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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 11/17/00 -- Vol. 19, No. 20
Chair/Librarian: Mark Leeper, 732-817-5619, mleeper@avaya.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper, 732-332-6218, eleeper@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist: Rob Mitchell, robmitchell@avaya.com
HO Chair Emeritus: John Jetzt, jetzt@avaya.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. Evelyn Leeper's Chicon 2000 (Worldcon) convention report is
available at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper/chicon2k.htm.
[-ecl]
===================================================================
2. As a mathematician there is a phrase we use in common language
that always gives me a bit of a twinge of discomfort. That phrase
is "everything else being equal." The problem is that it seems to
me to be ridiculous. "Everything else" encompasses so much that
the odds are nil that it could be "equal" or even "too close to
call." At least I would think that the odds are nil. Or at least
up to this election year I would have thought so. What is
happening this year seems like the stuff of a bad 1950s science
fiction magazine story. We are suffering a plague of ambivalence
or of even-handedness. So many election races are so evenly split
that more than a week later they are too close to call. There is
no way you could force that to happen. I am told that even if each
voter were just flipping a coin you would not expect the results to
be this close. How can you make two candidates have so even in
appeal, even if you wanted to? And it is happening all over. I
would not believe this happening in a story, yet it seems to be
true for real. I am both incredulous and fascinated.
Last week I made something of a mistake by discussing the
situation, one that just about everybody in the county has strong
opinions about. Well it looks like my discussion of Cincinnati
Chili will wait another week and let us take a look at the comments
being sent to me about last week's editorial. [Oh, as long as
other people are expressing opinions, I will also. I think fairly
Gore won, but Bush will probably get the office just because of the
imprecision of the vote process.]
The irrepressible Lax Madapati says:
This country's election system has so many serious flaws. If
you look at the voting patterns across the country today
regardless of states, it is Gore that has 0.2 million votes
more than his nearest rival with a larger percentage of votes
going to him overall. It is wrong to keep recounting FL so
many times and telecasting by the minute results. Is FL more
important that other states to determine the president or does
FL have more electoral discrepancies than other states? No
wonder most non-Americans are confounded by the recent
recounts and controversy over the presidential elections.
Besides, incorrect projections by the likes of Wall Street and
CNN-Time tend to throw off voting patterns, especially among
the undecided voters. Even telecasting the voting results
state by state on several network TV channels is wrong. Just
finish up the whole process, do a count, verify, certify and
declare. That's it. Instead the TV people reduce the
electoral process into some kind of a mass entertainment
circus show. Even the voting turnout is dismal and pathetic
for a country with such a high literacy rate and with so many
educated people. This time, it was around 100 million, just
half of the eligible voters. Forget about the non-eligible
voters like me (who still are to an extent influenced by the
outcome of the elections in terms of taxes, work rules, etc.),
but what about the rest of the 100 million?
Your comments recently about how it not bad for low electoral
turnout because it may tend to skew the results if people
without the ability to make intelligent choices participate
are not well taken. It can be perceived as an elitistic point
of view. No one has a right to decide who can and who can't
vote. I will point out I was not deciding who could and could
not vote, I was saying I would respect people's decision, even
if it was to abstain, without trying to change their minds. I
think the people who try to coerce them to vote are at least
being patronizing and were the ones deciding who must and must
not vote. --mrl] I don't know of a single democracy around
the world that puts forth a criterion for voting apart from
minimum age. It is a right every person in the country has
and must exercise even if it is not an intelligent choice. We
have to live with leaders who are chosen by the majority of
the country regardless of the voters' sex, race, education and
intellect levels.
I also believe the entire process and sequence of events that
lead to winning a presidential nomination somehow prevents
visionary leaders from getting there. Just look at the poor
percentage of good leaders this country has thrown up in the
past two centuries. When I joked about how sorry the choices
were this time (Gore vs Bush) for the public, you made
comments about how one must look at issues and their
positions, etc., and then decide. My question is, how much of
the agenda of these two will actually come into effect? If
the Congress keeps vetoing everything these people propose,
especially with different parties at the Senate and Congress,
I say it is not very likely that most of the agenda gets
through passing bills. Besides, neither of them had a clear
agenda anyway to start with and this time, Bush takes the
prize for being the more vague of the two. In the end, the
elections in this country are nothing but an excuse to claim
democracy.
Vested interests fund and engender mediocre or sub par
"leaders" who then have to resort to dubious victories over
shaky platforms that may or may not translate to actions and
benefits for the people who actually take trouble to analyze
and cast votes. This is the sad truth my friend. Of course,
there can always be the argument, "oh, this is better than
being ruled by Milosevich or Pinochet or General Speight" or "
at least we have a real democracy where people have a choice"
but unfortunately my standards are much higher than what is
going on in the most powerful country in the world that most
people look up to. After all, we ARE the melting pot of the
world.
Steve Humphrey says:
> The sad and scary thing is that is that not every election
> in this country meets our own high standards.
I think almost all elections in this country--especially the
presidential election--DO meet our own high standards. Are
there mistakes, perhaps even local cheating? Almost
certainly--I have no proof, but I concede it probably happens.
I say this because I accept that high standards do not mean
perfection. I believe (but again I must confess to not having
solid proof) that a very large fraction of the voting is
honest and mistake-free. I would very much like voting
districts to continue to pursue perfection, but perfection
will never be met. High standards mean we strive to achieve
honest & mistake-free elections; high standards also mean
there are no government barriers to honesty. We meet these
high standards.
A very close election magnifies the tiny fraction of mistakes
and dishonesty. Fine, use that magnifying glass to fix
problems, but DON'T put our elections in the same basket with
Russia's or Haiti's or Yugoslavia's (oops, the latter seems to
have clean up its act.)
> Personally I would hope that what comes out of this
> incident is the abolition of the Electoral College. It
> was established so that there would be some control by the
> ruling class over the will of the people.
No, it was established as a compromise between the statists
and the populists. As a compromise, it's pretty darned good.
> Another reason that the Electoral College is an
> embarrassment is that it does just the opposite of what
> people are claiming it does. I have heard several people
> claim that the election situation demonstrated that every
> vote counts in a democracy. That's the bunk. Really what
> it shows the world is that with states having
> winner-take-all systems with the electoral college, some
> people's votes can be worth a lot more than other people's
> votes.
Yes, by design. The electoral college gives a combination of
equal voice to each state plus equal voice to each person.
Well, of course by combining these voices they are no longer
equal. Rather, the will of the populous is tempered by the
will of the separate states & vice versa.
Perhaps you wish the United States became the United State . .
. fine, then work to change the whole constitution, not just
the provision for the electoral college. But as long as this
country is designed to preserve States' Rights, I want the
Electoral College kept in place. (And, yes, I would like to
preserve States' Rights.)
> Regardless of who wins, the final National Election of
> the 20th Century will have to be one of the most
> interesting of the century and may well drag on with
> implications that will shadow the next four years. As a
> Democrat, I cannot help but wonder. After eight years of
> the Republican Machine taking every innuendo about the
> Presidency and turning it into a national headline, I
> just wonder what that machine would have made of this
> incident had the tables been reversed. I mean, Bush was
> declared victor in a state where there were so many voting
> irregularities almost all of which by an odd coincidence
> seemed to help Bush and in which Bush's brother holds the
> highest political office. Had the table been reversed we
> would have heard about it from the Republicans for years
> to come.
Sour grapes, Mark? Please, raise yourself above such
pettiness. The Republicans certainly conducted themselves as
yapping dogs while Clinton was in office. But oral sex while
at work? I would have been fired had I obtained a blow job
while at the office, no questions asked. Lying about it?
Shows lack of character.
"A Republican Machine"? Sure. But please don't suggest, by
omission, that there is no Democrat Machine.
"So many voting irregularities"? Back to my initial
statements, I suggest that "so many" == "a small fraction".
You are a scientist (close enough), please respect the truth
by not stooping to cheap exaggeration.
"Had the tables been reversed we would have heard about it ...
for years to come"? Look, we're going to hear about this for
years to come no matter who wins, and no matter which way the
tables are turned. Someone is going to lose an extremely
close race; therefore, someone else is going to bitch about it
for years, nay decades.
Gerald S. Williams says:
> Personally I would hope that what comes out of this
> incident is the abolition of the Electoral College. It
> was established so that there would be some control by the
> ruling class over the will of the people.
Certainly it is time to eliminate the Electoral College, or at
least establish tighter controls over what they can do.
People vote for the candidate on the ballot, not for the
electoral college. Currently, the only way the electoral
college members can exert their influence is by going against
the will of the voters they are supposed to be representing.
The sad thing is that this has happened in recent history. I
believe in 1980 one of the votes for Ronald Reagan was
switched to a third-party (Anderson?).
The electoral college was not formed solely so that the elite
could exert their influence, however. This nation was founded
upon the premise of peaceful transitions of power. The
electoral college helps to ensure that by guaranteeing that a
single election results in the selection of a new president.
In the past, elections took much longer and there may have
been judgment calls to make. For example, one of the
candidates could have died in the period between the voting
and the tabulation of the votes. This should be far less
likely now, but with the way things are going...
> Further if we had a popular vote the vagaries of
> Florida's polls would be much less likely to be important.
It is one thing to say that the electoral college is outdated.
However, it is an entirely different thing to say that the
entire system of electoral votes is flawed. When these votes
were set up, electoral votes were not in direct proportion to
population. They were tilted slightly so that the larger
states could not completely overwhelm an election. This is a
good thing, I think.
As it stands, it is almost possible to win an election by
focusing entirely on the big cities. You probably noticed
that Bush won the vast majority of the states despite having a
slightly lower minority of the overall votes than Gore does.
If you look close enough, you'll see that Gore got almost all
of his wins from highly urban areas. When the states got
together to form this nation, they decided that this should
not be sufficient to win an election. Why should it be now?
One could even argue that, since states are much larger now,
it is time to extend this system down into the individual
states. Pennsylvania's electoral votes went to Gore, yet it
was only because Philadelphia dominates the population. If
the same weighting was applied to the voting districts as is
used in the national electoral college, the votes would have
gone to Bush.
Ultimately, it is up to each state to determine how their
electoral votes are distributed. There are two states that
split them according to their voting districts, I believe.
These states could have split them according to the popular
vote instead.
If you think that the vote should be distributed along the
popular vote, petition the New Jersey legislature to change
the way it allots its electoral votes. I may send such a
recommendation to my state representatives as well. But the
system of electoral votes is part of the checks and balances
that went into the formation of this nation. I see no reason
to change it at a national level.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
3. RED PLANET (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: Earth wants to colonize Mars as a
refuge when our ecological excesses destroy
nature, but our efforts to seed the neighboring
planet with oxygen-producing algae are failing.
A crew of six astronauts is sent only to have
five crash onto the planet and one be stranded
in space. The survival exercise that follows
seems more like a dramatized role-playing game
with problems and dangers not a whole lot like
real astronauts would face. There are a few
nice concepts floating around, but in general
the writing is just not very good. Rating: 6
(0 to 10), +1 (-4 to +4 scale) The discussion
of some technical details following the review
has some mild spoilers.
When I was growing up Mars gave me the same thrill that looking at
the Western frontier gave people of the last century. I even got
excited about films as unpromising as ANGRY RED PLANET. Mars just
has a certain aura. Films about missions going to Mars also have
their special excitement. The year 2000 brought us not one but two
exploration films, MISSION TO MARS and RED PLANET. Both films were
savaged by the critics. For my money the better film was MISSION
TO MARS which had very clearly delineated plot segment of when the
filmmakers were trying to be realistic and when they were adding
fantasy. The astronauts in MISSION TO MARS had landed on Mars as
we know it but it had a big surprise inside. Fine. RED PLANET is
much more like a throwback to earlier films, grounded in fantasy
and inaccurate science but with perhaps one or two interesting
science fiction concepts mixed in.
The year is 2050 and humanity's bad management of earth's nature
and natural resources has come home to roost. With our time on
Earth limited, we have decided we have to make Mars livable and to
move our population there. (Really?) Earth has been successfully
seeding the planet with algae to make it livable, but just recently
all the algae seems to be dying off. Our first actual human
mission to Mars is to find out why. The near perfect Mars mission
sours badly at the last minute leaving their commander Kate Bowman
(Carrie-Anne Moss) in orbit but dumping five men on the planet
along with a cleverly designed robot--with a few foolish design
flaws. On the planet is technician Robby Gallagher (Val Kilmer),
Dr. Quinn Burchenal (Tom Sizemore), the philosophical Dr. Bud
Chantillas (Terence Stamp) and two others. Following their crash
landing on the planet, they have a serious struggle on their hands
to stay alive and to understand some of the strange phenomena they
are seeing.
The script by Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin is frequently only
on the level of some cable films. This is not the kind of film
that should need nude shower scenes and the astronauts improvising
illicit alcohol distilleries. Luckily that part of the plot is
dispensed with early. The script improves somewhat after the five
astronauts are down on the surface of Mars, but the sorts of
threats they face and the puzzles they have to solve seem more like
they are from a fantasy role-playing game than from serious
scientific speculation.
Visually the film shows a smaller budget than most major releases.
I would say that the effects are sufficient but not actually good.
Frequently the scenes in space do not focus on where there would be
the greatest interest, maybe a rocket exhaust rather than the main
body of the craft where more detail work would be necessary. Once
the major setting moves to the surface of Mars the effects are just
a desert, I think it was Australian, filmed with a red filter. No
serious attempt is made to show Mars's lessor gravity.
Particularly in the rolling crash landing sequence the model-work
seriously betrays its small size. The robot which transforms into
a jungle cat or a martial artist is placed in the scenes by CGI and
moves a little too smoothly to be made of real matter.
The actors were partially sabotaged by very weak plotting and
dialog in the early parts of the film. With the exception of solid
character actor Tom Sizemore nobody really seems like someone who
really might be on a Mars mission. Val Kilmer has a kind of comic
charm, but he oozes The Wrong Stuff. Terrence Stamp's pensive
religious astronaut just seems wrong for the mission also. In THE
CONQUEST OF SPACE an astronaut who gets too strong a dose of God
decides the entire Mars mission is blasphemy and commits sabotage.
I almost expected a repeat.
In spite of having the trappings of a serious look at a possible
Mars mission this is really much more just a fanciful story that
could be set on any nearly Earth-like planet. It is not bad as a
space opera but as we hopefully near the time when we really will
be looking at colonizing Mars, RED PLANET is almost an anachronism.
It is engaging sci-fi (as opposed to science fiction) with a few
new ideas. I rate this film a 6 on the 0 to 10 scale and a +1 on
the -4 to +4 scale.
Minor Spoiler...Minor Spoiler...Minor Spoiler...
I should mention a few technical quibbles. Nobody in the film
seems particularly surprised by the storm system or the ice storm.
Admittedly they had been tampering with the environment by 2050,
but that effort was mostly a failure. Considering just five
decades earlier Mars had no clouds and at most too little water to
be unambiguously detected by Earth probes, clouds and ice storms
seem highly improbable. Without going into detail, the entire
ecology we see seems unlikely to have developed in the short time
necessary. Also considering that even minor fender-benders could
be a serious problem so far from Earth, the crew seems rather
cavalier about the possibility of collisions in space. [-mrl]
===================================================================
4. PANDAEMONIUM (a film review in bullet list form by Mark R.
Leeper from the Toronto International Film Festival):
Capsule: The friendship and conflicts of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth
portrays them like modern revolutionaries and
the creation of their greater poems. As with
AMADEUS its history is a bit speculative, but
it certainly gives new life and interest to the
poetry of the great poets. Some beautiful
landscapes and visualizations of Coleridge
poems. Rating: +2
- Julien Temple does for Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William
Wordsworth what AMADEUS does for Mozart and Salieri
- Social event, we do not yet know what
- Byron as pop star
- Coleridge to make speech, Wordsworth says some good things
about him, but they do not like each other
- Drugs ruining Coleridge life
- Coleridge sees past as flashback
- Coleridge as young man protests war with France
- He and Wordsworth know change is coming, poetry, ideas, and
politics in heady stew
- "Gas is the great liberator." See gas balloon
- Government repression
- Coleridge and Wordsworth go to beautiful Lake District to lead
bohemian life and write
- Play with physical effects of inhaling helium
- Wordsworth starts to dominate Coleridge
- Coleridge finds laudanum frees writers block, frees mind
- Wordsworth does not use drugs, not as creative as Coleridge,
creates tension
- Wordsworth's sister Dorothy also interested in the married
Wordsworth
- Creation of major poems, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla
Khan
- Rift increases
- Coleridge hallucinating under influence of drugs
- Carries draft of Kubla Khan with him but never publishes
- Romanticized but not necessarily realistic look at how poets
create
- Frankenstein images more accurate for Shelley and Byron
- Fantasy from Coleridge's mind visualized, including pleasure
dome
- Wordsworth becomes straight-laced
- Beautiful valleys and waterfalls
- Horrible credit sequence at end ruins feel of the film
- Actors do not seem to age
- "Tuesday, March 1, 1876", seen on pamphlet, but was Wednesday,
easy to look up
- Script draws connection poetry and revolution
- Triangle for control of Dorothy Wordsworth
- Dorothy Wordsworth judgmental but free-spirited
- Poets enthusiastic about ideas
- Feed each others egos
- Sarah Coleridge treated like "third wheel"
[-mrl]
Mark Leeper
HO 1K-644 732-817-5619
mleeper@avaya.com
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for
trivial reasons. -- Bertrand Russell