MT VOID 08/01/08 -- Vol. 27, No. 5, Whole Number 1504
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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
08/01/08 -- Vol. 27, No. 5, Whole Number 1504
Table of Contents
Sign of the Times (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Robots and Slaves (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
THE DARK KNIGHT (letter of comment by Andre Kuzniarek)
Autos, Decisions, and THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION
(letter of comment by Joseph T. Major)
This Week's Reading (YA genre fiction,
SPELLBOUND and THE JOYS OF READING)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Quote of the Week
El Honcho Grande: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
La Honcha Bonita: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
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Sign of the Times (comments by Mark R. Leeper):
I have been retired now for seven years. That really isn't that long. But o
ne problem with being retired is that I am away from the technical communit
y. One loses track of what technology is out there and what other people ar
e using. You know what I find shocking. There is something about seeing som
eone who looks like he lives at subsistence income. You know. His clothes l
ook really shabby. You almost feel sorry for him and then you see he is wal
king around with a bluetooth phone in his ear. I am just learning to use an
iPod. That just makes me feel maybe it has all gotten past me. Maybe the b
us has left and I wasn't on it. [-mrl]
Robots and Slaves (comments by Mark R. Leeper):
Our science fiction reading group is discussing a shorter work this month.
It is Jack Williamson's novelette "With Folded Hands", which appeared first
in "Astounding Stories" in 1947. In the story a man who sells in mechanica
ls--basically robots--finds his business dying when new superior robots com
e along to compete. The new robots, streamlined black humanoids--are in eve
ry way superior to the robots he had been selling. But the new robots have
more than superior technology; they have an ideology. They are "the perfect
mechanicals 'To Serve and Obey and Guard Men from Harm.'" In fact their id
eology is paternalism carried to an extreme degree. Human work is no longer
necessary. They are the same mix of slave and master that a parent is to a
very young child. Humans no longer have to work under their rule, but huma
ns also are stuck in a sort of stagnation and uselessness.
This story makes a good pairing with Isaac Asimov's robot stories. Both can
be seen as arguments about the institution of slavery about what would mak
e a perfect slave.
The three laws of robotics are, of course:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human
being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such
orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does n
ot conflict with the First or Second Law.
These are very much the priorities one would want to give a perfect, selfle
ss slave. Asimov makes his robot perfect slaves. And that is not so immoral
as it sounds at first since they are, after all, machines that do not suff
er or are degraded by servitude. Asimov's laws are just the very rules I wo
uld want to give a slave if I wanted to be entirely selfish.
The main intent Williamson had for "With Folded Hands" is reportedly just t
o point out that some inventions may seem like a good idea at the time they
are created, but may have some very nasty consequences. He was probably th
inking of the creation of the nuclear bomb which arguably saved hundreds of
thousands lives on each side of the Pacific War. But with nuclear prolifer
ation that invention seems like less and less like a good thing for humanit
y.
But like the Asimov robot stories, "With Folded Hands" brings up questions
related to those of human slavery. It suggests issues that actually were ar
gued in this country in the Antebellum South. Some in the South wondered if
slavery might not be a bad thing, but not because of the negative effect o
n the slave. The slave was generally considered a beast of burden and rules
of justice simply did not apply to him. But some argued that slavery was b
ad for the master by offloading all responsibility to work. The challenge o
f work is good for the soul. People who do not work stagnate. They need cha
llenges to hone their spirit and to keep them from falling into decadence.
At the risk of further mixing my metaphor I will point out that the same is
sue frequently applies to retired employees, some of whom remain active and
find new challenges and some of whom rapidly become useless couch potatoes
and fall into a pointless and empty existence. Just writing this editorial
is part of my campaign to remain in the former category.
But Williamson's concept of machines that will do all human labor is flawed
. Perhaps machines could do all menial labor. Intellectual labor is another
matter. Suppose I am trying to prove the Goldbach Conjecture in mathematic
s or to get a better understanding of the Persian Wars. In the first case i
t is unlikely that machines can be creative enough to do new mathematics. I
t is one thing to check the millions of cases for the Four-Color Map Conjec
ture. That is how the conjecture was finally proved. But that is not actual
ly creative work. To prove the Goldbach conjecture on the other hand seems
to require some sort of creativity of which machines are currently incapabl
e. Now that is not as clear as it used to be since computers can now be cre
ative in ways that rival or transcend human creativity. See the my editoria
l in the MT VOID 12/14/07: http://www.fanac.org/fanzines/MT_Void/MT_Void-26
24.html#4
But whether computers will ever do creative mathematical proof is still an
open question.
On the other hand even if a machine could get of good understanding of the
Persian wars, that would not be the point. A human would need to get the un
derstanding that that would require human work. Machines could retrieve inf
ormation. Certainly that is much what Google does today, but to understand
and make others understand the Persian Wars to any depth just does not seem
to be the kind of labor that one of Williamson's humanoids could do. So I
am not entirely certain that Williamson's humanoids would be so bad.
By the way, you can find a radio adaptation of "With Folded Hands" from "Di
mension X" at http://www.otr.net/?p=dimx. <-mrl>
THE DARK KNIGHT (letter of comment by Andre Kuzniarek):
In response to Mark's review of THE DARK KNIGHT in the 07/25/08 issue of th
e MT VOID, Andre Kuzniarek writes:
[Mark said,] "In addition to Bale and Ledger, Aaron Eckhart plays District
Attorney Harvey Dent on a strange journey from crusading public servant to
the featured villain in the next Batman film."
I think Two Face being in the next film is just a rumor. He sure seemed dea
d at the end of this one, and it seems like that's the whole point of Batma
n being "sacrificed" at the end. I do see some speculation online that Harv
ey Dent the person is dead, but Two-Face the villain survives, but that doe
s not really seem to fit with the message of the movie, or what we see.
As much as I like the film for its depth, and Ledger's awesome performance,
it also seemed quite muddled visually and from an editing and story tellin
g standpoint. Many scenes were just left hanging, like the interrupted part
y at Bruce Wayne's place (what happened after he rescued Rachel?), or liter
ally leaving the Joker hanging. Everything jumps around so much that the fi
lm seems almost incoherent at times. This might be in service of the story
with regard to the chaos created by the Joker, enhancing the unsettled feel
ing demanded by the events onscreen, but the pace could have been less fren
etic. It was also odd to add Scarecrow into the mix at the beginning, just
making more distraction and confusion. It's possible a lot was cut out to m
eet a length limit, which is surprising for a flagship production like this
. The fact that there is very little art direction related to the city envi
ronment also adds a bit to the sense of the production being done too quick
ly. Sure, there is some argument for keeping things realistic, but I think
the Burton films understood that a guy wearing a bat suit just doesn't fit
into the real world and so the overall art direction i those was an extensi
on of the character. The fact that it is lacking here is mostly covered by
very dark lighting and some jumbled action scenes. I think plenty of the sc
enes worked very well of course, more than not, but I just wish that as who
le it came together better. Perhaps a director's cut on DVD will resolve my
concerns. [-ak]
[As for Harvey Dent coming back after being apparently dead, well, Dracula
always did. So did Fu Manchu. Villains tend to find a way. -mrl]
Autos, Decisions, and THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION (letter of comment by J
oseph T. Major):
In response to the 07/25/08 issue of the MT VOID, Joseph T. Major writes:
Autos: They make SUVs in Louisville. Driving to the Sam's Club to get envel
opes for my family newsletter, we passed the Ford Louisville Assembly Plant
, where they make SUVs. Usually the parking lot is crammed full. This time
it was empty. Very eerie. (Good for the local air, but not so good for the
local economy.) [-jtm]
[Mark responds, "The Ford Louisville may seem eerie, but at least Ford clai
ms it is just a retooling and that they are investing big money into it. We
will have to see how that works out. Back at Lucent just about any merger,
divesting, or large change of management was used as an occasion to make t
he "hard decision" and to lay off people. It is sort of like fission of ato
ms releases energy and fusion of atoms releases energy. Fission or fusion o
f companies releases employees." -mrl]
Decisions: WWII Navy meals on the "New Jersey" and other combat ships, such
as my father-in-law's ship, "USS Bush", may have been unhealthy by modern
standards, but somehow my father-in-law survived. When I look over modern h
ealth standards for children, I wonder how I survived. Apropos of nothing,
there is a rising problem with children having impaired immunological syste
ms because they've been brought up in sanitized hygenic environments. Unfor
tunately not the way it worked in THROUGH THE EYE OF A NEEDLE. [-jtm]
[Mark replies, "Yes, people used to eat all sorts of unhealthy food and smo
ke and still lived well into their sixties. But it is also true that we do
seem to be overprotective of children. I used to walk twenty minutes to and
from school. These days that is considered very dangerous. Lots of things
are considered dangerous that were not in my day. We now have the media to
warn us of all the scary things that can happen to children to and from sch
ool so parents are more fearful. But then predators hearing about other pre
dators become more proficient also." - mrl]
THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION: Chabon is recreating the dreamland of the Je
wish Bund, which imagined a one world socialist state with a separate but e
qual world-spread entity for Jews, using the international language of Juda
ism, Yiddish. (Imagine the jolly fun they would have explaining that fact o
f life to the Jews of Thessalonika.) At least they got the Jewish part, in
this strange world where the Fourteenth Amendment says nothing about citize
nship. [-jtm]
Evelyn responds: "The Fourteenth Amendment refers to 'all persons born or n
aturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.'"
I suspect the answer is that these temporary refugees were not subject to
the jurisdiction of the United States, in the same way that Indians were no
t. Until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, most Indians were not citizens, t
he Fourteenth Amendment notwithstanding." -ecl]
This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
Sharyn November on how teens and other feel about YA genre fiction: "They a
re tired of faeries, werewolves and other shapeshifters, vampires, dragons,
the Greek gods, trilogies, pirates, zombies, teen superheroes, the teenage
Evil Genius, any kind of boarding school setting, 'mean girls,' undergroun
d cities (especially New York or London), the Victorians, the Male Chosen O
ne (in any genre), and retold fairy tales."
SPELLBOUND: THE SURPRISING ORIGINS AND ASTONISHING SECRETS OF ENGLISH SPELL
ING by James Essinger (ISBN-13 978-0-385-34084-7, ISBN-10 0-385-34084-2) is
more a history of the English language and less an explanation about spell
ing. Essinger also makes some mistakes, or rather, has some misunderstandin
gs. He refers to "a holy book, such as the Christian Bible, the Muslim Kora
n, or the Jewish Talmud" (page xxviii). The Talmud is not really a holy boo
k; it is more a set of annotations to the Torah, which *is* a holy book. He
says of "kosher" that it "has come to mean in modern English not just food
that is prepared according to Jewish but also, more broadly, anything that
is correct, genuine, and legitimate" (page 26). The only problem is that t
hat is what it means in Hebrew; one speaks of a "kosher scroll" in a mezuza
h, for example.
And in writing about languages which do not use the Roman alphabet, Essinge
r says, "where there is an accepted romanization system, the writing of a f
oreign nonalphabetic name is fairly straighforward. But a strange-looking n
ame in a foreign language that is written using Roman letters will not have
any standardized way of being written" (page 52). If it is already in Roma
n letters, why change it at all?
On page 77 he gives a sample of text written in the International Phoentic
Alphabet (IPA). I found myself thinking how interesting it looked. Then on
page 78 he says, "purely phonetic writing looks absolutely horrendous, as t
he physical appearance of Hamlet's speech in the IPA shows all too well." W
ell, that wasn't my reaction at all!
Essinger talks about how the English language became basically a completely
different language by 1500 from what it was in 1400, and the "Great Vowel
Shift", which made what had been pronounced "Saw it is team to say the show
s on the sarm fate noo," to our present "So it is time to see the shoes on
the same feet now." Again, though, a lot of this is only marginally related
to spelling.
Reading old books about books is enlightening. One discovers that authors w
ere considered great and lasting in 1937 are completely forgotten now, and
one is perhaps reminded that many authors currently in favor may fade from
view in another few decades. THE JOYS OF READING: LIFE'S GREATEST PLEASURE
by Burton Rascoe (copyright 1937, and of course there is no ISBN) has chapt
ers on "The Joys of Reading" and "How to Judge Literary Values," but it als
o has lists. The list of twenty-five favorite authors from 1900 to 1925 inc
ludes many that have withstood the tes of time: H. G. Wells, G. K. Chestert
on, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, and Jack London. But it also includes Jos
eph Hergesheimer, Gamaliel Bradford, May Sinclair, and W. J. Locke, and omi
ts (for example) Arthur Conan Doyle. A list of the twenty-five favorite boo
ks lists two by Wells: THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY and MR. BRITLING SEES IT THRO
UGH. Admittedly, his classic science fiction novels were written before 190
0, but this century still saw THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, THE FOOD OF THE GO
DS, and IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET. [-ecl]
[Actually, almost all of his most enjoyable novels were written prior to 19
00. The fun novels are THE TIME MACHINE, THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, THE INVISIB
LE MAN, THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU, and THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON. Of thes
e only the latter was written in the 1900s. THE FOOD OF THE GODS and IN THE
DAYS OF THE COMET are more pondeous philosophical works and generally not
fun reads. For some reason they were included in the famous collection SEVE
N SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS BY H. G. WELLS, and the more enjoyable WHEN THE SL
EEPER WAKES (1899) was not. -mrl]
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Quote of the Week:
All ignorance toboggans into know and
trudges up to ignorance again.
-- e.e.cummings, 1959