THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
09/05/03 -- Vol. 22, No. 10
Big Cheese: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Little Cheese: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
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Topics:
What Time Is It? (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
GIRL IN HIS POCKET (1957) (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
PICOVERSE by Robert A. Metzger (book review
by Joe Karpierz)
This Week's Reading (INTRODUCING FRACTAL GEOMETRY et al)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: What Time Is It? (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Last week I talked a little about how we all feel we have a right
to know the time. But there are so many people willing to give us
the time and so few that can be trusted. In truth I guess we all
need to know the time, but we vary in our tolerance for inevitable
inaccuracy in the time. Back when electronic watches were first
common (but sense was not) you used to hear a lot of watches beep
on the hour. You could sit in a movie theater and hear the
beeping each hour. They would start about seven minutes before
the hour and would still hear other watches five minutes after the
hour. If someone is inconsiderate enough to let his watch beep in
a movie theater he probably is not considerate enough to be sure
he is broadcasting to the audience members anything like the exact
time.
The world is full of people willing to tell the world the wrong
time. With all this misinformation it is very hard to get the
right time. We see so many new buildings and shopping centers
built with clocks in prominent places. It makes the stores look
good that they are putting up public clocks. After about a year
the poorly maintained clocks start being really inaccurate and
then probably stop altogether. They tell the world that when this
edifice was built somebody thought it was a good idea to tell the
world what time it was, more or less as a public service. Somehow
that commitment did not prove profitable and now the clock has
been left to its fate. That may be for the best. It is better a
clock be wrong by three hours than by fifteen minutes.
My cable company has a viewing guide channel with a clock. They
are generally off by about a hundred seconds. I am sure they are
just running a program on a PC that is not set to the right time.
Clocks in American cars were always terribly inaccurate the whole
time I was growing up. The General Motors designer got too smart
to know he was doing something stupid. The clock was mechanical
but was supposed to be self-adjusting. If you turned it ahead by
five minutes it would recognize it was going slow and would run a
little faster. After a few such adjustments it would be
reasonably close to ticking off exactly 24 hours in 24 hours. You
would be fine until you had to reset the clock for Daylight
Savings Time. Turn the clock back an hour and it got a lot
slower. It took a lot of resetting to undo that damage. I think
it was Japanese cars that introduced electronic clocks in cars
with the accuracy of digital watches. That is one reason why
Japanese cars had an edge with me.
As I have pointed out many times banks want people to think they
are very precise and exacting with numbers, getting everything to
the penny. Yet on their sign out from they will alternate between
a time that is four minutes fast and a temperature that is twelve
degrees too high. It is considered a public service and good for
the business to tell the time and temperature whether they get it
right or not. While I was writing this article I passed a church
with a big clock that constantly read 7:45. I am sure the clock
was put on this church with enough good intentions to pave a road.
Some people intentionally set clocks and other devices to the
wrong time. Spammers love to set their PCs to inaccurate times.
Most people have their email sorted by time and date sent.
Spammers, and by having their PC put the wrong timestamp on their
output, can arrange to have their mail sorted to the top or the
bottom of the stack and thus get special attention.
My mother-in-law always sets her kitchen clock five minutes fast
so as never to be late. But she knows how fast it is running so
she loses the effect. I admit that I am part of the problem. I
intentionally set my VCRs two minutes fast and then program them
to record an extra five minutes. That way there is less chance of
me missing some of the program if it starts a little early.
So while we all think we want to have access to the time, the
requirement for exactness on that time varies a great deal from
person to person. I generally could get by with a quote that is
within a minute of being correct. Still a personal quirk, I want
the time much more precisely than that.
Next week I will give you techniques you can use at home to get
not just accurate time, but REALLY, REALLY accurate time. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: GIRL IN HIS POCKET (1957) (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
GIRL IN HIS POCKET is a breezy sci-fi comedy from Gaumont studios
in France. It was adapted from by the short story "The
Diminishing Draft" by Waldemar Kaempfert, which appeared in "All-
Story Magazine" in 1918. This film was made in 1957 as AMOUR DE
POCHE, directed by later cult director Pierre Kast. But it was
not dubbed into English and released in the United States until
1960 or 1962, depending on the source. Perhaps complicating the
question of when it was released is the fact that it was released
in the United States under two different titles, GIRL IN HIS
POCKET and the more salacious NUDE IN HIS POCKET. It may have
passed for sexy stuff at that time, but this light science fiction
comedy would probably be G-rated today.
Prof. Jerome Nordman (played by Jean Marais) is a scientist and a
college professor. Handsome, he is the heartthrob of all his
female students, but emotionally he is very backward. He plans to
soon marry Edith (Genevieve Page), attractive but manipulative.
She wants him to work for a beverage company, Juvacola, because
that is where the money is. But Jerome is devoted to science. He
is looking for a chemical process to put animals and people into
suspended animation. Unfortunately currently they seem to just
vanish when he administers his formula, N730A.
One of Jerome's students, Monette (Agnes Laurent) convinces him to
let her be his lab assistant. Within minutes she proves her worth
as a lab assistant, shooing away a pesky colleague. Together they
discover that the disappearing test subjects are actually
shrinking to about 1/16th the scale of their original size. But
at first nothing seems to restore them to life and full size.
Eventually they find that the animals have to be dropped in a
large quantity of brine. (It is not clear why.) When an animal
drinks the chemical it turns into a miniature version of itself,
solid as a dehydrated vegetable. Dropping in salt water brings
the animal back to life, healthy, and happy. They have some fun
shrinking/suspending animals and bringing them back to life.
Jerome is finding he likes Monette, but does not want to admit his
attraction to her. Then Edith comes to the lab and accuses Jerome
of having an affair with Monette. To hide, Monette drinks some
N730A. What follows is a farce with Monette changing size
frequently and Edith trying to destroy her. The experience with
Monette teaches Jerome to go after what he wants and make him a
full human being. In specific he wants the pleasant and
intelligent Monette rather than the irritating Edith, no surprise
to the audience.
The film was made, apparently as a B-picture by Gaumont. Perhaps
the only actor familiar to Americans would be the star Jean
Marais. He was the actor with the exaggerated good looks who
played the prince and the beast in Jean Cocteau's BEAUTY AND THE
BEAST, a classic.
One cannot say that the jokes are particularly funny to modern
audiences. Perhaps something was lost in the dubbing. But the
situations are amusing. This film has become obscure, but it has
as much entertainment value as the Cary Grant MONKEY BUSINESS. In
the tradition of the theater, the special effects are really all
in the staging. Metamorphoses take place out of sight of the
viewer. A shrunken and solid dog model will be dropped into a
tub, and then Jerome will pull out a real dog.
BEST TOUCH: While this hardly functions as a science fiction film,
it is a pleasant and light piece of entertainment.
WORST TOUCH: There is a little too much exaggerated farce with
exaggerated caricatures of the behavior of scientists.
This is an amusing light comedy with some of the feel of a Thorne
Smith story. I would rate GIRL IN HIS POCKET a +1 on the -4 to +4
scale. Postscript: The original story has a somewhat darker
ending and has the villain be the wife of the scientist, not a
fiancee. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: PICOVERSE by Robert A. Metzger (copyright 2002, Ace
Hardcover, 389pp, ISBN 0-441-00899-2, $22.95) (book review by Joe
Karpierz)
Mailing lists. We're all on them. We get stuff in the mail
because we're on mailing lists. Most of the time, it's junk mail.
We throw it away, or, if we're good humans, we recycle it. Every
once in a while, we look at it, *then* we throw it away. Even
more rare - we look at it, and act on it.
I received a letter in the mail from Robert A. Metzger. Well, not
a personal letter. It was a glossy flyer describing his novel
Picoverse in such terms as to want to make the reader of the flyer
go out and read his book, preferably buying it first instead of
going to the library to get it.
I bought it. And I liked it, I really did, for about the first,
oh, 90% of it.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Katie and her ex-husband Horst are working on a fusion power
project called the Sonomak. Funding is cut, and the project, and
their lives, face an uncertain future. Among other things to
worry about, Katie and Horst have a son, Anthony, whom Katie is
raising on her own with the help of nannies. And he's going
through those nannies like they're going out of style. He's
gifted - just how much we find out later on.
So, things are in turmoil.
Until Alexandra Mitchell steps in, with her associate Dr. Quinn.
They take over the funding of the Sonomak project, but not for
fusion power, but to open new universes (or would that be
univerii?).
Okay - now we stop for yet another digression.
Most of the SF I read these days tries for intense scientific
accuracy. All the authors give extensive credit to the scientists
that they've gotten help from. Then, of course, they go on to say
that any error was introduced by themselves, and the helpers are
innocent.
Give me errors.
I want some wild extrapolation, some weirdness, some Cosmic Stuff
happening. I want the author to take a chance that his main
premise is full of so much poop that it makes everybody's head
spin, but at least he/she is telling a decent tale. I'm not
saying that what Metzger did was full of so much poop - because I
don't know enough about high energy physics and all that stuff,
but I can say that I don't think we're actually creating universes
*that we can travel to* in the laboratory.
At last, a wild, weird concept in modern SF. Oh, I'm sure there
are others that I don't know about, but there aren't in what I'm
reading these days.
It seems that Alexandra comes from the universe of the Makers, the
folks who made our universe. She wants to make another one to get
out of the reach of the makers. Seems they sent her here to stop
us from making new universes, but her programming was changed, and
now she wants us to do it so she can get away from the Makers.
But of course, that's not all there is to the story, as you might
guess. We do go into a few other universes, one in particular in
which the Russians, with the aid of "our" Alexandria, are the
rulers of the planet. The Alexandria of that planet is actually
married to Albert Einstein, who may or may not be in league with
Heisenberg and Tesla in trying to start *their* Sonomak. But they
need Katie's, Horst's, and Jack's (remember him?) help to do so.
The side note is that Anthony, our Anthony, is helping get the
Sonomak running.
The refreshing thing about this book is that it doesn't seem to
care how many rules it breaks, and how inaccurate the science
might be. It also kills off a character or two, which may or may
not be saying much in that a particular character may be alive in
another of the universes (oh, yeah, picoverse, because they're
smaller than our universe).
I was prepared to give the book a really rave review, but when the
Neanderthals were brought into it, the book dragged. Sawyer does
Neanderthals better than Metzger, and they make more sense when he
uses them. The end is a little weak, in that nothing is ever
decided, it seems, but a lot of books seem to have that kind of
ending these days.
Not a rave review, but overall a good one. I did like the book
overall, I just wished it would have lived up to its potential.
[-jak]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
I just read INTRODUCING FRACTAL GEOMETRY by Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon
and Will Rood, and Ralph Edney. This is part of a series of
introductory books from Totem Publishing which don't have to
appeal to dummies or idiots. :-)
I have read several in the past--INTRODUCING KAFKA by David Zane
Mairowitz and R. Crumb is probably of the most interest to readers
here. But isn't Robert Crumb an artist, you might ask. Yes, and
these books are ... well, if they were fiction, they would be
called graphic novels, but since they're non-fiction, I'm not sure
what to call them. If you are familiar with Scott McCloud's
UNDERSTANDING COMICS, it's in that category, although it does not
use a series of frames per se, but rather a system where the
illustrations occupy a large proportion of the page and are
integral to the content.
(Actually, this is somewhat discussed in the July issue of LOCUS,
which has a special feature section on "Graphic Novels." An
alternative that never caught on was "Drawn Books"; the Comic
Relief store has a section labeled "GNF" for "Graphic Non-
Fiction.")
These latest books seem to have been inspired by a previous
series, "X FOR BEGINNERS." These were less ubiquitous, though
David Brizer and Richard Castaneda's PSYCHIATRY FOR BEGINNERS
(1993) seems to be number 59 in "Beginners Documentary Comic
Books", indicating there were more than a couple of them. I also
have Joseph Schwartz and Michael MacGuinness's EINSTEIN FOR
BEGINNERS from Pantheon Books (1979). But the granddaddy of them
all seems to be CUBA FOR BEGINNERS by "Rius", published in 1970.
The "X FOR BEGINNERS" books frequently have a strong political
point of view.
Just to show the range of this series, other volumes I have
previously read and recommend include INTRODUCING POSTMODERNISM by
Richard Appignanesi (who is also the editor of the entire series)
and Chris Garratt, INTRODUCING SEMIOTICS by Paul Cobley and Litza
Jansz, INTRODUCING HEGEL by Lloyd Spencer and Andrzej Krauze,
INTRODUCING WITTGENSTEIN by John Heaton and Judy Groves,
INTRODUCING KANT by Christopher Want and Andrezey Klimowski,
INTRODUCING MACHIAVELLI by Patrick Curry and Oscar Zarate,
INTRODUCING JOYCE by David Norris and Carl Flint. and INTRODUCING
QUANTUM THEORY by J. P. McEvoy and Oscar Zarate.
Still queued up are a batch I bought recently: INTRODUCING LOGIC
by Dan Cryan and Bill Mayblin, INTRODUCING SHAKESPEARE by Nick
Groom and Piero, INTRODUCING STEPHEN HAWKING by J. P. McEvoy and
Oscar Zarate, and INTRODUCING MODERNISM by Chris Rodrigues and
Chris Garratt. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
This is the way the world is lead to war:
politicians lie to journalists, and believe
those lies when they see them in print.
--Anonymous
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