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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 11/06/98 -- Vol. 17, No. 19
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. URL of the week: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824/tiff.htm.
Evelyn Leeper's Toronto International Film Festival report. [-ecl]
===================================================================
2. This notice is brought to you by DAM--Mothers Against Dyslexia.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
3. In my irritation and rage over the lousy service we get from our
HMO and some of our other medical coverage. I have turned like a
mad dog on someone whom in my more rational moments I am sure must
be is really innocent. But I am going to vent my wrath on this
person anyway. For at least a few minutes I want this person to
know I blame him for the health care crisis. That person, of
course, is me.
Okay, me, stand up and take your licks. Now you know that for
something like twenty years you have gone to the same dentist. Is
this not true?
Well, no. Not exactly. I have had two different dentists.
But they have shared a practice and operated out of the same
office, have they not?
Yes, I think that would be accurate to say.
And how would you describe your relationship with these two
dentists? Has it been cordial?
Oh, I would say it has been more dental.
(Tittering from the audience)
And have the dentists spoken to you in a friendly way when you have
visited?
Yes I would say so.
Did the older of the two dentists describe for you his sports car?
Yes, on multiple occasions.
Did he not tell you about how he was rebuilding said sports car?
Yes, he mentioned that.
And did he not mention his boat?
Yes he did.
So you would conclude from this that your dentist was reasonably
well off financially.
Yes, that would be fair to say.
Mr. Leeper, do you not bring your lunch to work in order save
money? Do you not keep a supply of hot sauces in your desk drawer
expressly for the purpose of livening up such meals?
Yes. Yes. I admit it. I thought nobody knew. I am guilty. Yes.
But I am glad I do it. Guilty. I am guilty.
Uh, Mr. Leeper. Mr. Leeper. That is not the thrust of this line
questioning. I am unaware of any law against keeping hot sauce in
your desk. If the truth be known I do it myself.
You do? Someone as wise and intelligent as you obviously are?
Yes. It is all right, Mr. Leeper. Even I have hot sauces in my
desk drawer. But let us return to our line of questioning. Mr.
Leeper, you bring your lunch to work to save money. Do you
consider yourself to be well off financially?
Well, I am a software engineer for a major technology company.
As bad as that?
Every bit.
Mr. Leeper, what would you say has happened to your dentist bills
over the last 20 years? Have they increased or decreased?
I would say they have increased substantially.
And do you generally have serious dental problems?
I have had perhaps one or two cavities over the previous twenty
years.
Recent ones?
No, about ten or twelve years ago.
Mr. Leeper, about what does a dental visit cost these days?
I would say roughly $100.
And that would include what?
A cleaning and checkup.
How long does this take?
About 40 minutes.
About 40 minutes of the dentist's time?
Well no, about 35 minutes are the cleaning. The dentist just pops
in at the end to take a quick look.
And this costs $100?
"Yes."
Does this not seem excessive?
Well, there are other costs for the dentist to cover.
Such as?
Well, I am sure there is rent and malpractice insurance. And the
equipment does not come cheaply.
That's right, it doesn't. Would you say a boat and a sports car
come cheaply?
No, probably not.
Would you say that your dentist lives a good deal more comfortably
than you do?
That would be fair to say.
And does your dentist bring his lunch and have hot sauces in his
desk?
I would assume not. I don't know, but I doubt it.
Has it ever occurred to you to protest costs like $100 for a quick
checkup and cleaning?
No.
And why not?
Well, what good will it do?
Mr. Leeper, may I submit to you that because your employer was
footing the bill you sat idly by and watched your medical bills
increase and give you very poor price performance simply because it
was not you who was actually paying the bill?
There may be some truth to that.
And did you not think that this would come back to haunt you
someday?
Well I really thought it was a matter between the doctor and the
employer.
You thought your employer would put up with that situation
indefinitely? That the cost of your dental care wasn't going to
come back to bite you?
I thought it was just one of those expenses of doing business. I
thought the company would absorb it. I stood by while my company
paid prices I would never accept if they were coming out of my own
wallet. There was no check on these prices. I allowed myself to
be used by overcharging doctors and dentists. Okay, I was a chump.
You certainly were. There is enough blame to go around, of course.
You have the greedy dentists and doctors who drove the prices up.
And you have the corporations who found inexpensive alternatives at
the expense of their employees. I am not saying that you get the
whole blame. But there is a nice big chunk of it with your name on
it.
Guilty. Guilty. Uh, can I say that now?
Certainly, Mr. Leeper. Please be my guest. [-mrl]
===================================================================
4. VAMPIRES (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: There is an intriguing story about the
relation between vampires and the Catholic
Church in VAMPIRES, but it is pushed to the
background so that John Carpenter can try to
outdo other vampire films for gore and
violence. Even a James Woods performance (here
a little substandard anyway) cannot save this
film from itself. Rating: 4 (0 to 10), 0 (-4
to +4)
VAMPIRES starts out almost in the style of a spaghetti Western with
an attack on a small homestead in New Mexico. The house has a nest
of vampires and Jack Crow (James Woods) is leading a team of
vampire hunters in to clean them out. While the initial imagery is
a little over-dramatic, it gives way to what is a fairly decent
action sequence. That is enough action to last us a while and we
could, director John Carpenter would let us, get to a story line.
But it is not very long and there is not much plot until the next
big action scene. Then there is only a bit more of plot before the
next action scene after that. The plot is kept to a minimum and
the interesting ideas in the plot really get the short end. And
that is something of a pity because the film, based on the book
VAMPIRE$ by John Steakley, gives us a myth for the origins of
vampires and explains why vampires are so intertwined with
religious imagery. This could be an interesting departure from the
standard vampire film, but Carpenter decides to tell us about it
rather than to show it. What Carpenter saves his serious screen
time for a sequence of spectacular fights between hunters and
vampires. There is a lot of fighting and lots of gore. Anything
intriguing is kept to a minimum to so it does not get in the way of
pleasing the action film fans. This has not always been
Carpenter's style. His 1981 version of THE THING has action but
also challenges the viewer to do a little thinking about the film's
central science fictional question.
Jack Crow heads a vampire SWAT team, cleaning up nests of vampires
with high-tech spears and crossbows. In the early part of the film
his team is wiped out by a particularly mean vampire Valek (Thomas
Ian Griffith) who has been tipped off to who Crow is. Now Crow
team is gone and he is down to himself and his sidekick Tony
Montoya (Daniel Baldwin). To make matters worse, he does not know
the people on his own side, Tony and his backers, he can trust.
Meanwhile Jack is sure the vampires are looking for something that
must be hidden somewhere here in New Mexico.
If this is sounding like a very tired police corruption plot with a
few obvious substitutions, that's exactly what it is. The same
story looks just as well with two partner cops looking for a gang
of hood who are themselves looking for a packet of heroin. But
Carpenter goes against a familiar principle of film: show people,
don't tell them. Just about everything in the plot other than the
fights we are told about in the dialog and not shown. Fundamental
questions in the plot like where does Crow get his funding, why are
the vampires in New Mexico--what do they want and why do they want
it, what is the connection of the vampires and the Catholic Church,
how did Crow come to be a vampire hunter and why devote his life to
it? The answers to any of these questions could have been
dramatized, but instead are revealed through dialog.
Now if all this was not bad enough, Carpenter misuses the James
Wood persona. Woods plays a particular sort of cool lowlife very
well. But Carpenter leads off the film by having Woods do some
Sergio-Leone-style mythic posturing. While his crew prepares for
an attack he stands staring fixedly through shades at the house
that will be his target. Woods does not work as a larger than life
mythic hero. That is not his style and it just does not work very
well. There are some simple things that Carpenter should be
looking for as director that he misses. In one scene we are
looking at a motel room with dead people on the floor. One female
corpse is on the floor in front of a chair so that there is about
an inch of daylight between her and the chair. As the actress
breathes the gap widening and narrowing makes it obvious her arm is
moving up and down. One also wonders how the existence of vampires
is kept secret. These vampires do not maintain a low profile.
There are arguably logical flaws in the film. There is some
question in my mind whether Carpenter has a consistent policy on
what effect bullets have on vampires. It would take some
rationalization to explain why in some scenes sunlight has a
dramatic effect on vampires, yet in a scene toward the end a
vampire can walk under a burned roof that lets him be swept by
beams of sunlight.
I suspect that the book on which this film was based was better
thought out. While I might recommend this film to an action
audience I would say that what I look for in a vampire film
VAMPIRES rates a 4 on the 0 to 10 scale and a 0 on the -4 to +4
scale. Perhaps I will read the book. [-mrl]
===================================================================
5. KOMARR by Lois McMaster Bujold (1998, Baen Books, HC, SFBC
edition, 311 pp., ISBN 0-671-87877-8) (a book review by Joe
Karpierz):
I like Miles Vorkosigan--really, I do. I'm just tired of him.
Okay, that's not fair, I suppose. I'm tired of Bujold writing only
about Miles. Yes, I know she's written a fantasy novel. One.
Other. Novel. All the rest have been set in the Vorkosigan
universe. I'm beginning to think that Bujold is completely
incapable of writing anything else.
Oh. Komarr. That's what this is about, isn't it? Hmm. Okay.
Komarr is a nice little story. The dust jacket tells us it's about
Miles and another Imperial Auditor investigating the destruction of
a solar mirror vital to the terraforming of Komarr. Of course,
there is history between Komarr and the Vorkosigans, going back to
the Komarr revolt, Aral Vorkosigan (Miles' father), and all that
kind of political rot and intrigue. The story centers around the
investigation and eventual resolution of the problem, which leads
to the discovery of a bunch of disgruntled scientists and their
desire to close off wormhole access between Barrayar and Komarr.
Pardon me, but, yawn.
No, the real story here is "Miles is getting a real live, honest to
goodness girlfriend." It's just disguised as the other story.
Don't get me wrong--Miles could use a good woman in his life. And
one that will stick around, instead of taking off on him. And this
one might. So this part is good.
So, what's my beef with the novel? There's nothing to recommend
it, really. It's a standard, less than exciting Miles adventure
with a sidebar that is intended to set up even more books with the
heading "A Miles Vorkosigan Adventure." Miles isn't very witty.
Oh, we see him as a little vulnerable, nervous fellow as it's
obvious that he's falling for Kat, but he's not as witty as he
usually is. I was disappointed.
But that shouldn't let Miles/Bujold fans from reading the book.
It's not bad--it's just not good, either. [-jak]
===================================================================
6. ARROWDREAMS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE CANADAS edited by Mark
Shainblum and John Dupuis (Nuage Editions, ISBN 0-921-833-51-2,
1997, 191pp, C$19.95) (a book review by Evelyn C. Leeper):
This is a book for a fairly small audience, but one reason I'm
reviewing it is because even that audience might not hear about it.
(When I looked for it in the Toronto branch of Chapters, a Canadian
superstore, no one there could find it. I eventually found it in
short story collections, having checked the "Canadian Interest,"
"Canadian Fiction, and science fiction sections.)
It is, as the subtitle suggests, an anthology of alternate history
stories whose focus is on Canada: Canadian history, Canadian
personalities, Canadian sensibilities. I am (I hasten to point
out) not Canadian, so several of them simply went over my head.
Anthologies usually start out with their strongest story, so I can
only conclude that hockey is vastly more important in Canada than
any sport is in the United States, because Edo van Belkom's
"Hockey's Night in Canada" did nothing for me. Nancy Kilpatrick's
"Gross Island--The Movie" is not even what I would call alternate
history--a movie company is filming a historical drama about an
epidemic and being very inaccurate about it. There is no
historical speculation going on here. (Had this appeared as a
straight story somewhere else I would say it was an interesting
look at the film industry, so it's not badly written, just not
alternate history.)
"Health in Us" by Paula Johanson is also about an epidemic, but it
*is* alternate history and at least competently done, if a bit
short. Paul Scott's "On the Edge" is a post-apocalyptic story with
the "apocalypse" being the secession of Quebec in 1995. It's
barely alternate history, the more so because a secession tomorrow
could result in much the same story.
Michael Skeet's "Near Enough to Home" is set in a different United
States Civil War, the result of us having lost Louisiana to the
British and making Canada much more a force to be reckoned with.
The main game here seems to be "spot the stars," but it's not too
bad.
Derryl Murphy's "Cold Ground" has Louis Riel escaping execution
through black magic. If I actually knew who Louis Riel was, it
might have meant more.
"Misfire" by Shane Simmons has Richthofen surviving World War I and
leading Germany to greater air power than in our timeline, and this
survival is attributed to a jammed gun on an airplane flown by a
Canadian. This is a tenuous connection to Canada at best, and the
fact is that we have no idea who shot down Richthofen in our
timeline anyway. In spite of this, the speculation on the effect
of Richthofen's survival makes this worth reading.
My prediction is that Jews will enjoy "The Last of the Maccabees"
by Allan Weiss and Gentiles won't. It seems in many ways a sort of
in-joke which reminded me of the tribe in "Joe Versus the Volcano."
Not that "The Last of the Maccabees" is a humorous story, but
having "Indians" wearing tzitzit and payes, and speaking Hebrew is
by its very nature somewhat risible. The fact that their
discoverers are from the Roman Commonwealth, and the French seem to
be Buddhists just adds to the mix, and there's even more I won't
tell you. (Weiss does slip at least once and have the Indians
speak Yiddish instead of Hebrew.) I enjoyed this more than most of
the other stories, but then it really is more an "alternate
Judaism" story than an "alternate Canada" one.
"The Coming of the Jet" by Eric Choi assumes Canadian supremacy in
the aerospace industry. I suppose techno-types will appreciate it,
but it was only slightly above the hockey story for me. Dave
Duncan's "For Want of a Nail" assumes a French victory on the
Plains of Abraham an is not related to Robert Sobel's novel of the
same name (which dealt with a British victory at Burgoyne).
Glenn Grant's "Thermometers Melting" takes the familiar approach of
taking well-known people and looking at them in an alternate
timeline. In this case Grant uses Hemingway and Trotsky, and adds
an additional bonus at the end. It's a bit hard to follow at
times, since it is supposedly excerpts from a longer work, but one
of the better stories nonetheless.
And finally is "The Case of the Serial 'De Quebec a la Lune' by
Veritatus" by Laurent McAllister (pen name for Yves Meynard and
Jean-Louis Trudel). I *think* it is a (fake) academic article on a
(non-existent) serial patterned after Jules Verne's "From the Earth
to the Moon" but written by a Canadian and possibly set in its own
past. Are you sufficiently confused? If not, read the story and
you will be. Some people like this sort of thing, which is why
Connie Willis won a Hugo for "The Soul Selects Her Own Society
...," but this is so dry as to rive away all but the most confirmed
academic.
Interestingly, though the final story is about a (fictional)
French-language story, none of the stories in this Canadian
anthology appear to have been written in French. (At any rate, I
saw no translator credits.) This in itself seems to imply an
alternate Canada, one in which there is no French-language science
fiction. (I note that the one Quebec secession story implies a
negative result.)
If you are Canadian and enjoy alternate histories, you probably
want to seek out this book. For those of us south of the border
(or over the seas, or for that matter west of the border in
Alaska), this is probably not going to appeal to you unless you are
a student of Canadian history or culture. [-ecl]
===================================================================
7. The 1998 Toronto International Film Festival (film reviews and
commentary by Mark R. Leeper) (part 5 of 8)
WELCOME BACK MR. MCDONALD (Japan with subtitles)
CAPSULE: Very funny TV-like situation comedy of people trying to
put on a live radio play and having to change the plot many times
mid-broadcast. The territory it covers is very, very much like the
American cable TV show "Remember WENN." Somehow the plot seems a
little thin for a feature film, but still a lot of fun. Rating: 6
(0 to 10), 1 (-4 to +4)
- Written and directed by Koki Mitani.
- Staff of radio station is putting on an amateur play that won
a contest. Turns out that this was really the only entrant in
the contest.
- The play is not screened by all parties involved and the
initial changes are to correct the redundancy of "lift up." A
prima donna actor insists on a name change. This is the first
spark of a firestorm of plot changes.
- Story within story gets more and more contrived and absurd.
- Story could have been done on American Movie Channel's
"Remember WENN." In fact something very similar probably was
done.
- Some of the contrivances of getting around restrictions on the
script are fairly humorous.
- Fairly believable set of script changes. Director said that
all had happened at one time or another to him when working at
a station. A good reason why radio drama is taped.
Koki Mitani was around to answer questions after the film and
proved to be fairly funny, even with a language barrier. He
claimed that 80% of the jokes, both Americans and Japanese laughed
at. 10% just Japanese laughed at. 10% just Americans laughed at.
From there is was over to the Uptown for the midnight show.
[to be continued] [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com