THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
07/16/04 -- Vol. 22, No. 3
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
unless otherwise noted.
To subscribe, send mail to mtvoid-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
To unsubscribe, send mail to mtvoid-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
Topics:
The Loss of Innocence (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Those Phony Handwritten Fonts (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (Retro hugo nominees for novelette
and short story) (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: The Loss of Innocence (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I was reading about the 1950s quiz show scandals. The writer said
that this incident was when America lost its innocence. Of
course, it was when American doughboys went to World War I was
when America lost its innocence. Ken Burns assures me that the
so-called 1919 Black Sox Scandal was when America lost its
innocence. When Pearl Harbor was hit America lost its
innocence. I also hear that America lost its innocence when it
heard that United States soldiers were abusing prisoners at Abu
Ghraib. Of course America had already lost its innocence on
9/11. I guess innocence has got to be hands down our most
renewable resource. Lost it and it grows right back. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Those Phony Handwritten Fonts (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I got an appeal for money from an organization with whose goals I
agree. I won't say for certain that I would have contributed to
this appeal, but I might have. On it was what appeared at first
look to be a handwritten note to me explaining the virtues of
their program. I took a closer look at the note and discovered
what I had already suspected. Every "a" looked exactly like every
other "a". Every "b" was identical to every other "b". And so
forth. Every letter of a certain type was identical to every
other of the same type--upper and lower case. If one sighted down
the rows the bases of the letters were as straight as arrows.
Well, it is obvious what was going on. One of the inventions of
the computer age is the personalized printer font. All one needs
to do is fill out a sample card and write out the twenty-six
letters in lower case and the twenty-six letters in upper case.
There may be a few more symbols you also fill in. A computer then
scans in the letters and voila!, you have created your own
personal computer font that looks to be somewhat like your own
handwriting. You can then read this font into a program like
Microsoft Word and it will write out what you type in a font that
looks superficially as if you had written it. At least each "a"
looks like an "a" you might have written. But, of course, the
program that uses this only knows one way to make a lower case
"a". A smarter program might be able to vary it, but that smarter
program is not yet much used if it exists. The illusion that you
have hand written the output is a poor and unconvincing one. The
note fools the eye for only an instant of time. One quickly
notices the truth of the situation. Then whatever else the note
may say it bears a message that the writer went to a great deal of
effort to pull off a little deception on you, the reader.
How do you react to a small cheat from someone you trusted a
moment before? The author wanted to convince you that he or she
has personally handwritten this note, but, in fact, had done no
such thing. It is much the same as if you had been playing cards
with an old friend and just for an instant noticed that that
friend had dealt to himself off the bottom of the deck. Well, it
indicates that regardless of what you felt the relationship was,
the old friend was willing and happy to mortgage that good feeling
for a tiny advantage. I don't think that it would ruin a strong
relationship, but particularly if this had been a trusting
relationship in the past it can never be the same again. The
person who wrote the note really did feel that it was worth the
risk to try to deceive the reader.
Now why would someone use one of these fonts? Well for years
people who do mass mailings--advertisements, charities, political
appeals, etc.--have looked for a way to mass-produce mail, but
make it look like each piece had personal attention lavished upon
it. It calls attention to a particular appeal if it looks like a
human at the other end really thought about you and had sent you
your own piece of mail. The illusion they want to create is that
you are one of their most important contributors and without your
help their cause is lost. But they still want to use the
intelligence of a computer to mass-produce that illusion. They
want to rubber stamp personal attention.
We all have received form letters that have our own names as part
of the message. My mailbox is full of pieces of spam mail that
refer to me by name. But it is nearly always obvious that some
machine took our names from a list. Sometimes the results are
comical, since a program probably cannot use the judgment that a
human would give. I remember hearing a news story that the Church
of Christ somewhere received a piece of mail that asked "Dear
Mr. Christ, are you stuck in a low-paying, dead-end job?" (I am
also reminded that at one point to get the advantages of an
unlisted phone number free I put my telephone in the name of my
dachshund, Sam Arnsheim. I got a phone call from someone wanting
to sell Sam Arnsheim dancing lessons and claiming that a friend of
his suggested he would be interested in some dance lessons. The
image of my dachshund dancing has always stuck with me.)
Most charities and appeals seem to have (at least) two lists of
leads. There is the intelligent list and the sucker list. I
think I discovered this with a certain well-known anti-racist
organization in the American Southeast. They used to send me what
looked like personalized photographs of lynchings of blacks, made
to look like they had been taken with an old brownie camera with a
printed note made to look handwritten. Similarly they would send
what looked like handwritten notes on yellow lined school tablet
paper thanking me for my contribution. But it clearly was a
printed note and they would forget details like putting the
perforation at the top of the page. I sent them mail pointing out
that I agreed with their goals but that an appeal based on this
sort of deception is a mistake. Apparently they knew what I was
talking about and while I still got mail from them, it was on a
higher level. The grandstanding deceptions stopped immediately,
never to return.
So to return to the case I started from, I wrote a note to the
woman who had sent me the "handwritten" appeal pointing out that
that it was foolish of her to alienate contributors by including
what they could easily tell was an ersatz handwritten note. She
responded, as I might have expected, suggesting I had questioned
the value of her cause (which I had not) and the economies of
computer generation (which I had not). If anything what I was
questioning was the expense of creating a computer font whose sole
purpose was to deceive the very contributors she was dependent
upon.
This leaves me (and perhaps you) with a dilemma. I can be
sympathetic to a particular cause, but still be unhappy about the
tactics of the people collecting for the cause. This is not as
serious as catching them siphoning off funds. It is jut a small
deception on their part. On one hand you may not want to abandon
the cause. But on the other hand do you really want to reinforce
the behavior by giving funds to people who have already used your
money to deceive you? (Of course, I mean other than the
government, who frequently use your own money deceive you. You
have no choice there.) I don't have an easy answer. Perhaps the
best thing to do is simply ask to be taken off the appeal's
mailing list and have your computer remind you annually to
contribute. That is using a computer for a good and charitable
and non-deceptive purpose. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
One thing about the writing in 1953--they *loved* tobacco. I
suspect at the time no one noticed how often it showed up, but
fifty years later in a world of no-smoking buildings and so on,
it's glaring. So as I was reading the Retro Hugo nominees, I
started keeping track:
- Isaac Asimov's CAVES OF STEEL (pipe)
- Ray Bradbury's FAHRENHEIT 451 (none noticed)
- Arthur C. Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END (cigarettes)
- Hal Clement's MISSION OF GRAVITY (none)
- Theodore Sturgeon's MORE THAN HUMAN (none noticed)
- "Three Hearts and Three Lions", Poul Anderson (pipe)
- "...And My Fear Is Great", Theodore Sturgeon (none)
- "A Case of Conscience", James Blish (none)
- "The Rose", Charles L. Harness (cigar)
- "Un-Man", Poul Anderson (cigars and cigarettes)
- "Sam Hall", Poul Anderson (cigarettes)
- "The Adventure of the Misplaced Hound", Poul Anderson and
Gordon R. Dickson (pipe)
- "Earthman, Come Home", James Blish (cigar)
- "The Wall Around the World", Theodore Cogwell (pipe)
- "Second Variety", Philip K. Dick (cigarette)
- "Star Light, Star Bright", Alfred Bester (none, but then it's
mostly about children)
- "It's a Good Life", Jerome Bixby (pipe)
- "The Nine Billion Names of God", Arthur C. Clarke (cigar)
- "Seventh Victim", Robert Sheckley (cigarette)
- "A Saucer of Loneliness", Theodore Sturgeon (none)
The lack of smoking in MISSION OF GRAVITY might be partially due
to the nature of the setting, where fires of any sort are very
iffy.
As I noted two weeks ago, I found myself asking whether tobacco was
anachronistic in "Three Hearts and Three Lions". But I discovered
that the first literary mention of tobacco was in Edmund Spenser's
"The Faerie Queen" in the late 16th century, so I guess Anderson
is allowed to include it on the basis of established usage.
Of course, this is all incidental to whether the stories are good.
But I have to add that while some editors and publishers want to
take out all references to smoking when they re-issue earlier
works, I think that is a mistake, because it presents a false
picture of what the mindset was at that time.
I already talked about the novellas a few weeks ago. So now
first, the novelettes. My choice for the Hugo is "The Wall Around
the World" by Theodore Cogswell. Oddly enough, this seems like it
would be a fine companion piece for the "Harry Potter" books, with
its "scientific" approach to magic. I also liked Philip K. Dick's
"Second Variety", though either I remembered it or the ending was
obvious. Still, the discussion of war and its methods was what
the story was really about.
Poul Anderson's "Sam Hall" was okay but seemed like typical
conservative/libertarian preaching. (I know that "conservative"
and "libertarian" seem like opposites, but in many ways they are
not.) It wasn't helped, of course, by Anderson's introduction (in
THE BEST OF POUL ANDERSON) in which he explains how the McCarthy
era wasn't really that bad and the only people complaining were
very vocal in their complaints that they couldn't complain and
they were probably Commie liberals anyway.
On the other hand, James Blish's "Earthman, Come Home" suffered by
being a part of a larger cycle--it ended up as the last two
chapters of the last book of CITIES IN FLIGHT. Since I was not
familiar with what led up to it, I found it flat. (I still think,
though, that the scene in DARK CITY when the city is revealed is
the ultimate Blishian moment.) And while I'm a Sherlock Holmes
fan, I found "The Adventure of the Misplaced Hound" by Poul
Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson just too fluffy for an award.
The short stories were all of high-quality, and all award-worthy,
but I would pick "It's a *Good* Life" by Jerome Bixby, and not
just because it was made into a "Twilight Zone" story. It is a
very effective horror piece on its own.
Some people think "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C.
Clarke is too thin a story, but the concept is interesting and the
ending perfect.
"Star Light, Star Bright" by Alfred Bester is a classic tale of
mutants. Robert Sheckley's "Seventh Victim" (made into the film
TENTH VICTIM perhaps because there was already a different film
called SEVENTH VICTIM) was also somewhat predictable, and the game
doesn't bear close examination (in particular the "bootstrapping"
process of how it got started), but the world Sheckley describes
seems at least reasonably well imagined. And while I can
appreciate that "A Saucer of Loneliness" by Theodore Sturgeon is
quality writing, I found it the least engaging of the short
stories. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton
was the one who asked why.
--Bernard M. Baruch
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar.
Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/J.MolB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mtvoid/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
mtvoid-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/