THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
08/13/04 -- Vol. 23, No. 7
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
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Topics:
Chain of Fools (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
MORE THAN HUMAN by Theodore Sturgeon (book review by
Joe Karpierz)
COLLATERAL (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL, THE FATE OF HUMAN SOCIETIES
by Jared Diamond (book review by Pete Brady)
This Week's Reading (REBEL, BLOOD LINES, and THE ANUBIS
GATES) (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Chain of Fools (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
My sister sent me a joke about chain letters and I thought that it
might be time to recycle a couple I wrote, one seventeen years
ago, one from six years ago. Maybe they will make some lighter
reading.
THE SHORTER ITS LEGS, THE HIGHER IT FLIES
This message has been sent to you because you are a bozo and need
the luck it brings. Do not keep this letter. Make 43 copies and
send them to 43 people who are also bozos. Eventually this letter
will find its way to every bozo in the world. Won't that be
something!
This is the only true chain letter and it has brought luck to
millions. Unlike most chain letters, this one will list real case
histories of recipients whose names you will recognize and can
verify if you want. When they received the letter it was just as
you see it now and they were no doubt astounded to see their names
already on it.
Mickey Mouse received the letter and decided not to pass it on.
That afternoon he went to a picnic and it rained! When he got
home he sent out his 43 copies and the next day Morty came home
with a B+ in spelling.
Batman received the letter and lost it somewhere in the bowels of
the Batcave. Two days later the Riddler was released from prison
and started a crime wave in Gotham City.
Wiley Coyote ignored the letter and the Road Runner tricked him
into running off the edge of a 400 foot cliff. Coyote was in
itchy plaster casts for the next SIX scenes!
Beaver Cleaver got the letter but lost it spying on Wally, Eddie
Haskell, and Lumpy Rutheford. On the way home Beaver fell in
newly laid cement and ruined his new pants.
Donald Duck got the letter and sent out 43 copies. That afternoon
he got some voice improvement pills that made him sound like
Ronald Coleman. But the next day Mr. Mailman brought all 43
letters back and said Donald had forgotten to put stamps on them.
Donald used his new- found voice to chew out Mr. Mailman, but just
then the pills gave out and in a frenzy of duck yelling he ripped
up the letters. Two days later Uncle Scrooge gave all his money
to Oral Roberts.
The FBI is still investigating a torn-up copy of this letter found
by a waiter cleaning up Jimmy Hoffa's table setting that last day.
Don't risk it. Surely you run into more than 43 bozos EVERY DAY!
I know I do. How about the one who took up two parking spaces so
nobody would park near his fancy new car? I am sure he can use
this letter. Why not leave it under his wiper for him? And to be
sure it doesn't blow away why not epoxy it to his windshield? You
must know hundreds of bozos you could give it to, but limit
yourself to 43. Otherwise there could be a serious shortage of
bozos who haven't gotten it.
In 1998 I suggested to readers that when they get chain letters
they should return the dubious favor:
Dear Sir or Madam,
I recently received a chain letter from you with a puerile, feel-
good proto-prayer expressed as an incoherent thought surrogate. I
am so pleased that you thought of me, and I hope you are not
overly concerned about your possible upcoming martyrdom for your
fatuous beliefs. Let me explain in some detail what I mean. The
following facts have come to my attention.
-- Rudolf Hotze was on Death Row for the brutal dismemberment
murder and robbery of Robert Rowland. In what was to be his last
mail delivery he received a chain letter with some sentimental
claptrap. He made up copies and was about to send me one, when
decided it was not worth it. HE CHOSE NOT TO SEND ME A CHAIN
LETTER. Two hours later his execution was commuted to a prison
term. Last week due to DNA evidence he was released and now has a
lucrative job.
-- Carol Johnson, got a chain letter in the mail and immediately
thought of me. She made up a copy and crossed the street to MAIL
ME THE COPY. She was so excited she never saw the UPS truck
coming up the hill.
-- A man in Portland Oregon got a chain letter and immediately
threw it in the wastebasket. Two days later he won the Irish
Sweepstakes.
-- Robert Rowland got a copy of the same chain letter in the mail
and he SENT ME A COPY. A week later he suffered a misfortune and
his body was found in Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island.
-- Scott Adams had the idea to send anti-chain-letter mail and
today he writes the fantastically successful DILBERT comic strip
making millions from what should be common knowledge.
-- A woman in Stowe, Vermont STARTED A CHAIN LETTER and one week
later was diagnosed with lymph cancer.
Remember, chance favors people who are not moronic, superstitious
putzes. You already have made yourself a stupid jerk by giving me
a chain letter. A very bad fate may be waiting for you after what
you have already done. But there may still be time. Make ten
copies of this letter and pass it to the next ten people who give
you chain letters. I am doing this because in spite of the fact
that you have shown yourself to be dumb as a chewed pork chop, I
still care for you and I am ready to forgive. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: MORE THAN HUMAN by Theodore Sturgeon (copyright 1953,
Ballantine Books, SBN 345-02199-9, 188pp, $0.95) (book review by
Joe Karpierz)
I knew that I would only have time for one more of the retro-Hugo
nominees, so I picked the one novel that I'd never read--MORE THAN
HUMAN by Theodore Sturgeon. I've not read very much Sturgeon, but
certainly have intended to. I own the first seven volumes of THE
COMPLETE STORIES OF THEODORE STURGEON, but just haven't gotten to
them yet. I saw MORE THAN HUMAN as an opportunity to get into his
work.
Sturgeon has been hailed as one of the best literary SF writers in
history, and after reading this novel I can see why. This book is
the complete opposite of MISSION OF GRAVITY--character development
is everything, motivation is everything, and the sfnal elements
are secondary to the story. Indeed, they provide the backdrop for
the greater story of the morality of the next generation in human
evolution.
It's very hard to describe and summarize this novel. The next
generation that I mention in the previous paragraph is described
by one of the characters as Homo Gestalt--a kind of superhuman
entity made up of several almost less than human characters, where
the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. We do
get some insight on the background of many of the members of the
gestalt and how their behavior is shaped by their pasts.
This is one of those stories that seems to work on many different
levels, and I get the feeling that I need to read it a few more
times before I get them all. It's a terrific story with a
terrific ending, and I'm glad I picked it to read next. And once
again, this book proves that you can tell a terrific, "literary"
SF story in something less than 600 pages--in this case, 188. I
highly recommend it. [-jak]
===================================================================
TOPIC: COLLATERAL (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Jamie Foxx plays a cab driver who gets an unusual
passenger, a professional assassin who has a list of people to
kill that night. The driver learns from the assassin how to live
his life. The passenger learns why it is better for an assassin
to drive himself, even in Los Angeles. Tom Cruise, the assassin,
adds another good performance to his portfolio. But under
scrutiny the premise is actually absurd and script really falls to
pieces. Rating: +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
Tom Cruise long ago mastered the role of handsome lead and hero.
He moved on to a variety of more complex roles like a
dysfunctional maladjusted political activist, an amoral vampire, a
disaffected warrior, a man who learns to love his autistic
brother. Along the way his acting talent has steadily developed.
He is still limited. I doubt he could convey strong emotions the
way a Lee J. Cobb could. But he passed long ago the stage where
he was mostly decorative.
In COLLATERAL Cruise is a calculating and systematic hired
assassin. This time around he is not even the main character
though he certainly is the center of attention. We see the night
that the film takes place through the eyes of Max (played by Jamie
Foxx), the cab driver that assassin Vincent (Cruise) has hired to
take him around to his next five victims. From the Max's point of
view the story is a tense thriller. The cabby has to try to save
the lives of the victims and very possibly his own life. This
puts him in the position of sometimes working against Vincent and
sometimes working for him.
The surprise inside the story is that if we see the film through
the eyes of the assassin Vincent it turns from a thriller into a
shaggy dog story. Vincent, who outwardly looks so cool and
professional, is really something of a bumbler. The evening goes
nothing like he could have planned it. His primary error is to
put the success of his assignment and his very life into the hands
of an innocent bystander over whom he has so little control. We
are told why he does this and it still seems a bone-headed
maneuver that is not worth the risk and would likely not work the
way he hopes. He gets what he deserves. (I will discuss his
motive in more detail in a spoiler section following the review.)
Over the course of the evening Vincent loses the data he needs for
his work, he is made to look like a fool to his employers, and he
ends up in the hospital visiting his driver's mother Ida (Irma
P. Hall of the recent THE LADYKILLERS). At one point he has his
gun pointed directly at his victim and for no particular reason he
just pauses. And we quickly see why no assassin would ever do
that. In the end Vincent's worst nightmare about Los Angeles
comes true for him. It is unclear whether director Michael Mann
and writer Stuart Beattie recognized how unprofessional the
professional Vincent is. Certainly they hope the audience does
not notice.
In the course of the night there is a good deal of discussion of
philosophies of life. Max has big plans for his future but lies
to himself about going after those goals. Vincent wants to help
Max to control his life, but Vincent has his own fears. Max has
his own ideas of how to handle fears, which he imparts to an
earlier passenger, but is also limited by his own fears. Along
these lines there is someone else we see relating to Vince and Max
about the happiest night of his life.
Cruise here has prematurely grayed hair, dark glasses, a few days'
growth of beard, and a knockout suit. Somehow the look is one I
associate with Richard Gere. From a distance he even resembles
Gere. By now Mann is an old hand at filming crime stories set in
Los Angeles. Still at times his visual style seems to fight the
camera's storytelling. A sequence filmed in a disco is almost
incoherent.
COLLATERAL is one of those films that seem like one kind of film
while you watch it and becomes a very different film with thought
afterward. Still it rivets the viewer because it does not give
the viewer time to think about the premise. I rate it a +1 on the
-4 to +4 scale or 6/10.
Spoiler ... Spoiler ... Spoiler ...
The implication is that Vincent has been successful in framing a
similar driver on a similar assignment and the police had assumed
that they were random killings by a cab driver who suddenly turned
psychotic. But presumably in that assignment the victims were
related as they are here. It seems unlikely that the police would
think an amateur and psychotic would just happen to choose a
related set of victims. Even if they believe that once they would
never believe it twice and in fact they do not. A real
professional would have driven himself or gotten a local driver he
could trust. But then there would have been no story to tell.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL, THE FATE OF HUMAN SOCIETIES by Jared
Diamond (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999, 425 pages text,
480 pages total including references, plus 32 pages of
photographs. $16.95 soft-cover) (book review by Pete Brady):
(This review was first published as a book review in the "Bulletin
of the Association for Living History, Farm, and Agricultural
Museums".)
I know a woman that once had a de-scented pet skunk. The skunk
was slightly friendly and slightly playful. Like my cat. But
there is a major difference between the two animals. My cat is
domesticated and the skunk was wild.
GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL is an ambitious book, and the domestication
of animals is only one of many topics covered therein. The book
describes the present day world and its various peoples - the
languages they speak, their physical attributes, the diseases they
are immune to or susceptible to, the things they eat and, if they
grow crops, what they grow. The author shows how these factors
led to different peoples being subjugated by other people, and
why. So, in one sense this book is a directory of peoples of the
world. Diamond specializes in southeast Asia, where he has spent
much time, especially in New Guinea. "New Guinea has the highest
concentration of languages in the world: 1,000 of the world's
6,000 languages are crammed into an area only slightly larger than
Texas." And, as a directory of peoples, this makes a good and
thorough textbook.
But this is more than a textbook. Some forms of human or similar
species have occupied Earth for the past five million years, with
Homo Sapiens being around for the last 150,000 years. We have
historical records for only the last 13,000 years, and this
shorter period is the author's time-line. The author tells how
people moved from place to place and, when they stayed put,
developed or didn't develop in stature.
The big question that Diamond tackles is why people developed at
different times and at different rates. The title "GUNS, GERMS,
AND STEEL" refers to the way that the more advanced civilizations
conquered the others by using more advanced weapons, inadvertently
(usually) spreading diseases that the conquered people were not
immune to, and having a more mechanized way of life. Now, in a
planet of our size, one cannot expect all civilizations to advance
at an equal rate, especially if they were not connected to each
other until recently, some even in just the last few hundred
years. But Diamond argues that the differences are not just
statistical variance.
Diamond gives many reasons for these differences, and we can only
sample one or two here. We'll look at diseases. With
agriculture, populations are larger, and with mechanization,
cities and towns are larger. Thus, contagious diseases spread
more easily. This means that many will die, but natural selection
leaves those alive that tend to be immune, that is, immunity
builds up in the population. While this was taking place over
centuries in Europe, the native American Indians were thinly
spread over their continent and did not catch these diseases -
until the Spanish explorers and others arrived, at which point the
natives got nearly wiped out.
We then probe deeper. Why do some people have crops and others
remain hunter-gatherers? Diamond's answer is domestication. He
defines a domesticated animal as one that is "selectively bred in
captivity and thereby modified from its wild ancestors." Thus,
while our particular skunk was tame, it was not domesticated.
Diamond indicates that domestication is perhaps the major reason
that some civilizations developed more than others. Of the 148
big terrestrial herbivorous animal species, only 14 have been
domesticated, and further, those 14 were all domesticated prior to
2500 B.C. (Attempts have been made in more modern times to
domesticate other species such as the zebra and American bison,
but these have not succeeded.) Domestication was not uniformly
spread over the continents. Of those 14 animals mentioned above,
only one--the llama (alpaca)--came from the western hemisphere.
So, the Americas lacked the advantages gained from, for example,
cattle which supplied work and meat to Eurasians.
Domestication also applies to plants (that is, to crops), because
this is what made agriculture possible and transformed us from
hunter-gatherers into civilized people that were freed from
hunting and could indulge in the arts, develop machines, and, with
more food, increase in numbers. The author uses the wild almond
as an example of the value of modifying crops. A few dozen wild
almonds contain enough cyanide to kill a person, but with
domestication, they become an ingredient in candy bars. There are
200,000 species of flowering plants, but only a few were
domesticated in the Americas. For example, the native Americans
did not domesticate the grape or apple, although these plants have
later been domesticated. In Australia, macadamia nuts are the
only practical crop that evolved from native plants. Thus,
Australians remained hunter-gatherers.
Once crops began to be established, Diamond argues that the
geographic shape of the continents played perhaps the major role
in spreading the knowledge about farming, arts, writing, and
machinery. Eurasia is lateral; one moves easily east to west
across a similar climactic zone. But the western hemisphere has
Central America blocking the way, with a difficult passage thru
Panama. Similarly, the north-south routes in Africa are blocked
by desert and jungle. So, the Americas and southern Africa
remained primitive while civilization advanced in Eurasia.
Diamond is so firm in his conviction that geography and prior
settings of natural plant development are the major, if not sole
reason for differences in humanity that, at the end of his book,
he makes a daring conjecture: "If the populations of Aboriginal
Australia and Eurasia could have been interchanged during the Late
Pleistocene era [13,000 years ago], the original Australians would
be occupying Europe and America and the original Eurasians would
be downtrodden fragments in Australia." It's where they were way
back when, not what they were.
That argument can be subject to the fallacy of post hoc, ergo
propter hoc (after the fact, therefore because of the fact). That
is, we see what's around us today and we see what conditions
existed a few thousand years ago (such as the existence of the
Isthmus of Panama), and conclude that those conditions had to
produce our current state, even if the populations had been
switched around. Well, Mr. Diamond, what about chaos? Chaos
occurs when the process that produces the final result is so
complex, with so many variables, that the slightest change in even
one initial variable can produce a profound and unpredictable
change on the final result. How does he know if one or more
seemingly insignificant events, which he could not know about
thousands of years later, and which would not repeat if you
switched populations and started over, had a profound effect on
our current status?
Diamond himself makes such an argument. He notes that in summer
1930, two years before Adolph Hitler seized power, he was nearly
killed in a car-truck collision. He speculates that if the truck
driver applied his brakes two seconds later and killed Hitler,
wouldn't that have completely changed the course of events in the
20th century? Would there have been, for example, a frantic
search for the atomic bomb, or any of the technological advances
produced by World War II?
So, this book makes very informative and challenging reading. It
will particularly appeal to back-breeders interested in early
crops and how they changed. With my own interest in history of
languages, I was pleased to learn how major language groups
developed and spread, and how some nations acquired an alphabet
while others remained using pictographs. One of my biggest
challenges from this Pulitzer Prize-winning book has been to
review it in a limited space. I hope I have done at least a fair
job of that. It remains for you to go to the book and get the
full story. But be warned--it's not bedtime reading! [-ptb]
About the Author
Pete joined ALHFAM in 1976. He is now retired, but continues as a
volunteer historic interpreter, fiddler, and database designer,
and is the founder and manager of the D-Major Singers, a group of
four people who sing folk music of the 1700s. They have performed
at 16 sites in five states including several ALHFAM sites. This
is his fifth book review for the ALHFAM Bulletin.
[Pete is also a very old and respected friend. His musical
evenings are great and memorable events. -mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Jack Dann's REBEL (ISBN 0-380-97839-3) is an alternate history:
what if James Dean had not been not killed in his car crash? This
didn't sound very promising to me, and indeed becomes interesting
only by getting Dean involved in politics by way of Marilyn
Monroe's connection with the Kennedys. I felt like I was reading
a tabloid newspaper through most of it, with the bulk of the story
being about Jimmy and Marilyn, and Jimmy and Pier Angeli, and
Marilyn and Jack, and Marilyn and Bobby, and all sorts of other
pairings. Oh, and Elvis. Even I, a cinema fan, found this
uninvolving. (Contrast this with Kim Newman's or Howard Waldrop's
Hollywood alternate histories--those are very engaging.)
Ruth Rendell's BLOOD LINES (ISBN 0-517-70323-8) is a collection of
mystery short stories in a style similar to Patricia Highsmith,
though not nearly as edgy and unsettling. The result is that I
can actually *read* these stories, and I recommend them. I have
not read any of Rendell's novels, but she has several other
collections out as well, and she also writes under the name of
Barbara Vine.
Tim Powers's THE ANUBIS GATES (ISBN 0-441-00401-6) is a classic
that I had never gotten around to reading. Its macguffin is a
poet named William Ashbless, who does not exist in the (our) real
world. I mention this because, like FARGO, this story has
convinced many people of the reality of something which is not
real. ("William Ashbless" was a pen name used by Tim Powers and
James Blaylock for their jointly written poetry in college. Both
authors now use the character.) Powers's style reminds me of Ray
Bradbury's. I have no idea why, and I'm sure everyone now thinks
I'm nuts for saying so. But there you have it. Maybe it is just
a highly poetic style with the sort of imagery that Bradbury might
use.
This book was a reprint by Orb, and one quibble I have is that
what I assume were errors in the original printing were not
corrected. For example, on page 47, the characters talk about
October 1, 1810, as a Saturday; it was a Monday. (Earlier on page
29, they spoke of September 1 of that year as a Saturday, and on
page 132 they are only up to September 11, so the typo is
obvious--and should have been fixed.) [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
The feeble tremble before opinion,
the foolish defy it, the wise judge it,
the skillful direct it.
-- Jeanne-Marie Roland
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