Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
01/31/20 -- Vol. 38, No. 31, Whole Number 2104
Co-Editor: Mark Leeper, *mleeper@optonline.net *
Co-Editor: Evelyn Leeper, *eleeper@optonline.net *
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Topics:
COLOR OUT OF SPACE Correction
Science Fiction (and Other) Discussion Groups, Films, Lectures, etc.
(NJ)
My Picks for Turner Classic Movies in February (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
COLOR OUT OF SPACE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
SEVEN SURRENDERS by Ada Palmer (book review by Joe Karpierz)
This Week's Reading (MEN AND DINOSAURS) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: COLOR OUT OF SPACE Correction
Yet another correction: Mark's review of COLOR OUT OF SPACE was
accidentally left out of last week's issue. It is in this week's
issue.
I cannot blame this one on the mailing options transition. This
was totally my mistake. :-( [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Science Fiction (and Other) Discussion Groups, Films,
Lectures, etc. (NJ)
February 13, 2020: THE HANDMAID'S TALE (1990) & novel by Margaret
Atwood (1985), Middletown Public Library, 5:30PM
*https://www.biikan.com/wenxue/read-13516_1.shtml
https://www.biikan.com/wenxue/read-13516_1.shtml*
March 12, 2020: THE QUIET EARTH (1985) & novel by Craig Harrison
(1981), Middletown Public Library, 5:30PM
*https://www.rulit.me/books/the-quiet-earth-read-351976-1.html
https://www.rulit.me/books/the-quiet-earth-read-351976-1.html*
March 26, 2020: THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT by Edgar Rice Burroughs,
Old Bridge Public Library, 7PM
*https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/551
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/551*
May 28, 2020: THE DARK FOREST by Cixin Liu, Old Bridge Public
Library, 7PM
July 23, 2020: CLIPPER OF THE CLOUDS by Jules Verne (a.k.a.
ROBUR THE CONQUEROR, [Fr. title ROBUR LE CONQUERANT],
published by Ace in 1961 in an omnibus titled MASTER OF THE
WORLD, which is the title of the sequel), Old Bridge Public
Library, 7PM
*https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3808
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3808*
September 24, 2020: TBD from Europe/Latin America,
Old Bridge Public Library, 7PM
November 19, 2020: Rudyard Kipling:
"A Matter of Fact" (1892)
*https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16578
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16578*
"The Ship That Found Herself" (1895)
*https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2569
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2569*
".007" (1897)
*https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2569
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2569*
"Wireless" (1902)
*https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9790
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9790*
"With the Night Mail [Aerial Board of Control 1]" (1905)
*https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29135
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29135*
"As Easy as A.B.C. [Aerial Board of Control 2]" (1912)
*https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13085
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13085*
"In the Same Boat" (1911)
*https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13085
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13085*
Old Bridge Public Library, 7PM
Northern New Jersey events are listed at:
*http://www.sfsnnj.com/news.html http://www.sfsnnj.com/news.html*
===================================================================
TOPIC: My Picks for Turner Classic Movies in February (comments by
Mark R. Leeper)
Back in the 1930s and 1940s one popular sub-genre of film was the
drama of true science discovery. Yes, science fiction was fun but
I admired scientists who were actually changing the world and who
were likely to be making the world a better place. My heroes were
not sports figures but people uncovering the secrets of nature. I
loved films about the discovery of radium and of penicillin. And,
of course there was the Manhattan Project studying the nature of
the atom and all the things that could be done once the atom was
split. And there were the Curies unknowingly irradiating
themselves.
Sadly the science film has largely disappeared. In the last year
or so we have not seen many science discovery films. The most I
have see in the last year or two have been have been THE IMITATION
GAME, possibly THE THEORY OF EVERY, and THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY.
This year we have the highly fictionalized THE AERONAUTS about a
flight by balloon to record breaking altitudes. It is based very
loosely on a real flight to 36,000 feet. TCM offers two such
films.
THE STORY OF LOUIS PASTEUR (1936) tells of the 19th century
microbiologist who faced the scorn of the medical community trying
to show that there are tiny animals in dirty water that could be
very dangerous to humans and animals. Pasteur (played by the great
Paul Muni) argued for physicians to boil heir instruments between
usages. Milk sold to the public has to be boiled now to kill off
tiny organisms.
[THE STORY OF LOUIS PASTEUR, Wednesday, February 5, 10:15 AM (ET)]
And for more about 19th century medical scientists who were
persecuted there is DR. EHRLICH'S MAGIC BULLET (1940). About the
scientist who used poison to combat syphilis at a time when is was
not socially acceptable to speak the name of the disease.
[DR. EHRLICH'S MAGIC BULLET, Wednesday, February 19, 09:15 AM (ET)]
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: COLOR OUT OF SPACE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: This is the latest film adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's
horror story tells of a meteor strike in the Massachusetts back
woods. Toward the beginning director Stanley sets his story in a
pleasant natural setting. As the story progresses and nature
corrupts or gets corrupted. The herbage becomes harder to
understand and to visually parse. The meteor goes missing and the
woods and everything in it becomes corrupted and sinister.
Nicholas Cage stars. Animals deform and the food form the
livestock becomes poisonous. Directed by: Richard Stanley; written
by: Scarlett Amaris; story by: H. P. Lovecraft. Rating: high +1
(-4 to +4) or 6/10.
This film is the latest adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's horror
story of a meteor strike in the Massachusetts back woods. In one
of Lovecraft's more popular stories a meteorite brings to Earth the
color of a frequency of light never previously seen on Earth. The
meteor goes missing and the woods and everything around it becomes
corrupted and evil. We see eggs on the farm grow double yokes, one
yellow and one black. Animals deform and the food from them
becomes toxic. Everything seen on this planet becomes corrupted.
It is in the nature of the story that it has a slow start. The
meteorite crashes during one of the most spectacular electrical
storms on film, albeit created with special effects. It turns the
sky to many colors, some of which are likely unnamed even outside
of the film. The poison of the meteorite takes a while to spread.
And then the trouble starts.
I rate COLOR OUT OF SPACE a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10.
Release date: January 24 2020
Film Credits:
*https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5073642/reference
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5073642/reference*
What others are saying:
*https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/color_out_of_space
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/color_out_of_space*
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: SEVEN SURRENDERS by Ada Palmer (copyright 2017, Tor, $17.99,
384pp, Trade Paperback, ISBN 978-0-7653-7803-3) (book review by Joe
Karpierz)
Back in 2017, Ada Palmer won the Astounding Award (previously the
John W. Campbell Award) for best new writer on the strength of her
first novel, TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING, the first novel in the four-
book "Terra Ignota" series. LIGHTNING was a powerful story with
outstanding and highly interesting world building, presenting a
setting and situation that I've never seen before. Influenced by
both science fiction and history, in retrospect I believe the novel
could have won a Hugo for Best Novel in just about any other recent
year within memory. It was a finalist in 2017, but the competition
it was up against was stiff. Any one of the six deserved to win
the award, and finishing behind Jemisin's OBELISK GATE is nothing
to be ashamed of.
SEVEN SURRENDERS continues the story started in TOO LIKE THE
LIGHTNING. It is told by Mycroft Canner, and covers the two days
that follow the first book. After reading the novel, it's hard to
believe that all the events that happen took place over just two
days. It could be argued that there is *too* much going on in this
book; there probably is. But one of the things that keeps me
reading the "Terra Ignota" books is the fact that I have not seen
any world building like this before, nor have I seen the kind of
story that Palmer is telling. Yes, it's difficult reading at
times, but it's well worth the effort.
Our cast of characters is the same, but there's much more going on
with them than we knew from the first book. We know what Mycroft
Canner's crimes were, but now we find out *why* he committed them,
and just how brutal they were. We know that the seven Hives
essentially govern the planet, but in SEVEN SURRENDERS we find out
more about just how far they are willing to go to preserve the
peace that has lasted for 250 years. We learn about a god from
another universe, and how he is here to save the planet.
As was with TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING, the story is complex and
involved, and we see that there is much more going on than meets
the eye. Yes, there's a 250 year period of peace, but is war
inevitable? And if so, is it better to have war sooner rather than
later because the longer we wait, the less knowledge there will be
about war and how to wage it, thus it will be more brutal with more
casualties? There are conspiracies within conspiracies, and
characters with powers that we can't imagine.
And I, for one, have no idea where it's headed and no way of being
able to figure it out.
No book is perfect, and this one is no exception. It is not an
easy read, and while that is not a flaw in and of itself, it may
turn away a lot of readers. While the characters are rich and have
fascinating backgrounds, they really aren't characters that we can
identify with. None of them are really likeable at all, and it's
not likely that a typical reader will be able to identify with any
one of them, especially if that's what turns particular readers on
to a book.
And yet, it's fascinating, in part because I don't know where it's
going and I've never seen a world like it before now. Palmer has
piqued my interest, and as arduous a reading process as these books
are, I suspect I will be reading book three, THE WILL TO BATTLE,
sooner rather than later. [-jak]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
MEN AND DINOSAURS by Edwin H. Colbert (Dutton, 1968, no ISBN) is of
course about the men (and they were almost entirely men) who
studied dinosaurs from the early beginnings of paleontology to the
(then-)present. But rather than give a summary of the book--this
is a classic work by a renown author--I am going to focus on two
minor bits.
The first is the phrase "two types of dinosaurian pelves." Only a
few days before reading this phrase, I listened to an episode of
John McWhorter's "Lexicon Valley" podcast titled "Does 'Processes'
Rhyme with 'Knees'?" in which he talked about how in Latin, words
ending in 'is' were made plural by changing the 'is' to 'es'. This
persists in English in a few words, but McWhorter claimed that most
words had lost this pluralization, and just added 'es' instead.
However, when McWhorter listed examples of 'is' words that just
added 'es', he included a lot that I would pluralize by changing
the 'is' to 'es', including 'axis', 'oasis', and 'diagnosis', I
noted in an email that I would also include 'prognosis',
'analysis', 'emphasis', and 'exegesis'.
But not in my wildest dreams would I have included 'pelvis' as one
that is still pluralized the Latin way, into 'pelves'.
[Note: I wrote to McWhorter re this, and he gave me a shout-out on
the next episode of "Lexicon Valley": "Verbs on the Move". Go to
about 34 minutes in for the section talking about plurals.]
And no, this does not mean that the plural of 'Elvis' is 'Elves'.
The other thing I want to focus on is Franz Aron Nopcsa von Felso-
Szilvas. Early on in his account Nopcsa's life, Colbert writes how
Nopcsa was "living the life of a baronial lord, going from one
Hungarian estate to another, with peasants owing low before him as
he drove by. His was on such occasions the life of a semiroyal
person in a sort of dreamland out of an operetta. And this life
seemed in part to be sufficient for Nopcsa never married." In
1968, this *might* be a reasonable conclusion. Nowadays, one comes
up with a different conclusion, and indeed a few pages later,
Colbert writes about Nopcsa's male secretary, "Bajazid, the
secretary who lived with Nopcsa for many years, was more than a
secretary; he was a lover.. Indeed, Nopcsa maintained two Albanian
homosexual boyfriends, who participated in his strange and unreal
life."
In writing about Nopcsa, Colbert also displays a definite
condescension towards Albania. For example, he writes, "... this
colorful, backward land and its primitive people cast a lifelong
spell over Nopcsa." Later Colbert describes Albania as "that
picturesque and backward corner of the Balkan world." [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
*mleeper@optonline.net *
Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence
that you are wonderful.
--Ann Landers