Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
11/06/20 -- Vol. 39, No. 19, Whole Number 2144
Co-Editor: Mark Leeper, *mleeper@optonline.net *
Co-Editor: Evelyn Leeper, *eleeper@optonline.net *
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Topics:
Una O'Connor (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Entropy (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
And What May Be the Freakiest Bizarre Animal Story of the
Year (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Ed Bishop (letter of comment by Paul Dormer)
This Week's Reading (Time Magazine's Best 100 Fantasy Books,
OZMA OF OZ, and FIVE CHILDREN AND IT) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Una O'Connor (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Una O'Connor was the Jar Jar Binks of her age. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Entropy (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Mark Leeper's Journal, December 9, 1988
As I promised last week I would explain a study I am doing on
entropy. As you probably know, universal entropy increases. This
means things get more mixed up. If you put red marbles and green
marbles in a large Tupperware snuff mull and shake them up and look
inside, it is unlikely that all the green marbles are together and
all the red marbles are together. The highest probability is that
they will be mixed together and no amount of shaking the mull will
separate them. Entropy says things get more mixed up. (I tell
people that things are getting more confused, but they tell me the
problem is all in my mind.)
Anyway, one cannot decrease the overall entropy of a closed system.
You can make a machine that will cool your Jolt cola and blow hot
air out the bottom, but it has to expend energy to do it and that
energy is dissipated as heat. These forces clearly apply
universally or they are not true at all. It has been observed that
the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This goes against
entropy in a limited area but that area is not a closed system. In
fact, if the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, such a system
must be expending energy as heat. This heat gets observed as
racial friction leading to long hot summers. It may also be
generally contributing to the heating up of the Earth's surface
which will change climates so that our growing seasons will be
affected and we will have more droughts. Poorer nations will get
richer; richer nations will get poorer. Entropy will win out in
the end.
Anyone know if you can get Nobel prizes in economics *and* physics
for the same work?
In our last MT VOID, Estes Slade was told to look up the definition
of "disenfranchised." He did so and this is what he reports:
"dis-en-fran-chised - 1. Being formally part owner of a small
hamburger chain. 2. An ex-citizen of France. 3. An over-weight
person having had a stuck French fry removed from the lower gut."
So now you all know.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: And What May Be the Freakiest Bizarre Animal Story of the
Year (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Well, we've swarms of locusts in Africa, dangerous funnel-web
spiders in Australia, Pablo Escobar's hippopotamuses as an invasive
species in Columbia, iguanas falling from tress in Florida, wild
boar on the streets of Barcelona, mountain goats in a town in
Wales, whales in the Mediterranean shipping lanes, seagulls in Rome
hunting rats and pigeons, and murder hornets. But the latest story
may have the best headline:
"Escaped cloned female mutant crayfish take over Belgian cemetery"
*https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/23/escaped-cloned-female
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/23/escaped-cloned-female*-
mutant-crayfish-take-belgian-cemetery/.
[-ecl]
And we thought we had social unrest. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Ed Bishop (letter of comment by Paul Dormer)
In response to Evelyn's comments on Ed Bishop in the 10/30/20 issue
of the MT VOID, Paul Dormer writes:
[Evelyn wrote,] "The only problem is that whenever I hear Ed
Bishop in anything else, I immediately think, "What is Philip
Marlowe doing in this?" [-ecl]
For me, Bishop is always Commander Straker in UFO, although he was
also the voice of Captain Blue in CAPTAIN SCARLET AND THE
MYSTERONS, which I watched when it first came out. [-pd]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Time Magazine just ran its list of "100 Best Fantasy Books of All
Time" and naturally there are objections. (See
*https://time.com/collection/100-best-fantasy-books/
https://time.com/collection/100-best-fantasy-books/* for the
list.)
One big objection is that Time gives three slots to J. R. R.
Tolkien's THE LORD OF THE RINGS, separate slots to Lewis Carroll's
ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS, and
two slots to two parts of Philip Pullman's HIS DARK MATERIALS, both
of which are really one work in three volumes. Of course, everyone
disagrees on what should go in the four slots that would be
produced. My suggestion for one of them is Homer's ILIAD and
ODYSSEY.
Anyway, the list serves as reasonable suggestions of what to read
in this time of pandemic. I've read twenty-six of them, and have
another eleven. Of the remaining sixty-three, my library has a
whopping forty-nine. And by "my library", I mean my town's own
library, not the county consortium of libraries or any inter-
library loan network, though my guess is that with those, I would
have access to almost all of the remaining fourteen. (Currently, I
can check books out of the local library, but inter-library loan
has been suspended.)
I was surprised at how many are classified as either juvenile or
young adult, which I'm assuming means (the later Harry Potter books
notwithstanding) that they won't be massive tomes. Of course, the
major one I'm looking forward to is THE ARABIAN NIGHTS; I have the
unabridged Richard Francis Burton translation, which is three
massive tomes. (However, it has only one slot.)
So far on this project I have read OZMA OF OZ by L. Frank Baum
(courtesy of Project Gutenberg), FIVE CHILDREN AND IT by E. Nesbit
(Puffin, ISBN 978-0-141-32161-5), and THE DARK IS RISING by Susan
Cooper (Margaret K. McElderry Books, ISBN 978-0-689-82983-3).
I was never a big fan of the "Oz" books; in fact, I read at most
the first one, and I cannot say I recall reading it--just that I
figure I must have done so at some point. So I'm not sure why Time
Magazine picked OZMA OF OZ over the other books in the series; one
would have expected them to pick the first book, THE WIZARD OF OZ.
THE WIZARD OF OZ is one of my favorite movies, though that may be
from the iconic stature it achieved while I was growing up. It is
well known as the film that ran every year, but only once a year,
and people waited eagerly for it. (The first time I missed it from
my early childhood on was in college when there was some sort of
field trip that day.) OZMA OF OZ was okay, and maybe my being an
adult makes my judgment less valuable for this, but I cannot see
why it particularly is on the list.
FIVE CHILDREN AND IT is basically a sequence of short stories where
the five children find a "sand fairy" who grants them a wish a day.
(They are four really--one is just a baby and not involved in the
wishing or anything else that requires cogitation.) As with every
story involving magical wishes, the wishes go awry. There are
about a half dozen wishes, and the theme goes a bit tedious after a
while.
However, FIVE CHILDREN AND IT has one startling feature--Nesbit was
an "early adopter" of gender-free pronouns. She does not invent
new ones, but she has no problem with using "its" as a pronoun
referring to people ("Each of the children carried its own spade"
[page 6]), or using the plural "their" to refer to a single person
("Has anyone else anything to do with this?" "Yes, ... but it
wasn't their fault." [page 122]).
She also has one character say, "Friends, Romans, and countrymen--
and women..." On the other hand, at one point one of the girls
says to the other, "Oh, Jane, do try to be a man!" [page 112]
However, she follows this with "Jane did try to 'be a man'" so
maybe she's getting in a sly dig here.
It is quite surprising to find these in a book first published in
1902. (Yes, I know Jane Austen used the third-person plural
pronoun as grammatically singular.)
(Looking around, I see that this has been observed by others, and
also in other books by her. There are various explanations given
for why she might have done this, but no one really knows.)
Nesbit concedes that adults would wish differently, but has the san
fairy complain that grown-ups wish for things like "a graduated
income tax, and old-age pensions and manhood suffrage, and free
secondary education, and dull things like that."
I will probably cover THE DARK IS RISING next week. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
*mleeper@optonline.net *
The circumstances of human society are too complicated
to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical calculation.
--Marquis De Custine