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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 06/12/98 -- Vol. 16, No. 50
MT Chair/Librarian:
Mark Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-5619 mleeper@lucent.com
HO Chair: John Jetzt MT 2E-530 732-957-5087 jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian: Nick Sauer HO 4F-427 732-949-7076 njs@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist:
Rob Mitchell MT 2E-537 732-957-6330 robmitchell@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-2070 eleeper@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-447-3652 for details. The New Jersey Science Fiction Society
meets irregularly; call 201-652-0534 for details, or check
http://www.interactive.net/~kat/njsfs.html. The Denver Area
Science Fiction Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of
every month at Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
1. URLs of the week:
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/6960/turkey.htm and
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824/turkey.htm. Our trip logs for
Turkey. [-ecl]
===================================================================
2. I don't know if this article is going to go where you will
think it is going to go. But some of the news has given me pause
and something to wonder about. It seems that Disneyworld is caught
between two camps. Gay Pride Month is being celebrated in Orlando,
Florida, this year. Orlando would probably not do anything to stop
the celebration even if it could. I think they would have some
serious Constitutional problems if they tried to say that gay
people could not come to Orlando or could not celebrate. Basically
it is a First Amendment issue.
Now you may have heard that Pat Robertson--that's the Reverend Pat
Robertson, minister and sometime Presidential candidate--has stated
in that august public forum, THE 700 CLUB, that "I would warn
Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes and
I don't think I'd be waving those flags in God's face if I were
you." He suggested that tolerance of homosexuality "will bring
terrorist bombs, it'll bring earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a
meteor." I guess one can infer from this that he is a pompous
zealot who presumes to speak for God, though he does seem to be
keeping current on his movies. But the point of this piece is not
to deride the Reverend. Frankly that is a waste of good typing.
Why should I waste my time composing paragraphs to make fun of
Robertson? Most of the country is doing that already, and even
that is a waste since Nature has insulted Pat Robertson far beyond
our poor means to add or detract.
But that is not where I am going here. The irony of the situation
is that Robertson's real anger is at Disneyworld and as it happens
Disneyworld is safe, at least from tornadoes. How can I be so
sure? It's thermodynamics. Disneyworld is a place with a lot of
heavy machinery, after all. And heavy machinery gives off a lot of
heat. And heat rises. And cooler air comes in at the bottom. Now
I don't completely understand the dynamics of a tornado, but from
what I am told tornadoes, which after all are spinning funnels of
air, cannot come too near rising columns of air. The two are
incompatible. So if God indeed set of the laws of nature to work
His will, as I assume the Reverend Robertson believes, then perhaps
God does not reward intolerance to homosexuality. That would just
be Robertson projecting his intolerance on God. Perhaps what God
rewards is the generation of heat.
Okay, I can see that look on your face. Why would God want us to
generate heat? As if all the other acts of God were completely
comprehensible and this was would be the first mysterious one.
Look, Moses came down from the mountain with ten rules and who were
those rules good for? It just happened they were pretty good rules
for running a society. I mean, things tend to fall apart with
people murdering each other and coveting each other's asses. The
Ten Commandments did a lot to hold things together and so were
fairly self-serving on a societal level. They were just what the
Israelites needed at that moment in time. It would be a pretty
nifty coincidence if it were also what served God's wishes. What
if Moses, in a good cause, made them up? I mean, he smashed the
tablets and then reconstructed the whole list perfectly? Do you
believe that? I can't even remember a shopping list. Maybe Moses
was the author himself and wanted to attribute the laws to God to
make them seem more official. Maybe God really loves people who
generate heat. Perhaps the real message was not the tablets; it
was the Burning Bush. I mean, from the early times in Egypt, what
was the symbol of God? The sun.
And you don't have to go back to ancient history. The standard of
living of the world increased during the Industrial Revolution.
Life became more rewarding. You know what else was changing? We
were building great factories that generated heat.
Look at the end of World War II in the Pacific. Both sides were
headed for a protracted siege that could have killed a million on
each side. And there was very little doubt about the eventual
outcome, which was pretty much obvious after the Battle of Midway.
But it was going to be very, very expensive to get the Japanese to
submit to the inevitable. And God was not showing himself to put a
stop to it all. But then what happened? Suddenly in Alamogordo,
New Mexico, something happened that generated a great heat. Then
the same people generated two more great heats. And fortune smiled
on those who created that heat. Even today the world's most
powerful country is the one that generates the most heat.
Why would God want heat? Who knows? Why do so many people think
He wants us to live in harmony? "What is Man that Thou are mindful
of him, O Lord?" Our prayers say all the time that we are
insignificant. Maybe we are and he is not doing it for us. Maybe
the universe is more comfortable for Him if it isn't so cold and
dark everywhere. Maybe God comes to Earth and enjoys the creature
comforts of warming up. And that is really what he wants, for us
to make a warm place for him to rest when his current seventh days
come around. It makes as much sense as anything else does. [-mrl]
===================================================================
3. Detective's tale at Lucent Technologies leads to monument
honoring the father of radio astronomy
HOLMDEL, N.J. -- A detective's tale, involving a Nobel Prize winner
and a National Academy of Sciences member, has led to a June 8
ceremony at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs facility here that
honors the first person to hear radio waves from outer space.
Karl Jansky's discovery in 1931, which was not publicly discussed
until a 1933 page-one article in the New York Times, spawned the
field of radio astronomy. When Jansky died in 1950 at the young
age of 44, however, the Bell Labs scientist had received no formal
recognition from the scientific community.
"The discovery was ahead of its time because in 1933, radio waves
had nothing to do with astronomy, so it really fell between radio
engineering and astronomy," said Bell Labs astrophysicist Tony
Tyson, one of the two sleuths in this tale and also a member of the
National Academy of Sciences.
Tyson helped pinpoint the former location of Jansky's original
100-foot-long antenna, which resembled a box kite lying on its
side, supported by Ford Model T tires. The location was a crucial
finding because monuments--in this case, a 13-foot-long stylized
replica--fittingly reside on historical sites.
"It didn't seem right to just go out there and pick a spot," said
Tyson's fellow sleuth Robert Wilson, a Nobel Prize winner and
former Bell Labs astronomer. "Because Jansky's antenna was the
start of our science, we wanted to mark it appropriately."
Jansky's discovery actually was an offshoot of his work to find
sources of static in overseas radio signals. While two clear
culprits were local and distant thunderstorms, a third was a steady
hiss of unknown origin that appeared daily at the same time and
same location. By using a star map, Jansky discovered that the
waves came from the center of the Milky Way.
"There is a clear message here," Tyson said. "Serendipity happens
to those people who are both prepared and open minded."
Even though Jansky performed some follow-up studies on the
extraterrestrial radio waves for several years--mostly in his spare
time--he largely abandoned those efforts to pursue wartime
research. Years later, other scientists continued developing the
field of radio astronomy, which has led to such discoveries as
quasars, pulsars, black holes and the expanding universe. In fact,
near the site of Jansky's monument, Wilson and fellow Bell Labs
scientist Arno Penzias discovered radio waves that actually were
remnants of the Big Bang. Their 1964 discovery led to the Nobel
Prize in Physics 14 years later.
About 10 years ago, Wilson and Tyson were talking about Jansky and
decided they wanted to honor his contributions to astronomy, which
were not fully understood until shortly after his death. Until
that initial conversation, there had been relatively little
recognition for Jansky, except when astronomers labeled the radio-
wave measurement unit the "jansky."
Sometime during the 1960s, the state of New Jersey erected a road
sign on an utility pole near the Bell Labs' Holmdel facility, which
marks the site--roughly one half mile from the original antenna--as
the birthplace of radio astronomy. Unfortunately, it's unsafe to
stop along that section of the road. "You could hardly stop in your
car and read the sign without getting hit from behind," said
Wilson, now a senior scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center
for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and a Bell Labs consultant.
Also during the 60s, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in
Green Bank, W. Va., dedicated a replica of Jansky's antenna, which
was built by the same carpenter at Bell Labs who had worked on the
original.
Wilson and Tyson began searching for Bell Labs records about
Jansky, but they soon discovered Jansky's lab notebooks from 1928
to 1937 were missing. Those notebooks, they realized, would
provide one of the crucial clues that would pinpoint the antenna's
original location. The antenna itself vanished sometime during the
1950s.
A few years ago, a summer student majoring in archeology found an
old box of papers at Bell Labs' former facility in New York City.
At one time, the papers had been slated for a corporate museum, but
they remained in the possession of a company executive who had
corresponded with one of Jansky's colleagues.
One page in the notebook, Tyson discovered, provided the location
of Jansky's office and also the antenna's angular position. Then,
he and Wilson analyzed the other pieces of the puzzle: a survey of
the former Holmdel building; an old map of Holmdel Township, which
showed the building's location by a stream; and an old aerial
photograph that faintly showed the antenna itself, the stream and a
tree line that partially exists today. Eventually, with lots of
geometric analysis, the two astronomers determined that the
original antenna was 1,000 feet from the old building, placing it
on a grassy patch near the current Holmdel building's main parking
lot.
"I was just relieved that the actual location was on grass and not
asphalt," quipped Tyson, who along with Wilson have devoted a few
hours weekly to the Jansky memorial during the last several years.
For the June 8 ceremony, Tyson and Wilson were expecting many
members of Jansky's family, including his sister, son and daughter,
and also some of his former colleagues and friends. For instance,
Jansky's former table tennis partner and Bell Labs engineer George
Eberhardt attended. And Grote Reber, who confirmed Jansky's
results in 1937 and later mapped the Milky Way galaxy in 1941,
traveled from Tasmania to attend. Also attending were be Jesse
Greenstein, who was one of the first scientists to attempt a
theoretical explanation of Jansky's observations.
Lucent Technologies, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., designs,
builds and delivers a wide range of public and private networks,
communications systems and software, data networking systems,
business telephone systems and microelectronics components. Bell
Laboratories is the research and development arm for the company.
For more information on Lucent Technologies, visit the company's
web site at http://www.lucent.com.
===================================================================
4. THE TRUMAN SHOW (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: A man lives his life not realizing
that he is on television and an audience of
millions watches his every move. But the game
is starting to slip and Truman is beginning to
guess that reality is not what he thinks it is.
Jim Carrey stars in an old science fiction idea
that is new to films. After several years
Peter Weir returns to the weird. Rating: 9 (0
to 10), +3 (-4 to +4) SPOILER WARNING: The
premise of THE TRUMAN SHOW is told in all of
the trailers, but it is not fully revealed
until well into the film. This review does
discuss that premise.
There was a time when Australian Peter Weir made strange and quirky
films like THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS, THE PLUMBER, and THE LAST WAVE.
But Weir lost that level of creativity at some point. His films
were more professional and perhaps more polished, but they were
closer to Hollywood fare. At most they had just a small whiff of
the strange his earlier films had. It has been a long time since
Weir made a film as enthralling philosophically as THE TRUMAN SHOW.
Weir looks at the media and what it is doing to both the viewer and
the person under media scrutiny. The film also takes a playful
look at the relationship between humanity and God.
Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey) is now thirty and through his
whole life he has been off-camera only in his most private moments.
In some unspecified number of years, in the future people all over
the world tune in to watch THE TRUMAN SHOW and track how his life
is progressing. As sort of a cross between AN AMERICAN FAMILY and
CANDID CAMERA, "The Truman Show" follows one character through his
every day and even his every move. Truman has no idea that he is
being watched. If he knew it would spoil the entire project. And
a phenomenal investment has been put into creating the huge domed
studio the size of a town with cameras everywhere to relay to the
world everything that happens to Truman.
The whole project is the brainchild of the godlike producer
Christof (Ed Harris). No effort has been spared to build the
unbelievable domed studio or to ingrain phobias into Truman so that
he is afraid to stray too far from his home. As part of the latter
effort we see a visit to a travel agent who has decorated her
office with marvelous anti-travel posters. Christof has programmed
nearly everything that has ever happened to Truman. Christof has
cast the important people in Truman's life including his supposed
parents and his wife Meryl (Laura Linney of TALES OF THE CITY).
Meryl's responsibilities include keeping Truman in line and
unsuspecting, delivering charming commercials for sponsors'
products placed into Truman's world, and above all to keep smiling.
But things are getting a little difficult for Meryl as Christof's
production staff gets a little sloppy: lights fall from a clear sky
and supposedly dead characters from Truman's past find their way
back onto the show set. Truman is starting to get suspicious that
there is something not right about his reality.
Does Jim Carrey do a good job of playing Truman Burbank? That is a
very difficult question to answer. At first brush it would seem
not. Carrey is his usual weird and does his trademarked brand of
clowning around. Is this the way someone raised on camera with
scripted experience would behave? Probably not, but it is unclear
how he would behave. He almost certainly would lean to some form
of weird. Whether this is one way he could be weird is hard to
tell. The constantly smiling Laura Linney is at first charming and
quickly becomes grating, but again these are unusual circumstances.
She would not behave like an actress because this is like almost no
acting job has ever been. She would have to be constantly
improvising and be onstage 16 to 24 hours a day, year in and year
out. Her role would have to be her primary life. Perhaps her
little Stepford wife is precisely what would result. Rounding out
the major characters is Ed Harris as the de facto god of Truman's
world. Harris takes his role in a quiet understated manner and
does a fine job.
I would have loved to have seen THE TRUMAN SHOW cold, having no
idea what the film was about. Unfortunately the ads give much too
much away. There is a slow build to where the viewer is told the
information in the trailer. Much of the mystery of Andrew Niccol's
script (as complex as his script for GATTACA) is lost. One of the
big holes, however, is that this is a much less believable story if
taken literally rather than as allegory. One must believe that
there are thousands of actors in Truman's world who are just
waiting months or years to be cued. There are probably parts of
Truman's town that he never visits, but the actors have to be
prepared if he does. Fantastic preparedness must be arranged for
contingencies that probably will never occur. In addition, the
number of cameras needed to produce THE TRUMAN SHOW must be
literally phenomenal. At one point Christof estimates that 5000
cameras are used to cover all the places that Truman might possibly
go. A little back of the envelope calculation will show that
figure has got to be orders of magnitude low without a fair risk of
losing Truman. The town as shown must be about nine square miles
and then Truman goes off into the woods in the course of the film.
The logistics of setting up and running this pseudo-town seem more
and more complex the more one thinks about them. But again, this
is more a religious allegory than a science fiction story to be
taken literally. Niccol has a lot of fun playing with the various
features of the artificial sky as a recurrent theme in the film,
but also giving the film a sort of medieval cosmology.
Music is by Burkhart (von) Dallwitz and seems to consist mostly of
easy listening and classical music on a sort of celestial, New Age
theme. The idea for THE TRUMAN SHOW is one that has been done in
science fiction several times previously. Then there are ideas
borrowed from other sources like the 60s TV show THE PRISONER. I
would rate THE TRUMAN SHOW a 9 on the 0 to 10 scale and a +3 on the
-4 to +4 scale. This is Weir's best film since THE LAST WAVE by a
wide margin. [-mrl]
===================================================================
5. A PERFECT MURDER (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: This is an updating and a remake of a
great stage thriller. The new version adds
some complexity to the story, but nothing that
could really be called an improvement. This
story did not need to be moved into the world
of international finance and the ultra-rich.
Director Andrew Davis has little grasp on what
made the original characters compelling. He
delivers a version that is dark, humorless, and
violent. Rating: 5 (0 to 10), low +1 (-4 to
+4)
I did not care much for Alfred Hitchcock's DIAL M FOR MURDER when I
saw it as a child. It seemed a set-bound and a rather dry
exercise. Seeing it as an adult was an entirely different
experience. It clearly is a stage play, but it has to be one of
the most brilliant stage thrillers ever written. The entire play
works like a well-oiled machine of surprising complexity. It was
*the classic* stage murder thriller. Compared to DIAL M FOR
MURDER, SLEUTH and DEATHTRAP are merely gimmicky. For DIAL M FOR
MURDER, the playwright really sat down and sweated all the details.
The one unrealistic touch is that main character Tony Wendes is
just too brilliant to be fully believed. He has a mind like a
computer, thinking out all possibilities and reconstructing his
plans instant by instant. The play must have been rewritten over
and over as Frederick Knott rethought the possibilities. The
remake A PERFECT MURDER has some of the plot, but it loses a lot in
the transition.
In A PERFECT MURDER, the Taylors are probably one of the top 100
prominent couples in the country. Steven Taylor (played by Michael
Douglas) is an international commodities dealer who makes deals in
the hundreds of millions of dollars every day. Emily Bradford
Taylor (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) is an heiress to one of the
richest families in America. She has a position working as
translator at the United Nations General Assembly and as an aide to
the Unite States ambassador. But Emily has other positions she
likes more, fooling around on the side with promising new artist
David Shaw (Viggo Mortensen). Shaw has a future as an artist, but
he also has a past, and that he would like to keep quiet.
Unfortunately Steven Taylor knows all about Shaw's past and has his
own plans for Shaw's future. The plans include killing Emily
Taylor. Saying any more about the new and somewhat cluttered plot
would really be telling too much.
Michael Douglas is something of a master at portraying quiet
smoldering anger on the screen. He is a good choice to show rage,
but he cannot bring to the role the kind of passionless thinking
machine quality that Ray Milland had in the original. Luckily this
script does not call for Steven Taylor to make the sort of quick
rethinking of problems that Tony Wendes did in the original film.
Paltrow really does have the sort of pristine good looks that are
reminiscent of Grace Kelly in the first film. There are even
scenes where she looks a bit like Grace Kelly. The problem is that
the film insists on showing her in bed with her lover. 1990s
audiences demand to see some flesh, I suppose. There clearly is
passion going on though nothing is seen that really counts as
nudity. But what we do see of the sex is enough that she no longer
appears to the viewer to be an innocent. And that loses her the
audience's sympathy. We are left with several cold and
unsympathetic characters wandering around on the dark sets of this
film. I should mention that Dariusz Wolski shot the film and if
that name is unfamiliar, he also filmed THE CROW and DARK CITY.
That should tell you that he likes under-lit sets to create a cold
and dark feel. And this film certainly has that. Viggo Mortensen
plays the third leg of the romantic triangle. He does not have
much screen presence, but he does have a very realistic look.
Rounding out the cast, but appallingly under-used, is David Suchet
as Detective Mohamed Karaman. I suspect he had a bigger role in
the original script. It is his character in the original play who
does the real detective work. But rumors say that the end of the
film was re-shot and presumably his role was cut down in size.
Perhaps test audiences thought him solving the crime was a little
too close to what he does in his TV persona as Hercule Poirot. But
for whatever the reason Suchet had only a small part, and it was a
serious waste to have such a good character actor in so tiny a
role.
If you have seen the original film, there will still be plot twists
to keep you guessing, but you will also get an appreciation of how
good material can sour in the wrong hands. It takes a remake like
A PERFECT MURDER to show the viewer how much has changed in the
1990s conventions of films and to appreciate the genius of an
Alfred Hitchcock. This cold and dark remake gets a 5 on the 0 to
10 scale and a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
Television is the first truly democratic culture--
the first culture available to everybosy and entirely
governed by what the people want. The most terrifying
thing is what the people want.