it, but Clute and
Nicholl's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION did list Willis George
Emerson and this book. Emerson apparently mostly wrote Westerns,
and this was his foray into the world of fantasy. It is kind of
fun. Not a full novel, about 18,000 words. It is more a long
story than a novel.
The author claims to have known an old Norwegian sailor Olaf Jensen
who worshipped Norse gods. Jensen claimed there was a world within
our world. On his deathbed Jensen leaves the author a manuscript.
The manuscript turns out to be a memoir of a voyage.
In 1829 during his youth Olaf goes on a fishing expedition with his
father into the frozen north. To their surprise they discover it
is not so frozen. They find an area of warmer fresh water further
north. They decide to follow this water north to the North Pole.
They steer by the pole star. One day they notice a second sun in
the sky, a smoky red ball. They figure it is an optical effect and
it will soon fade.
The red sun gets brighter instead of dimmer and soon it is always
blazing overhead. They find land that looks like Norway and which
they later find out is called Hiddekel. The people are a race of
bearded giants, twelve feet tall.
The cities are lit by something that in his later days Olaf guessed
was electricity. But there is always light from the red sphere in
the sky. The "immutable laws of gravity" keep the glowing red
sphere in place. Olaf sees some futuristic inventions and some
large versions of animals on the surface. I suppose it could be
more imaginative.
He has some further adventures on the trip back to his own world.
It is a long way from deathless prose, but it seems to have been
lost in time. People who like to read the old stuff, the science
fiction that pre-dates even the term "science fiction" my find the
story of more than passing interest.
People interested in finding sites for downloadable fantastic
literature can find it at the following sites:
http://207.55.146.84/sfbooks/index.htm
http://home.swipnet.se/~w-60478/
And online books in general at
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/
[-mrl]
===================================================================
3. THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: The Disney animation factory tells a
story of its own invention set in pre-Columbian
Peru. A selfish young emperor is turned into a
llama. Taken far from his palace he goes on an
odyssey to return to his home and win back his
throne from an evil pretender. The story and
the characters are likable, and for once Disney
is not trying to impress with cutting edge
animation techniques. While is it no BEAUTY
AND THE BEAST, it is both fun and funny with a
couple of good lessons for kids hidden behind
the entertainment. And how many films can you
name set in pre-Columbian Peru? Rating: 6 (0
to 10), +1 (-4 to +4)
What would the holiday season be without a new animated film from
Disney? This outing rather than taking some classic story and
inaccurately making it into a film, they have taken their own story
setting it in Peru vaguely sometime before Columbus came to the New
World. The Emperor Kuzco (voiced by Saturday Night Live veteran
David Spade) has been particularly cruel to a well-meaning lug of a
peasant Pacha (John Goodman). Kuzco may not have a shred of
meanness in his body but the also does not have a scrap of empathy
or kindness. What does have is an ambitious and evil adviser, Yzma
(the great Eartha Kitt). Yzma tries to poison Kuzco in order to
take his place but instead accidentally turns him into a llama and
then loses him. Kuzco find himself alone and friendless except for
the peasant he has mistreated. He finds it a rocky friendship but
one he comes to depend on.
As Disney animated films go this is not the best, but definitely
not the worst. The script does not go into the characters as much
as it might, choosing instead to keep the script denser in humor.
Wait long enough and the relationship between Kuzco and Pacha will
become surprisingly touching. The choice of setting is one that
has rarely been used for film and one that the younger members of
the audience might not immediately recognize or understand. It may
provide a good opportunity for parents to give their children a
history lesson, if indeed the parents understand it themselves. Of
course the history must not be taken too seriously either. The
script mixes its cultures a little too much having in one scene a
Mexican piata party. One of Sting's forgettable songs incorrectly
refers to this part of the world as "Meso-America." John Goodman
is a little large and plump to play an Inca. Incas were probably
short and certainly not heavy. The script manages to avoid having
anything larger than a ladybug die in the course of the story. The
most frightening scenes are not of violence, but of dangers of
falling from great heights. Then again, this is Peru and you
expect great altitudes. The religious right may object to a
usually likable gay character, even if he is the conflicted
henchman of the villain. Those who would ban books like Harry
Potter and THE WIZARD OF OZ may be unhappy that magic has an effect
in this film; though they may take consolation in that it seems
never to be the effect intended.
This film does push what were at least of few years ago limits.
For most of the film Pacha's wife is noticeably pregnant. And in
spite of the fact she seems content to be what we would call "a
housewife," she proves herself more than match for some powerful
baddies. Most of Disney's best villains have been women so they
have never held back from allowing women to be villains, though
usually they are uglier and older women and this film is not really
an exception. The corpulent hero is, however, something of a
change for Disney.
For once the animation techniques do not run away with the show.
There are no scenes that are anywhere near a breath-taking as the
opening of THE LION KING. Most of the animation seems fairly flat
and old-fashioned. This is Mark Dindal's second outing as
director. His previous effort was CATS DON'T DANCE for Turner
Broadcasting. He did previously direct for Disney the animation
sequences for the under-rated THE ROCKETEER. The music is by John
Debney and David Hartley. Sting wrote the songs and is apparently
unhappy that some of his songs were dropped. He might have a
point. The songs dropped could easily have been better than the
boring place-holder songs that were not dropped. At least I think
they were boring place-holder songs, admittedly not much about the
songs comes to my mind at the moment. When Disney Studios said
that they mourned the loss of Alan Menken, it was with only the
best of reasons.
As animated films go, this one is above average, but it will
probably not be a Disney classic. I give it a 6 on the 0 to 10
scale and a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
===================================================================
4. CALCULATING GOD, by Robert J. Sawyer (Tor 2000, Hardcover,
$23.95, 334pp, ISBN 0-312-86713-1) (a book review by Joe Karpierz):
My first exposure to CALCULATING GOD came at a teeny tiny regional
convention in Columbus, Ohio in October of 1999 called Context. My
wife and I had used the weekend as a short getaway without the kids
for a few days, with the main attraction being Rob Sawyer as Guest
of Honor. He read the first chapter to a small group of us on
Saturday afternoon, I believe. My wife and I were both taken by
the story immediately, and we discussed later that day how we
couldn't wait for the novel to be published. That first chapter
was witty, engaging, and interesting.
The story starts with an alien ship landing just outside the Royal
Ontario Museum in Toronto, and its inhabitant, a spider-shaped
critter, walks in to the museum and asks to see a paleontologist
(As an example of the humor and wit evident here, later on the
alien is told that he should be asking to be taken to our leader,
because, after all, that's how it's done. The alien, Hollus,
replies that he thinks he has rather more experience in these
matters than the earthers do.). The upshot is that Hollus wants to
look at some of our fossils and the like in order to help prove
that God exists. Well, the aliens believe, you see, that God
definitely exists--science has proven it. It seems that the
universe is the way it is due to the design of some intelligence
who has created it just so, and has been nursing it along to the
stage it is today. For example, Earth, the planet of the
Forhilnors (Hollus' race), and the planet of the Wreeds (another
race of beings along for the ride in Hollus' parent craft) have all
experienced mass extinctions at exactly the same time in history,
the most recent being 65 million years ago. Obviously, that can be
considered a coincidence. But Hollus has what he (eventually we
find out he is a she) claims is overwhelming evidence for God,
including, if I remember correctly, something to do with the Grand
Unification Theory, and similar DNA among the three races.
Our human paleontologist, Dr. Thomas Jericho, doesn't believe in
God. Furthermore, as with protagonists in other Sawyer novels,
Jericho is saddled with a deadly disease, in this case lung cancer,
contracted from all the stuff he's been breathing over the years
he's been a paleontologist. Jericho is married, and has an adopted
son. The combination of the aliens' belief that God exists (the
Wreeds claim there is evidence to prove it as well), his family,
and his cancer, eventually cause Jericho to wrestle with his
beliefs (or lack thereof), as we might expect.
This novel is pretty much what I've come to expect from Sawyer:
it's got more ideas than it has room for (not necessarily a bad
thing), it's not the kind of book that makes you work at reading
it, and it's fairly fast paced. All of these are good things, I
think. In comparison to his other novels, I think it most closely
compares to ILLEGAL ALIEN. Indeed, like that novel, it seems ripe
for a Hollywood treatment (I do believe I read somewhere that
someone, maybe even Sawyer himself, was working on the screenplay
for ILLEGAL ALIEN, but don't hold me to that one.). If it has a
downside, I would say that I would have liked it to pursue the God
idea a whole lot more than it did. There is some discussion about
the nature of God, but it's not until very late in the novel that
we encounter a being that just may be God.
CALCULATING GOD is a novel that raises a good deal of questions
about the relationship between God and science, and makes us think
about things we may normally not want to think about. Whether or
not you're a believer in some Higher Being, I think you'll find
this novel thought-provoking. [-jak]
Mark Leeper
HO 1K-644 732-817-5619
mleeper@avaya.com
The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing
opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things
other people think about us. -- Quentin Crisp