THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
09/01/06 -- Vol. 25, No. 9, Whole Number 1350
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:
The Real Secret (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Thoughts on Time Travel (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Hugo Winners
EXULTANT by Stephen Baxter (book review by Joe Karpierz)
Interviews (letters of comment by Paul S. R. Chisholm,
Mike Glyer, and George MacLachlan)
The Video Revolution (letter of comment by Andre Kuzniarek)
This Week's Reading (SPACE CADET, TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES
UNDER THE SEA, BRAVE NEW WORLD, and "No Woman
Born") (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: The Real Secret (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Where is Donald Wollheim when we need him? Sadly he is no longer
around to ask him about this. He wrote the book THE SECRET OF THE
NINTH PLANET that I read as a teen. I guess even he did not know
that the real secret of the ninth planet was that it was not a
planet at all but a planetoid. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Thoughts on Time Travel (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Recently I watched the film THE TIME MACHINE again. That is one
science fiction film that never ages. (In part that is because
none of it is set in the present. This film always sparked a
disagreement between Evelyn and me about the nature of time
travel. Assume the story were true. If today you went down into
the cellar of the Time Traveler's house, would you see the Time
Traveler there frozen like a statue or would you not see him
there at all? Evelyn thought the former and I thought the
latter. I am speaking about being in the world of the story, of
course. And this is assuming that time travel is possible. I
will get back to this discussion a little later, but let us look
at some of the ways of thinking about time travel.
There is such a thing as effective time travel and real time
travel. Most of us have experienced something very like
effective time travel. I do some nights. I am lying in bed at
night and the clock says midnight. I close my eyes for just a
second, look at the clock again, and it says 2AM. I close my
eyes again and when I look the clock says 4AM. One more time and
the clock says 6AM. Effectively I have gone through the whole
night in just a few blinks. But at any point if you dropped into
my bedroom you would see me there, most likely asleep. That is
effective time travel. The important point is that if I had a
watch in my pocket, it would stay synchronized with my clock. I
wake up eight hours older, not a few seconds. But this is very
like what I see as Evelyn's concept.
We are talking here about sorts of suspended animation. This is
ways of slowing down our personal clocks while the world runs on
at its normal rate. In Evelyn's view the time machine becomes a
sort of preserving machine. It is not so crude as the falling
asleep and waking back up or even as suspended animation. But it
is effectively creating a field in which things move slower and
time goes faster. This is moving forward in time at a rate
faster than one. That means that more than one second goes by for
every second the time traveler feels going by. We all travel
forward in time at rates very near one. How near depends on our
acceleration at the moment, but we rarely feel much force of
acceleration so are not accelerating much.
A rate of one is when one second of time in the real world goes
by as one second of your time does. The suspended animation
example has time going by at rates greater than one. Wells also
wrote about people traveling forward in time at a rate less than
one but greater than zero. This was not an entire novel but a
short story entitled "The New Accelerator."
A copy of this story is available at
http://www.readprint.com/work-1495/H-G--Wells.
In that story people took a drug that speeded them up so that the
world around them looked like it was moving much slower. One
second in real time might have felt like (or even having been)
one hour under the drug. Traveling forward in time at a rate of
zero simply means the world is frozen around you. You see this
in a lot of old "Twilight Zone" episodes. A stopwatch or
something or other freezes time. Negative rates really mean
going backward in time.
My gut feeling is that we mostly all travel forward in time at a
rate of one, or very near one. I would contend that rates of
greater than one have been accomplished, but not in the Wells
manner. When you are accelerating you really are moving forward
in time faster than people who are not accelerating. That is
what the Twin Paradox in relativity is all about. Wells talked
about time travel in which you move forward in time while staying
in much the same place. Relativity implies you cannot stay in one
place since it requires acceleration.
Negative rates I have always suspected are impossible. If we
could go backward in time you run into the question what happens
if you kill your grandfather before he had children. There are
arguments that if you change history you just fork off into a
parallel universe where you did not exist. But that buys into
this entire theory of parallel nearly identical universes. That
is a kludge and goes against Occam's Razor. I find it possible,
but only just. It is not likely as far as I am concerned. That
is better than theories that the universe somehow protects itself
from tampering by time travelers from the future. It seems most
likely that the way it does that is that it does not allow
backward time travel.
But getting back to Evelyn's and my disagreement, I think she
sees time travel as being a sort of stasis field in which time
slows down for those people inside. That is possible. But that
is not the sort of time travel I see in Wells. I see it as a
sort of a limited existence at each point in time. Consider the
town of Brigadoon from the play and film of the same name. It
exists just one day a century according to the story. If you
live in Brigadoon you are essentially in a time machine in which
each day when you wake up the world is a century ahead of where
it was the day before. You experience just one day of every
36524 days. Then you skip the next 36523 days. But now speed
things up. You experience just one microsecond of every 36524
microseconds. Then you skip the next 36523 microseconds. Now
speed it up again and again. The limit is what I see as what
happens in time travel. Inside the time machine looking out
things seem very much speeded up indeed. Outside looking in you
do not see the Time Traveler at all. The Time Traveler is
traveling through the time, but he is flitting by too fast to be
seen even subliminally. This is why the small model of the time
machine is not visible at to moves forward in time.
Some have suggested that if you really had a time machine and
went into the future the earth would have moved away from under
you as you stay at the same spot. This is assuming that there is
such a thing as the same spot. There is not. But it does not
matter. Brigadoonians feel the force of gravity the whole time
they are around and so the village of Brigadoon moves with the
planet. So would the time machine, assuming that such a thing
were possible. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Hugo Winners
Best Novel: Robert Charles Wilson, SPIN
Best Novella: Connie Willis, "Inside Job"
Best Novelette: Peter S. Beagle, "Two Hearts"
Best Short Story: David D. Levine, "Tk'tk'tk"
Best Related Book: Kate Wilhelm, STORYTELLER: WRITING LESSONS AND
MORE FROM 27 YEARS OF THE CLARION WORKSHOP
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: SERENITY
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: DOCTOR WHO: "The Empty
Child" and "The Doctor Dances"
Best Professional Editor: David G. Hartwell
Best Professional Artist: Donato Giancola
Best Semi-Prozine: LOCUS
Best Fanzine: PLOKTA
Best Fan Artist: Frank Wu
John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: John Scalzi
This was David G. Hartwell's 32nd nomination (in various
categories)--but his first win.
===================================================================
TOPIC: EXULTANT by Stephen Baxter (copyright 2004, Ballantine/Del
Rey, 497pp, $7.50, ISBN 0-345-45789-7) (book review by Joe
Karpierz)
Readers of this humble reviewer's missives probably have figured
out that I have a longing for the good old days of galaxy
spanning adventure, of space travel, exotic aliens, lots of stars
and planets, and the nice Cosmic Thing thrown in. Yeah, you all
remember, that sense-of-wonder stuff that attracted many of us to
science fiction in the first place, back during our personal
Golden Years of SF.
We have one here, folks. This is the real deal when it comes to
everything I like in an SF novel, or at least the things that
attracted me to the genre to begin with. This one convinces me
what many other people already know--that Stephen Baxter is a top
shelf SF writer with brilliant ideas and a grand storyteller's
ways. He's been compared to Arthur C. Clarke, and I think I'm
beginning to agree with that assessment. This is a terrific
novel.
The story takes place 30,000 or so years in the future. Humanity
is at war with the Xeelee--yep, this is a novel in the Xeelee
sequence, although I don't ever remember it being billed that
way. And at best we're fighting to a standstill, and in reality
we're losing. Along comes Pirius, who travels into the future to
defeat the Xeelee in a battle by acquiring knowledge needed to
win. He comes home to a court-martial (along with his crew, by
the way). Worse yet, he comes back to a time before he left,
which means that he gets to meet his younger self. The older
fellow is Pirius Blue, the younger is Pirius Red. Blue is
sentenced to a penal colony to serve out his days, while Red is
taken back to the center of all things, Earth, by a fellow called
Commissary Nilis. Nilis has grandiose plans, unbeknownst to Red,
of using Blue's tactic to move humanity's government toward a way
of winning the war with the Xeelee.
The plan, eventually, is to attack the heart of the Xeelee
operations--Chandra, the monster black hole at the center of the
Galaxy. In order to do that, the aid of the ancient enemy Silver
Ghosts and that of the refugees from the Qax occupation must be
enlisted. Both cause problems for Red, for they go against
everything he has been taught to believe.
This is a much more complex book character-wise than might first
meet the eye. Back in the Solar System, Red has to confront his
feelings about himself, the government, ancient alien enemies,
and his entire belief system to get through the ordeal that Nilis
steers him to. He also gets to confront first-hand the
stagnation that has become human government. Like anything that
has lasted 30,000 years, it needs a little shaking up to get it
started. The prospect of ending the war has some government
officials quaking, knowing that their useful time may be at an
end.
Fighting resistance every step of the way, Nilis, Pirius, and the
rest of our intrepid cast eventually get what they need--ships
and people to go to the Galactic Center to take on Chandra and
the Xeelee. But before it's all over, a complication arises that
changes everything--a complication that I presume will be settled
in the next book, TRANSCENDENT.
At this juncture the two novels appear to be connected by a
couple of very thin threads. We do get to see a Coalescence, a
hive colony running a library of ancient knowledge. These hive
colonies were the subject of the first book in the series. The
other is the mysterious and revered Michael Poole, whom I assume
will play a large part next time around.
Next up I will return to the "Dune" universe, as HUNTERS OF DUNE,
the first book of the conclusion of the original "Dune" saga,
will be the next book I pick up.
Till then. [-jak]
[Joe reports that he will be doing fewer reviews because he has
changed jobs and no longer has a long commute on the train every
day (which is when he did a lot of his reading). His gain is our
loss, I suppose. -ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Interviews (letters of comment by Paul S. R. Chisholm,
Mike Glyer, and George MacLachlan)
In response to Mark's article on interviews in the 08/18/06 issue
of the MT VOID, Paul S. R. Chisholm writes, "Some interviews are
decidedly amicable towards the subject; some, decidedly
antagonistic. '60 Minutes' is famous for the latter. I've heard
they sometimes taped interviews, then (in the absence of the
subject) re-taped the interviewer to make him or her more
polished, confident, etc. Can anyone confirm?"
Not that they can't also be accused of the opposite:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes#Viacom_cross-promotion.
ESPN is working very hard to have more effective interviews:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5625218.
Hope this helps. [-psrc]
Mike Glyer writes, "You might be right that the crime novelist
provided the questions. Isn't it just as likely, though, that
the novelist had previously written or spoken about 'what a crime
novel can do' and that the interviewer picked up on that in
researching the subject? In line with your comment about the
interview being done to entertain an audience, surprising the
subject with a question is risky and dumbstruck pauses would make
bad radio. An interviewer needs to throw pitches they know the
subject can hit in order to be certain the result will be
entertaining. Or so I have always assumed in preparing to
interview SF writers on convention programs." [-mg]
George MacLachlan writes, "Your editorial on "What Can an
Interview Do?" struck a chord with me. Someone recently emailed
me a URL (http://www.aish.com/movies/PhotoFraud.asp for a video
clip that describes the efforts of Reuters, New York Times, and
Associated Press to editorialize their photography to put a
negative slant on Israel's bombing of Hezbollah strongholds in
Lebanon. If the statements and examples in the video clip are
true (given what's going on in the news media today, it's hard to
know what is true and what is staged), they are very disturbing
indeed." [-gfm]
(There is an interesting article on misrepresentation of the truth
in the news at http://tinyurl.com/qqr8k. [-mrl])
===================================================================
TOPIC: The Video Revolution (letter of comment by Andre Kuzniarek)
Regarding Mark's comments in the 08/25/06 issue of the MT VOID on
the video revolution, Andre Kuzniarek writes, "Golly, I have
scads of these [classic movies] on tape, but not just any--on
Beta! I still have a Betamax just to be able to watch these when
I want to, but I'm so busy these days, I'm only watching films
from my DVD collection. I also have hundreds of laserdiscs,
which I collected by scouring sales and from video clubs, from
just before DVDs came along. I was working long nights and never
had a chance to get to a video store at a decent hour, so it was
nice to have stuff I could watch from my own collection to wind
down with. DVDs make this so much easier of course, having
become popular enough to be commodities. Laserdisc (and the
Discovision) were actually available to consumer before VCRs
became commonly available, but the advantages of being able to
record programs were too plain to ever make LD catch on except as
a videophile format (and in Japan).... [-ak]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
This year's World Science Fiction Convention (L.A.con IV) chose
four works to be featured. People were encouraged to read them
before the convention and then attend discussion groups about
them. The four were SPACE CADET by Robert A. Heinlein, TWENTY
THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA by Jules Verne, BRAVE NEW WORLD by
Aldous Huxley, and "No Woman Born" by C. L. Moore.
I commented on BRAVE NEW WORLD in the 12/09/05 issue of the MT
VOID, and since I read it so recently, I did not re-read it for
L.A.con IV.
SPACE CADET by Robert A. Heinlein (ISBN 0-765-31450-9) is very
much a mixed bag. Written in 1948, it swings between being
perceptive and being way off-base, being liberal and being
reactionary. On the one hand, Heinlein seems to have foreseen
microwave ovens when he has the cadets heat something with "high-
frequency waves." On the other, he seems to think that learning
will be done by a combination of injections and hypnosis--which
does make it easier to fill his book with more interesting things
than having his cadets sitting in class for hours on end. On the
one hand, he has an important black character, at a time when the
military had just been integrated, and equal treatment of blacks
was almost unheard of. (Actually, when he wrote the book, the
military was probably still segregated.) On the other hand, all
his main characters are male and have either Anglo-Saxon or French
names and backgrounds, even when they come from Venus or
Ganymede. The lack of women, Asians, or even eastern or southern
European cadets seems very obvious today.
TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA by Jules Verne (ISBN
0-870-21678-3) has a reputation as a children's adventure book.
This is mostly because a lot of the characterization and detail
that Verne put in was removed by Mercier Lewis, the translator
whose English translation has been the most widespread (in the
United States at least). For this occasion I re-read the book in
Walter James Miler's annotated version (for which the ISBN is
given), and Miller includes his translations of the parts that
Lewis had omitted, as well as noting the many places where Lewis
mis-translated Verne. If Lewis was not writing that the density
of steel was "from .7 to .8 that of water" where Verne had said
that it was "7.8 that of water," then he was having Nemo talk
about "jumping over" an island where Verne says "blowing up" (the
same word in French, but Lewis completely misses the meaning).
In fact, Lewis consistently gets the numbers and calculations
wrong. He frequently confuses the French "six" (6) with "dix"
(10), and substitutes English measures for metric. The latter
would be almost close if he substituted "yards" for "metres," but
he sometimes substitutes "feet" instead! When you read this
book, use either Miller's annotated version or a newer
translation. (If the fourth paragraph mentions Cuvier and other
naturalists, it is undoubtedly a newer translation.) Verne has
both a lot more technical detail and a lot more politics and
philosophy than Lewis included.
"No Woman Born" by C. L. Moore is a novella about a woman who was
turned into a cyborg. As an updating of the Frankenstein story,
it has its merits, but it did not strike me as a classic in the
same way that the novels that were chosen did. It is available
in several anthologies; you can look up an up-to-date list at
http://www.isfdb.org (a highly recommended site in general).
[-ecl]
[When I write up the panels that I attended for these, I will
either include those write-ups, or provide pointers to them. -ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Zeal is fit only for wise men, but is
found mostly in fools.
-- Thomas Fuller