THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
11/08/13 -- Vol. 32, No. 19, Whole Number 1779
Co-Editor: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Co-Editor: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Game of the States (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
What You Claim is True You Lose (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
30 SFF Films I Would Recommend That You Almost Certainly
Haven't Seen (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
THE ACT OF KILLING (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
SHORT TERM 12 (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Science and Science Fiction Movies (letter of comment
by Guy Ferraiolo)
THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT and Names (letters of comment
by Tim Bateman, Keith F. Lynch, Philip Chee,
David Friedman, and Scott Dorsey)
THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT and Evolution and Deep Time
(letters of comment by Tim Bateman, Keith F. Lynch,
Philip Chee, and David Friedman)
Bell Labs, CAPTAN PHILLIPS, MIRACLE FOR SALE, EERIE TALES,
"War of the Worlds" Tour, Turner Classic Movies
(letter of comment by John Purcell)
This Week's Reading (GALACTIC POT-HEALER and JORGE LUIS
BORGES: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: Game of the States (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Evelyn seems to know United States geography very well. She made a
comment about the shape of Alabama and I had to admit I really did
not know the shape of Alabama from memory. When Evelyn was small
she used to play "Game of the States" and it all stuck with her.
My father was a chemist so "Game of the States" was a lot easier
for us. We had only three: solid, liquid, and gas. I don't even
remember what the new flag looked like when plasma was admitted.
But it doesn't matter. Nobody gets all misty to hear about the
four states of matter. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: What You Claim is True You Lose (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I saw a documentary that told the story of the reprehensible Jorg
Lanz. He liked to call himself Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels. This is
a man who in all likelihood had a great injustice done to him
personally by Adolf Hitler. And I feel not one iota of sympathy
for him. He was probably the root cause of millions of deaths
before and during World War II. But Lenz claimed with a certain
amount of justification that Adolf Hitler based his anti-Jewish and
racist views on the writings of Lanz. Hitler never credited him or
mentioned that his ideas had a source in anyone but Hitler. I will
not go over Lenz's whole career, but he was a journalist and at one
point a monk who founded the magazine "Ostara" in which he
presented his racist "theories" of the superiority of his race and
of his arguments against people of any other race, particularly of
Jews. He named his magazine for the Ostrogoths and the Old High
German goddess Ostara.
Hitler apparently had the complete run of the magazine. When he
had all but two issues, Hitler went to visit Lanz himself and to
get the two missing issues. In return, Hitler did what Lanz
thought was a great injustice. Hitler had all of Lanz's writings
suppressed, not because he disagreed with the content, but because
he wanted to claim its ideas as his own. Lanz claimed that Hitler
owed him a great debt for all his ideas that Hitler used quite
handily as a warrant for mass murder. I will not go into this
history very deep, but I was taken with Lanz's dilemma. During the
time that Hitler was in power he could not claim the ideas that
Hitler was making so freely with were actually his ideas. Hitler
would not have hesitated to have Lanz murdered. After Hitler died
Lanz's odious message would have had a very selective appeal at
best. He could hardly claim authorship of a philosophy that
justified great mass murder. So he was the victim of a great
injustice and as they say, it could not have happened to a nicer
guy.
But this got me thinking about a drawback of inventing history and
claiming it was real. Lanz could not say that Hitler's view of
history was stolen from him. In the blood-soaked pages of Ostara
Lanz was writing what he claimed was history. Once he said it was
history he no longer really had ownership of the ideas. If you
write a piece of fiction and label it as fiction and somebody
steals your plot, you have the recourse to sue the thief for
copyright infringement. But once Lanz wrote his view of history he
could no longer claim ownership of it. If poor little Adolf read
Lanz's view of history and was convinced by it, then Adolf could
claim it was reality. He could use it and repeat it whenever he
wanted just like I can write about the Battle of Gettysburg. If I
do write about Gettysburg and organize the information in my own
way the authors of the history books I read cannot turn around and
claim ownership of that piece of history.
A similar problem came up involving THE DA VINCI CODE. The fiction
novel THE DA VINCI CODE by Dan Brown used--extensively apparently--
the supposed history written in a book called THE HOLY BLOOD AND
THE HOLY GRAIL (US title: HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL) by Michael
Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. The authors of this
book sued Dan Brown's publisher for plagiarism in stealing their
research. But they found themselves with a problem. They claimed
that what they had put in the book was really history. Dan Brown
could not be sued for using that history, no matter who discovered
it. The contents of THE HOLY BLOOD AND THE HOLY GRAIL were claimed
to be true and they could not turn around and sue Dan Brown for
believing them even if it was a lie.
Even if Hitler was convinced by the contents of Ostara, Lanz cannot
claim that the ideas were stolen from him. Lanz has to just
content himself to know that his writings may have made him
complicit in the murder of millions. [-mrl]
Evelyn adds:
In particular, Wikipedia says of the 2006 lawsuit by the authors of
HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL against Dan Brown, "Because Baigent and
Leigh had presented their conclusions as historical research, not
as fiction, Justice Peter Smith, who presided over the trial,
deemed that a novelist must be free to use these ideas in a
fictional context, and ruled against Baigent and Leigh. ...
Baigent and Leigh appealed, unsuccessfully, to the Court of
Appeal." [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: 30 SFF Films I Would Recommend That You Almost Certainly
Haven't Seen (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
In response to the various films named by the panelists on the "30
Great SFF Films You Almost Certainly Haven't Seen" panel at
LoneStarCon 3, and described in the 10/04/13 and 10/11/13 issues of
the MT VOID, here is my list of thirty films, some of which are
shamelessly lifted from Mark's list of forgotten science fiction,
fantasy, and horror films, because everyone needs a memory-jogger
for this sort of thing, and also because it is not surprising we
should have some overlap. But all the descriptions are mine.
- FRAU IM MOND (1926): A silent film with very accurate spaceflight
scenes, probably because Willy Ley worked on it. For some reason,
there seem to be only a half dozen silent films that most SFF fans
know about (THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919), NOSFERATU (1922),
THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1923), THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1924), THE
PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925), and METROPOLIS (1926)). Even THE LOST
WORLD and this film seem to be below most people's radar.
- THE BLACK CAT (1934): A surreal extravaganza with Boris Karloff
and Bela Lugosi, worth watching for the set design alone. One gets
to see both stars acting as human characters, which is kind of a
nice change.
- THE DYBBUK (1939): Yiddish-language film based on the Jewish
legend of the dybbuk, or possessing spirit. One of the last of the
era of great Yiddish films.
- THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943): The bleakest of Val Lewton's films, it
is much less seen than CAT PEOPLE or THE LEOPARD MAN.
- DARK INTRUDER (1965): Only an hour long, an interesting little
horror story. The only problem is remembering that at this point
Leslie Nielsen was not a comedy actor.
- QUEST FOR LOVE (1971): Unusual alternate history film, based on a
John Wyndham story.
- THE BIG BUS (1974): Parody of the then-current spate of
airplane/ship/train disaster films, but with an atomic-powered bus.
- WHO? (1974): Based on the Algis Budrys novel about identity, for
some reason never got much of a release.
- THE LAST WAVE (1977): Unusual Australian film using aboriginal
beliefs as the basis for an apocalyptic fantasy.
- AN ENGLISHMAN'S CASTLE (1978): An alternate history mini-series
back before most people had any idea what alternate history was.
Stars Kenneth More in a Britain that lost WWII.
- KNIGHTRIDERS (1981): George Romero's most unusual film, about a
traveling Arthurian Faire that jousts on motorcycles.
- MAN FACING SOUTHEAST (1986): An Argentinian film about a
mysterious inmate in a mental asylum who may or may not be an
alien.
- CAST A DEADLY SPELL (1991): An HBO movie that combines a hard-
boiled detective in the Philip Marlowe style with the Cthulhu
Mythos.
- CRONOS (1993): Guillermo del Toro's first feature film, a new
take on vampires.
- JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO (1990): Generally considered the least of
the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan trilogy (to the extent that the career
retrospective of Hanks on "Inside the Actors Studio" did not even
mention it!), but taken as a fable rather than a realistic story it
works surprisingly well.
- LAKE PLACID (1995): More than just a giant monster movie, this is
heavily laced with comedy without detracting from the tension.
- RICHARD III (1995): Shakespeare's play, set in an alternate
Fascist England of the 1930s, and starring Ian McKellen.
- CURE (a.k.a. KYUA) (1997): Not Kyoshi Kurosawa's first film by a
long shot (he had been directing for twenty years when he did
CURE), but the first to make a splash internationally, and one that
arguably launched the recent wave of Japanese horror films.
- LAST NIGHT (1998): Canadian film about the last six hours in
Toronto before the world ends.
- TITUS (1999): Shakespeare's play, set in 1930s Italy and directed
by Julie Taymor.
- INTERSTATE 60 (2001): Another film that works on the level of a
fable rather than as a film of realism or even of traditional fantasy.
- 2009: LOST MEMORIES (2002): An alternate history from South Korea
that turns on the Ito Hirobumi assassination. Interesting mostly
because one finds so few cinematic alternate histories.
- CODE 46 (2004): Not a great plot, but the use of a futuristic
version of English, and interesting set design makes it worth
watching.
- CYPHER (2004): A Dickian look at corporate espionage, not based
on anything Dick wrote.
- THE CALL OF CTHULHU (2005): A production of the H. P. Lovecraft
Historical Society. A silent film done in the style of Lovecraft's
time, by people who really care about Lovecraft.
- WAR OF THE WORLDS (2005): The three-hour version directed by
Timothy Hines (there were *two* other versions of the story that
year). The first version of the H. G. Wells story to be done as an
Edwardian period piece. Hines has since issued two other, shorter
edits of the film (one at 135 minutes, and finally one at 125
minutes), and then in 2012 used footage from it, as well as new
"found footage," to make a "reboot" of the story.
- THE MAN FROM EARTH (a.k.a. JEROME BIXBY'S THE MAN FROM EARTH)
(2007): More a stage play than a film, it unfolds its main
character's secret through intense philosophical dialogue.
- SLEEP DEALER (2007): Taking place in Mexico and the United
States, this covers telepresence, uploaded amateur videos, water
wars, and many other topical subjects in a believable setting.
- TIMECRIMES (2008): If you liked PRIMER, you'll like this one.
(It used to be that PRIMER was an unknown film, but I do not think
that is true anymore.)
- THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS (2011): Another HPLHS production, this
one a sound film, but still in period style.
[-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: THE ACT OF KILLING (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: An oddly surreal documentary made by a film crew largely
working anonymously. The camera focuses on a major executioner
from the 1965 killings following the military coup in Indonesia.
To get him and some of his friends to be truthful the company films
them re-enacting their murders in the style of American gangster
films and lavish musicals, claiming to film them for a movie. The
killers apparently have never given much thought to regretting
their actions. Joshua Oppenheimer, Crystine Cynn, and a third
person unnamed directed this film. Rating: low +3 (-4 to +4) or
8/10
In 1965 a coup overthrew Sukarno's government of Indonesia and
placed it in the hands of the military, making Suharto president.
The military claimed it was saving the country from Communism.
More than a million political enemies were accused of being
Communist and then were murdered. Today the country is still in
the hands of the military and people who did the killing for the
government are now treated as heroes of the state.
The expression "the banality of evil" has rarely taken so concrete
a form as it has in Anwar Congo, a lover of movies, music, and fine
clothes and also the mass murderer of over a thousand people.
Joshua Oppenheimer, Crystine Cynn, and an unnamed person direct THE
ACT OF KILLING. There is a lot of smiling in this film. Congo
will spontaneously do a little dance when he is happy. The word
key to this documentary is "impunity." Anwar Congo proudly admits
he had led a death squad in 1965 and 1966 and killed over a
thousand people working as a "gangster" for the military government
of Indonesia. He also extorted money from the Chinese murdering
those who did not pay.
The filmmakers now invite Congo to relive those killings to be
filmed as Hollywood-style fantasies. Congo sees this as his chance
to be in the movies. The killers re-enact their murders in the
style of their favorite film genres the gangster films, lavish
musicals, and westerns. These scenes have a feel as surreal as
anything in the film ARGO. The plot is worthy of a comedy, but it
was the actual strategy the filmmakers used and it got the killers
to tell very openly about their crimes. And we see in one of
Congo's fantasies put on film a lavish musical in which Congo
imagines his victims will return to thank him.
For Congo, killing several hundred people personally was a job and
a way to earn money for niceties like nice clothing. He is proud
of finding a way to kill that made clean-up easier. Because the
government who paid him is still in power, he is treated by friends
and neighbors like what he thinks he is, just a hard-working, fun-
loving, former employee of the government. And I the government
called people communists he had no scruples about killing them.
The filmmakers interview Congo and his friends, including the
paramilitary Herman Koto. And the killers openly talk about the
days they had their brand of fun killing for the government. They
candidly talk about raping and murder and the pleasure it brought
them. They take pride about being a "gangster" which in their
language is the same as a "free men." Credits for the production
are mostly anonymous in a country in which the government is
probably not done killing.
This film manages at times to be funny and others times
horrendously tragic. In many ways it is just extraordinary. And
few documentaries can match the power of the last ten minutes of
this film. I rate THE ACT OF KILLING a low +3 on the -4 to +4
scale or 8/10. This is a film that is hard to watch and just as
hard to forget.
Film Credits: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2375605/combined
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_act_of_killing/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: SHORT TERM 12 (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: This film covers familiar territory but still manages to
secure an emotional hold on the viewer. At a foster care facility
Grace, the staff supervisor, is emotionally involved with the lives
of the at-risk teens under her care. Destin Daniel Cretton writes
and directs with a message that with enough effort and patience,
psychologically scarred people can get together and help each
other. Rating: +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10
A foster care facility is generally a place to keep troubled teens
until society sends them out on their own. But implicitly the
situation calls on the better staff members to become some
combination of friend and parent to teens, some of whom are coming
from intolerable situations at home. And because the term of their
involvement is usually short the staff members frequently do not
have the time to earn trust the way a real parent would. When the
foster teens are approaching the end of their youth, their hormones
and their peers make them particularly rebellious and difficult to
deal with. One caregiver who really wants to help is the aptly-
named Grace (played by Brie Larson of "21 Jump Street"). With only
five or six years of age and experience between her and the
adolescents she dealing with she tries to fix what she can of their
broken lives. Grace is the staff leader of the titled facility,
and while she doubts herself every step of the way she seems to
have a natural talent for handling her charges.
Grace's escape from the pressures and worries of work is her
private relationship with Mason (John Gallagher, Jr.) a fellow
staff member. But this is not that much of an escape. As she
approaches her mid-twenties she has to decide if she is going to
commit to this relationship or not. This is weighing on her when
she gets a new troubled and, of course, uncooperative teen Jayden
(Kaitlyn Dever) to care for at the facility. Helping Jayden Grace
gets some mastery of the demons in her own background, a background
slowly revealed to the viewer.
The relationships and situations we see in this film are familiar
and the plot covers well-trodden ground. However, frequently
facilities like this one are not so positively portrayed. Grace
has roughly the same job and responsibilities that Nurse Ratched
had in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEXT, but Grace doubts herself
even as she sincerely tries to help the people under her care.
That makes her the antithesis of Nurse Ratched. Writer/director
Destin Daniel Cretton is very careful to color each interaction
with assurances that doubts her own power and where she can she
will manipulate patients for their own good, helping them to help
themselves.
The story was inspired by Cretton's own experience in a foster care
facility. Some of the incidents seem more idealized than
authentic, but there will be viewers who will be deeply touched by
the accounts and by Grace's sincerity. I rate SHORT TERM 12 a +2
on the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10.
Film Credits: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2370248/combined
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/short_term_12_2013/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Science and Science Fiction Movies (letter of comment by Guy
Ferraiolo)
In response to Mark's review of EUROPA REPORT in the 10/25/13 issue
of the MT VOID, Guy Ferraiolo writes:
[Mark said, talking about EUROPA REPORT] "The best science fiction
films have no chases, no guns blaring, no zombies, no prosthetic
makeup, and no suspension of the laws of science."
I have to disagree. This is no longer science fiction. It may be
a form of science documentary. I always thought the idea was to
change one, or a most a small set of things, and work out what
would happen. [-gf]
Mark replies:
EUROPA REPORT is hardly a documentary. Can you give an example of
a better science fiction film than EUROPA REPORT that breaks those
rules? Really I am saying why I think EUROPA REPORT is better than
action films like THE MATRIX. [-mrl]
Guy responds:
It seems to me that your rule "no suspension of the laws of
science" is very restrictive. Perhaps I'm taking it more
rigorously than you intend. Almost all science fiction, as defined
by people who read, write and edit science fiction, does have
scientific speculation. What does your rule exclude? Wouldn't it
exclude every SF work that has FTL travel. That's a rather
comprehensive list right there. Time travel? Clearly disallowed.
There are no Martians, does this put War of the Worlds in the less
favored category? I'm reading Gardner Dozois' 29TH ANNUAL BEST SF
collection. I doubt if a single story would not be excluded. What
about ADVENTURES IN TIME AND SPACE? Yes, there is an entry that
passes: Willy Ley, "V-2: Rocket Cargo Ship" (essay) (1945).
As for EUROPA REPORT not being a documentary, would it be better if
I said "it may be a form of popular science edutainment"? Despite
various pretensions of the media, that's a pretty good description
of what usually is presented as a documentary. But let's stick
with my cumbersome second formulation. A work completely without
any speculative aspect is just a reiteration of facts, however
elegantly presented. And that means it doesn't have any
speculation, it's no longer science fiction. [-gf]
Mark answers:
I did not rule out scientific speculation. A theoretical physicist
speculates all the time but within the laws of science. I do not
think a theoretical physicist would spend much time speculating
that perhaps sound travels in a vacuum.
Having two large objects collide in space and make a noise without
benefit of conduction medium is a violation of the laws of physics.
Taking a kilogram of matter and accelerating it to the speed of
light and perhaps even past the speed of light without expending
infinite energy is a violation of the laws of physics. Faster than
light travel is *not* against the laws of physics. If tachyons
exist they do it all the time. It may be that matter can be pushed
through a wormhole or across wrinkles in space and have the net
effect of FTL travel.
Side point: And what makes you so sure that time travel violates
laws of physics? We have achieved forward time travel (at rates
faster than 1); it just is very expensive right now. That is what
the Twin Paradox is all about. And I assure you that the Twin
Paradox phenomenon does not violate the laws of science. It is
used to demonstrate the laws of science.
Rule of thumb: if respected physicists suggest how a phenomenon
might occur, that phenomenon is probably not a violation of the
laws of physics.
Let me rephrase what I said: "Science fiction that does not
*obviously* violate laws of physics is better than science fiction
that does, everything else being equal."
I think also you are confusing a "law of science" with a
"scientific finding." Otherwise how does "War of the Worlds"
violate laws of science? [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT and Names (letters of comment by
Tim Bateman, Keith F. Lynch, Philip Chee, David Friedman, and
Scott Dorsey)
In response to Evelyn's comments on THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT in
the 10/25/13 issue of the MT VOID, Tim Bateman writes:
[Evelyn said, "First, like just about everyone else, the internal
narrator uses 'Frankenstein' to mean the Creation."
I bet these people are not even aware of the combination of "It's
All In The Manual" and "Word of God" which, combined with
deduction, would prove them correct (or even make them right).
And why do people call those characters in Geo. Lucas's RETURN OF
THE JEDI_'Ewoks'?
Keith Lynch adds:
"Who played the title role in the 1931 movie FRANKENSTEIN?" is a
good trivia question. (Colin Clive, not Boris Karloff.)
At the Halloween event I attended, we were discussing major
characters without names. Examples include Frankenstein's monster,
the robot in LOST IN SPACE, Agent 99 on GET SMART, and the time
traveler in Wells's "The Time Machine." Can you think of any
others?
Evelyn responds:
The narrator in REBECCA (unless of course, you're actually
responding to my comments on REBECCA in the 11/01/13 issue--but
since I haven't posted that one yet, this must just be an example
of synchronicity).
Philip Chee says:
Tsk. Shame on you for forgetting The Doctor.
Without a name at all, or just name not mentioned and/or not known?
How about The Saint? I don't think the author ever let on what name
the character was using for the first eighteen years of his life.
Patricia Holm [1] was my favourite character. I was rather
disappointed that she was written out of all the later stories. On
the bright side she's back in the latest reboot. And played by
Faith, er, Eliza Dushku [2].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Holm
[2] http://screencrush.com/the-saint-reboot-trailer-eliza-dushku/
[-pc]
David Friedman responds:
"Simon Templar, no? Is there a suggestion somewhere that that
wasn't his original name?" [-df]
Philip responds:
According to Wikipedia, S.T. started using that nom de plum at 18.
[-pc]
Scott Dorsey adds:
The Starchild in 2001. The aliens in ALIEN. And all of the real
people in Cordwainer Smith's stories. [-sd]
[A long discussion of nameless characters ensued in
rec.arts.sf.fandom.]
==================================================================
TOPIC: THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT and Evolution and Deep Time
(letters of comment by Tim Bateman, Keith F. Lynch, Philip Chee,
and David Friedman)
In response to Evelyn's comments on THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT in
the 10/25/13 issue of the MT VOID, Tim Bateman writes:
[Evelyn said, "Burroughs] also thinks Piltdown Man was real (as I
suspect Burroughs did, since it was not debunked until 1953)."
I would bet you a Kit-Kat that there are people who still believe
it today--the debunking is never given the publicity of the
Original Hoax.
[Evelyn also writes,] "Burroughs has a strange notion of how
evolution works (worked). I do not mean just the notion of
creatures evolving individually as they travel upstream. I am
referring to the whole Caprona 'continent.'"
I suspect that Burroughs's notion of how evolution works (worked)--
in Caprona, and probably nowhere else--is the way it needs to work
to make the plot work... [-tb]
Keith Lynch adds:
No stranger than Greg Bear in DARWIN'S RADIO, in which a new
natural virus causes a constellation of new useful traits which
interact as if they had been carefully designed. Olaf Stapledon
got it right seventy years earlier in LAST AND FIRST MEN, in which
future human evolution was very slow, with lots of backtracking,
false starts, and dead ends. [-kfl]
Phillip Chee suggests:
I don't think Stapledon knew about punctuated equilibrium then.
[-pc]
To which Keith replies:
On the contrary. He may have been the first to come up with it.
Each future human species is pretty much unchanging, often for
millions of years. But then a catastrophe comes along, the
population crashes, and there's speciation. Generally all but one
human species soon dies out. (There were also sapient monkeys for
a time. And sapient Martians and Venusians, but both were wiped
out by man.)
Thread crossover: Eventually, the descendants of mankind forgot
that the long-destroyed Earth had ever existed. But still later
they rediscovered the whole of human history in complete detail.
Anyone who hasn't read this should do so. It's utterly unique.
It's not the only SF novel which depicts billions of years, but
it's the only novel I've ever read which makes billions of years
*feel* like billions of years. There's nothing like Clarke's
poking around the ruins of Shalmirane, which completely ruined two
of Clarke's novels for me, as it made what was supposed to be a
billion years feel like about a thousand years. A billion years is
a *seriously* *long* *time*. I pointed out to a friend who
suggested that inscriptions on stone might last that long that if
erosion amounts to just one millimeter per thousand years, he'd
better carve the letters at least a kilometer deep. [-kfl]
David Friedman notes:
As my wife likes to put it, a geologist is someone who refers to
the everlasting hills as a temporary surface phenomenon. [-df]
And Keith elaborates:
Indeed. One millimeter per thousand years is certainly an
underestimate. The Appalachians have lost several kilometers to
erosion even though they're less than *half* a billion years old.
I've always been a fan of deep time. About a half century ago I
found some fossils dating to the Ordovician. The time since the
Ordovician is to half a century about what half a century is to
three minutes. So it's a long time, but not inconceivably long.
Of course the Ordovician was more than 90% of the way from the
beginning of our planet to the present. In other words, if the
Earth was one year old, formed on January 1st and now it's the end
of December 31st, the Ordovician would be near the beginning of
December. And the dinosaurs didn't die out until after Christmas.
Recorded history began a few seconds before midnight.
Phrased another way, if [rec.arts.sf.fandom]had the total
accumulated volume it does, but it had built up not irregularly
over 22 years, but regularly over the age of our planet, that would
be just one post every four thousand years, i.e. one post during
recorded history and over a million prehistoric posts. It would be
an average of one line of text per century, one character every
year or two, one bit every few weeks.
It's interesting that cosmology has come around to the same non-
Newtonian view as religion -- that time had a beginning, and may
have an ending. It's also interesting is that so many processes
would take much longer than the whole of the past and perhaps the
whole of the future too. The half-life of tellurium 128 is more
than two trillion trillion years, i.e. 160 trillion times longer
than the age of the universe so far. In that many years, you could
reach anywhere in our galaxy if you travel at the speed at which a
stalactite grows. After a century, you'd be less than an inch of
the ground; after a thousand years, less than a foot. But you'd
get anywhere in our galaxy before your tellurium power supply gave
out.
But, as every programmer knows, it's trivially easy to accidentally
write a program that would take enormously longer than that to
complete. In about an hour I could write a program to factor RSA
2048 by trial division, but even if I ran it on the fastest
computer ever built, all the tellurium in the universe would have
long since decayed before the program was a trillionth of the way
to completion. [-kfl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Bell Labs, CAPTAN PHILLIPS, MIRACLE FOR SALE, EERIE TALES,
"War of the Worlds" Tour, and Turner Classic Movies (letter of
comment by John Purcell)
In response to the 11/01/13 issue of the MT VOID, John Purcell
writes:
Many thanks for sending off the latest MT VOID. As always, it is
appreciated and once again, there are a couple items of note to
comment upon.
Somehow it does not surprise me that the birthplace of the
cellphone is being turned into a shopping mall. This strikes me as
a rather apropos demise, being that such a conversion is symbolic
of the transience of modern society. Nothing lasts anymore, or at
least is built to last for longer than a single generation, if even
that long. Sometimes I wish the cellphone would be dis-invented,
but that would never happen; it will simply be replaced by the next
electronic communication doo-dad. The day will come when everybody
will have communication chips implanted at the back end of the
jawbone because of the proximity to the auditory canal and vocal
chords. And people think that the NSA's actions are frightening.
Just wait ... Worse is coming. Real. Soon. Now.
Interesting listing of movie reviews, especially the ones about
CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (which I would like to see before it leaves the
theaters), MIRACLE FOR SALE and EERIE TALES. I am going to have to
plunk that URL you provided for EERIE TALES into the browser
sometime and watch it. I am always on the lookout for rare films
that sound cool, and this one foots the bill. Thank you, Mark, for
the link.
Say, that "War of the Worlds" Tour you two had sounds like fun.
What a great idea! That cafe likewise sounds like the place to
visit when one is in Grovers Mill, NJ. Hiking that trail in Van
Nest Park would be a good thing to do, and it brightens my heart to
hear that the water tower survived its "attack" and is still
standing. That's funny someone shot at it. I can just hear that
farmer now: "Consairnin' Martian invaders! Take that!" BLAMMM!!
Wow. Did he actually hit it? The gullibility of people is
something else, ain't it? Put the suggestion of practically
anything in their heads and let imagination take its natural
course.
So I thank you once again for filling my Friday morning coffee time
with your MT VOID. It is always a pleasant read to start the day.
Until next week, enjoy the movies on AMC and TCM. I've been
digging the Thursday night Vincent Price films on TCM during the
month of October, especially last night's line-up of THE HAUNTED
PALACE (1963), THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1964), and THE
ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES (1971). Fun stuph! [-jp]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
GALACTIC POT-HEALER by Philip K. Dick (ISBN 978-0-679-75297-4) is a
later Dick novel, after he has had time to develop a distinctive
voice:
"A man is an angel that has become deranged, Joe Fernwright
thought. Once they--all of them--had been genuine angels, and at
that time they had a choice between good and evil, so it was easy
being an angel. And then something happened. Something went wrong
or broke down or failed. And they had been faced with the
necessity of choosing not good or evil but the lesser of two evils,
and so that had unhinged them and now each was a man. ... Joe
felt weak and unsure of himself, and ahead of him lay a terrible
job--terrible in the sense that it would put inordinate demands on
his waning strength. I am like a gray thing, he thought. Bustling
along with the currents of air that tumble me,that roll me, like a
gray puff-ball, on and on."
At first, the view of Muslims as crazed jihadist terrorists seems
to pre-date 9/11 here: when the "Padre booth" is dialed to Allah,
the first thing it says is, "Kill your foe." Yet it is also true
that when Joe replies, "I have no foe. Except for my own weariness
and fear of failure," the Padre says, "Those are enemies which you
must overcome in a jihad; you must show yourself to be a man, and a
man, a true man, is a fighter who fights back." In other words,
jihad is not necessarily a war carried out against other people; as
many have pointed out, it can be against personal shortcomings or
other abstractions. (One criticism I have of the Padre booth is
that for most of the settings Dick uses the actual theology or
belief system of the religion, but for Judaism he resorts to the
booth recommending a bowl of fatworm soup. One, that is cultural
rather than theological, and two, worms of any sort would not be
kosher. So he is not just ignoring the religion and treating it as
"funny culture" but he is actually contradicting the religion.)
Dick is not strong on zoology either. He refers to "the life of an
insect, a spider," implying that spiders are insects.
In JORGE LUIS BORGES: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS
(ISBN 978-1-61219-204-8), there is an interesting exchange between
Borges and Richard Burgin. Borges is talking about an anthology
that appeared in Argentina in which six writers each chose the best
story they knew, and he said, "[One] took, I don't know why, a very
disagreeable and rather bogus story by Lovecraft. Have you read
Lovecraft?" And to Burgin's negative response, he said, "Well, no
reason why you should." Given how many parallels and borrowings
from Lovecraft that Borges made, as were pointed out in the book I
reviewed last week, BORGES Y LA CIENCIA FICCION, this seems a
rather surprising statement.
And in his prologue to the Argentinean edition of Ray Bradbury's
THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, Borges writes, ""Bradbury is heir to the
vast imagination of the master [Edgar Allan Poe], but not of his
'interjective' and at times dreadful style. Deplorably, we cannot
say the same of Lovecraft." For someone who copied Lovecraft as
much as Abraham indicates, these seem odd sentiments. [-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
A bad book is as much labour to write as a
good one, it comes as sincerely from the
author's soul.
--Aldous Huxley