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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 1/21/00 -- Vol. 18, No. 30
Chair/Librarian: Mark Leeper, 732-817-5619, mleeper@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper, 732-332-6218, eleeper@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist: Rob Mitchell, robmitchell@lucent.com
HO Chair Emeritus: John Jetzt, jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian Emeritus: Nick Sauer, njs@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
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 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. Under the Nazis, under the Soviets, perhaps even in our system
the problems that the individual faced are in large part because
the individual is not very powerful. We tend to think that when
technology has empowered the individual, that things will be a lot
better. In fact empowering individuals may be just what we do not
want.
Back when I was a young kid I would play around with aluminum foil.
I would take a piece of it and put it over a coin like a quarter.
I would rub the coin through the foil and it would take the
impression off the coin. You could get a fairly good reproduction.
I knew that plates to counterfeit currency were valuable. I
pictured myself using this impression and counterfeiting quarters.
There would be this whole furor about counterfeit coins in our area
and when I got caught--I expected I would get caught; the concept
of getting away with it never occurred to me--it would be
discovered that the counterfeiter is just a kid who was using
aluminum foil to reproduce the image. But then I came back to
reality. I was smart enough to realize that that sort of thing
just did not really happen. Young kids with almost no resources
cannot subvert something big like the US Treasury. They were just
not powerful enough.
Those were days that power was hard-earned. One of the amazing
things of the computer age is the way it empowers people. You hear
of massive computer break-ins at major corporations. There is a
big investigation and it is traced down. And who is the culprit?
It is a high school kid who was fooling around with his computer in
his spare time.
Kids have a sort of power envy. Society does not let them drink or
drive. Maybe their parents tell them when they have to be in at
night at a certain time. They have to go to bed at a certain time.
Young people want to feel they have some power. It must feel
marvelous to break into some big corporation's most private
information. Or maybe some government agency's private national
security data. Who has the last laugh then?
It may be older children, but that probably is what is behind
people whose hobbies are a thing like creating and releasing
computer viruses. The thing is that we are headed toward a period
of time when the individual is going to have more and more power.
That already is a problem for the National Security Agency. During
World War II the bad guys had most of the nifty weapons but the
good guys had the nifty cryptographers. And that was probably more
important. The Germans encrypted their most private communication
with a code machine called "Enigma." It was a very good code, but
not good enough to stand up to British mathematicians like Alan
Turing. The Americans did pretty well with Japanese codes also.
For about half a century the good guys have been able to break the
bad guys' codes, but it took the resources that only the government
had to rule the roost. Those days are over, however. Today
consumer electronics give pretty much anyone who wants it data
security that is pretty much cast iron. The NSA with all its
experts are outclassed by codes and protocols invented by a couple
of graduate students from Stanford. And all the resources of the
US Government will not overcome that.
Just in the news recently was the problem that DVD manufacturers
had. DVDs have a copy-guard mechanism CSS (Content Scrambling
System) so that you absolutely cannot pirate films from a DVD. It
had an unfortunate side effect. It meant you also could not play
the DVDs on a PC. The film industry was ready to move into DVD
distribution because it trusted the security of CSS encryption.
Well, you guessed it. Back in November the protection system was
cracked. I believe it was a side effect of work that had nothing
to do with pirating movies.
We reach the irony that progress is stopped because of technology.
DVD technology should give the film industry more power, but
effectively they do not have it, because others are empowered to
get in their way. In a society if you give one person the power of
Superman, maybe he can accomplish something. Now you may think
what he accomplishes is good or bad. But if you give everybody the
power of Superman and everybody will just get in each others way.
At least it is something to think about. [-mrl]
===================================================================
2. MANSFIELD PARK (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: A liberated young writer is brought to
her uncle's mansion to be little more than a
servant. As she grows she is involved in
romantic adventures as she seeks happiness and
the right husband for her. Patricia Rozema
adapted and directed the novel by Jane Austen
mixing in details from Austen's own life and
adding themes that Austen somehow missed. This
is an entertaining but decidedly fluffy tale of
romance. Rating: 6 (0 to 10), +1 (-4 to +4)
Let me start by identifying my attitudes on Jane Austen so the
reader knows if to continue or not. I consider these stories an
excellent view into the minds of a certain class of woman in the
early 19th century. Austen novels are at the high-end of what we
have come to call the romance novel. Jane Austen heroines, if one
may call them heroines, seem to aspire mostly only to achieve
comfort. This they accomplish via the institution of marriage.
The choice of whom they will marry is usually obvious to every
reader, if not to the heroine herself, from the early pages of the
novel. Her heroines are people with no ambition to be known fifty
years after their death or indeed fifty miles from home during
their lives. Usually the reader has more interest and certainly
better knowledge of the events of their times than they appear to
have themselves. They are living during the Napoleaonic Wars, a
fascinating period, but to all appearances are ignorant of the
fact. This does not say that great literature cannot be written
about minor and narrowly absorbed people, but the greatness of some
other authors is more readily apparent.
Fanny Price in the new MANSFIELD PARK is a little more aware of the
world than most Austen heroines, though not by the intention of
Jane Austen herself. Patricia Rozema who adapted the navel for the
screen and then directed it has revised and corrected Austen for
current audiences. To spice up Fanny's personality she now is a
budding writer. The amusing melodramatic stories that Fanny writes
are stories that really did exist. They are stories that Jane
Austen herself wrote as a young teen. Fanny's knowledge of the
world, her social conscience, and most of the anti-slavery subplot
is all Rozema's revision. There is some but very little mention of
slavery in the Austen novel, though by a coincidence that perhaps
Austen herself was not aware of, Mansfield Park was named after
Lord Mansfield who in 1772 ruled that any slave brought to England
was legally free. The film's implications of open sex and even
lesbianism are pulled from Rozema's fertile imagination. Still it
is hard to be too harsh on a film with this much historic charm.
It may not be what Austen intended, but it is still enjoyable.
Fanny Price (Frances O'Connor) was taken from her poor parents in
Portsmouth at age ten and brought to Mansfield Park to be raised by
the Bertram family who live in a huge mansion called Mansfield
Park. The masters of Mansfield Park are her aunt and uncle and she
is to have a status somewhere between a family member and a
servant. She will get to know the Bertram children but everyone
will be constantly aware that she is not their equal. She is
treated at best insensitively by the family except for young Edmund
Bertram who from the very start shows her compassion.
As the years pass Fanny is accepted at arm's length by the four
Bertram children Tom, Edmund, Maria, and Julia. Into their lives
come brother and sister Henry and Mary Crawford (Alessandro Nivola,
Embeth Davidtz), neighbors. Henry and Mary are close and share a
tendency to flirt, an attraction to the opposite sex, a sense of
style, an interest in the Bertrams, and both are attracted to
women. Fanny who secretly loves Edmund sees him attracted to Mary
Crawford and Maria and Julia attracted to Henry. But Henry is more
interested in Fanny. This is Jane Austen so we know from the start
that things will sort themselves out and that the heroine will get
the right man and in doing so get to live on the big estate. "It
could have ended differently, I suppose, but it didn't," Fanny
muses at the end of the film. But then she does not know Jane
Austen as well as we do.
Frances O'Connor's Fanny Price is perky and free-spirited, but just
a little too attractive for the Jane Eyre-like heroine. Sir Thomas
Bertram is played by none other than Harold Pinter. Alessandro
Nivola does bring enough charm to the role of Henry that the
audience is almost rooting for him. Michael Coulter's camera
captures a usually bright and sunny view of early 19th century
England created by production designer Christopher Hobbs and art
director Andrew Munro. The historical detail is questionable with
details like lipstick and eye makeup on a ten-year-old child, but
it is nice to look at.
This is perhaps not Jane Austen's MANSFIELD PARK, but Jane Austen
would have probably recognized most of it and would have been
amused by the rest. I rate it a 6 on the 0 to 10 scale and a +1 on
the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
===================================================================
3. ANGELICA'S GROTTO by Russell Hoban (Bloomsbury, ISBN 0-747-
54611-8, 1999, 271pp, L9.99) (a book review by Evelyn C. Leeper):
Russell Hoban has written several science fiction and fantasy works
(RIDDLEY WALKER and FREMDER among others), but this, like his
previous book (MR RINYO-CLACTON'S OFFER) is a return to a non-
fantastic setting. In fact, it bears some similarity to Hoban
earlier TURTLE DIARY--both involve a man and a woman who need each
other in dissimilar ways, and who come together to satisfy these
needs without becoming romantically involved. Both also show
Hoban's love of London in his detailed descriptions, and both have
other, smaller touches that seem to run as threads through Hoban's
work: beach stones, statues, and various off-beat allusions to
homosexuality.
The protagonist, Harold Klein, has many features in common with
Hoban--age, background, profession, etc. Nevertheless, it would
probably be a mistake to read this as even semi-autobiographical.
At the beginning of the book, Klein has lost his ability to keep
his inner voice inside himself. So, for example, when he is
talking to a woman and thinks, "What a nice pair of breasts," he
actually says it aloud. This, as one might expect, causes him
problems. (In some way, this malady is the reverse--or perhaps the
extension--of the bicameral mind that Julian Jaynes discussed.
Jaynes theorized that the inner voice was at one time an actual
voice that the individual heard and received as external. Whether
this is an intentional reference or not, I have no idea.)
Because of his problems, Klein goes web surfing and discovers a
porn site named "Angelica's Grotto." He is fascinated by it, and
its owner is fascinated, or at least interested, by him and
contacts him for a study she is doing. Thus begins Klein's odyssey
through an alien world.
Hoban's works concentrate on the connections between people, on
their need for each other, and on the unusual forms this need can
take, and this book is no exception. ANGELICA'S GROTTO is a
disturbing book in some ways (and may prove too graphic for some
readers), but it is ultimately a very human book. [-ecl]
Mark Leeper
HO 1K-644 732-817-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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