THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
10/13/17 -- Vol. 36, No. 15, Whole Number 1984
Co-Editor: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Co-Editor: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Personal Realities (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
STARLINGS by Jo Walton (book review by Joe Karpierz)
REALIVE (letter of comment by Fred Lerner)
MEDUSA (letter of comment by Gregory Benford)
This Week's Reading (SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SHADWELL SHADOWS
and HIEROGLYPH: STORIES AND VISIONS FOR A BETTER
FUTURE) (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Personal Realities (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
In 1995 I was visiting Scotland. A local radio station broadcast
an interesting feature. Several well-known celebrities were asked
the question, "What is the most important lesson you have ever
taught your children?" One respondent gave an answer that troubled
me: "The most important thing I ever taught my child is to never
assume there is only one reality. Your truth may be different from
my reality. What is true for you may not be true for me." She was
very proud of that observation, but it really bothered me. It is a
nice cushy feeling that if we disagree on what a truth is, we can
both be right in our own private realities.
I see a great deal of risk in abandoning the idea of there being
one true reality and giving everybody the right to their own
private choice of the way things are.
I had never actually heard this idea that everybody is entitled to
the reality that makes him or her feel the best. If you want, one
plus one equals whatever you want it to be. If you believe that
female genital mutilation is a virtue my feeling is that this is
not a "reality" you have a right to, even if you do not take
action. It seems to me valuable to have to have people around who
have differing viewpoints to help shape my own. But my ideas are
better than some people's and not as good as others. It is a
mistake to say everybody's ideas, their reality, are of the same
value and people have a right to them.
My feeling is that there is a single reality and many perceptions
of that reality, some correctly interpreted and some incorrectly
interpreted. My perceptions might contradict your perceptions, but
both are just subjective perceptions. Perceptions do not always
tell the full story and may be misleading. Even correct
perceptions may be incomplete. The real truth may lie beyond.
The best example of this is probably the story of the elephant and
the blind men. One blind man feels the elephant's trunk and
declares the elephant to be like a tree. One feels the tail and
declares the elephant to be like a rope. And so forth. The
elephant is just what it is if many of the perceptions of it are
wrong.
The assumption that each person has his or her own reality may seem
very comfortable and not at all dangerous. It, in fact, may seem
like a useful expedient for avoiding conflict, but it may be just
kicking the can down the road. It may create other problems,
particularly in the Age of the Internet.
The Internet, while making communication far easier than it had
been previously, may exacerbate the problem. With the Internet you
have more opportunity than ever before to choose what opinions
reach you. It is now easy to surround yourself with opinions that
are very much like your own, if you so choose. You cannot only
create your own reality, you can choose pundits to reinforce your
natural prejudices.
It may be that on the short run complacency that everybody's ideas
are of equal value may avoid small conflicts in the short run, but
it in the long run with the help of the Internet it is dividing up
the United States and will lead to disaster in the long run.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: STARLINGS by Jo Walton (copyright 2018, Tachyon
Publications, 288pp, Paperback, Print ISBN 978-1-61696-056-8,
Digital ISBN 978-1-61696-057-5, ASIN: B073WG5J8N) (book review by
Joe Karpierz)
I've not read much by Jo Walton, but even to use the word "much" is
a bit of an exaggeration. Up until STARLINGS, the only work I've
read from her is her Hugo award winning novel AMONG OTHERS. While
I enjoyed the novel, I thought it had a few flaws. Nonetheless, I
enjoyed it enough to know that I would be okay with reading more of
Walton's work at some point in the future.
STARLINGS is a collection of short fiction and poetry. Walton is
not known as a writer of short fiction; as she states in her
introduction, novels came much more naturally to her than short
fiction ever did. In fact, STARLINGS is her first collection of
short stories, and the poetry that is included in the volume is, in
her words, her fourth poetry collection. The stories and poetry
collected here are as diverse in their subject matter as they are
in their style and technique. This was a different kind of book
for me to read in more ways than one, not the least of which is the
fact that it contains poetry. More on that a bit later on.
However, one of the things I enjoyed about the book was that
instead of an introduction before each story, Walton gives the
reader a background for the story at the end, a sort of "now that
you've read it, here's the deal with it". That kind of structure
appealed to me and I really enjoyed it.
The book contains a lot of pieces that Walton says aren't stories
at all; they might be pieces that play with form, mode, or point of
view. A good number of them defy description or summary. For
example, "Parable Lost" certainly be read as a parable, but don't
get lost in all the jellyfish. Then there's "Escape to Other
Worlds with Science Fiction", a piece that's stitched together from
newspaper, ads from various science fiction magazines (among other
things), and story fragments. It certainly isn't a story, but it's
fascinating in any event. There's a snippet of a narrative called
"What Joseph Felt", a retelling of a portion of the circumstances
surrounding the birth of Jesus from the point of view of Joseph; I
enjoyed this one quite a bit. There's a book review, written by an
alien, of a novel that has humans as its central characters,
entitled "The Need to Stay the Same". At one point the review
complains, albeit gently, of the book being the eighth book in the
sequence and the "themes are starting to feel familiar"--there's
something we see all too much of in this field. "Joyful and
Triumphant: St. Zeobius and the Aliens" is a wonderful guide for
new residents of heaven who are a bit surprised that there are
aliens there. Growing up Catholic, I certainly never thought that
there'd be anything other than humans in heaven. I found the piece
interesting and delightful. "Turnover" is a piece that I think of
as a short story, but Walton says is the first chapter of a novel;
if that's true, then this is a novel that I'd like to read. It
takes place on a generational starship, and in this particular bit
we're joining some of the starship travelers for lunch as they talk
about whether they want to go on to the landing or not, as the
Turnaround of the story, where the ship turns around and begins
deceleration toward the planet upon which it intends to land, is
quickly approaching. The idea of residents of a generational
starship born during the journey discussing that they didn't choose
this life--it was chosen for them--is not a new one in science
fiction, but the idea of being a figurative fly on the wall during
one of these discussions is intriguing. "What Would Sam Spade Do?"
is a piece with a fascinating idea: clones of Jesus are a common
ethnic group in the United States. The narrative relates the
circumstances under which one clone is investigating the death of
another clone at the hands of yet a third clone. The idea that
someone would find Jesus' genetic material and create clones of him
is interesting in and of itself, and the oddness of the
investigation is an intriguing and interesting way of using the
concept.
Real honest to goodness stories? How about "Unreliable Witness",
about a woman with dementia who meets aliens--and of course, no one
believes her? One of my favorite pieces in the book is entitled
"Three Shouts on a Hill (A Play). It's a story told in play form
based on an Irish legend. My wife may be half Irish (on her
father's side), but I've never heard the legend before. This one
had me going for a while as I didn't know where it was headed. It
was certainly a lot of fun. "A Burden Shared" is a wonderful piece
the central conceit of which is the fact that a person's pain can
be shared by other people, but the story is really about familial
relationships and how we deal with suffering loved ones.
The remaining prose pieces are generally just as interesting and
just as creative and diverse as those I've already talked about.
They nicely demonstrate Walton's range as a writer and storyteller.
There are many pieces throughout the book, either some that I've
mentioned above or those that I haven't, that I would like to see
fleshed out into complete stories or novels.
The second section of the book is a collection of poetry. In the
interest of full disclosure, I've never been into poetry; maybe
it's because I don't know how to read it or appreciate it for the
many and varied forms it takes. I will admit to having a difficult
time in reading and appreciating the poetry that appears here.
Favorites are "Ten Years Ahead: Oracle Poem", a piece that tries
to predict the future; "The Godzilla Sonnets", the title of which I
suspect is fairly self-explanatory; and "Three Bears Norse", the
subject of which may be obvious.
STARLINGS is a collection that demonstrates Jo Walton's ability as
a writer. The pieces within show off her range and versatility,
her style and technique. This short story collection may not
contain a whole lot of traditional short stories, but what it does
contain is a whole bunch of good old fashioned high quality
writing, the kind she demonstrated in AMONG OTHERS, and the kind I
expect we'll see from her as her career continues. [-jak]
===================================================================
TOPIC: REALIVE (letter of comment by Fred Lerner)
Mark's review of REALIVE doesn't indicate whether the film
addresses the central question of cryonic preservation and revival:
what incentive is there for anyone in the future to go to the
trouble of reviving someone who underwent the process? Perhaps
Marc Jarvis is the only person who was cryonically frozen, and thus
would be of interest to historians wanting a firsthand account of
life in 2015. Or perhaps he is thought to know the location of
some buried treasure. But if he is one of many optimists who
thought that their medical problems might be resolved in the
future, I fail to see what he would have to offer the world of
2084. I suppose that some war or disaster might have set
civilisation so far back that the technological knowledge of a
random person who had been alive seventy years before might be
considered valuable. But would such a post-disaster world possess
the technology to revive him? Absent such a cataclysm, the world
of 2084 would presumably be sufficiently well populated not to
require the presence of Mr Jarvis. If the folk of that year
harbored kind feelings toward him they might decide to leave him in
the tank so that some future era might choose to decant him. More
likely they would decide that the resources necessary to keep him
on ice might be more usefully deployed elsewhere. [-fl]
Mark responds:
SPOILER:
The film does address the question of why. Marc is the first and
the real motive is scientific curiosity. And one never knows what
application scientific knowledge will bring. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: MEDUSA (letter of comment by Gregory Benford)
In response to Joe Karpierz's review of MEDUSA in the 10/06/17
issue of the MT VOID, Gregory Benford writes:
Good review. Agree with "It's a throwback to a different time, when
the sense of wonder that was present in the science fiction that we
read--maybe it was just because we read those books as young people
with eyes wide open to the future--was what brought us into the
field to begin with."
But I think there's a dearth of optimistic, cosmic sf because it
takes more work to envision a positive, expansive future than to
just see problems and dystopias.
I might also note regarding: "It's not until the final story, where
he is called to unknowingly be the delivery system for a virus that
will destroy the machines, that the ultimate solution--the
unification of machine and man--is the way to get the long elusive
peace to occur."
--that this is the ending of my Galactic Center series, too. I
think it's inevitable, with much stress before... [-gb]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SHADWELL SHADOWS by James Lovegrove (ISBN
978-1-785-65291-2) crosses Sherlock Holmes with H. P. Lovecraft's
"Cthulhu" world. It is also the first of a trilogy, though it does
stand on its own. One thing that I find a bit off-puttng is that
Watson changes a lot of the original canon, with pretty much the
same explanation that he used for not writing about the Giant Rat
of Sumatra: the world is not yet ready for the true story. (I hear
Jack Nicholson in the background yelling, "You can't handle the
truth!") By the time you change as much of the background story as
Watson/Lovegrove does, it is questionable whether you still have
Sherlock Holmes. And Lovegrove seems to go a bit overboard on the
writing styles, both Victorian and Lovecraftian. Still, it's
enjoyable in a pulpish sort of way.
HIEROGLYPH: STORIES AND VISIONS FOR A BETTER FUTURE edited by Ed
Finn and Kathryn Cramer (ISBN 978-0-062-20471-4) is the product of
a challenge to science fiction writers to write more positive, big-
engineering (or big-science) sorts of stories. Apparently someone
blamed science fiction writers for the current sad state of "big
science", saying that they had stopped writing inspiring stories.
Well, it is true that ANALOG (and before that, ASTOUNDING) used to
publish this sort of story (and maybe still do, for all I know).
But an issue of ANALOG would have one earnest story about "big
science" ... and then there would be a humorous "first contact"
story, and a puzzle sort of story, and so on. Having an entire
(thick) volume of earnest "big science" stories just accentuates
how they are all trying so hard to send a message to the reader,
often at the expense of story and character. I don't mind
infodumps, but many of these are nothing but infodumps.
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse
gets the cheese.
--Jon Hammond