THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
06/15/07 -- Vol. 25, No. 50, Whole Number 1445
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
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Topics:
Ray Bradbury: FAHRENHEIT 451 Misinterpreted
Audio Hugo Nominees (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Mars Has Ponds (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
A Way with Words (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
SH20--The Seeds of Destruction (Part 2) (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
OCEAN'S THIRTEEN (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
SH20 and LOST (letter of comment by Andre Kuzniarek)
This Week's Reading (authors' opinions, BRAVE NEW WORLD,
BLOOD ON THE SADDLE) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Ray Bradbury: FAHRENHEIT 451 Misinterpreted
"Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his
iconographic work and what he really meant. FAHRENHEIT 451 is not,
he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a
response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had
already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.
Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of
reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about
how television destroys interest in reading literature."
Full story at http://tinyurl.com/2lrl7k.
However, Patrick Nielsen Hayden has posted a "rebuttal" at
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009076.html#009076.
===================================================================
TOPIC: Audio Hugo Nominees (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
For those who enjoy dramatic readings of science fiction, this
year the five nominees for the Hugo for short story are all
available in that form. We previously published where they can be
found on-line.
"How to Talk to Girls at Parties" by Neil Gaiman (FRAGILE THINGS)
Gaiman himself reads the story at links off of:
http://tinyurl.com/2b9z82
"Kin" by Bruce McAllister (Asimov's, February 2006)
"Impossible Dreams" by Timothy Pratt (Asimov's, July 2006)
"Eight Episodes" by Robert Reed (Asimov's, June 2006)
"The House Beyond Your Sky" by Benjamin Rosenbaum
(Strange Horizons September 2006)
The people who do a weekly audio science fiction story, usually
good, at http://escapepod.org/ have also done a reading of each
of the other four Hugo nominees which can be found from links off
of:
http://escapepod.org/category/podcasts/hugo/
Note: If you are the sort of person who wants to multi-process and
enjoy the story when, say, you are driving to and from work, be
informed that most police and traffic safety officials recommend
the audio version over the text version of these stories. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Mars Has Ponds (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
By the time this gets published it may be old news, but in case
you missed it. It has not been verified yet as of June 10, but it
appears there are ponds on Mars. This makes life on Mars much
more likely.
http://tinyurl.com/2sxezk
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: A Way with Words (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
These magazines get sent to my house with ads for local
businesses. The magazines have names like "Shopping Spree,"
"Shop Till You Drop," and my personal favorite "Shop-a-holic."
Really. Are there people who really like to think of themselves
as being a shop-a-holic? Any day now I expect to see "Daddy's
Spoiled Little Princess", "More Money then Sense," or "Spend
Money Like Water." [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: SH20--The Seeds of Destruction (Part 2) (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
I have been reading several people's predictions for the 21st
Century. Some make it seem likely that from many different
aspect, the last half of the last century may well have been more
comfortable than this half of this century will be. Last week I
was talking about SH20 (pronounced S-H-2-O), the second half of
the 20th century. These 50 years are FH21. It was in SH20 that
the lot of the average American worker may have peaked in that
time and may be headed downward. The causes of downward trend
may well be just how good things were at that time. Let us look
at some other aspects of the changing times.
With the prosperity of SH20 more people had cars. Industries
expanded. There was demand for energy. This all dumped a lot of
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now the climate is behaving
strangely. Suddenly the environment is doing things that it has
not done in tens of thousands of years or maybe a lot more. And
I mean suddenly. Climate change is generally slow but it is
happening in just a very few short years after big industrial
expansions. That may be coincidence, but I do not think that is
the way the smart would bet. In any case it is clear that there
are large changes in the environment. The weather is behaving is
very new ways. We have lost what is currently about half of a
major city in the United States to extreme weather and the extreme
weather changes may well be just the beginning.
Meanwhile countries all over the world, particularly India and
China, want the same sort of prosperity that we have had for the
last half-century. Humans will be dumping a lot more carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere as that happens. This is an area where
nobody can with any assurance accurately predict the future, but
I suspect we have to be ready for some very nasty environmental
shocks. The age of carelessly dumping more carbon dioxide into
the air with little consequences may be coming to an end. China
and India are industrializing. Within a short time China will be
putting more carbon dioxide in the air than the United States is.
And China is concerned about environmental changes, but they say
that what is happening is the result of years of western
industrialization. They are willing to compromise, but the
United States has to make sizable cutbacks first. In the last
half of the 20th century we reaped the benefits of the industrial
society, without thinking much that it would have to be regulated
sooner or later.
Another area where things my be past their prime is with travel.
In the 1950s and 1960s more people were driving and the Interstate
Highways were developed. Traveling by car became a lot faster.
But more and more people drove. That meant there were more
traffic jams. The travel times are starting to increase again.
Much the same has happened with air travel with congestion over
cities. The drive time for a trip from Manhattan to Boston really
decreased in the second half of the 20th century, but as the
amount of traffic increased drive time is rising again.
Air travel in the meantime has gotten either more expensive or
less comfortable or both. These days flying coach class, the way
the majority of people fly, means being confined to a little,
uncomfortable capsule of space. This is because the airlines have
to squeeze more profit from a flight in large part because the
plane runs on petroleum and there is more competition
internationally for petroleum so its price has gone up. To pay
for it the airlines have to put more passengers in each plane.
Air travel has become much less comfortable. Meanwhile security
concerns have made getting on the planes less convenient and more
stressful. The pleasure many of us used to feel in flying has
turned the flying experience into a trial that many of us just
want to get over with.
Speaking of security, I am sure there will be some people who
will remember SH20 as a time of fears about the atomic bomb. We
lived in fear of what the Soviets might do. Perhaps that is
true, but the Soviets were a less threatening enemy for us than
our current ones. While there might have been some in the USSR
who were hawks, the real truth was that all along the Soviet
Union was something of a paper tiger. They were constantly
covering up the fact that they just did not have the economy to
oppose us effectively. And they had to fight a constant two-
front war. They were opposing the West and at the same time
opposing their own people who were desperate to leave a
totalitarian system that was rotting from within. The Berlin
Wall was intended not to keep others out but to keep their own
people in. There was barbed wire across Eastern Europe for the
same reason. They had the resources to be scary, but not to be
effective. And at heart they really did not want a nuclear war.
In 1945 nuclear energy saved the United States from having to
invade Japan. It probably saved literally millions of lives.
Ironically it probably meant fewer Japanese died in the long run.
As the years passed it allowed both the American and Soviet
military to have much smaller armies because they could enforce
their will without large standing armies.
But what sustains our power also sustains the power of our
enemies. We are probably in more danger of having a nuclear
confrontation than ever were in the second half of the 20th
Century.
Today we are fighting more determined enemies in what is at heart
a religious war. There are Islamic fundamentalists who believe
that if there is a nuclear war they automatically win and very
possibly are willing to demonstrate that belief. The principle
is that God will take the faithful to Paradise and will punish
the dead of the other side. The philosophy in the late 20th
century of Mutually Assured Destruction, really the most powerful
nuclear deterrent of the Cold War, is now broken at a time when
it is not just a tiny handful of countries that have nuclear
weapons but a large number. If we thought we were close to
having a nuclear conflict in the Cold War most signs say we are
much closer right now.
I will conclude this discussion of the shape of things to come
next week. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: OCEAN'S THIRTEEN (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Danny Ocean is back and masterminding literally dozens
of scams to help a friend who has lost his casino to a double-
crossing partner. The script is fun and breezy and not meant to
be taken very seriously. The film is full of little "aha!"
moments as pieces of the scam come together. The whole scheme
would probably never work in real life, but this isn't real life
by a long stretch. Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
The pleasure of a heist film like this, much like that of the old
"Mission Impossible" television program, is in seeing an
impossible task broken down into a myriad of pieces, all
seemingly unlikely, and to see each accomplished. This is not so
much a single story but a dramatization of many little scams that
fit into a master plan. That is probably how the film has to be
done. The title scheme requires that there have to be thirteen
conspirators. There are a lot of under-handed sub-tasks and so
the scriptwriters could just apportion them out to the various
members of the team so everybody gets to do something. If they
had wanted to roll it back to OCEAN'S EIGHT or SEVEN it probably
would have worked as well. Personally, I thought that the
Clooney OCEAN'S ELEVEN was a cop-out on the ambitious Sinatra
version in which the five major casinos--the Sahara, the
Flamingo, the Riviera, the Sands, and the Desert Inn--were all
robbed at the same time on New Year's Eve. However, OCEAN'S
THIRTEEN is not a remake of anything so has no responsibilities
to any film but itself. It is just a sequel and probably one
that improves on the original (if a remake can be called the
original). It has a breezy but still engaging story.
The story centers around revenge on the heavy, Willie Bank
(played by an Al Pacino who somehow just does not look like a
Willie). Bank double-crosses his business partner Reuben
Tishkoff (Eliot Gould). He essentially steals Tishkoff's casino
and renames it after himself. Tishkoff was one of the great
lions of the old Vegas, a mythical figure and one who did lots of
favors for lots of people. And many of those people think if him
like a favorite uncle. Now the double-cross by Bank has left
Tishkoff with nothing to show for his old position but a coronary
and a few remaining friends. But one of the friends is, of
course, Danny Ocean (George Clooney), the affable crook who leads
a gang of crooks, all loyal to Ocean and to Tishkoff. Ocean
hatches a plot to have hundreds of unsuspecting bystanders
playing different games all win fabulous in the same three
minutes of time.
Bank's Girl Friday, Abigail Sponder (Ellen Barkin), runs the new
Bank Casino for Bank and she does much of the dirty work like
firing servers who have gained a little weight. Ocean may be a
crook, but the audience knows who to side with. From the
beginning we know that Bank and Sponder are both going down, but
the question is how will Ocean arrange it all.
Steven Soderberg (who started out with the minimalist independent
film SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE) has directed all three OCEAN'S
10+N films and is getting used to handling a huge cast in
luxurious locations. It cannot be an easy task handling so many
major actors.
In our fourth film this summer that is the third film of a series
it is nice to see a film that does not spend most of its budget
on CGI. The characters are not deep, but at least the film
concentrates on characters rather than bits and bytes. I would
give OCEAN'S THIRTEEN a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0496806/
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: SH20 and LOST (letter of comment by Andre Kuzniarek)
In response to Mark's article on the second half of the twentieth
century in the 06/08/07 issue of the MT VOID, Andre Kuzniarek
writes, "Oil is the primary engine of all things great and good
in SH20, and that's going fast. Just ponder how much of
everything in our modern lives traces back to the availability of
cheap oil, and it's easy to see how beak the future might be
without it. It seems to unlikely that there will be anything to
replace it in terms of extraction to application energy/price
ratios, but I sure hope the Peak Oil crowd are just stuck in
schadenfreude and that unexpected alternatives will appear to
keep our modern lives afloat."
[I am not sure I am entirely convinced of the Peak Oil crisis.
Frankly I just don't know if we are really that close to running
out or not. (It may come as a surprise after these editorials
that I am not so pessimistic about everything. I am trying to be
more selective in my pessimism.) But if the Peak Oil situation
turns out to be real it will be just one more case where
short-sighted policies in SH20 and into the present were the seeds
of the problems to come. A current assessment of the problem I
was just reading yesterday is at
http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article2656034.ece. -mrl]
And in response to Mark's question about "Land of the Lost" in
the same issue, Andre writes, "'Lost' vs. 'Land of the Lost'--I'm
very familiar with both, and have certainly considered this
comparison. The thing about 'Lost' is that it makes reference to
all sorts of comparable stories/ideas, sometimes in subtle ways,
sometimes not, but it's so much of a potpourri that you can make
the case for just about any slightly similar concept, even
'Gilligan's Island'. Also, 'Lost' is so so vague and moves so
slowly in terms of addressing mysteries that it's all too much up
in the air right now, there's not enough concrete exposition
related to any of the SF/fantasy elements to really make honest
comparisons with. Best coverage of the show and its relation to
other concepts is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lostpedia." [-ak]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
An observation about authors (though not a new one): Authors and
other artists can be poor judges of their own work, and
contemporary critics are often no better. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
was sure he would be remembered for his historical novels such as
the THE WHITE COMPANY and SIR NIGEL, while his Sherlock Holmes
stories were just fluff. Sir Arthur Sullivan felt his great work
was his one true opera, "Ivanhoe", while he looked down on his
collaborations with W. S. Gilbert. And Mark Twain's literary
executor Albert Bigelow Paine was sure that time would judge JOAN
OF ARC to be Twain's greatest and most enduring work.
Last month our science fiction book group read BRAVE NEW WORLD by
Aldous Huxley (ISBN-10 0-060-77609-9, ISBN-13 978-0-060-77609-1).
A lot has been said about this, so I will comment just on a few
aspects. First are the names Huxley used. Most of the names he
chose he took from prominent and famous at the time of his
writing. The following is a list of all the names in the book,
with sources for the ones (I think) I know: Ford and Freud are
well-known and commented on, but we also find Bokanovsky, Podsnap
(OUR MUTUAL FRIEND), Foster, Mustapha Mond, Lenina (Lenin--
a political philosopher), Fanny, Marx (a political philosopher),
Pfitzner (a composer and anti-modernist), Kawaguchi, Edzel (Edsel--
an industrialist), Benito (a politician) Hoover (a politician),
Helmholtz (a physician and physicist) Watson (a child
psychologist), Stopes (a family planning advocate), Rothschild (a
financier), Sarojini (a woman's emancipationist) Engels (a
political philosopher), Bradlaugh (an atheist), Diesel (an
inventor), Deterding (the chairman of Royal Dutch Petroleum in
Huxley's time), Bakunin (a political philosopher), Tomakin,
Dr. Shaw (socialist), Gaffney, Keate, Primo (a dictator) Mellon (a
banker), Darwin (a scientist), Bonaparte (a politician). Some of
those seem obscure but were not at the time the book was written
(1932). For example, Miguel Primo de Rivera was the dictator of
Spain from 1923 to 1930. (The few I have not annotated I could
not find any well-known real-life person of the time with that
name.)
The racism of the book is also worth noting, not just the entire
portrayal of the Zuni as unhygienic fanatics, but also the
comments about the fertility of different races, etc.
And finally, was Huxley being slyly sarcastic when he wrote,
"[And] on khaki paper and in words exclusively of one syllable,
'The Delta Mirror'"
BLOOD ON THE SADDLE by Rafael Reig (translated by Paul Hammond)
(ISBN-10 1-852-42870-8, ISBN-13 978-1-852-42870-9) is a hard-
boiled detective novel set in a near-future Madrid. Actually, it
is even more specifically a Raymond Chandler (Philip Marlowe)
pastiche. (One of the missing persons the detective is looking
for is a character from a novel, so there may be a dash of Jasper
Fforde here as well.) I'm not sure the genre feeling survives the
transition in both time (from the 1940s and 1950s to the 21st
century) and space (from Los Angeles to Madrid). And having to
further be interpreted into Spanish by Reig and then translated
back into English (by Hammond) may be more stress than this very
stylistic genre can bear.
This is not to say that the book does not have its moments. On
listening to some literary critics, our narrator Carlos Clot
says, "These were penitential readers. The value they attributed
to a book was in direct proportion to the effort it had cost them
to finish it." (page 102)
Because this was translated for British publication, Britishisms
such as suspenders (for garters) and Inland Revenue and British
spellings occur throughout. This seems very odd in a book that
is clearly a Raymond Chandler pastiche. One quibble: Walter
Benjamin's "Passagen-Werk", which the character Penuelas
dismisses as "a work about shopping arcades . . . a work without
too much interest, not to say a pure clinker" (pg. 89) is
actually much more than that and is considered a major work in
20th Century studies. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Happiness in intelligent people is
the rarest thing I know.
-- Ernest Hemingway