THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
06/01/07 -- Vol. 25, No. 48, Whole Number 1443
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Literature of the Aged (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Blogs (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Logical Paradoxes From Illogical Minds (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
Food Stamp Challenge (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
RAINBOWS END by Vernor Vinge (book review by Joe Karpierz)
The Golden Man and NEXT (letter of comment
by Frank R. Leisti)
MINORITY REPORT (letter of comment by Mike Glyer)
Eponyms (letter of comment by Peter Rubinstein)
EIFELHEIM (letter of comment by Gerard Ryan)
This Week's Reading (SACAGAWEA'S NICKNAME, FILM FLAM,
"Bambi Steaks", "The Orchid Forest")
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Literature of the Aged (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
It seems that the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club, long a
powerful force in science fiction and more recently fantasy, may
be going away. Certainly there seems to be a shakeup in how it is
doing business.
http://www.jonathanstrahan.com.au/wp/2007/05/24/sf-book-club/
It may be that Doubleday just is not finding it a profitable as it
once was. I think much of the reason for this is that younger
people are not the market for science fiction that they once were.
If you go to science fiction conventions you really see that the
average age of attendees has risen and there are fewer teenagers.
In the 1960s it seemed the Book Club was aimed mostly at younger
readers. Now fewer teens are reading science fiction and the
average age is increasing. A friend showed me a premium she got
for signing up for the Book Club. It was a fancy pill case. For
that to be a Science Fiction Book Club premium indicates to me they
recognize that much of their market has aged. The average age has
increased to the people who take a lot of prescribed medications.
In another few years the Science Fiction Book Club premium would
have been the Imperial Walker. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Blogs (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Soren Kierkegaard said, "Life must be lived forward, but can only
be understood backward," but he was wrong. How do I know? Well,
I've been reading some blogs lately. The standard seems to be
that the first entry is the latest, so reading them in order
should help one understand it better. It doesn't. All these
blogs keep referring to events that happened earlier, assuming
one has already read that entry. And there is no convenient way
to say, "Reverse the order." Bleh. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Logical Paradoxes From Illogical Minds (comments by Mark
R. Leeper)
Logic is the only field of reason that may be more basic and more
concrete than mathematics. The fact that the statement that says
"A implies not B" is the same as "B implies not A" seems far
removed from the psychological workings of the mind. Yet there
is an interesting class of logical paradoxes that seem to involve
psychology and the degree of thinking person uses and the number
of levels of logic he chooses to employ and even a person's
mental capacity.
A prime example to show what I mean is the "Unexpected Hanging".
It goes like this. A man is sentenced to death by hanging on a
weekday in a given week, but as a merciful part of his sentence
he *must not* know which day he will die until he is actually
taken to be hanged.
The prisoner, a logician, thinks about his situation and reasons
that he has actually been spared the hanging altogether. How?
He knows that the day of the hanging cannot be Friday. If he
were to be hanged on that day, he would know on Friday that it is
the last possible day so it had to be that day. But he is
supposed to not know. That rules out Friday as a possible day of
the execution and makes Thursday the truly last possible day of
the dreaded event. Knowing that the Friday hanging is
impossible, if he is still alive on Thursday, that must be the
day. But he is not supposed to know the day of his hanging. So
Thursday cannot be chosen for the day of the execution.
Wednesday is the last possible day. The prisoner and the
executioner both know that Wednesday is really the last chance.
So the same logic says that is not possible either. If we
continue applying the logic in this way we will rule out every
day as being a possible day. Hence there is no day that he can
be hanged.
Yet suppose Tuesday is chosen. One of the prisoner's proofs was
that Tuesday could not possibly be the dreaded day, but the day
chosen was Tuesday nonetheless. How unexpected! In spite of a
logical proof that Tuesday was not the day, it still was. How do
we resolve this contradiction? It was not known how deeply the
executioner would think about the problem. It was conceivable he
could have chosen Tuesday and assumed that the prisoner had not
ruled out that day.
The real uncertainty comes from not knowing at what depth the
executioner is thinking of the problem and how deeply the
executioner thought the prisoner was thinking about the problem.
How many steps would each carry the logic? We do not know if the
executioner knows the reason the prisoner has ruled out Thursday
and accepts the logic, for example. But the degree of logic used
is hard to quantify. Both have a long chain of assumptions of what
the other person will realize. Only some may be true.
I discovered a similar paradox that proves by induction that
everybody already knows the solution to the famous "Towers of
Hanoi" puzzle. Let me first describe the puzzle.
Take the spades from a deck of cards. Place the picture cards
picture down in a row. The backs of the cards will just be
placeholders for stacks of face-up cards. Order the number cards
(count the ace as a one) in order in a stack face-up, going ace
on top to ten on the bottom. Put this stack on the leftmost of
the picture down cards. Now the object of the game is to move
all the cards to the back of a different picture card. There are
two restrictions. You can move only one card at a time from
stack to stack. You can put a card only directly on the back of
a picture card or on top of a number card of greater value. Your
mission is to move all the cards from the position they are now
on the back of one picture card to the back of a different
picture card obeying these two rules. If you had only two cards
to move it would be easy. Move the ace to the back of one picture
card, move the two to the back of the remaining uncovered picture
card. Move the ace onto the two (allowed since 2 is greater than
1). You have just shifted the ace and the two to another position.
Now start over and following the rules move all the cards to the
back of one of the other picture cards following the rules above.
Go ahead. I will wait.
[Pauses while reader tries out a ten-card puzzle. Listens for
song of a sparrow. Does not hear one. Thinks an X-rated
thought. Smiles slightly. Reader returns.]
So you knew immediately how to do it, right? No? LIAR! Here we
were having this nice conversation and you lied to me. You
certainly know the fastest method to move those ten cards. I can
prove it.
I will prove the assertion by induction. You know how to move
one card to a different stack. Moving the ace to a different
stack is allowed in the rules. You know how to move two cards.
I told you how above.
Now suppose you know the (perhaps complicated) process how to
move N cards to a different stack following the rules of the
game. Do it. You now have the N smallest cards in one stack,
the rest are still in the original stack. One stack is empty.
Move the N+1st card to that empty stack. Now, again following
the rules, move the first N cards on top of it. Voila, you have
moved N+1 cards to a different stack. So you must know how to
move N+1 cards to a different stack. If you know how to move N
cards you know how to move N+1. Because you know how to move two
cards, you know how to move three. Because you know how to move
three cards you know how to move four. Because you know how to
move four cards you know how to move five. And so forth. So
apparently you know how to move any number of cards. That seems
like a good induction proof.
Yet my knowledge of the real world tells me that people usually
cannot move the cards in this way. For these people the logic
breaks down. They probably know how to transfer one or two
cards. But transferring ten cards or thirty cards or one hundred
cards may be a little daunting for them.
One reason someone might not know how to move all ten cards is
the limit of memory. In the middle of the effort to transfer ten
cards you will be in the middle of the effort to move nine cards.
Doing that you will be in the middle of the effort to move eight
cards. And so forth. To use computer jargon you are essentially
running a stack of subroutines and a human mind can only manage a
stack to a certain small depth.
Evelyn has a different explanation. She says you know the method
for moving one card really well. The method for moving two cards
you know pretty well. For three cards you know it sort of well.
Each step you know it a little less well. That may amount to the
same thing. The larger the number of cards to be moved the
harder it is to maintain. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Food Stamp Challenge (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
[This has nothing to do with science fiction, but is an
interesting exercise to see how *you* would do this.]
Four Congressmen, including Tim Ryan (D-OH) and Jim McGovern (D-
MA), tried to eat for a week on $21/person, which is what food
stamps allow a person.
Ryan and McGovern kept blogs of their experience
(http://www.house.gov/apps/blog/oh17_ryan/index.shtml and
http://foodstampchallenge.typepad.com/, respectively. Their
blogs indicated what they bought. Many people posted comments
about how poorly they shopped, but I will add mine as well.
Ryan ($20.66):
One bag of corn meal: $1.43
One jar of chunky peanut butter: $2.48
Two jars of strawberry preserves: $4.00
One loaf of wheat bread: $.89
Two boxes of angel hair pasta: $1.54
Three jars of tomato sauce: $4.50
Two cartons of cottage cheese: $3.00
One can of coffee: $2.50
One clove of garlic: $.32
My comments: It seems to me that one can find pasta slightly
cheaper than that, even while not on sale, but perhaps not in
Washington DC. Two jars of strawberry preserves seems like an
extravagance--it is his second most expensive purchase, and has
no nutritional value to speak of. I'm not sure what size peanut
butter he got, but it can be found for about $1.50 for an 18-
ounce jar.
McGovern ($41.70 for two):
Fajita kit ($1.79)
Brown rice ($2.04)
Two cans of tuna ($3.50)
One can of coffee ($1.55)
Lentils (73 cents)
Chicken ($7.32)
"Fatty" beef ($7.06).
My comments: What is a fajita kit? If it is tortillas, one can
get them cheaper as just tortillas. I suppose it may include
salsa or something. $3.50 for two cans of tuna?! Even solid
albacore is available for $1 a can, and chunk light cheaper than
that. I'm assuming the lentils were dried, because that is must
cheaper than canned. It was suggested that if one was going to
buy a chicken, one should buy an onion, some celery, and a couple
of carrots, and make a large pot of soup instead of just roasting
it for basically one meal as the McGoverns did.
Someone commented that both of them seemed to shop in a more
expensive supermarket. However, they shopped at the supermarket
closest to them. Anything else would have required taking mass
transit (and a fair walk)--the former costs money, and the latter
is difficult with a lot of groceries.
In general, the claim was that one could not buy milk on that
budget, but non-fat dry milk is $6.49 for enough to make ten
quarts.
Someone else who did this noted that that Ryan and McGovern have
is that they are 1) starting from scratch, and 2) buying just
enough for a week. I realize the last sounds counter-intuitive,
but if one expects to be on the "$21/week diet" for a long period
of time, one can have a wider variety by buying different foods
each week, then carrying some over. (For example, a box of
oatmeal can be consumed over several weeks, as can a dozen eggs.
So one week you buy one, and the next the other.) Also, tea bags
are only about a penny each at a dollar store, but one needs to
buy a hundred.
The first problem (starting from scratch) can be bypassed in a
short test period by assuming one has basic seasonings already
and can use them. For example, I would consider it allowable to
use existing salt, pepper, cooking oil, olives (for seasoning,
not eating), soy sauce, citric acid, cumin, chile, Sazon, and
sofrito.
In general, I would also try to buy day-old bread, and supplement
with canned fruits and vegetables from the discounted dented can
bin (assuming one can find one).
My shopping list (starred items will last longer than one week)
($20.11):
One pound dried kidney beans (0.79)
One pound dried lentils (0.79)
18 ounces bulghur* (1.49)
Two pounds brown rice* (1.29)
Two pounds white rice* (0.79)
42 ounces oatmeal* (1.75)
One can gandules (0.89)
Two 8-oz can tomato sauce (0.50)
18-ounce jar peanut butter (1.50)
Three packages ramen (.34)
One dozen eggs (1.89)
Garlic (0.43)
Loaf bread (0.69)
Tea bags* (1.00)
Three pounds onions (1.99)
24 ounces raisins (2.99)
Corn tortillas (.99)
With this I can make five pints of Puerto Rican beans and five
pints of Arroz con Gandules (from only 8 ounces of the white
rice). Adding bulghur to the beans will stretch it further. The
starches will all last more than a week.
As noted, this does not have much variation in meals, but I could
live with that. In week two I could add elbow macaroni (0.59)
and cheese (4.99/lb) to the menu. A bag of roasted peanuts might
also be a good investment later on--high in protein and filling.
I would spring for some real olive oil (for flavoring) when I
could (8.5 ounces for 2.99).
I am not saying this is a good way to live--there are no fruits
other than raisins, no vegetables other than onions, etc. But
note that in subsequent weeks, there would be more money to spend
on those. Some people have claimed that canned or frozen produce
was cheaper, others that fresh produce was cheaper. One person
claimed that bananas could always be found for 30 cents a pound.
Not around here! Another suggested a 5-pound bag of potatoes,
which is probably affordable most places.
There is also no provision for non-food items such as soap or
toilet paper.
(There was someone recently who did an experiment of eating for a
month on $1 a day, so it can be done even cheaper.)
Note that this is one of several current "agenda diets"; others
include such old-timers as the kosher, vegetarian, or vegan diets;
the "eat organic diet"; and the "eat locally" diet (for example,
http://www.eatlocalchallenge.com/). [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: RAINBOWS END by Vernor Vinge (copyright 2006, Tor, $7.99,
381pp, ISBN 0-812-53636-3) (book review by Joe Karpierz)
We begin our review of this year's Hugo-nominated novels with
Vernor Vinge's RAINBOWS END. The novel is subtitled "A Novel
with One Foot in the Future". I have to say I agree with that
statement--as far as the rest of the novel goes, I really don't
know what to make of it.
Our central character--I don't think you can call him a
protagonist, although if you squint a bit maybe you can--is one
Robert Gu. Gu was a world famous poet until Alzheimer's set in.
He comes to in 2025, with his mind and health restored by the
miracle of modern health technology. But along with that modern
health technology comes other technological advances which are
completely foreign to Gu. Your clothes connect you to the
Internet with the help of smart contact lenses. Nothing is as it
seems--reality is whatever someone else wants it to be. What one
person sees as one thing may be seen by another person as
something else entirely. Books are on their way out. Things
have changed too much, too fast.
Gu was an abusive person. He believes that his wife is dead,
when in fact she left him years before his Alzheimer's set in.
She lives in the Rainbows End retirement home. His son and
daughter-in-law are high-level government agents, he in a
military capacity, she in a sort of intelligence agency. He has a
granddaughter named Miri, who believes that he has changed--that
he's not the man he once was. Her parents and his wife think
she's wrong.
Meanwhile, there's a little matter of some international
espionage and hornswaggling going on. Alfred Vaz is running
experiments in San Diego in YGBM technology--You've Gotta Believe
Me. Call it a sort of mind control thing, if you will. The
international community has caught on, and Alfred joins forces
with two other international expert analysts to figure out what's
going on. Yep, that's right--he's an international expert in
these things too, and he's in charge of ratting out his own
experiments. The three of them enlist the aid of the Rabbit--an
international expert in something or other, but he's not telling.
He just convinces the other three that he can get to the bottom
of what's going on in San Diego, and that has Vaz worried.
But wait, there's more.
There's the Librareome Project, where books in libraries all over
the world are being scanned, shredded, and digitized. And oh,
yes, Gu and many other old timers recovering after their health
is restored are back at school, trying to become accustomed to a
new way of life.
And then it gets complicated.
Actually, it's complicated from the beginning, and while at the
beginning I thought this book was going in a terrific direction,
for me it stalled out. There was too much going on in too many
different places all at the same time for me to keep track of. I
will say that it's inventive and in many places intensely
interesting. It's an interesting extrapolation of where the
Internet could be heading, and that may be *my* problem. I
realize there's a lot more going on with the net than I take
advantage of or even care to know about, and this takes it a
great deal further. If this is our future, I'm not sure I want
it.
So, not a great start. Let's hope the next entry, BLINDSIGHT by
Peter Watts, is a lot better. [-jak]
===================================================================
TOPIC: The Golden Man and NEXT (letter of comment by Frank
R. Leisti)
In response to Mark's comments on time travel in the 05/25/07
issue of the MT VOID, Frank Leisti writes:
With Mark's viewpoint of time travel as a video reset (with
retaining the information gathered in prior attempts), one could
look at the 'golden man' ability to see various pathways into the
future given the current state of time.
[Mark notes, "I am not sure that is so much my viewpoint. That is
the plot of films I have reviewed, notably GROUNDHOG DAY."
-mrl]
Since that first step limits all of the other possibilities (like
if he went to the horseshoe pit earlier and couldn't throw the
ringer), the bigger action would be the affected person's own
influence on the future pathway. At what point does the future
become set for a person like that?
If I think that I will extend my arm to catch something falling,
that has yet to get tipped over, have I limited my actions during
the time of thinking to extend my arm? What about indecision--
where I see only so far into the future based on the current
state of time and I start on a path that soon enough brings me
close to personal peril? As I get closer to getting killed, I
see the results and start trying to climb out of that pathway,
would it be similar to getting caught in a black hole of time?
It will be interesting how the screen writer of Next has
interpreted this ability and the director's method of displaying
it to the viewer.
I have always found this idea stimulating and so when the movie,
Next came out last Friday, I was ready to pluck down extra money
to see it with my girlfriend, rather than at the rush show where
it is a few dollars cheaper, but my girlfriend was still working
at that time.
The movie does show instances where Nicholas Cage does see &
interact with his future--first with a car chase (him in the
stolen car, racing to beat a train--the first time shows him
crashing with the train when driving at 80-90 mph, but just
zipping past when driving at 120 mph (the physics is off for the
distance & speed to be that close to the train as shown in the
movie.)
The next time is that he sees the FBI agent, Julianne Moore
coming to talk with him and he has the conversation, sees the FBI
SWAT team arrive and leaves before she really does arrive--now
knowing what she wants of him, even though they had yet to talk
in "real time".
Later, when searching on a booby-trapped boat, he 'splits' to
search multiple levels of the ship in order to find the girl that
he had visions about that were not limited to just over 2 minutes
of time viewing. With all of his splits, some come across places
that explode, so other versions of himself start to avoid those
locations. The issue here is that even if you could split off
into multiple people, with a two-minute limit, you are hard
pressed to make the necessary full length search of a ship. You
normally couldn't do that in the time limit, but the
visualization of him splitting into multiple individuals does
move the plot line along and leads up to the confrontation with
the bad guy. That part had physics problems as well--multiple
shots in the general direction of a person walking to you will
likely hit somewhere on that individual (even given the fact that
police at point blank range often has only a 25% success rate at
hitting someone--given the "excitement" at the time of the
shooting.)
I liked Dick's story better in the way that the "Golden Man"
waited when the horseshoe playing was going on, then took a
particular moment to advance and throw the horseshoe for a
ringer. It was that time when the ringer would be made, so that
was the time that he went to throw it. Sort of like the
universe's random actions aligned at that moment of time for him
to throw the perfect shot. Now, it could have been that he
visualized his multiple attempts at throwing until his muscles
learned to throw that perfect shot. But if that was the case,
then he would have to visualize lots of things before doing
things just right.
From the NEXT movie, the case scene (walking) in the casino was a
splendid example of doing all of the things at just the right
time, even to the part where he walks around the security men
even as they are being told where to look for him. For the rest
of us, we would see him as extremely lucky in getting away with
the situation.
As to "déjà vu" incidents, I have experienced them a lot over my
lifetime. One of the most recent being when I went to my son's
mother's house to see him and there was a Direct TV tech
installing a system for them. He had parked his truck in the
driveway on the left side, and I parked on the right side, almost
into the grass. I knew that if I didn't leave before that
person, he would hit my car, even though there was plenty of
space and absolutely no reason for him not to see my car. Yet,
when I spent time with my son (he was showing me his room there),
the technician came back to the house saying that he had run into
my car.
For my own personal belief, I feel that we can sense strong
emotions through time and these can produce the "déjà vu" image
that we see before it happens. Perhaps the writers of the Matrix
aren't so far off the mark when it comes to living in our world.
Perhaps we actually are multi-dimensional beings existing in this
universe and we are only tied down in these three dimensions but
those other dimensions can touch us in ways that we don't
understand. I can imagine our world where our
"super-consciousness" mingles with others around us and can draw
people we want or don't want to us in this world.
A wonderful conversation. Hope that you enjoy the movie, NEXT.
[-frl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: MINORITY REPORT (letter of comment by Mike Glyer)
In his comments on MINORITY REPORT in the 05/25/07 issue of the
MT VOID, Mark wrote, "The *real* story 'Minority Report' by Dick,
inaccurately presented in the film, has three different psychics
seeing three different futures because knowing a future
supposedly allows one to avert it and bring about a different
future. That was really the point of the original written story."
[-mrl]
Mike Glyer writes, "A number of SF writers like Clarke and
Bradbury have explicitly said that science fiction foretells
futures in order to avert them. Do you think Dick's 'Minority
Report' is on any level a commentary on the genre itself? [-mg
Mark answers, "I cannot judge what did and did not go on in
Dick's strange mind. But the idea for layered is complex enough
it could easily have been all that was on his mind." [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Eponyms (letter of comment by Peter Rubinstein)
In response to Mark's comments on Quisling in the 05/25/07 issue
of the MT VOID, Peter Rubinstein writes, "Ranks right up there
with the aptness of Don Quixote's name in light of his quixotic
behavior!" [-pir]
===================================================================
TOPIC: EIFELHEIM (letter of comment by Gerard Ryan)
In response to his own letter of comment on EIFELHEIM in the
04/20/07 issue of the MT VOID (and Tara's in the 05/25/07 issue),
Jerry Ryan writes:
Well, I had to buy EIFELHEIM and read it just as soon as I
realized that it was based on that old short story that I
remembered.
I enjoyed it very much. Very richly drawn characters, and a very
compelling story. Flynn basically wrote the story of the village
that had the encounter with the extraterrestrials and intercut it
with the short story that he wrote twenty years ago.
My only criticism is that he didn't spend as much time fleshing
out the "modern" characters that deduced the story of the village
of Eifelheim. The chapters marked "Now", the piece parts from the
original short story, don't read as well as the chapters from the
past. Maybe he didn't really need to do more with the "Now"
pieces--maybe doing more would have interfered with the main line
of the story.
Good stuff, though. I agree with Taras, you should pick it up and
read it. I have the sense that it's the sort of thing that would
appeal to you. [-gwr]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Larry McMurtry is best known for LONESOME DOVE--indeed, for most
people, that is his only work they could name (but see the review
of FILM FLAM below for a list of others). However, he has also
written a fair amount of non-fiction, mostly in the form of
essays. These have been collected into several, one of which is
SACAGAWEA'S NICKNAME (ISBN-10 1-590-17099-7, ISBN-13
978-1-590-17099-1). This includes twelve essays from "The New
York Review of Books", covering such diverse aspects of the West
as Buffalo Bill, the Zuni tribe, John Wesley Powell, and Angie
Debo, as well as (obviously) Sacagawea. McMurtry places his own
view of the West between the triumphalists and the revisionists.
(I would summarize these as "manifest destiny" and "noble
savage", but that is my shorthand, not McMurtry's, and even I
will admit that both are more complex than that.) McMurtry has
been involved in the popularization of "the West", yet he still
retains the ability to look at how that popularization has done a
disservice to both the West and those who are perceiving it.
I was reading the foreword to FILM FLAM: ESSAYS ON HOLLYWOOD by
Larry McMurtry (ISBN-10 0-743-21624-5, ISBN-13
978-0-743-21624-1), but was taken aback when I read, "As the ante
for each picture goes up the old fever of excitement gives way to
the constant low-grade fever of dread. What if we spend $30
million and it flops?" Just how old was this book?! It turns
out it is from 1987, those halcyon days when $30 million was a
lot of money in Hollywood. (SPIDER-MAN 3 just cost $250
million.) These essays reflect McMurty's experience both as an
author whose novels have been filmed, and as a screen-writer.
His filmed novels include HORSEMAN, PASS BY (filmed as HUD); THE
LAST PICTURE SHOW, TERMS OF ENDEARMENT, and perhaps his best known
novel, LONESOME DOVE. McMurtry takes a refreshingly practical
approach to the business of screen-writing--and, yes, to him it is
a business. In the essay "The Fun of It All" he says that far too
many screen-writers have an inflated sense of their own
importance, and need to gain some perspective. (Among other
points, he notes that "if writers play limited roles in Hollywood,
they also bear limited responsibilities. They don't have to foot
the bill when a picture gets made; and nobody's going to blame
them if a picture flops.") This attitude puts him at the far end
of the spectrum from, say, Harlan Ellison. McMurtry is in favor
of treating screen-writing as a craft, working with deadlines,
being open to input from others and changes to the script, and not
insisting on being on set through the entire shoot.
Of having one's novels turned into movies, he writes, "When
Hollywood entered my life I was sitting in a tiny room in Fort
Worth eating meatloaf. The phone rang, and I was informed that
some people I had never heard of had just bought the movie rights
to my first novel. Three nights later I was sitting in the best
restaurant in Fort Worth, eating my first chateaubriand--a steak
so thick that in most parts of Texas it would have been called a
roast--and discussing title changes with a gentleman from
Paramount. At the time it never crossed my mind to wonder
whether the movie would turn out to be better than the book; what
I knew for a certainty was that the steak was better than the
meatloaf." (page 36) (Stephen King tells a similar story about
hearing about the sale of the movie rights to CARRIE.)
But what about the notion that a bad movie hurts the author of
the source book? Regarding RAGTIME, McMurtry says, "In my view
it is preeminently silly for Doctorow to give a damn about what
happens to RAGTIME as a film. His work is done, and his tale now
belongs, most properly, to its readers, not to him. The film De
Laurentiis may eventually make of it is another problem, but it
is clearly De Laurentiis's problem, no Doctorow's." (page 71)
McMurtry's implication throughout all this, never stated, and
perhaps just my conclusion, is that if the author is going to
care that much about what a film made from the book will be like,
he should not sell the rights. (Returning to Steven King,
however, it is generally agreed that the best films made from his
works are those he had the least involvement with, and
conversely.)
(The title of this book, FILM FLAM, is a (perhaps unintentional)
example of how books and movies are different. No one would use
this phrase in a movie, because it is virtually unpronounceable.)
"Bambi Steaks" by Richard A. Lovett (ANALOG, May 2007) is the
sort of story that makes me yearn for the days of Frederik Pohl
and C. M. Kornbluth. It is set in the future (sometime after
2017) and apparently the Red states and the Blue states split
apart (actually there seemed to be six different splinter
countries at one point) which eventually re-formed into a
confederacy. And someone has developed mind transference, so
there is a draft where Reds swap minds/bodies with Blues for a
week or a month or whatever. (This is the best use they have for
mind transference?!) Our narrator is a Blue and has to live as a
Red for a month. Oh, and people are supposed to try to conceal
their identity during the swap. The word "predictable" is far
too understated for this story. The narrator has his brain full
of stereotypes of Reds, but as written, is just a mass of
stereotypes about Blues. And just in case even this is too
subtle, the tagline reads: "The trouble with the real world is
that it too often refuses to fit our nest pictures of it. . . ."
And the fact that the exchange is symmetrical provides no
balance--when he returns, his Blue buddies talk about what a
great guy his Red "mind guest" was. The Golden Age of social
satire science fiction is indeed passed.
On the other hand, if the traditional sources of short fiction
are disappointing, one can occasionally find a gem in the most
unlikely places. For example, "The New York Review of Science
Fiction" does not usually publish fiction, but the February 2007
issue has a wonderful piece by Michael. A few weeks back (in the
04/27/07 issue of the MT VOID) I reviewed Rhys Hughes's A NEW
UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY. Well, "The Orchid Forest: A
Metafactual Narrative Introduction to THE CRYSTAL COSMOS by Rhys
Hughes, by Miguel Obispo" is described as "Rhys Hughes's 612th
piece of fiction in his projected life's work of one thousand
discrete, albeit subtly linked, items of fiction." Except, of
course, it is written by Michael Bishop. Only about 5500 words
long (placing in firmly in the Short Story category for Hugo,
hint, hint!), it is chock-a-block with literary references,
allusions, and in-jokes. Some are overt (Hughes the character
says that all the ships in his latest work, THE CRYSTAL COSMOS,
are named for Ian Watson novels), some are more subtle (Moby K.
Dick, the Paranoia Whale), and others are downright obscure (I am
sure that "an unpronounceable town in Finland" must be a
reference to *something*). This is one of those stories that as
soon as I finished it I wanted to read it again, and will
definitely be on my Hugo ballot next year. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Janie's a pretty typical teenager--angry,
insecure, confused. I wish I could tell
her that's all going to pass, but I don't
want to lie to her.
-- Alan Ball, AMERICAN BEAUTY, 1999