THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
03/05/04 -- Vol. 22, No. 36
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
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Topics:
Oscar Comment (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The Myth of Hydrogen (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (CONTACT, FATHER OF FRANKENSTEIN,
SIXPENCE HOUSE, LIKE A HOLE IN THE HEAD, and
Sherlock Holmes) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Oscar Comment (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I have been asked several times what I thought of the Academy
Awards. I will just make one statement here. I was a little
disappointed that MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD
did not get more attention than it did. Perhaps they needed a
timely tagline, something to tie the film into what is happening
in the world. How about a tag like "You'll actually believe the
French as a military threat."
I am pleased to see a fantasy film win the Academy Award for Best
Picture. I was a little astounded by the statistic that 25,000
people did work on this film. It was an incredible feat of
filmmaking. Until Peter Jackson made his version, I don't think
anybody thought a live-action version was even possible. In the
past all adaptations had been done with animation. Animation is a
good tool for visualizing what cannot be done with live action,
but live action seems more believable and at the same time more
respectable. Actually much of the Jackson film really is
animated; it is just that animation has gotten to the point that
it does not look like animation.
But as for LORD OF THE RINGS, I think the way to go from being
simply a notable filmmaker to being one of the majors is to take
some work that other people have deemed unfilmable and to make a
good film out of it. So less than 48 hours after Jackson won big
at the Oscars we have had another announcement of a film in the
works. Robert Rodriguez is going to try to pull the same sort of
coup. What I think was the last big "unfilmable" fantasy/SF
project is going to be filmed by the man who made the EL MARIACHI
and SPY KIDS series. Rodriguez is scheduled to film A PRINCESS OF
MARS, the first story from the Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter
of Mars series. Several filmmakers have investigated the series,
including Ray Harryhausen, but to have six-armed frog-headed
Martians as major characters is a pretty daunting task. The task
does not seem as formidable as LORD OF THE RINGS and the story is
probably not as compelling, but it will still be quite an
impressive achievement if Rodriguez can do it.
Now get this. Rodriguez is famous for miniscule budgets.
Reportedly Paramount wants something to rival a Peter Jackson
production and is giving Rodriguez a hundred-million-dollar budget
to do it. Not huge, by today's standards, but pretty big by
Rodriguez standards. The Burroughs stuff is fun, but probably not
of the profundity of THE LORD OF THE RINGS. It will be
interesting to see what Ridriguez does with it. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: The Myth of Hydrogen (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Back when I was in junior high school, I remember I puzzled one of
my teachers with an observation that was both right and wrong. I
thought that I was misunderstanding on a point. Now it is coming
to be more important and even affecting national policy.
We were studying energy. Different sorts of energy were being
discussed. You know the sort of thing, heat, light, chemical,
electricity, etc. A confused Mark raised his hand. Is
electricity really energy? "Certainly it is," I was told,
"Doesn't it light your home?" "Is electricity energy or is it
simply a medium for transporting energy? I mean we have fossil
fuels in the ground. They have energy. We have light, which is a
form of energy. That I believe. But isn't electricity only a
medium to carry energy?"
Let me explain. I remembered visiting a recreation of an early
1900s factory. There was a time when a factory had to be built
next to a running river. A big water wheel would be put into the
water. Once the wheel was in place in the water, little could
stop it from turning. It would be geared up and used to power a
rapidly spinning cylinder, like an axle, that would run the length
of the factory. The power of the water would turn that axle with
a great deal of force. A belt would be put over the axle for each
machine in the factory and the belt would be used to power the
machine. The power of the water in the river would run every
machine in the factory. But a spinning axle is not actually a
form of energy; it is just a device for transferring energy.
Something similar is still used today. The fan belt in you car's
engine transfers energy from the motor to the fan belt. The fan
belt runs the fan. But the fan belt is not a form of energy; it
is only a medium for carrying force. And in your house we still
do something very similar. The way I figured it electricity was
like the spinning axle in old factories. It transmitted the
energy, but it was not itself a form of energy.
When you run the vacuum cleaner in your house where does the
energy come from? It comes from a power plant, which very likely
gets most of its energy from turbines, which are just fancy
waterwheels. Instead of putting the energy into a spinning axle
that goes from the turbine into your home, it does something a
little more sophisticated. It spins magnets in a coil and then
wire can carry the power around corners (difficult to do with an
axle) and over many miles to you house. It carries it through the
wiring and the outlet into your house, through the cord of the
vacuum cleaner, to a coil in the vacuum cleaner. In the coil is a
magnet. They magnet takes energy from the water and it spins,
powering the vacuum cleaner. You are taking power from a spinning
axle at the power plant and using it to spin a magnet in your
home. This is a somewhat more sophisticated way of putting a belt
over a spinning axle. (By the way, in Massachusetts the energy
also came in large part from coal burned at the electrical plant.
It may not have seemed as polluting as if the coal was burned in
the house, but it simply moved the problem of generating energy to
another location, which did pollute the air. That distinction
will be important a few paragraphs down.)
Then is the electricity really energy or is it just a medium for
carrying energy? The answer, I guess, is that it is both. It is
a medium for carrying energy. But the way the medium works is
mechanical energy is turned into another breed of energy,
electricity, that is easy to move around. In your vacuum cleaner
it is turned back into mechanical energy.
There is an important distinction between petroleum which when
found in the ground already has chemical energy, and electricity,
which has to be generated.
President Bush has been talking about how hydrogen is a nice clean
fuel that combines with oxygen to create non-polluting water
vapor. The problem is that hydrogen is only a medium for carrying
energy from elsewhere. We are not finding reserves of hydrogen in
the ground. The real energy is created someplace else where
hydrogen has to be separated from oxygen. That process is neither
cheap nor necessarily clean. Hydrogen is not so much a form of
energy but a medium of just transferring the problem of creating
energy to a different location. It is a means of taking energy
that has already been created and moving that energy to where it
will be useful. But you still need more traditional energy source
to power the collection of the hydrogen as well as the
transportation.
I am not advocating petroleum in the long-term, but it is at least
well behaved. If you put some gasoline in a bucket and it will
stay in the bucket. At least most of it will. Try that with
gaseous hydrogen. I park my current car next to my water heater,
which has a pilot light. In a gasoline car that is not all that
scary a thing to do. Even if my tank has a small leak the gasoline
falls to the floor and probably no place near the flame. With a
tank of hydrogen in the car, I am not sure I would feel so cushy
and safe. If the hydrogen hits the flame, you could have a
reaction. That reaction is what brought down the Hindenberg. It
is something to think about.
So don't expect pollution-free hydrogen vehicles any time soon
according to a recent panel at the National Academies of Science.
It will take more than a decade to do the technology and to work
out the bugs of the cars and the hydrogen production. And that is
the time to introduce the first prototype cars to the early
adopters. Don't expect to see a hydrogen car in your driveway much
before 2040. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
In an attempt to get more people interested, our science fiction
discussion group chose Carl Sagan's CONTACT as this month's book. It
seemed like a good possibility to get readers who were not normally
involved, given the familiarity of Sagan's name outside of the
field of science fiction and the success of the film version. We
did get three new people, but 1) they came only because they knew
of Sagan as a scientist, 2) they said at the beginning they didn't
like science fiction and that basically they wouldn't be coming to
future meetings, and 3)they thought we would be reading the book
at the meeting, rather than having read it beforehand and
discussing it at the meeting. The last seems particularly
strange--how could one read a 430-page book at a two-hour meeting.
In any case, we didn't really build up our attendance and we all
pretty much agreed that Sagan was not a very good science fiction
writer. Many people found his digressions annoying, and one also
pointed out that Sagan never really describes any action. For
example, he leads up to the explosion, but then "cuts away" and
resumes writing quite a bit after it occurs. This was a
bestseller when it was published (1985), but I don't think it was
highly regarded by science fiction fans then, and does not stand
up well over time.
Another book made into a film was Christopher Bram's FATHER OF
FRANKENSTEIN (made into GODS AND MONSTERS). As is often the case,
I wish I had read the book first, as I found myself watching the
movie in my head while I was reading it. This was pretty easy, as
the book seemed to have been written very "cinematically" and the
movie stuck closely to it. The book does have more background
information about the making of THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN that the
movie was forced to leave out (for time reasons), so I would
definitely recommend the book if you are a student of old films.
For people who know about Hay-on-Wye, Paul Collins's SIXPENCE
HOUSE will be of interest. Collins decided to leave San Francisco
with his wife and baby and move to Hay-on-Wye. This sounds like a
book-lover's dream, but as Collins discovered, there is reality to
deal with as well as the fantasy.
Jen Banbury's LIKE A HOLE IN THE HEAD is a mystery centered around
a bookstore and a first edition Jack London, but the first edition
is more of a Maguffin than a book--it could just as easily be a
bag of flints. And I guess I prefer "cozies" to mysteries with
graphic violence. (I haven't gotten to John Dunning's bookstore
mysteries yet--I hope they're better.)
Coming soon: After I mentioned that Alan Stockwell's Holmes
pastiches were not in the first rank, someone asked me which ones
I thought were. I need to think about that. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Don't do things half-assed. If a thing is
worth doing at all, it's worth doing as
well as you can possibly do it. Pick out
something you think is worthwhile and do
it or work at it with passion. Do it with
all your might.
-- Hugh Young
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