THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
10/08/04 -- Vol. 23, No. 15
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:
A Sign of the Times (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Influenza 102 (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
PRIMER (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
LES REVENANTS (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (HER NAME WAS LOLA, SOMETHING ROTTEN,
I RODE WITH STONEWALL) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: A Sign of the Times (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
There was a time when the maid service at a motel cleaning the
bathroom would leave a ribbon of paper across the toilet to show
it was clean. Fancy hotels would instead do some sort of origami
with the toilet paper. These days what they do is leave the seat
up. I think this is emblematic of our times when vulgarity seems
more acceptable. Perhaps it is an improved way of doing things.
It is faster and cheaper. It requires no special materials and it
takes just an instant to do it. It just somehow lacks the charm.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Influenza 102 (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I was talking last week about influenza and in particular the
pandemic that was likely influenza that followed World War One.
Let me start with a correction. Well, sort of. I said in the
last issue that it was still not certain that the 1918 pandemic
was a strain of influenza. Articles I have been reading over the
week suggest that it is now reasonably certain. My information
was based on an article in the "New Yorker" magazine from a few
years ago. However in the interim lung tissue has been found from
a few people who died of the 1918 pandemic, including a United
States Soldier. The 1918 strain is now known to be a variant of
Influenza A. It was a close relative of the influenza viruses we
get most commonly. It is now shown that very deadly varieties are
only a simple mutation or recombination away. It was too close
for comfort. I think that is actually bad news. There have been
two pandemics since 1918 and both have been Influenza A variants.
There was a pandemic of the Asian Flu in 1957 and the Hong Kong
Flu in 1968. The more recent reports downplay the bird-origins of
the virus saying that it probably spent several years in human
and/or pig systems before it mutated to the virulent form.
I actually find it fairly interesting how the pandemic interlocks
with the war. Most years the influenza outbreak that comes around
is mostly an inconvenience. It feels unpleasant for a day or two.
That is bad enough, surely, but it could be a lot worse. There
are probably worse flu viruses, potentially fatal ones, but
those are the less successful ones. There are reasons for that
lack of success. A really bad virus will debilitate its host.
The host may be bed-ridden. In any case the host will not be
moving among people and they will not catch the virus. So it is
really the flu viruses that do not debilitate the host that will
likely spread to a lot of people because the carrier will be well
enough to move among them.
That is not how it happened in World War One. Much of the war in
Europe was fought in trenches. That meant that if someone was
infected with the influenza virus the dynamic was just the
opposite. If a soldier got a relatively benign virus he would
feel bad but stay at his post, probably in a trench, and continue
fighting, but not coming in close contact with many people. A
really bad influenza virus would send him to a field hospital
where he would be in contact with doctors and other patients. He
would see more people and they might return to service spreading
the virus to other trenches. The more serious the flu virus the
more likely it was to spread. Then once the virus was cultured in
this way, the soldiers were placed on high-occupancy troop ships
home. A trench war is a perfect setting to choose for the
propagation of the worst viruses.
The influenza virus itself is particularly simple. It is just the
right string of eight genes. And it is not a very robust virus.
If it lights just about anywhere it the human body, it is
ineffectual and is killed by the body's defenses. You would think
that it is too weak and vulnerable to be the killer of what is
probably more than thirty million people in the year following
World War One. But if it finds the right location in a human, it
is a different story. The right place to lodge the virus is the
lung. The virus can bond with a lung cell and make it into a
little production facility for mass reproducing the same eight
genes. The new viruses bond to new lung cells and the result is a
chain reaction. And many of these strains do travel out from the
lung on a breath and are then breathed in by someone else.
The danger of another very deadly influenza pandemic, one as bad
at the 1918 one, is a lot like the danger of a meteor strike or
the danger of a really big earthquake in California. Everybody
who studies the subject is moderately sure it will happen, but we
just have no idea when. One more thing to worry about in an
increasingly worrisome world. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: PRIMER (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: This SF film gets the research environment and the
baffling scientific techno-jargon just about right. The story is
hard to follow, but that might not be so unrealistic either.
Definitely this is a demanding and puzzling film that does a lot
with its miniscule budget. Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
[Minor spoilers.]
PRIMER is a foxy, ultra-low-budget, amateur film and is perhaps
the most believable time-travel story on film. It may also be one
of the most incomprehensible. This is a real physicist's science
fiction film. If time travel is going to be invented in the next
decade, the research environment shown in this film is probably
the sort of place it will happen. And these are the sort of
people who will do it. The viewer goes through a lot of
obfuscation to get to the point, only to find that the confusion
and the verbal fog are much of the point. For about the first
twenty minutes of this film there is nothing really comprehensible
said but business and scientific babble. We are clearly looking
at a startup technical company with a very great deal of technical
expertise. The talk sounds believable and is delivered with
realistic overlapping dialog.
We are looking at a startup company of a handful of young
physicists who have incorporated and then done something
extraordinary in a garage. Leading the project are Aaron and Abe,
two people who are on a higher plane of technical expertise than
anyone you know. Something amazing has been developed here in a
Texas garage, but the viewer does not know what it is that the
company has created. When we get enough clues finally it turns
out has something to do with what uninitiated laymen would call
time travel. Confusing the issue is a short discussion thrown in
about fungus. What fungus has to do with time travel is never
explained. (Heck, nothing is every explained in this film.)
There is a plot dealing with causality problem avoidance and
multiple parties trying to counter each other's actions. One
probably has to see the film several times or even many times if
the plot is going to sink in. If PRIMER has anything to offer the
viewer it is intelligence. And intelligence is a commodity
missing from so many films; PRIMER is worthwhile for science
fiction fans and for techno-geeks and especially techno-geek
science fiction fans. It is enjoyable for those who like puzzle
films. Others may go running out in frustration.
This film somehow got the Best Drama award at the 2004 Sundance
Film Festival. That is something of a jaw-dropping surprise.
Director, writer, actor, cinematographer, producer, editor, and
composer Shane Carruth actually needed a few other people, notably
actors, to make his film. Just how he managed to both run the
camera and star in the film is anybody's guess. But he made an
intelligent, albeit frustrating, science fiction film and copped a
major award with it at Sundance. It won't have a wide audience
and for those who equate science fiction and special effects it
will not have a lot to offer. Those looking for sci-fi instead of
science fiction will not like it. And those who absolutely hate
being baffled will not like it. Who does that leave? [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: LES REVENANTS (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: A creative and intelligent recycling of the horror concept
of the dead returning, but this time it is used for non-horror
purposes. LES REVENANTS runs into pacing problems toward the
middle. Rating: +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
This film is a sort of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD without the horror
premise. One day everybody who died in the previous ten years or
so comes back to life. In a George Romero horror film the zombies
want to eat the living and the premise is used for horror. In
this film the dead have come back a little slower and not as
bright as they were, but notably no more malicious than they were
in life.
So all these dead people have returned. Now what? Who is going
to feed and care for them? Can their small economy give them
jobs? Will they be putting the living out of work? What problems
are there in integrating them back into society? Do the dead feel
oppressed by the living? Do the living feel endangered by the
dead? Certainly not the issues that George Romero faces. They
have to be treated like refugees with living accommodations. Some
go back to live with their families, some do not, and we see the
reasons why. On the whole it is more the living who have
unfinished business with the dead.
This could have been a zombie film with intelligence instead of
horror. It very nearly is. Co-writer and director Robin Campillo
does not handle the film as well as it might have been. Part of
his point is that the dead are slow and a little dazed, but in
this film the living also become slow and a little dazed. This
leads to slow and introspective conversations between the living
and the dead punctuated with meaningful stares and spoken in
disjoint four-word phrases with long pauses. (That does make the
subtitles easier to read.) The film then takes on a lethargic
pacing and tone. In the final reel the pace picks up a little,
but also betrays the spirit of the film to that point, much in the
way Tod Browning's FREAKS did.
Sidenote: There seem to be obvious problems with the film. When
we first see the dead they are marching from their graves in a
mass exodus, wearing casual clothing like sun dresses. Are people
really buried this way in France? I doubt it. For that matter
many of these people would have long since decomposed. This has
to be seen as a pure fantasy with most logic questions delegated
to a willing suspension of disbelief. The mechanism is not as
important as what is done with the ideas. This film is more an
interesting failure than great use of a very different idea.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Russell Hoban is one of my favorite authors, but his novels do not
always get published in the United States. HER NAME WAS LOLA
(Arcade, 1-55970-726-7) is his first to "cross the pond" (I
believe) since ANGELICA'S GROTTO; the intervening AMARYLLIS NIGHT
AND DAY and THE BAT TATTOO are available only in British editions.
In LOLA, as in many of Hoban's books, the main character seems
patterned after Hoban himself.
Max Lesser is a Jewish expatriate American author living in
England. Max is the author of many financially successful
children's books and several financially unsuccessful novels.
However, I do not think the novel itself is auto-biographical, any
more than TURTLE DIARY (or RIDDLEY WALKER, his best know adult
novel). Max meets first Lola Blessington, and then Lula Mae
Flowers, and finds himself enmeshed in a romantic and sexual web.
At the same time, he tries to break out of his writer's bloc with
a novel about Moe Levy, who meets Lulu and Linda Lou under
suspiciously similar circumstances. Apparently Max can talk to
Moe; what's worse, Moe can talk back. Oh, and Max also has
arguments with his own mind, and three-way conversations with his
mind and the dwarf demon Apasmara Purusha, called Forgetfulness.
Hoban's style is (to me) quintessential magic realism, and
incredibly poetic, and I wish his adult books were not so hard to
find. (His earlier ones, such as PILGERMANN, THE LION OF
BOAZ-JACHIN AND JACHIN-BOAZ, and TURTLE DIARY, do show up
occasionally. RIDDLEY WALKER is unlike any of his other works--
it's great, but do not assume it is typical.) HER NAME WAS LOLA,
like all of Hoban's books, gets a strong recommendation from me.
Jasper Fforde's SOMETHING ROTTEN (ISBN 0-670-03359-6) is the
fourth in the "Thursday Next" series. It's good, but do not start
with this one--start with THE EYRE AFFAIR (which my book
discussion group is reading in November, so I will undoubtedly be
saying something about it then). THE EYRE AFFAIR had a fairly
substantial alternate history element, but that was pushed to the
back burner by the second book, or indeed, off the stove
altogether. Instead, Fforde concentrates on the more literary
aspects of his milieu, with the main supporting character here
being Hamlet, hiding out in England while the literary detectives
try to prevent the hijacking of the play script. I actually think
this is an improvement over the previous book, so I'm looking
forward to more.
Henry Kyd Douglas's I RODE WITH STONEWALL (ISBN 0-891-76040-7) is
one of many first-person Civil War accounts I picked up when one
of the local used bookstores closed. Douglas was on Jackson's
staff, and so there is a lot more about the major personalities
and anecdotes and less of details about battles than one would
find in a foot soldier or line officer's account. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Dawkins's Law of Adversarial Debate: When two
incompatible beliefs are advocated with equal
intensity, the truth does not lie half way
between them.