THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
09/07/07 -- Vol. 26, No. 10, Whole Number 1457
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Hugo Awards
Unwelcome Company (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Oscar Senses Death Coming (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
C. S. Lewis (letter of comment by Gerald S. Ryan)
This Week's Reading (correction, THE TANGO SINGER,
THE AVRAM DAVIDSON TREASURY, and THE LOG FROM
THE SEA OF CORTEZ) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Hugo Awards
The Hugo Awards were announced September 2 in Yokohama, Japan.
The winners are:
Best Novel: RAINBOWS END by Vernor Vinge
Best Novella: "A Billion Eves" by Robert Reed
[Asimov's Oct/Nov 2006]
Best Novelette: "The Djinn's Wife" by Ian McDonald
[Asimov's July 2006]
Best Short Story: "Impossible Dreams" by Tim Pratt
[Asimov's July 2006]
Best Related Non-Fiction Book: JAMES TIPTREE, JR.--THE DOUBLE LIFE
OF ALICE B SHELDON
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: PAN'S LABYRINTH (2006)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Who--"Girl in the
Fireplace" (2006)
Best Editor, Long Form: Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Best Editor, Short Form: Gordon Van Gelder
Best Professional Artist: Donato Giancola
Best Semiprozine: LOCUS
Best Fanzine: SCIENCE FICTION FIVE-YEARLY
Best Fan Writer: Dave Langford
Best Fan Artist: Frank Wu
===================================================================
TOPIC: Unwelcome Company (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Well, we just had a holiday weekend. Our trash bin was ready to
go out, but they were not going to be around on Monday to do it.
Evelyn told me that if it smelled bad I should put it around the
side of the house. I explained to her that first, it did not smell
and second, it was a bad idea to put a trash bin that smells bad
outside the house. It might attract a racoon or some other
animal with a different aesthetic. That is one thing you don't
want is hanging around some animal with a different aesthetic.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Oscar Senses Death Coming (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
A number of sources including SCIENCE NEWS and the BBC NEWS have
been reporting about Oscar, the Providence, Rhode Island nursing
home cat who can sense the coming of death. It seems that Steere
House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center adopted Oscar. The idea
is that animals around a nursing home tend to cheer up their
patients. Well, that is true in theory, anyway. Oscar it
appears is not the most social of cats. He is usually very
much a loner. However, he becomes much more social and seems to
want to be fondled and to comfort those who are soon to die. He
purrs, cuddles, and nuzzles people who are otherwise engaged in
the sad business of dying. Humans may not be sure that the
person is dying, but Oscar has an infallible sense. There will be
weeks when three people die, and Oscar is there nuzzling up to
each. Then next three weeks nobody will die and Oscar will spend
the week by himself.
How does Oscar know who will live and who are about to die? As
some have quipped, it may be that seeing Oscar the death-seeking
cat coming for a patient is enough to put that patient over.
Probably more likely is that there may be an aroma, undetectable
to humans associated with death. A cat has a better sense of
smell than a human does by quite a bit. So why do we allow
packaged cat food to be so malodorous?
Dogs have a better sense of smell than do cats, leading one to
wonder why dogs do not appear to smell human death when some cats
do. Perhaps it is something different in dog psychology that
they do not acknowledge death in humans the way cats do. Maybe
dogs have more tact or may easily go into denial.
This whole issue of heightened animal knowledge is a fascinating
one. One wonders what animals sense that we do not. We know
that there are dogs who can be trained to sniff out narcotics.
More recently they also have been used to successfully sniff out
which patients have cancer. What is probably true is that most
species of animals get a mix of senses at varying degrees of
sensitivity and their worldview is made up of these senses.
There's an old saying: "A leaf fell in the forest. An eagle saw
it. A deer heard it. A bear smelled it." Well, this tells us
two things. First it tells us that each of these animals has
some sense that is much more powerful than the corresponding
sense in humans. Eagles (well, all birds) have amazing vision.
I had never heard before that deer have really super-hearing, but
it would make sense. They can direct their ears and they live by
their hearing. When it comes to the sense of smell bears are
even better than dogs are who are better than cats are who are
far better than humans are.
The saying also tells us that these senses overlap to a very
great extent. What seeing tells the eagle, hearing tells the
deer, and smell tells the bear. This strongly determines how an
animal envisions the world. Most humans get the majoritiy of
their information from sight. We even have the word "vision"
within "envision". If I told you to memorize the room you are
in, most likely you would mentally photograph it. You would
memorize where light was coming from and what objects you saw.
What does the window smell like? You probably would have no
idea. A dog would probably map the room in a very different way.
Well yes there are probably some tables and some other things.
But it would be something like, "Over here somebody has stood who
has just come in from the garage. Last week somebody spilled
some sweet liquid on the floor just over there. Somebody a few
rooms away has opened a window." Well, you get the idea of the
odor-map.
I guess in theory there are four kinds of heightened sensitivity
of senses, not all of which may be real, but we do not know.
--Better knowledge processing: One might make better use of
senses we have in common. I am reading a story with a superb
native tracker. He sees things other people miss. Sherlock
Holmes looking at a room supposedly might observe what we only
see. He just looks at what we could perceive with more
intelligence and is able to draw better conclusions. At least it
makes for good stories.
--More acute senses: An animal may have senses we have but in
more intense forms. A bloodhound can track a fugitive by the
smell of the ground he has walked on.
--Additional senses: We can certainly find animals that lack some
of the senses we have. A cave lizard is blind. There is no
reason to believe we have all the senses that there are. It is
just hard to imagine what those senses are and how they would be
perceived. It is like trying to describe color to a blind man.
Birds supposedly can feel the magnetic lines of force of the
Earth and use them to navigate. It has been suggested that dogs
have something someone dubbed "air tasting" that gives them some
knowledge that we are not privy to. It is very hard to decide if
this is really another sense or a sensitive use of one of the
five senses we share in common.
--Psychic knowledge: There may be ways of knowing things that go
beyond perceiving by senses. Nobody knows much of what that
might be. What makes this hard to study is that fact that the
world is full of proven charlatans who claim to have psychic
powers. Some can be very convincing.
(Aside: I cringe to see my town school system sending around a
brochure of evening courses they including one that is "HAVE A
PSYCHIC READING: DISCOVER SECRETS OF YOUR PERSONALITY AND FUTURE"
an another "SPIRIT ENCOUTERS: HOW TO COMMUNICATE WITH LOVED ONES
THAT HAVE CROSSED OVER". They are not so hot on teaching some of
their sixteen-year-olds the multiplication tables, but they are
right at the forefront of teaching locals how to get psychic
readings.)
I tend to be very skeptical about psychic phenomenon. A local
psychic had to shut down her reading business when an unexpected
windstorm destroyed her illuminated glass store sign. A cheap
piece of plywood on each side would have protected it, but who
knew? I suppose she might have just shut down rather than go to
the expense to repair the sign, but I prefer to think her
business was destroyed by irony.
I hold these skeptical attitudes in spite of having some "psychic
blood" in my veins. Family legend says my father's mother could
see death in people's faces. Supposedly on November 21, 1963, she
saw John Kennedy on the news and said, "My God, there's death in
his eyes." She never taught me how to recognize it. But Oscar
has the knack. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: C. S. Lewis (letter of comment by Gerald S. Ryan)
In response to Evelyn's comments on REVISITING NARNIA in the
08/17/07 issue of the MT VOID, and Fred Lerner's response in the
08/31/07 issue, Jerry Williams adds:
I was too busy to write earlier, although I think it is more
relevant that C. S. Lewis declared himself an atheist at 13
(though such "angry atheists" are usually really agnostics),
returning to Christianity 20 years later as an Anglican, despite
his good friend Tolkein's wish that he would choose Catholicism.
In any event, one might expect him to have some views that are
perhaps not typical for either Catholics or Anglicans.
Also, it's beside the point, although I don't believe that
requiring a priest to intercede is quite as traditional a
Catholic view as you imply. Priests are not required for prayer.
In fact, non-priests can be Eucharistic ministers, perform Last
Rites, etc. And straying even farther from the point, the
current degree of priestly involvement in Catholic rites probably
only dates back to the Council of Nicea anyway, so they're not
*that* traditional. :-)
Back to the point, Lewis could have been making reference to the
Pope, or perhaps the Islamic Prophet Mohammed, in which case it
shouldn't be that surprising. However, while he was alive, Lewis
insisted that the messages in Narnia weren't allegorical--he was
rather speculating how Jesus Christ might have appeared in his
imagined world--so you have to be careful about reading too much
into the ape's misdeeds. [-gsw]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Correction: Last week's review of THE SFWA EUROPEAN HALL OF FAME
should have listed both James Morrow and Kathryn Morrow as editors.
Authors often find themselves the center of other people's
novels--or they would find themselves if they were still alive,
because, generally, dead authors are chosen (for obvious reasons).
So one can have a series of mysteries centering around the works
of various classic authors (e.g., Edith Skom's) or a series with
a famous author as the detective (e.g., Peter Heck with Mark
Twain), or a book in which the main character is a graduate
student working on a thesis centering around a particular author.
The latter is the case with THE TANGO SINGER by Tomas Eloy
Martinez (translated by Anne McLean) (ISBN-13 978-1-58234-601-4,
ISBN-10 1-58234-601-1). The protagonist, Bruce Cadogan, is a
graduate student in New York writing his dissertation on Jorge
Luis Borges's essays on the origins of the tango. (See, you knew
I would end up writing about Borges in late summer--it's
tradition!) Cadogan goes to Buenos Aires in June 2001 for six
months (this lets the author have an American protagonist while
at the same time getting him thousands of miles from New York for
9/11 and three months after). Though a completely random set of
events, Cadogan finds himself living in the rooming house that is
also the home of Borges's "Aleph": that point from which the
entire universe is visible. Cadogan, however, is more concerned
with trying to find Julio Martel, a legendary but elusive tango
singer.
THE AVRAM DAVIDSON TREASURY by Avram Davidson (edited by Robert
Silverberg and Grania Davis) (ISBN-13 978-0-312-86731-7, ISBN-10
0-312-86731-X) is a collection of some of Davidson's best work,
arranged chronologically with introductions by Silverberg and
Davis. I would *swear* that Davidson's story "Or the Grasses
Grow" had been made into a "Twilight Zone" episode, but thorough
checking tells me I would be wrong. And in his introduction to
the story, Gardner Dozois acknowledges that "Full Chicken
Richness" is one of only two stories on its particular topic.
Since the other came out just three years earlier and was even
nominated for a Hugo, I suspect that Davidson may have been
influenced by it.
THE LOG FROM THE SEA OF CORTEZ by John Steinbeck (ISBN-13
978-0-140-18744-1, ISBN-10 0-140-18744-8) is Steinbeck's journal
of a biological collecting trip (on a shoestring) through the Sea
of Cortez, a.k.a. the Gulf of California. Steinbeck explains
that he calls it by its older name because "that is a better-
sounding and a more exciting name." As you might guess from
that, there is more here than just a description of all the
specimens they found.
There is travelogue: "One fine thing about Mexican officials is
that they greet a fishing boat with the same serious ceremony
they would afford the Queen Mary, and the Queen Mary would have
to wait just as long. This made us feel very good and not
rebellious about the port fees--absent in this case! We came to
them and they made us feel, not like stodgy people in a purse-
seiner but like ambassadors from Ultra-Marina bringing letters of
greeting out of the distances. It is no wonder that we too
scurried for clean shirts, that Tony put on his master's cap, and
Tiny polished the naval insignia on his, which he had come by no
doubt honestly in a washroom in San Diego. We were not smart,
not very alert, but we were clean and we smelled rather
delicious. Sparky sprinkled us with shaving lotion and we filled
the air with the odor of flowers. If the brazo, the double
embrace, should be indicated by any feeling of uncontrollable
good-will, we were ready." (page 205)
There is philosophy: "There is a strange duality in the human
that makes for an ethical paradox. We have definitions of good
qualities and bad. Of the good we always think of wisdom,
tolerance, kindliness, generosity, humility; and the qualities of
cruelty, greed, self-interest, graspingness and rapacity are
universally considered undesirable. And yet in our structure of
our society, the so-called and considered good qualities are
invariable concomitants of failure, while the bad ones are the
cornerstone of success. A man--a viewing point man--while he
will love the abstract good qualities, and detest the abstract
bad, will nevertheless admire the person who through exercising
the bad qualities has succeeded economically and socially, and
will hold in contempt that person whose good qualities have
caused failure. When such a man thinks of Jesus, or
St. Augustine, or Socrates he regards them with love because they
are symbols of the good he admires, and he hates the symbols of
the bad. But actually he himself would rather be successful,
than good." (page 112)
And there is even poetry (or perhaps incoherence--take your
pick): "For in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary,
the trait of hope still controls the future, and man. not a
species, but a triumphant race, will approach perfection, and,
finally, tearing himself free, will march up the stars and take
his place where, because of his power and virtue, he belongs: on
the right hand of [the pi-th root of -1]." (page 103)
It is, however, marred by more typos than I would have expected
of a Penguin edition: "whether" for "weather", "wtih" for "with",
"string" for "sting", and so on. Not all the errors are
Penguin's, though; I suspect the triple occurrence of "octopi"
for "octopuses" is Steinbeck's own. There is a glossary and an
index for people, places, and animals, but with as much
philosophy as Steinbeck included, the index should have included
ideas as well. (I have no idea if the typos have been corrected
in later editions.)
While not a classic in the same sense as Charles Darwin's THE
VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE, Steinbeck's LOG FROM THE SEA OF CORTEZ is
must-reading for anyone interested in how field work was carried
out in the 1930s by those not endowed with large grants. [-ecl]
[What is the pi-th root of -1? Actually there is more than one.
Next week I will publish the answer and the names of everybody who
sends me by Tuesday 9/11 a correct characterization of all the
pi-th roots of -1. Take that, John Steinbeck. -mrl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.
-- Colette