--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
07/09/04 -- Vol. 22, No. 2
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
All comments sent will be assumed authorized for inclusion
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Topics:
An Induction Cooker (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Comments on I, ROBOT and Harlan Ellison's Script
(comments by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (Hugo-nominated novelettes and
short stories) (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: An Induction Cooker (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The store had something called an "induction cooker." I told
Evelyn that it was a cook stove that came with a starter and a
guarantee that if it heated for n minutes, it will heat for n+1
minutes. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Comments on I, ROBOT and Harlan Ellison's Script (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
Last week I was talking about robot stories and about adaptations
of Asimov's I, ROBOT. Of course, the three laws are:
1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction,
allow a human being to come to harm.
2) A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where
such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such
protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
And what are we really talking about here with the three laws? It
is not really about robots. It is anachronistically about what
makes for the ideal human slave. Robots are really just machines
that are slave-surrogates. A machine is a slave that is totally
selfless and does not object to being a slave or object to
anything else for that matter. (Of course, you can posit the
possibility of giving them emotions and then having to respect
those emotions. What you have then is A.I.: ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE.) Robots are mechanical slaves. Slavery is, of
course, a very great immorality when we talk about human
slaves. But suppose it wasn't. Enslaving a machine is not, after
all, immoral. I remember waking up one morning and as I walked
in the kitchen at 5 AM I heard my bread machine kneading dough for
fresh bread for my breakfast. That was the sort of thing that the
slave-owners wanted, except when they wanted it, a human had to
get up at 4:30 to do it. It isn't the slavery that is immoral, it
is enslaving a human or animal that objects.
So when we discuss robots we can talk about what we would want in
an ideal slave without feeling racist. In fact, hatred of or
prejudice against the computer and the robot is the current
acceptable form of racism. The plantation owners, if they had an
unsuccessful year could tell their friends that it was the fault
of the slaves. "You just can't get good slaves these days." That
attitude is still with us, but it is in blaming things on the
computer. We see banks claim that their computer made a mistake.
That can happen, of course, but it is very, very rare. And most
educated people seem to know it. But banks feel just fine blaming
their problems on their computer. I just heard a waiter tell a
complaining customer that the computer spit out the wrong order
for this person.
Asimov's stories are partially about what makes a perfect slave
and also about human racism against robots. I guess the point
there is that hatred actually hurts the racist, because it cannot
hurt a machine. Also the stories are also about program
debugging. Several of the Asimov stories are about debugging
computer software. The problems one sees debugging a program are
typically what you see in Asimov's stories. It is a task that
many of us did for a living, but Asimov is making computer
software a romantic (or at least science fictional) profession.
Typically a story is that a robot's program is making it do
something unexpected. An investigator goes in to see why this
particular behavior is just what the programming is telling the
robot to do. Someone studies the software and figures out why it
is giving rise to this unexpected behavior. I have done the same
sort of work myself. It is a tribute to the genius of Asimov that
he could take a story about the dull profession of debugging
software and make it even marginally intriguing.
I guess I find it interesting, though not unexpected, that the
upcoming film is not being made from the famous Harlan Ellison
script. His script for I, ROBOT has been a sort of cause celebre
in science fiction fandom. His publisher gives it the nickname
"the greatest science fiction film never made." (A phrase that
sounds suspiciously like one Harlan would have modestly authored
himself.) I have read the screenplay and do not find it
particularly impressive. He took a handful of the Asimov stories
and retold each of them, using a framing sequence that is a
variant on a story Rod Serling did on "Twilight Zone." (Being
fair, a lot of stories from different authors seem to borrow ideas
from "Twilight Zone". It may have been done earlier than
"Twilight Zone", for all I know. I will tell which story on
request, but I will not spoil the Ellison screenplay here.)
Digressing a bit, I must say that Harlan Ellison may be a good
writer, but every time I try to read him he writes about an image
he describes such as someone pouring Drano down somebody else's
throat. At that point I decide I have better things I could be
reading.
I will give an example. In the original Asimov I, ROBOT story
"Liar!", the robot Herbie, faced with a dilemma
uncharacteristically screamed. Asimov describes it, "It was like
a piccolo many times magnified--shrill and shriller till it keened
with the terror of a lost soul and filled the room with the
piercingness of itself." That is fairly strong language for
Asimov. But Ellison's description of the same scene in his film
script is "And Herbie screams! A sound we've never heard on this
Earth before. A SOUND THAT CHILLS US, that contains in it all the
pain of inarticulate creatures senselessly murdered, small things
crushed underfoot, seals bashed with ball bats, whales punctured
by exploding harpoons, cows having their throats slit, millions
going to the furnaces, memories of the rack and the boot and the
Inquisition. A SOUND OF HORROR and ABOLSUTE UTTER AGONY!" Jeez,
pity the soundman who would be told to create it somehow. In the
story, robot psychologist Susan Calvin looks at the malfunctioning
Herbie and in frustration just says the accusing word "Liar!"
Ellison has her kicking the head of the robot (!) and then crying
"Liar... liar... liar... liar..." and then we hear the word
repeated in an echo chamber. Wow! What writing! I doubt that
Asimov would recognize this Susan Calvin.
Ellison's writing is, I guess, an acquired taste. I admit I have
not acquired it. In fact, I can tolerate his writing style for
about as long as a robin can survive after it has accidentally
landed on a needle stuck in the ground that has pierced into its
stomach and the robin is now flying its last mournful flight as it
internally bleeds to a painful death. When I have to read one of
his stories I quietly whimper to myself like a formerly-loved pet
dog who has been left tied to a tree, who is now seeing the sun
going down, who cannot free himself to get food, who knows now
that he must slowly and painfully die a lonely death for the
simple crime of becoming inconvenient.
I may be the one voice saying this, but I don't think Ellison's I,
ROBOT script would make a very good film. In any case Ellison
need not feel alone in that his script did not sell. There are
lots of better scripts that never became movies. His may or may
not be better than the I, ROBOT script that did sell, but it would
not have made a very good movie to at least match his script.
Still, when his fans first heard that I, ROBOT was to be made into
a movie, the first question that was asked was would it be the
Ellison script. He has a marvelous talent for rabble-rousing and
getting other people to be indignant over so-called injustices to
Ellison. I am told he suggests in the introduction to the book
publication of the screenplay that the reader should write to
Warner Brothers and tell them that they should be making a film of
his script. However, they may be disinclined to deal with Ellison,
perhaps in part because he told the head of the studio that he
(the executive) had "the intellectual capacity of an artichoke."
On the subject of Ellison, he is famous for finding innovative
ways to be inconsiderate and/or selfish for his own profit. He
edited an anthology to be called LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS and then
put it away for decades, it has been suggested until it increases
sufficiently in value. It by then it will not do much good for
its authors, some of whom are already deceased. So there are a
bunch of fans out there angry that Ellison's script is not the one
that is used and by a strange coincidence they mostly have picked
up on this phrase that it is "the best science fiction film never
made." It is almost an iron-clad cinch that when the film comes
out either Ellison or some of his fans will be indignant that
they made this poor film when they could have filmed Harlan
Ellison's script. But Ellison has another chance. He can always
adapt Asimov's "Foundation" books. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Moving right along, the Hugo-nominated novelettes and short
stories:
On the whole, I was disappointed in the novelettes; I ranked only
two of the six nominees above "no award". The best of the six was
"The Empire of Ice Cream" by Jeffrey Ford, about a man with
synesthaesia (as in the punch line of "The Man with English",the
classic science fiction story by Horace L. Gold: "What smells
purple?"). There seems to be an increase in the number of stories
about diseases, or more specifically, mental conditions.
Recently, for example, there has been Elizabeth Moon's THE SPEED
OF DARK and Mark Haddon's THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE
NIGHT-TIME about autism, and now this. And, yes, this is in fact
science fiction, although that doesn't become obvious until the
end.
"Hexagons" by Robert Reed is an alternate history set in "New
Rome" and suffers only from having too much of a similarity to our
own world in setting and in some of the characters. (Robert
Silverberg gets this right in his "Roma Eterna" stories, by the
way.) This is probably why "Hexagons" didn't make the short list
of finalists for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, but I
still like it quite a bit.
And then we have the rest: "Legions in Time" by Michael Swanwick
(a time travel story without much point that I could see),
"Bernardo's House" by James Patrick Kelly (about an intelligent
house), "Nightfall" by Charles Stross (whose work I have always
found hard to read, and this was no exception), and "Into the
Gardens of Sweet Night" by Jay Lake (which, if anything, was less
comprehensible to me than the Stross). None of these seemed of
Hugo quality, and a couple I couldn't even manage to finish.
The short stories are more to my tastes--I voted only two of them
below "no award".
With "A Study in Emerald", Neil Gaiman looks likely to make it
three years in a row as a Hugo winner. Yes, I like Sherlock
Holmes, but most Holmes stories these days are pale imitations of
the Doyle. Gaiman's is new and fresh and different, and not just
because it includes Lovecraft's "Old Ones" (though of course that
helps). And this is an alternate history as well, in which the
Old Ones rule England (shades of Kim Newman!). This story is so
far ahead of the others that I recommend it even more strongly
than usual.
"Four Short Novels" by Joe Haldeman is really four connected riffs
on immortality, each linked with a classic title from literature.
(I have forgiven F&SF for describing this in the previous issue as
being "four short novels by Joe Haldeman", implying a rather
thicker issue than either usual or delivered.) You could think of
them as short-shorts, but they do relate to each other such that
the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
I agree with others that "Robots Don't Cry" by Mike Resnick verges
on the overly sentimental, but Resnick manages to carry it off.
"The Tale of the Golden Eagle" by David D. Levine (about a brain
in a spaceship) is another story that left me cold. (Reviewers
have compared both this and Jay Lakes's "Into the Gardens of Sweet
Night" to Cordwainer Smith's writing. I don't particularly like
Smith's writing, so I guess it's no surprise I didn't like these
two stories either.)
And "Paying it Forward" by Michael A. Burstein doesn't just verge
on the overly sentimental; it crosses the line. A touching tale
of a budding author who gets advice from the spirit of a well-
established, but recently deceased, author via the Internet, it
seems designed to appeal to writers more than the general
audience, and to some extent plays on the feeling of loss we have
for dead authors.
So there you have it--a few good stories (especially the Gaiman),
but on the whole, for me, a disappointing selection. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Take care of the luxuries and the necessities
will take care of themselves.
--Dorothy Parker
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