THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
11/21/14 -- Vol. 33, No. 21, Whole Number 1833


Co-Editor: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Co-Editor: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
        Updated Film (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
        How Can I Love Dogs and Not Want One of My Own? (comments
                by Mark R. Leeper)
        INTERSTELLAR (film review by Dale L. Skran)
        Code Knocking (letter of comment by Kip Williams)
        INTERSTELLAR (letter of comment by Andre Kuznariak)
        This Week's Reading (ARROWSMITH) (book comments
                by Evelyn C. Leeper)

==================================================================

TOPIC: Updated Film (comments by Mark R. Leeper)

I understand that they are going to remake the Cold War thriller
THE BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN.  It will be updated to the present and
will be called THE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLAR BRAIN.  [-mrl]

==================================================================

TOPIC: How Can I Love Dogs and Not Want One of My Own? (comments by
Mark R. Leeper)

I have always loved dogs as far back as my memory goes.  When I was
young I would have sworn that when I was an adult and had my own
house I would most certainly have a dog.  Even today I can be in
the middle of a conversation with someone and a dog wanders onto
the scene and I almost cannot continue the conversation.  I can
try, but my mind will be on the dog.  I will want to be petting and
interacting with the dog even as I am talking.  A dog is more than
enough to highjack my attention.

Several friends have independently given me the same piece of
advice: I should get my own dog.  As well-meaning as the suggestion
is, it does me no good.  I choose not to get a dog.  The fact that
I like dogs so much is precisely why I do not want to get one of my
own.  Is that odd?  I don't think so.  I refuse to abuse a dog.
And I am convinced that abusing the dog is inevitable.  Just the
act of getting a dog is cruel.

I would not intentionally treat the dog badly.  The way I would
abuse a dog is not what most people would call animal abuse.  There
are dogs that actually are horribly abused in this country.  They
are fought for sport; they are starved; they are kept in
disgustingly unsanitary conditions.  And I have to admit that I
would like the people responsible to be treated just as barbarously
as they have treated dogs.  But again that treatment of a dog is
not what I am referring to.  What I am referring to is what better
dog owners do to their pets, things that if done to a human would
be recognized as cruel.  Let me give an example of what my family
did to our dog.

I grew up with a dachshund I named Sam.  Let me tell you about what
I am afraid was the happiest moment in Sam's life.  I think I never
saw Sam so happy before or since that moment.  I think Sam was less
than a year old when my family went on vacation.  We could not take
a dog along, so we boarded Sam with his veterinarian.  After two or
three weeks our vacation was over and we went to the vet to pick up
Sam.  The moment he saw us he was in ecstasy.  His tail whipping
the air, he was so energized he ran back into the cage room and
then out again.  He was just that happy to see us.

But why was he so happy?  Well, we had no language in common.  We
could not tell Sam beforehand we would be back after two or three
weeks to pick him up and take him back to the home he loved.  For
all he knew this restricted life in so many cages and with so many
restraints was to be for him the new normal.  He undoubtedly spent
his sentence very unhappy.  And it must seem like a very long time
for a dog--not understanding what was going on.  Sam's experience
being boarded must have frightened the daylights out of him.
Seeing us told him this unpleasant interlude was coming to an end.
It is bad enough that we did not give much thought to this
situation before we boarded Sam.  Even worse was not giving it any
thought even after Sam made it so obvious what a bad time he had
had.

As Sam got older he apparently got over his separation anxiety, but
that was a matter of him coming to trust us.  Most dogs spend their
lives trying to understand what is going on around them, even
learning words in human language.  They have involuntarily been
dropped into a new world alien to their natures.

Speaking of separation anxiety, dogs experience it early.  Dogs are
probably born with the same affection and need for their mother
that most humans have.  The difference is that a mother dog may or
may not be experienced with giving birth and nurturing her puppies
only to have them suddenly disappear from her company, never to see
them again.  What does it do to the mother the first time this
happens?  What does it do to her when it happens repeatedly?  What
does it do to a puppy to be taken from its mother at a young age?

This sort of treatment is not generally considered animal abuse.
In fact these separations are the core of the pet industry.  But it
must be an emotional jolt to the dog involved.  I have no reason to
believe that splitting up families is any the less tragic and
painful for dogs than it would be for humans. We have come to
realize how bad it is for humans, thank goodness, but we give it
very little thought when it happens to dogs.

And what kind of a life does a dog have once brought to their new
homes?  My dog must have slept eighteen hours a day.  It was not
that he was tired.  He did not need that much sleep.  Dogs do not
need that sleep, but what else can they do to pass their time?
They are lucky if they get some sort of exercise beyond walking
more than once a week.  We give most dogs very little to amuse
themselves.  I would not even know how to give a dog a life any
better.  It would be one thing if I lived on a farm and the dog had
animals to have contact with.  What Sam had during those eighteen
hours was a couch that with some effort he could jump on and curl
up for more sleep to pass what must have been a very long and slow
day or a slow night for him.  That cannot have been much of a life.

When Sam went for a walk if he would see another dog he would pull
on the chain to get as close to the stranger as possible.  He was
so desperate for contact with others of his own species.  He might
have maybe five minutes a day on average communing with other dogs
and exchanging information, mostly by smell.  Then no matter how he
resisted he was pulled away by the chain around his neck and
dragged back to his home and the same boring couch.

I would really like a dog around the house.  Yes, I really would.
But if I could not give him a better life than Sam had I think I
have no business getting a dog.

I have made these observations before and I get responses like, if
I am going to get a dog, of course I have to take him from his
mother.  Of course I cannot take the dog just anywhere I vacation.
Of course the dog is going to have to get used to being boarded.
It is hard on the dog, but after all he is only a dog.  Few of us
would accept similar treatment being given to other humans.  But
after all a dog is only a dog.

That "only a dog" rankles a bit.  A dog can feel pain.  A dog can
worry.  And it is even worse than a human being worried because he
cannot ask questions.  I see no reason why it should matter less if
the emotions are happening to a dog.  I can only hope other people
who own dogs think about what they do through a dog's eyes.  And
frankly, I just do not want to make the necessary sacrifices to
treat my own dog truly humanely.  [-mrl]

==================================================================

TOPIC: INTERSTELLAR (film review by Dale L. Skran)

I'm just going to come right out and say it--INTERSTELLAR is
probably the best SF film in many years, and the best space SF film
in decades.  It is hard to know what is good enough to make a
comparison worthwhile doing--maybe CONTACT or WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
or IMPACT or 2001, but it is not a long list.  There are other very
good SF films: THE PRESTIGE (directed by Nolan, as was
INTERSTELLAR) and Mark Leeper's favorite, THE MAN FROM EARTH, but
this list is really not all that long.  INTERSTELLAR is about 100x
as ambitious as the recent and well made GRAVITY, which I liked.

INTERSTELLAR is an all-out, no-holds-barred argument for the human
settlement of space, the emptiness and desolation of our likely
future on Earth, the endless wonder of the universe, and the
magnificent destiny the human race might have if only we have the
courage and hope to seize it.  This is a movie with all the balls
in the air--Von Braunian space exploration, O'Neillian space
colonization, Sagan's human-robot partnership, and Egan's ascent to
higher dimensional spaces.  INTERSTELLAR is a tale of brave heroes
Heinlein would be proud of--astronauts who put everything on the
line to give the human species a marginal chance of survival, and
scientists who work in secret to save any scrape of humanity while
the world slowly dies.

Populated by some of the best actors of our time--Matthew
McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, John
Lithgow, and Matt Damon--INTERSTELLAR tells a human tale of
desperate people taking on the greatest possible challenges in the
depths of interstellar space.  This is a film of dazzling vistas,
the pain of a broken man, the love of a father and daughter, and
the frightening indifference of the universe.  It is also a story
of the highest human aspirations and our deepest fears.
INTERSTELLAR is not going to win the Oscar for best picture, but in
some better alternate universe than ours it would.

INTERSTELLAR has wonderful inside views of an O'Neill cylinder--
perhaps the best yet to appear in a major movie, and in the context
of an entirely positive human movement into free space.
INTERSTELLAR also features a no-apologies effort to preserve the
human species, and a hero who is not afraid to say that humans
belong in space, not "in the dirt."  There is also a wonderful
moment of humor when Astronaut Cooper discovers why the O'Neill
cylinder is named Cooper.  Supported by physicist Kip Thorne,
INTERSTELLAR may be the only film that will result in the
publication of a scientific paper based on new black hole results
found while attempting to create realistic special effects.  I have
only one bone to pick with INTERSTELLAR, which is that some may
come away with the impression that the settlement of space requires
contact with advanced aliens who provide tunnels in space to allow
us to visit distant Earth-like planets.  To refute this view would
take too much time for a movie review, so I refer you to the
National Space Society produced "Roadmap to Space Settlement" which
can be found at: http://www.nss.org/settlement/roadmap/.

Mark Leeper has rated INTERSTELLAR a +3 on the -4 to +3 scale, and
I certainly agree that it deserves at least a +3.  This is a film
that takes on so much, and achieves so much, that any failings are
of a minor nature.  I haven't said this in a long time, but
INTERSTELLAR makes me think it may be time to unlimber the rarely-
used +4 rating.  A film can really only be a +4 in retrospective,
but INTERSTELLER is certainly a worthy candidate.  INTERSTELLAR is
rated PG-13, and includes a fairly desperate fight scene, along
with much perilous action, but somehow is easier to take than
GRAVITY.  INTERSTELLAR is too complicated and intense for young
children, but may be experienced on different levels by tweens and
up.

** SPOILER ALERT **

Don't keep reading if you haven't seen the movie, and if you are
concerned about spoilers.  Jeff Foust has written an article in
SPACE REVIEW where he questions why NASA is so gung-ho on
interstellar flight in the movie, given that it seems well
established that they have the technology to, say, settle Mars in
hand.  This is explained pretty well in the movie.  NASA is well
aware that apparently friendly aliens have placed a wormhole mouth
near Saturn, and have, via their super-science, gathered some
"Earth-like" planets at the other end of the worm hole.  This is
clearly an unexpected situation from our viewpoint, but once you
know about it, it seems quite reasonable that NASA would focus on
planets more Earth-like than Mars given the opportunity.  Also,
from the plot of the movie, it is reasonable to conclude that
although NASA has a lot of resources, they likely fall well short
of what would be required to settle the solar system in any time
scale that would allow for a significant number of humans to be
saved.

I've seen critics on the Net that complain about the apparently
magical rockets used in the movie.  I'm not sure what they are
complaining about as the movie seems to take place at least fifty
years in the future.  They have a robot with human or super-human
intelligence and a very advanced body design.  It is certainly
possible that the ships are powered by the mini-fusion drives
Lockheed just announced they are developing, or something similar.
The movie establishes subtly that NASA has been working in secret
for a long time to build all this equipment, and it is implied that
a large fraction of tax money goes to NASA, since little is
available for other purposes.  The rockets don't have unlimited
fuel, and the lack of fuel plays an important role in the plot.

Other Net critics complain about the contrast between the
relatively primitive life of the corn farmers and the advanced NASA
technology.  In particular, people seem to be driving cars that
look a lot like the cars of today.  First, the famers use fully
automated combines, so it is not true that no advanced technology
is in use.  Second, it seems clear that the government is secretly
devoting much of the GNP to NASA, while pretending that NASA has
been shut down.  It is possible, that, as was the case in WWII, car
and truck production lines have been shut down to produce other
things--like rockets, but that this is not known to the general
public, who are being fed lies that the moon landing was faked.
Yet another critic complained that it was not likely that the
farmers would be growing corn as corn does not do well during
droughts.  While this was not justified during the movie, it could
easily have been explained by just having a character say, "Thank
heavens for this GMO drought-resistant corn.  We would have starved
years ago with the old corn."

Still another complaint is that the astronauts are launched on a
Saturn V shown in stock footage.  No "stock footage" of a Saturn V
is in evidence that I can recall.  The astronauts are launched on
some kind of multi-stage rocket, but you never see the rocket
stacked on the launch pad.  Instead, you see the stage separation.
It does look a bit like the stage separation of a Saturn V, but it
could just as easily be a SLS or Musk's proposed Mars Colonial
Transport.  I note that the retired Saturn V, the cancelled Ares V,
and the currently under construction SLS all look a lot alike, even
sporting similar paint jobs.

Another complaint is that the movie is full of weird and
unexplained jumps and events.  There are certainly many surprising
turns, but to my reading things were well explained, or at least as
well as one can expect in any fictional story.  It does help if you
have a basic understanding of relativity and understand that time
passes more slowly near a black hole.  At the very end there is one
scene that doesn't seem to quite make sense from a time
perspective, although it just now occurs to me that possibly Amelia
Brand is supposed to have lived for many years with Edmonds and the
embryos at the colony, and Edmonds has just now died.  This would
fit in the timeline better than what I first thought.  However,
this lack of clarity in the final scene is a minor blemish on a
great film.  [-dls]

Mark responds:

Many thanks for the reference, Dale.  My review can be found at
http://leepers.us/interste.htm, or in the last issue of the MT
VOID.

I keep my +4 limber and ready to use on any film.  Two years ago I
used it for LES MISERABLES.  I did not use it here in part because
the drama seemed a little lopsided.  For example, Cooper has two
children, but one is used only as a plot contrivance.  He is never
developed as a full character, I seem to remember.  There are some
weird things like beer made when people are starving for food.  I
like the film a lot, but it has some problems.  Some of the
explanation is very hard to follow.  [-mrl]

==================================================================

TOPIC: Code Knocking (letter of comment by Kip Williams)

In response to letters of comment on code knocking in the 11/14/14
issue of the MT VOID, Kip Williams writes:

I'd use a knuckle roll for the longs, presuming the rhythm wasn't a
dead giveaway all by itself. (Knuckle here indicates the main bend
of the finger, but I'm not aware of a simple word for that.)  [-kw]

==================================================================

TOPIC: INTERSTELLAR (letter of comment by Andre Kuznariak)

In response to Mark's review of INTERSTELLAR in the 11/14/14 issue
of the MT VOID, Andre Kuznariak writes:

I would argue PRIMER is a far more audacious SF film than
INTERSTELLAR, especially since it seems Nolan was trying awfully
hard to make his film approachable via a number of audience-
friendly tropes and fantastical elements, whereas Carruth makes no
compromises with narrative structure or his world-building rules.
[-ak]

Mark responds:

Andre, you are right that the dialog in PRIMER is probably more
realistic than that in INTERSTELLAR.  However, realism is a dubious
virtue in drama.  It is a secondary virtue.  I would say that
realism is much less important than communication with the audience
members.  You can do a great drama in a style very realistically.
But if the audience does not get what is going on and never would,
it is a waste of their time.

PRIMER takes several watchings for the viewer to understand (most
of) what is going on.  It is a puzzle for the viewer to solve.
Solving the puzzle may be fun, as a challenge.  Christopher Nolan
knows how to put in-line puzzles in his film as he did with THE
PRESTIGE, but by the end of THE PRESTIGE he has given the viewer
the solution to the puzzles and he has communicated with the
viewer.  Carruth has left the viewer to watch multiple times to try
to work out an understanding of what PRIMER was all about.

Actually I thought some of the scientific exposition could have
been made a little simpler for my taste.  [-mrl]

==================================================================

TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)

ARROWSMITH by Sinclair Lewis (ISBN 978-0-451-53086-8) is the story
of one man from boyhood through medical school and then career.
Martin Arrowsmith is constantly coming into new situations full of
idealism and noble intent, but running up against entrenched ideas,
commercialism, greed, and all of humanity's other flaws.  Unlike
many such novels, though, he is also imperfect.  He has a terrible
bedside manner and, indeed, shows little interest in actually using
his discoveries to help humanity--he desires the knowledge of the
causes, cures, and prevention of diseases for its own sake.  He is
abrupt to everyone around him, especially his first wife, Leora.
However, one aspect that has not stood the test of time so well is
Lewis's seeming attitude toward women/wives.  Although it is seems
clear that Lewis is critical of Martin for his attitude towards
Leora, Lewis also seems to hold her up as the perfect wife,
completely devoted to her husband.  This does not play so well
these days; although Joyce Lanyon is often shallow, she at least
has some spirit and will of her own.  Lewis seems to emphasize the
shallowness, with passages such as:

"They really had, it seemed, to stay with the Principessa del
Oltraggio (formerly Miss Lucy Deemy Bessy of Dayton), Madame des
Basses Loges (Miss Brown of San Francisco), and the Countess of
Marazion (who had been Mrs. Arthur Snaipe of Albany, and several
things before that), but Joyce did go with him to see the great
laboratories in London, Paris, Copenhagen.  She swelled to perceive
how Nobel-prize winners received Her Husband, knew of him, desired
to be violent with him about phage, and showed him their work of
years.  Some of them were hasty and graceless, she thought.  Her
Man was prettier than any of them, and if she would but be patient
with him, she could make him master polo and clothes and
conversation ... but of course go on with his science ... a pity he
could not have a knighthood, like one or two of the British
scientists they met.  But even in America there were honorary
degrees...."

In this we see one constant of Lewis's writings: cynicism about
people and their motives.  We see it in MAIN STREET and BABBITT
before ARROWSMITH, and in ELMER GANTRY and DODSWORTH after it.
Here we see it in such passages as:

"Roscoe Geake was a peddler.  He would have done well with oil
stock.  As an otolaryngologist he believed that tonsils had been
placed in the human organism for the purpose of providing
specialists with closed motors.  A physician who left the tonsils
in any patient was, he felt, foully and ignorantly overlooking his
future health and comfort--the physician's future health and
comfort.  His earnest feeling regarding the nasal septum was that
it never hurt any patient to have part of it removed, and if the
most hopeful examination could find nothing the matter with the
patient's nose and throat except that he was smoking too much,
still, in any case, the enforced rest after an operation was good
for him.  Geake denounced this cant about Letting Nature Alone.
Why, the average well-to-do man appreciated attention!  He really
didn't think much of his specialists unless he was operated on now
and then--just a little and not very painfully."

Lewis is even cynical of his protagonist, noting how fickle
Arrowsmith is in his hero worship: "And the great god Sondelius had
slain Dean Silva, as Silva had slain Gottlieb, Gottlieb had slain
'Encore' Edwards the playful chemist, Edwards had slain Doc
Vickerson, and Vickerson had slain the minister's son who had a
real trapeze in his barn."

I suspect (though have not verified) that Arrowsmith's "Prayer of
the Scientist" is one of the more quoted passages of the book:

"God give me unclouded eyes and freedom from haste.  God give me a
quiet and relentless anger against all pretense and all pretentious
work and all work left slack and unfinished.  God give me a
restlessness whereby I may neither sleep nor accept praise till my
observed results equal my calculated results or in pious glee I
discover and assault my error.  God give me strength not to trust
to God!"

One of the issues Lewis touches on--though not perhaps as deeply as
one might wish--is the morality of conducting clinical tests with
control groups when testing vaccines or cures against deadly
plagues.  If the untreated group is sure to die, then what is the
purpose of leaving them untreated?:

"'It comes to me that there is pneumonic plague in Manchuria and
bubonic in St. Hubert, in the West Indies. If I could trust you,
Martin, to use the phage with only half your patients and keep the
others as controls, under normal hygienic conditions but without
the phage, then you could make an absolute determination of its
value as complete as what we have of mosquito transmission of
yellow fever, and then I would send you down to St. Hubert. What do
you t'ink?'

Martin swore by Jacques Loeb that he would observe test conditions;
he would determine forever the value of phage by the contrast
between patients treated and untreated and so, perhaps, end all
plague forever; he would harden his heart and keep clear his eyes."

It is not just for the ideas and "philosophy" that one reads
ARROWSMITH, but also for the style, the turn of phrase, such as:

"He had not merely to get through each minute as it came; the whole
grim thirty minutes were present at the same time."

and:

Watters's house was new, and furnished in a highly built-in and
leaded-glass manner. He had in three years of practice already
become didactic and incredibly married; he had put on weight and
infallibility; and he had learned many new things about which to be
dull. Having been graduated a year earlier than Martin and having
married an almost rich wife, he was kind and hospitable with an
emphasis which aroused a desire to do homicide."

and:

When Leora received the idea that he was going off to a death-
haunted isle, to a place of strange ways and trees and faces (a
place, probably, where they spoke funny languages and didn't have
movies or tooth-paste), ...

Another reason I read ARROWSMITH is that it has been given as an
example of a book that seems to meet many definitions of science
fiction, yet few would actually claim it was science fiction.  For
example, Barry N. Malzberg wrote, "[Collier's Encyclopedia says,]
'Science fiction is that form of literature with the effects of
technological change in an imagined future, an alternative present
or a reconceived history.'  Workable and cautious, but it does not
evade what could be called the ARROWSMITH problem--Sinclair Lewis's
novel, that is, which all of us science-fictioneers would
instinctively agree is *not* of the genre, would probably fall into
it under the terms of this definition."

Martin Arrowsmith is born and grows up in "the state of Winnemac
[which] is bounded by Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana."
Zenith is its largest city; the state university (with five
thousand students at the start of the twentieth century, but twelve
thousand in 1924) is in Mohalis.  Martin is from Elk Mills.  All
this certainly seems to be "an alternative present or a reconceived
history."  And the book is about "the effects of technological
change," the technology in this case being medicine, which Martin
constantly in conflict with doctors who want to stick to the old-
fashioned ways (which certainly to us in the twenty-first century
look like little more than patent medicines and humbug), while
Martin wants to develop new, more effective methods--better
diagnoses, vaccines, effective public health measures.

Yet I must agree that this is a book that shows that Collier's
Encyclopedia's definition does not fully capture science fiction,
or rather, like trawling nets for tuna, captures a lot that it is
not intended to.

(Winnemac and Zenith figure in other Lewis works, and there is some
cross-over.  For example, Arrowsmith meets George F. Babbitt at
lunch one day.  And the concept of "boosterism" plays a role in
ARROWSMITH.)  [-ecl]

==================================================================

                                           Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net


           If God creates a world of particles and waves,
           dancing in obedience to mathematical and physical
           laws, who are we to say that he cannot make use
           of those laws to cover the surface of a small
           planet with living creatures?
                                           --Martin Gardner