Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society

08/06/21 -- Vol. 40, No. 6, Whole Number 2183



Co-Editor: Mark Leeper, *mleeper@optonline.net *

Co-Editor: Evelyn Leeper, *eleeper@optonline.net *

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Topics:

A SCANNER DARKLY Discussion Rescheduled

James Bond Films (comments by Mark R. Leeper)

Ursula K. Le Guin Stamp

Pre-Crime Programs Are Here

THE GOD EQUATION (book review by Gregory Frederick)

GIRL IN THE BASEMENT (letters of comment by Paul Dormer

and Keith F. Lynch)

This Week's Reading (KLARA AND THE SUN) (book comments

by Evelyn C. Leeper)



===================================================================



TOPIC: A SCANNER DARKLY Discussion Rescheduled



The Middletown (NJ) Library discussion of the book and film A

SCANNER DARKLY has been rescheduled from August 5 to August 12,

still at 5:30PM, due to work on the library's HVAC system.



===================================================================



TOPIC: James Bond Films (comments by Mark R. Leeper)



We interrupt these opinions on James Bond films to give you another

(unrelated) opinion on James Bond films, requested by Fred Lerner,

who wrote, "I think I'd like to watch some James Bond movies this

summer.  Can you recommend a few that have held up well after all

these years?"



Thank you for a nice succinct question.  I would say the best, is

CASINO ROYALE (2006)/QUANTUM OF SOLACE (2008), which is really one

story in two parts.  The next would be SPECTRE, FROM RUSSIA WITH

LOVE, SKYFALL, and ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE.  After that

would be DR. NO, but there is a big drop in quality between ON HER

MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE and DR. NO.  However, if you add DR. NO

for historic reasons, the "rule-based" answer is "Watch the Daniel

Craig films, watch the first two Sean Connery films, watch the

George Lazenby film, then stop."



Remember that taken out of Cold War context, some Bond films lose a

lot.



Len Deighton's "Harry Palmer" films came from much the same factory

and would rank highly if they were on the same list, so just as a

hint I would recommend THE IPCRESS FILE and FUNERAL IN BERLIN, and

some people like the third (THE BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN).  Avoid the

last two (BULLET TO BEIJING and MIDNIGHT IN SAINT PETERSBURG),

which were made-for-TV movies.



For the full answer on James Bond films, here is my list of all the

Eon Bond films in descending order of quality:



  1. CASINO ROYALE (2006)

  2. SPECTRE

  3. FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

  4. SKYFALL

  5. ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE

  6. QUANTUM OF SOLACE

  7. DR NO

  8. THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS

  9. LICENSE TO KILL

 10. GOLDFINGER

 11. THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH

 12. FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

 13. YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE

 14. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME

 15. OCTOPUSSY

 16. THUNDERBALL

 17. TOMORROW NEVER DIES

 18. GOLDENEYE

 19. DIE ANOTHER DAY

 20. DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

 21. THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN

 22. A VIEW TO A KILL

 23. MOONRAKER

 24. LIVE AND LET DIE



Evelyn adds:



My policy has been to start with DR. NO and watch them all in

chronological order through SPECTRE.  Only completists need to

watch NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN.  Only super-completists used to need

to watch the "Casino Royale" episode of CLIMAX (because it was so

hard to find); now it's on YouTube, and worth a look out of

curiosity if nothing else.  Only masochists need to watch the Woody

Allen CASINO ROYALE.  [-ecl]



===================================================================



TOPIC: Ursula K. Le Guin Stamp



From *https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/literary-arts-stamp
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/literary-arts-stamp*-

series-honors-cross-genre-author-301342281.html:



The forward-thinking and genre-crossing writings of acclaimed

author Ursula K. Le Guin, whose novels and short stories increased

appreciation of science fiction and fantasy, are being celebrated

with a new Forever stamp--the 33rd in the Postal Service's Literary

Arts series.  ...



As an author, Le Guin was interested in more than just science

fiction and her prescient writings are now viewed as more than just

fantasy.



"Ursula once said she wanted to see science fiction step over the

old walls of convention and hit right into the next wall--and start

to break it down, too," said Joseph Corbett, U.S. Postal Service

chief financial officer and executive vice president, who served as

the stamp ceremony's dedicating official.  "She felt the ideas

represented in her fiction could help people become more aware of

other ways to do things, other ways to be and to help people wake

up."  ...



The stamp features a portrait of Le Guin based on a 2006 photograph

with a background that references the wintry world and characters

she created in "The Left Hand of Darkness."  Designed by Donato

Gionacola, with Antonio Alcala as art director, Le Guin's name

appears along the bottom of the stamp.  ...  News of the Ursula K.

Le Guin stamp is being shared with the hashtag #UrsulaKLeGuinStamp.



===================================================================



TOPIC: Pre-Crime Programs Are Here



*https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210724/15223647236/florida
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210724/15223647236/florida*-

sheriffs-office-now-notifying-people-it-will-be-inflicting-pre-

crime-program-them.shtml



Those selected receive a letter that says in part:



"You may wonder why you were enrolled in this program.  You were

selected as a result of an evaluation of your recent criminal

behavior using an unbiased, evidence-based risk assessment designed

to identify prolific offenders in our community.  As a result of

this designation, we will go to great efforts to encourage change

in your life through enhanced support and increased

accountability."



TechDirt elaborates:



It all sounds so positive.  While there's really no evidence this

is actually "evidence-based" or "unbiased," at least the Sheriff's

Office is willing to "encourage change in your life."  It sounds

nice but "encouragement" probably just means "constant harassment"

and "enhanced support" is probably a euphemism for suspicionless

searches.  "Increased accountability" may be part of this program,

but it won't be applied to the Pasco County Sheriff's Office.

Nope, there's a really good chance "increased accountability" means

more fines, more citations, more arrests, and more jail time.



And later TechDirt says:



The stated goal of the Sheriff's "pre-crime" program was, in the

department's own words, to make targets so miserable they either

moved or sued the Sheriff's Office.  Now that some targets have

done both, the Office appears to be trying to rein things in just a

bit, or at least pretend the program is not solely about

vindictive, unjustified harassment of certain Pasco County

residents.



===================================================================



TOPIC: THE GOD EQUATION: THE QUEST FOR A THEORY OF EVERYTHING by

Michio Kaku (book review by Gregory Frederick)



This is another great science book by the physicist and author

Michio Kaku.  I have now read four books by this author.  He truly

makes complex scientific principles understandable for an average

non-scientific reader.   As is typical for this topic of

unification, the author takes us on a journey from the ancient past

up to the present scientific understanding about what exactly

comprises the elementary ingredients of the Universe.  This journey

starts with Democritus from ancient Greece and proceeds to physics

discoveries by Newton, Faraday, Einstein, Bohr and others.  The

problem with unifying the four fundamental forces is that Gravity

will not fit into the accepted Standard Model which contains the

other three fundamental forces.  Therefore a new theory is needed.



In a previous review of a book by another physicist, I talked about

a Quantum Gravity theory which combines all field theories into

only one entity known as Covariant Quantum Fields.  That is a

possibly unification theory or theory of everything which combines

Gravity into a theory containing the other three fundamental

forces.  But Michio Kaku is a supporter of the more widely studied

String Theory.  String Theory is the other possible candidate for

the theory of everything that combines all of the four fundamental

forces.  String Theory states that all particles are not points of

matter but actually incredibly small strings which vibrate.  They

are much smaller than any sub-atomic particle, for example, so we

can never actually view them directly.  The type of vibration the

string has will determine if the particle will be an electron or a

quark, for example.  But with further study it was determined that

five different String Theories existed.  This was confusing to many

scientists until 1995 when M (membrane) Theory was developed and it

was discovered that all five String Theories were actually all

included in M Theory.  So actually, M-Theory is the unification

theory or theory of everything that Kaku really supports.  Multi-

dimensional membranes in M Theory can collapse into these strings

in five different ways.  That is why there were five different

String Theories.  The author, Michio Kaku, is extremely talented

when it comes to translating complex subjects into information that

is accessible for the lay reader, making this a very good book.

[-gf]



===================================================================



TOPIC: James Bond Themes, THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD, THE INVISIBLE MAN

(2020), THE STEPFORD WIVES and the MT VOID (letter of comment by

Guy Lillian III)



In response to the MT VOID in general and various specific items in

the 07/23/21 issue of the MT VOID and earlier in particular, Guy

Lillian writes in ZINE DUMP #52:



Ever mutable, always readable and interesting, MT Void (get the

pun?  It took me years) features wise opinions on all sorts of

stuff from Evelyn and Mark Leeper, and comes to its subscribers

weekly via e-mail.  Great way to insure frequent renewal of fannish

spirit.  Topics this issue include James Bond themes--FROM RUSSIA

WITH LOVE and GOLDFINGER excel here, as in all other measures of

007 excellence--and past issues hit on THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD (IMHO

the only film fantasy arguably as grand as LotR), Evelyn's reading,

the new (and quite excellent) INVISIBLE MAN, STEPFORD WIVES, and

anything else you, the Leepers, or the sundry Chorus enlivening

their letter column can think of.  [-gl]



===================================================================



TOPIC: GIRL IN THE BASEMENT (letters of comment by Paul Dormer and

Keith F. Lynch)



In response to Art Stadlin's review of GIRL IN THE BASEMENT in the

07/30/21 issue of the MT VOID, Paul Dormer writes:



Yes, I remember the Fritzl case when it hit the headlines.  Quite

creepy.



Not long after, English National Opera in London did a staging of

Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle that obviously had echoes of this

story.  (I mean the staging had echoes, not the original story.)

For those that don't know the opera, Bluebeard brings home his new

bride, Judith.  She finds the castle so dark, she persuades him to

open up seven doors.  Behind each door is a secret--a torture

chamber and an armoury among them--each covered in blood.  Finally

he opens the seventh door to reveal three previous wives, all still

alive.  Judith goes to join them...  [-pd]



Keith F. Lynch adds:



That also reminds me of the man who kidnapped three women and kept

them locked up in his house in Cleveland for more than ten years.

One of them gave birth and that child spent the first six years of

her life locked in that house.  Perhaps the most tragic part of the

story was that one of the women watched, on TV, her mother

consulting a psychic who falsely told the mother that her daughter

was dead.  The mother soon died of grief.  The good news is that

all three women and the child survived in good health, and that the

perpetrator pled guilty to 937 counts of rape, kidnapping, and

aggravated murder (for induced miscarriages), and was sentenced to

life plus 1000 years in prison without the possibility of parole.

He hanged himself in prison.  See

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Castro_kidnappings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Castro_kidnappings*.



As for deliberate errors in movies based on true events, see this

well-written thread by Amanda Knox, who is not happy about the new

movie STILLWATER, "based on the Amanda Knox saga":



*https://twitter.com/amandaknox/status/1420871392266911746
https://twitter.com/amandaknox/status/1420871392266911746*



I recently watched THE LIFE OF EMILE ZOLA, which is largely about

the Dreyfus case.  The movie was full of deliberate errors,

including having no mention of anti-Semitism.  I learned that the

non-mention of anti-Semitism was so as to not offend Nazis.  (The

movie was released in 1937, when Nazis were still considered just

another political party.)  [-kfl]



Paul notes:



I remember watching that film on TV when I was at university in the

early Seventies.  [-pd]



===================================================================



TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)



KLARA AND THE SUN by Kazuo Ishiguro (Borzoi, ISBN 978-0-593-31817-

1) has the "Subjects" on its copyright page as "Science fiction"

and "Love Stories". but your chances of finding this in the science

fiction section are slim to none.  Even my library, which at least

used to hone strictly to the copyright page classification, has

filed this in "Fiction".



I have talked before about how Jose Saramago was a Nobel laureate

who had written at least a dozen stories of the fantastic, at least

two of which are absolutely science fiction rather than fantasy, as

well as few fantastical short stories.  In spite of this body of

work, when (from the audience) I recommended Saramago's work at the

"Things You Should Read (But Don't Know about Yet)" panel at the

2015 Philcon, not only had no one in the audience heard of him, no

one *on the panel* had heard of him.



Kazuo Ishiguro is the new Saramago.



On the (highly recommended) Coode Street podcast, they talked about

how a lot of SF (i.e., speculative fiction) was marketed/positioned

as literary or mainstream fiction rather than SF.  This is

definitely science fiction, but you won't find it in the science

fiction section of your bookstore.  If you did, it would have a

cover that showed Klara, and would have "In the grand tradition of

Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury" blazoned across the cover.  (Well,

maybe not--Asimov is not well known to the current generation of

science fiction readers, and most of those who know of him also

know of his reputation as a sexual harasser.  And while so far as I

know Bradbury's reputation remains intact, his is no longer a name

to conjure with either.)



Anyway, the connections to Asimov and Bradbury are obvious.  Klara

is an "AF"--an "artificial friend", i.e., a robot/android that

serves as a companion for a child.  This is a world where most

people keep their children in isolation, apparently schooled via

some equivalent of Zoom, but the children also have "interaction

meetings" (in-person get-togethers where the children presumably

learn how to live in society with others)--shades of "The Machine

Stops" by E. M. Forster, and Asimov's spacemen in THE CAVES OF

STEEL and THE NAKED SUN as well as Asimov's "Robbie" and Bradbury's

"I Sing the Body Electric", a.k.a. "The Electric Grandmother", I

suppose.)  I should note that this was almost definitely conceived

before the COVID-19 lockdowns, remote learning, and so on, but it

seems eerily familiar now.



But there is more to KLARA AND THE SUN than that.  For one thing,

Klara has a religion.  And of course, from our perspective this

religion is entirely misguided, based on Klara's misperceptions of

the world.  Which of course leads the reader to ask if *their*

religion is entirely misguided, based on *their* misperceptions of

the world.



There are definite parallels to Ishiguro's earlier novel, NEVER LET

ME GO.  In both, people rely on "constructs" to fulfill tasks that

should be done by other people, or perhaps not at all.  Calling the

clones in NEVER LET ME GO "constructs" may seem demeaning, since

they are clearly fully human beings.  But they are treated by

everyone else in the novel as "constructs", and it is defining the

clones as not human that lets humans decide what tasks can be

foisted off on them.  In both NEVER LET ME GO and KLARA AND THE

SUN, humans have used technology to create a class of slaves.  That

the reader is horrified by this in NEVER LET ME GO, but only

somewhat bothered by it in KLARA AND THE SUN says something about

our attitudes.



The reliance on technology in care-giving, in education, and in

other aspects of life is obviously something that concerns

Ishiguro, but most specifically when it involves creating sentient

beings who are not given self-determination.  [-ecl]



===================================================================



                     Mark Leeper

*mleeper@optonline.net *





          Logical positivists have never taken psychology into

          account in their epistemology, but they affirm that

          logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing

          but linguistic structures.

                                          --Jean Piaget