THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
08/26/05 -- Vol. 24, No. 9, Whole Number 1297
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:
Where Would I Be Without It? (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Forbidden Power (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE by J. K. Rowling
(book review by Joe Karpierz)
What I Read on Summer Vacation (THE SNOW, HARRY POTTER
AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE, CENTURY RAIN, RAVENOR,
OLYMPOS, ENGINE CITY, and ACCELERANDO)
(book reviews by Dale L. Skran Jr.)
This Week's Reading (CRIME & MYSTERY: THE 100 BEST BOOKS
and CODY'S BOOKS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A BERKELEY
1956-1977) (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Where Would I Be Without It? (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I was watching telly in London and they had a news story of a rape
case that was solved something like sixteen years after the
incident using new methods of investigation. The victim had a
pronouncement on the case that for me generated a lot of thought.
I cannot improve upon it so I will just repeat it. "Thank God for
DNA!" [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Forbidden Power (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Arts and Letters Daily http://www.aldaily.com/ called my
attention to an article by Chris Mooney in the American Prospect.
The article "The Monster That Wouldn't Die: Why Hollywood never
seems to get tired of the Frankenstein myth" can be found at
http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=10078.
In the article, Mooney says that he gets very tired of the film
industry repeatedly doing versions of the Frankenstein myth in
films. Here he means not just films with the Frankenstein
monster. He is looking at the broader meaning of the myth. He
is looking at all science fiction films in which a mad scientist
or a whole scientific community overstep the bounds to knowledge
that God has put in placed in His Wisdom. They invent a new life
form or drill a hole though the crust of the Earth or clone a
dinosaur. In a sense these are all Frankenstein myths reframed.
As a direct result there is Divine Retribution. God somehow
seems to find it necessary to punish not just the perpetrators of
this blasphemy, but also their entire community and frequently
the whole dang world. God apparently feels that everybody has
sinned because they allowed this blasphemy to occur. This is a
very scary interpretation of religion because it essentially says
there is nobody innocent when one person oversteps the bounds
placed by God. Those who would appear to be uninvolved are
guilty of negligently allowing this impiety to occur in the same
world that they share. The moral is that it then behooves
everybody to police the world to be sure that God's laws are
obeyed. Everyone has a responsibility to be a vigilante for God
or will suffer the consequences. I hopefully do not have to
remind the reader that that belief is very much in today's
headlines.
This myth of the person who brings disaster by trying to achieve
more than God allows goes back to Faust and the Sorcerer's
Apprentice and the golem and the Tower of Babel and perhaps even
to the Garden of Eden story. The belief is that there are things
that a human was not meant to know. And if someone finding them
out or otherwise breaking God's laws we are all in big trouble.
I personally cannot believe in knowledge that is actually
prohibited by God. The Bible claims that are actions that are
forbidden, but I know of no place where it says that there is
information that is God's top secret knowledge, and we are
forbidden to know it. The closest we get is eating of the Tree of
Knowledge, whatever that means. And the Bible seems to have it be
literal a tree and not metaphorical. The sin of Babel seems to be
vanity.
In fact, I would like to think that if there is a God that He
would want us to use our minds and to discover all that we can
about the world. Just as an artist would want the people who see
his work to understand and appreciate what they are seeing in his
paintings, so too the more we understand the universe the more any
God that I could respect would respect us.
However, religion throughout history has always been the ally of
people opposed to change. At least opposed to intellectual
change. The Church was never against knowledge of the universe.
Even before Galileo's time the Pope had his own astronomers. (At
the last Worldcon I heard an astronomer from the Vatican
Observatory. I hadn’t known it existed, but it goes back beyond
Galileo's time.) But when Galileo suggested that the universe did
not behave as it had been thought to through the previous
history, then Galileo was in trouble with the Church. God
apparently wanted us to have knowledge but was opposed to changing
the interpretation of that knowledge. There is a very natural
fear of change universally. People do not like the unexpected.
They project this prejudice onto their god. God is believed to be
opposed to all scientific change. I find that very hard to accept.
We see the religious fear of change in current politics. This was
not a new argument with stem cell research. Ministers in the
Americas blamed the devastating 1755 Lisbon earthquake on God's
wrath over the invention of the lightning rod. This was seen as a
device that turned aside His righteous lightning. There were
strong religious protests over the introduction of vaccination to
fight disease for very similar reasons. Disease was supposedly
God's tool to use as He saw fit. It was considered by many to be
wrong to resist diseases in this way. And again if A was
vaccinating B, C was against it because he was afraid that
he--C--would be punished. That argument is actually still with
us. There are religious protests against doing AIDS research by
religious people who believe that AIDS is God's vengeance against
homosexuals and hence curing AIDS is against God's Will..
Hanns Heinz Ewers's novel ALRAUNE is about a beautiful woman who
at the same time is a soulless monster intentionally bringing
ruin and destruction to all who know her. And how did she become
a soulless monster? Her birth was the result of an artificial
insemination, and hence it broke God's laws. This story was done
as a film no less than four times, once as recently as 1952.
I think today we recognize that artificial insemination is no
more playing God than is vaccination or putting up a lightning
rod. That is not what we mean by playing God. Though I am not
sure there is a common definition as to what playing God is. I
do not think it is something that can be done in a science
laboratory. Playing God was motioning left or right with a
riding crop to new arrivals at Auschwitz Concentration Camp. And
there was nothing very scientific about that.
So do I have no fears for this brave new world of scientific
knowledge? Well, not for the knowledge itself, but the
empowerment the knowledge brings scares me a great deal. This is
an age of empowerment when individuals or small groups can
achieve a lot more than even governments could even two decades
ago. Private enterprise is now putting rockets into space and
selling passenger space for tourism. SpaceShipOne shows that
individuals with a little capital can go into space. That feels
pretty good until I start thinking of SpaceShipOne and El Qaeda
in the same thought. Suddenly I am not so sure I want so much
empowerment. Certainly I do not like universal distribution of
empowerment. Universal empowerment was what the Krell of
FORBIDDEN PLANET provided their people. It turned out to be a
fatal mistake. And we are approaching a time when individuals or
small groups will be able to wage nuclear or chemical or
biological war. I do not know if we were meant to have such power
or not meant to, but I do fear for when it happens. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE by J. K. Rowling
(Scholastic, copyright 2005, 652pp, $29.99, ISBN 0-439-78454-9)
(book review by Joe Karpierz)
[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers. Another warning
will appear right before the spoiler, but you may want to skip it
entirely if you don't want to risk it. -ecl]
So, when I reviewed the audio book of HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER
OF THE PHOENIX, I said something like, "It's too late to stop
reading HP now". Hounded by my daughter mercilessly the evening
of July 15th to allow her to go to the midnight release party of
HALF-BLOOD PRINCE when she had to be up very early the next day
for a softball game (the Scrooge-like answer from both my wife
and myself was, "No--you'll get the book after your game
tomorrow"), I knew that I would eventually get around to reading
this one as well. We did indeed pick up our copy at about 11:45
on Saturday morning, and by 7:30 that night my daughter had
finished reading it. By 5:30 the next day my son had finished
reading it. By Monday night my wife had finished reading it.
Not to be outdone, I gave in and started reading it on the train
to work on Tuesday.
And promptly took about a week to finish it off. I suppose
that's what happens when you don't drop everything else and read
the book from start to finish in one or two sittings.
But you know, I can see the appeal of this one. Rowling has
gotten it right this time, I think. The story is fast-paced,
there is no padding to speak of (it's actually shorter than the
previous two books in the series), and Rowling had made every one
and every thing in it interesting to say the least. And, for the
first time, the reader can see some of the method behind
Rowling's madness, if you will, as she begins to tie things from
all the previous books together in this one, and set the up the
final, probably apocalyptic confrontation between Harry and
Voldemort.
It is year six for the gang of Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Harry
has been named captain of the Gryffindor Quidditch team, but
that's about all the happy stuff there is. At the end of
PHOENIX, we know that Voldemort and his Death Eaters are about,
killing people and generally terrorizing the Wizard population.
The book actually starts out in the office of the Prime Minister
of England, and recounts his meeting with the new head of the
Ministry of Magic, as Fudge has been relieved of duty after the
fiasco of the events of PHOENIX. It turns out that every Prime
Minister gets to meet the head of the Ministry of Magic, and
there is no need to worry about secrecy. After all, if you were
Prime Minister would *you* tell someone about Wizards and all
that sort of goings on? I thought not. Anyway, Hogwarts is
under heavy security. Everything is checked going in and out of
the school. In fact, the parallels between world events after
9/11 and what's going on at Hogwarts are eerie. Anyhow,
Dumbledore decides to take Harry under his wing and give him
private lessons. These lessons are really an excuse for
Dumbledore to fill Harry in on all things Voldemort.
Here is where the novel sets itself apart from the earlier
entries in the series. Voldemort is no longer some faceless
enemy--we get his background fleshed out. We now know who he is
and what motivates him. This really becomes a key for both Harry
and the reader--we are given reasons to truly dislike or hate
him. In fact, Rowling does an outstanding job in continuing to
flesh out her characters. They are getting older, and acting
more like teenagers or young adults than young students. They
have real feelings and emotions, as evidenced by Ron's
relationship with Lavender, Harry's with Ginny, and Bill Weasley
with Fleur. This is yet another theme that runs through the
novel - the fact that love is more powerful than any magic,
whether that be a romantic kind of love, or the love that
nurtures close friendships, or the love parents and children have
for each other.
Of course, the big story is that a major character is killed off.
SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't read the novel and don't want it
spoiled, skip ahead to the END SPOILER. Otherwise, carry on
reading. The death of Dumbledore is disappointing in more ways
than one. First of all, the actual act of the murder of
Dumbledore by Snape seemed disappointing and not quite right to
me. Certainly, Rowling makes the reader pity Draco Malfoy, as he
is supposed to be the one to kill Dumbledore but can't bring
himself to do it, so Snape does because of the Unbreakable Vow he
makes early on in the novel. However, I expected something more
spectacular than what Rowling gave us. Furthermore, it is
cheapened by the unbelievable fact that Dumbledore trusted Snape
to the bitter end. I found it too difficult to be upset that
Dumbledore was killed because of the simple fact that he was
actually stupid enough to trust Snape. However, I'll have to say
that Dumbledore's funeral scene is one of the best funeral
scene's I've ever read, from the singing of the Mermaids to the
pure emotion on the faces of everyone to the excruciating
decision that Harry has to make. It was very well done.
END SPOILER.
So, all in all a pretty fine effort from Rowling. There is one
novel to go and a lot to cover. Stay tuned. If it's as good as
this one, it will be terrific. [-jak]
===================================================================
TOPIC: What I Read on Summer Vacation (book reviews by Dale
L. Skran Jr.)
As I have just returned from a restful vacation in Scotland where
I was able to catch up on my reading, I decided to produce a
"batch review" covering just those books that I read "while on
summer vacation," started reading during the vacation, or
finished just before leaving--okay--I am stretching this a bit to
include a particular book.
THE SNOW by Adam Roberts
This is a J. G. Ballard-type disaster novel, where the end comes,
not via heat, rain, or wind, but SNOW. I am only up to page 75
but it has that distinctly British pessimism and stiff upper lip.
HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE by J.K. Rowling
Another page-turner from Rowling, this is a decent sixth book
full of major revelations about he who must not be named and big
plot events I will not mention. It follows the standard Potter
formulation, but for the first time reveals a lot about
Voldemort's past. It also follows the series pattern of bigger
and splashier action scenes at the end. This one features
Dumbledore and Harry fighting a lake full of zombies.
Thankfully, it is not a dark and mean as the fifth book. A lot
of plot threads are tied up, and the stage is set for the final
battle between Voldemort and Harry in the seventh and hopefully
final book in the series.
CENTURY RAIN by Alastair Reynolds
I actually finished this book just before I left for the
convention, but Jo read it during the convention, and we got
Reynolds to autograph it, so I thought it ought to be included.
I have read and liked all of Reynold's previous books, but they
tend to be overly complex and somewhat creepy. CENTURY RAIN has
a much simpler plot structure and less creepiness.
It is the future. The Earth has been destroyed in a nano-tech
catastrophe, and the human race lives off-earth. There are two
main political groups--the slashers [from slash dot] and the
threshers [from threshold]. The slashers have fully embraced
technology, in spite of the disaster on Earth, while the
threshers believe in holding back from more advanced nanotech in
an attempt to prevent future disasters.
The threshers have discovered a portal to what appears to be a
different time located in a cave inside Phobos. If you travel
through the portal, you show up in Paris in 1959. But is it
really Paris, and is it really the past? The threshers are using
the tunnel to collect books and such from the past that were
destroyed in the nanochaust. As they study the books it becomes
clear that this is an alternate Earth in which WWII ran a
different course, avoiding the massive loss of life we
experienced, but also missing out on the tremendous push to
technology that the war gave.
One thread of the novel follows a Parisian detective
investigating a murder, while another thread follows a thresher
agent sent to investigate the same murder. At this point, we are
just setting the stage. Wonder follows wonder, as the fantastic
truth about what is really going on comes out, concluding in the
kind of epic space battle that Reynolds specializes in. I plan
on nominating this novel for the Hugo. Reynolds, a professional
astronomer, now retired to write fiction full-time, has
contributed a well-executed and original novel, which can only
build his reputation.
RAVENOR by Dan Abnett
This is the first book in a new series by Dan Abnett, best known
for the "Ghaunt's Ghosts" series and also the "Inquisitor
Eisenhorn" series, all set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. I
managed to seek him out at the con and collect his autograph on
this book, and discovered that he is well known as a comic
writer, having most recently been scripting the Legion of Super
Heroes, which I had in fact been reading.
Unfortunately, the "Ravenor" series, chronicling the adventures
of a grand inquisitor confined to a life-support system, is
simply not as engaging as his other work, in large part because
Ravenor is more off-stage and less compelling that Ghaunt or
Eisenhorn. These dark, violence soaked books are not for
everyone, and if you find the premise interesting, I suggest
taking a look his other works. I will say that I find most game-
based fiction to be dreck, but for some reason the "Warhammer
40,000" books, especially the space opera ones, seem to rise
above the usual run of game fiction.
OLYMPOS by Dan Simmons
OLYMPOS is the sequel to the earlier ILLIUM, and has a complex
premise. First, there is a post-Singularity earth, populated by
a few million Eoli who spend their time having sex and watching
an elaborate live-action drama of the Iliad. The post-humans are
all dead, or perhaps gone, but the world is littered with their
artifacts, including such grand conceptions as the Atlantic Rift,
a force-field path that allows a person to cross the Atlantic on
foot. But it turns out that they are not just watching a TV
drama--on an alternate Earth the Iliad is being re-enacted with
real gods. It gets stranger from there, and includes the last
literate man, the Wandering Jew, Odysseus, Caliban, and monsters
from other dimensions.
I have just realized that I don't have the stomach for trying to
summarize the plot of this elaborate book. It combines high
adventure with literature and more than a bit of violence into
something that is hard to describe but is interesting to read.
If anything, I liked the second book more than the first. It is
about men and women trying to re-discover what it means to be
human in a world of gods and monsters, and about what happens to
you if you answer the question "Do you want to be a god?" with a
yes. And to some extent it is a cautionary tale about what the
Singularity might really mean--a world stranger--and more
horrible--than we can imagine!
ENGINE CITY by Ken Macleod
Ken Macleod attempts to complete his somewhat turgid and
overwritten "Engines of Light" series. Although vaguely set in a
post-Singularity universe, it always seems to be more about the
politics of today than anything else. Although I really like
some of Ken's earlier books, I feel like he is losing steam. The
one book by Macleod I can strongly recommend is THE CASSINI
DIVISION.
ACCELERANDO by Charles Stross
We are all deeply in debt to Vernor Vinge for pointing out that
something like the Singularity might occur, and that much of SF
was pure nonsense since it ignored the likelihood of such a
thing. Various writers have taken up this challenge, and here a
strong new writer tries to tell the story of a particular, rather
dysfunctional, family as it evolves through the singularity.
There is a bit of a trick behind the story which I will not
reveal, which once put on stage, makes the whole plot seem more
likely. Suffice to say, the major characters are never quite in
charge of things as they think. Stross has a really neat new
idea about what happens to intelligence as it evolves, and why we
see the Fermi paradox. I think his idea is original, and a real
contribution. He also does a good job of conveying the fast-pace
of modern business and how it may evolve as we get more and more
connected. Stross has also figured out a way to write a post-
singularity story about recognizably human characters while
treating the Singularity in a realistic fashion--his approach is
much more plausible than the "slow zone" gimmick Vinge has been
using.
Stross is the weakest in portraying the sex lives of his
characters. Stross has given Manfred a major kink, I think
mainly to illustrate how people might use advanced technology to
un-kink themselves, but it just doesn't work. Manfred's wife/ex-
wife the IRS agent seems wholly unbelievable as well--just a
caricature. The couple is so extreme that it really detracts
from the rest of the book, which is excellent. Another flaw in
the book is that the character of Manfred is derived in some part
from an "Analog" story called "Owe Me" in that he never gets paid
and collects favors which he uses to pay for things.
Due graphic sex scenes of an unusual nature, this is clearly not
a book for kids, but Stross has written a great novel of ideas,
and presented a vivid picture of a family changing as it passes
though the singularity. [-dls]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
In his introduction, H. R. F. Keating says that his CRIME &
MYSTERY: THE 100 BEST BOOKS (ISBN 0-88184-441-1) would be better
titled "One Hundred Very Good Crime and Mystery Books, Taking into
Account that No Author Should be Represented by More Than Three
Titles (So As To Be Fair to Others) and Allowing for a Little
Personal Idiosyncracy in Naming One or Two Whom the Majority of
Other Commentators Might Not Have Chosen Very Readily". (And as
the publisher notes, modesty forbade Keating from including any of
his own stories.) At any rate, Keating gives us a two-page essay
on each work: why it is included, what its flaws are, which other
works by the same author are considered on a par (or perhaps even
better), and so on. He rarely gives spoilers, but when he does,
he warns the reader first. Keating starts with Edgar Allan Poe in
1845 and ends with a 1986 P. D. James novel. Since this book was
published in 1987, that makes it as up-to-date as it could be, but
obviously provides no guidance for the last two decades. Still,
for those wanting to sample the classic mysteries, this book is
the perfect companion.
Pat and Fred Cody's CODY'S BOOKS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A BERKELEY
BOOKSTORE 1956-1977 (ISBN 0-8118-0140-3) is at times more about
Berkeley in that turbulent time than about the bookstore itself.
People looking for tips on how to start and operate a bookstore
will find some information here, but even that is of more interest
historically than practically. When Cody's started as a paperback
bookstore, distribution, marketing, and just about every other
aspect of book-selling was very different than it is now. (And by
paperback bookstore, they seem to have meant primarily trade
paperbacks, not mass market.) So far as I can tell, in fact, the
store was kept afloat for many years only by the wildly successful
European art calendars, in a time when there was not an American
calendar industry other than those given away by service stations
and such. This book probably has its greatest appeal as a history
of those times in Berkeley from someone "on the front lines", so
to speak. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
God MADE us such that we would eat of that
fruit, God would have been ashamed of us
if we hadn't done it. God would never
have bothered to make a man and a woman
to live out their days dreaming in a garden.
-- Russell Hoban, PILGERMANN