Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
11/20/20 -- Vol. 39, No. 21, Whole Number 2146
Co-Editor: Mark Leeper, *mleeper@optonline.net *
Co-Editor: Evelyn Leeper, *eleeper@optonline.net *
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Topics:
THEM! (1954) (film retrospective by Mark R. Leeper)
THE LORD OF THE RINGS Life Lessons (comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
NUCLEATION by Kimberly Unger (book review by Joe Karpierz)
THE LONG GOODBYE (letter of comment by Kip Williams)
REPLAY (letter of comment by Jim Susky)
This Week's Reading (THE DARK IS RISING, AKATA WITCH,
THE TEN THOUSAND DOORS OF JANUARY) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: THEM! (1954) (film retrospective by Mark R. Leeper)
THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS did well enough for Warner Brothers
that they followed it up with another monster film, THEM! In fact,
THEM! was one of the better Fifties science fiction films and one
of only a handful that are still fairly effective forty years after
it was made due in large part to some very intelligent script
choices. The style of the film begins as a straightforward police
procedural in which the killer turns out to be giant mutated ants.
The feel of the drama is no less than one would find in "Dragnet."
The terrible poster used in the ad campaign gives away that this is
a monster movie. But with the exception of the comic scientist,
the parts are all played with grim realism.
Certainly the opening does not immediately give a clue of what is
to come. A girl is found wandering in the desert of New Mexico.
The police investigate as they would a human crime and besides some
odd clues there is no evidence that the police are not dealing with
human criminals. Investigating is Police Sergeant Ben Peterson
(played by James Whitmore) and his partner. As the police
investigated keep finding apparent crime scenes and odd clues. The
partner is killed after having been left at a crime scene. One of
the first victims was an FBI agent, so another agent is assigned to
the case, Robert Graham played by James Arness. Arness had been in
two previous science fiction films: TWO LOST WORLDS and more
notably in the title role of THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD. The
plot unfolds tensely, but has time to have several comic vignettes.
Some of the comedy involves Edmund Gwenn as an entomologist brought
in to when somebody discovers that the clues point to giant ants.
Joan Weldon appears as his daughter, also a scientist. Reportedly
one of the minor players built an entire career on this film.
Walt Disney--who reportedly was a fan of THEM!--saw Fess Parker
and decided he would be a good Davy Crockett.
Some of the touches have their problems. Multiple times ant
footprints are found, but always singly. Do ants hop on one foot?
In the ant colony, Whitmore's and Arness's voices are muffled by
their breathing gear, but Joan Weldon's voice seems to be clear and
unmuffled. The ant props are surprisingly well-handled to give the
impression of many more ants were than props than there actually
were. In fact, there is only one and a half adult ant mock-up built
for the film and half of another that were used in the films. The
audience never sees more than one ant and a half ant in any one
scene. The film was made in color, by the way, and the ants were
purple. THEM! was released in black and white and that probably
helps the tension of the film.
BEST TOUCH: The combination of realism with the science fictional
plot.
WORST TOUCH: The usual expository lectures about ant natural
history seem particularly awkward.
This film stands up very well today because it was taken seriously
by the filmmakers. I rate it a high +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Turner Classic Movies is running this on December 3, 4:15 PM.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE LORD OF THE RINGS Life Lessons (comments by Evelyn
C. Leeper)
I just watched THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS and discovered
it had valuable life lessons for the viewer--things like "Don't
build your evil fortress downstream from a dam" and "Don't piss off
the ents." These are surely lessons we can all live by. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: NUCLEATION by Kimberly Unger (copyright 2020, Tachyon
Publicatons, ASIN: B084ZZM6YJ, Print length: 288 pages) (book
review by Joe Karpierz)
First contact stories have been a part of science fiction for
decades. Humans are fascinated by the concept of there being other
races out there, other beings for us to communicate with.
Underlying that fascination is the simple question: are we alone?
Kimberly Unger's debut novel, NUCLEATION, doesn't start out as a
first contact novel. Helen Vectorovich is one member of a two-
person team which is on a very high profile project: the
construction of a wormhole gate that would connect earth to, well,
"out there"--interstellar space. She is connected via quantum
entanglement to a waldo, a robot hundreds of light years away. She
and her partner Ted are amongst the best in the business, and thus
they have been assigned to this very high profile mission. All is
going well, and the team is going through the standard system
checklists checklists when something goes very wrong--that can't be
much of a surprise, of course - and Ted is killed.
The mission is put on hold, of course. This kind of thing *never*
happens; if anyone is in danger, it is the pilot, not the
navigator. And so, an investigation ensues. There are all sorts
of possibilities, of course. Industrial espionage is the number
one suspect, of course. Any number of companies and hot shot young
teams would like to take over the project and make a name for
themselves. But what if it's not that? What if what killed Ted
was a new life form that humans haven't encountered previously?
Another team is sent out to investigate, and more problems occur.
As the person with the most experience, Helen is part of the team
leading the investigation, but as one of the top suspects in the
accident, her job is difficult, with many roadblocks thrown up in
front of her.
It shouldn't be much of a surprise that the answer to the problem
is a combination of espionage and alien life forms. But who is
leading the sabotage, and how are they working with what appears to
be a new life form that is essentially destroying Helen's team's
corporate equipment?
NUCLEATION is a well-written, fun, fast paced, and interesting
debut novel. It's a whodunnit, a "whydunnit", and a "what's gonna
happen next?" kind of story. This is an idea novel, the kind of
novel that many of us used to read as kids when we were starting to
get our feet wet in science fiction. This is really not a
character driven novel, other than the fact that the characters are
there to move the plot along. And that's okay, as plot and idea
are among the core tenets of science fiction. If you're looking
for deep dives into the backgrounds of the characters in
NUCLEATION, you won't find them, as those deep dives aren't
necessary. Unger tells us just enough of what we need to know to
move the story along. There isn't massive world building and
character development, but it's not necessary for the story; I find
this a benefit, not a etriment. The story works because of it.
There is definitely room for a sequel. The story has really just
begun, and I'm interested in finding out what comes next, whether
it's in the NUCLEATION universe or something else from Kimberly
Unger. I believe she's a writer to watch. [-jak]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE LONG GOODBYE (letter of comment by Kip Williams)
In response to Evelyn's comments on THE LONG GOODBYE in the
11/13/20 issue of the MT VOID, Kip Williams writes:
The biggest change they made in that wretched movie was to make
Marlowe into a whining loser, a betrayal of the source material
that's on a par with what Disney did to Victor Hugo. They could
perhaps have deviated farther from the books by making him a tap-
dancing hedgehog, and I'm not entirely sure why they didn't. [-kw]
ObSF: And for this we may have to blame Leigh Brackett, who wrote
the screenplay. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: REPLAY (letter of comment by Jim Susky)
In response to Evelyn's comments on Time Magazine's list of "100
Best Fantasy Books of All Time" in the 11/06/20 issue of the MT
VOID, Jim Susky writes:
Thank you for the notice on the Time Magazine "top 100 fantasy
books".
I quite agree that THE LORD OF THE RINGS is one work along with
other famous multipart works.
Clarke and Asimov formed my young fiction tastes well before any of
the fantasists so I still tend toward hard SF in the spec-fiction
realm. Still, I was surprised to find that I'd read six on the
list (four, properly accounted).
I'd like to mention the winner for the 1988 World Fantasy Award for
Best Novel--Ken Grimwood's REPLAY.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replay_(Grimwood_novel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replay_(Grimwood_novel*)
This was a most satisfying, fully-adult, time-travel yarn set with
a plot-device similar to that for GROUNDHOG DAY--albeit with a 25-
year cycle.
According to the Wikipedia entry, in 2010 Warner announced a film
version--which apparently remains in "development hell". [-js]
Evelyn responds:
REPLAY seems to be the literary equivalent of a cult film--it is
not at all well-known, but keeps popping up in discussions of time
travel books. There is another difference between Grimwood's time
loop and GROUNDHOG DAY's besides the length, but I won't describe
it. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
THE DARK IS RISING by Susan Cooper (Margaret K. McElderry Books,
ISBN 978-0-689-82983-3) is another book on Time Magazine's "100
Best Fantasy Books of All Time". It is another juvenile/young
adult book, and has what is clearly a common theme in this
category: the child or teen of about the age of the target audience
who has unsuspected magical powers. (In science fiction, the
protagonist has unusual intelligence, calculating skills, or
deductive reasoning.)
Towards the beginning of the book, the powers of darkness try to
defeat the protagonist in a sequence that is very similar to one in
the film THE DEVIL RIDES OUT: a rider appears on a black horse, and
the people representing the forces of good form a circle, holding
hands but facing outward, to hold it off. Then voices come through
the door claiming to be the protagonist's sister and mother, asking
him to let them in. All this is very much like the scene in THE
DEVIL RIDES OUT where the voice of the daughter of a main character
is heard (and indeed, her image is seen) but it is a trick to tempt
the mother, and there is a black horse and rider. I assume these
are standard tropes, although it is possible Cooper borrowed them
from the Dennis Wheatley book THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, which came out
in 1934 (the film was in 1968), while THE DARK IS RISING was
published in 1973.
And the theme of the child with unexpected magical powers appears
again in AKATA WITCH by Nnedi Okorafor (Speak, ISBN 978-0-142-
42091-1). This is set in Nigeria, but the protagonist was raised
in both Nigeria and the United States, which makes her someone a
little less alien to American readers. (This reminded me of THE
AMERICAN GIRL magazine published by the Girl Scouts of America in
the 1960s. It had an advice column where an American girl would
ask for advice and someone from another country would answer. The
one I remember was an American girl asking what to wear to a party
and getting an answer from a girl in Africa about how to wrap a
kanga. I guess this was the 1960s version of promoting diversity,
but I was unimpressed.)
Anyway, AKATA WITCH does a much better job of giving American
readers a sense of another place in general and of Nigeria in
particular. This is particularly tricky since the fantasy element
could easily overwhelm the reality of Nigeria. (For example,
reading older books, one often gets the impression that zombies are
wandering down every street in modern-day Haiti, or that everyone
in a shtetl breaks out in song almost every day.) I think I
preferred this to THE DARK IS RISING, maybe because the fantasy
element was much less familiar to me.
And once more, THE TEN THOUSAND DOORS OF JANUARY by Alix E. Harrow
(Redhook, ISBN 978-0316421973) has a child with unexpected magical
powers--at which point I decided enough was enough. THE TEN
THOUSAND DOORS OF JANUARY has gotten a lot of good reviews, what I
read was quite good, but I have just had enough of children with
unexpected magical powers, at least for now. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
*mleeper@optonline.net *
Going out to eat is expensive. I was out at one
restaurant and they didn't have prices on the menu.
Just faces with different expressions of horror.
--Rita Rudner