THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
07/08/11 -- Vol. 30, No. 2, Whole Number 1657
Frick: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Frack: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Returning... Online... Free
(comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Short Film (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Quantitative Generosity (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Disney Princesses and Why We Already Have Enough (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
Norman Rockwell Museum (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
FEED by Mira Grant (book review by Joe Karpierz)
MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Tuna, International Space Development Conference, SUPER 8,
GREEN LANTERN, THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE
WRITING 2009, and Birthers (letter of comment
by Taras Wolansky)
This Week's Reading (Hugo-nominated novellas) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Returning... Online... Free
(comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Peter Nichols's excellent ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION is going
to have a new edition. Since the last edition, eighteen years ago,
it has doubled in size. But rather than sell it as a book, it is
going to be online and free. See:
http://www.ibtimes.com/art/services/print.php?articleid4748
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Short Film (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I won't say exactly what this is, but it is a 92-second film on
vimeo with a surprise and it was worth 92 seconds.
http://tinyurl.com/leeper-exorcist
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Quantitative Generosity (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
There is a Museum of Mathematics opening next year in New York
City.
http://momath.org/
Even their structure for contribution is mathematical.
Corporate/Institutional Funding Levels:
* Prime Donor -- $1,001
(the product of three consecutive primes 7 * 11 * 13)
* Triangle Supporter -- $5,050
(the 100th triangular number 1 + 2 + 3 + -- + 99 + 100 that
Gauss is said to have calculated as a young child)
* Cubic Base -- $19,683
(the number three cubed cubed)
* Key Factor -- $45,360
(the smallest number with 100 different factors)
* Prime Sustainer -- $102,359
(the smallest prime with six distinct digits)
* Functional Partner -- $230,631
(the smallest number which requires more than 400
applications of the hailstone function to reach 1)
* Factorial Patron -- $524,880
(18!!!, the triple factorial of eighteen
3 * 6 * 9 * 12 * 15 * 18)
* Exponential Benefactor -- $1,048,576
(2^20, two raised to the twentieth power)
I am very enthused about this and have made myself an Additive
Identity Benefactor. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Disney Princesses and Why We Already Have Enough (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
My niece has a whole line of a plastic dolls that are Disney
princesses. Now I read that by the year 2010 there were over
26,000 Disney princess products, and they are their own industry
pulling in $4,000,000,000 a year. The princess thing is big
business. There are now a whole lot of Disney cartoons with
Princesses as the main protagonists. You know, there was Sleeping
Beauty, Snow White, Cinderella, etc. Okay, Cinderella was not born
a princess but married into it more or less like Grace Kelly did.
Well, you know there were a bunch of different princesses. Now
there seems to be lot more, you can ask any little girl and most
little girls at some point seem to aspire to be princesses. I
don't think this is a very good thing. I do not much care for the
pink princess role model.
I still remember wondering why princesses are so popular in Disney
cartoons. What is a Disney princess, really? Riddle: What is the
difference between a Disney princess and a leech? A leech has some
use in medicine. A princess is just an attractive parasite. She
generally does not earn anything. She makes it in the world
because 1) she is attractive and 2) because of whom she is. Did
you hear me mention a personality virtue there? I didn't hear me
mention a personality virtue there. Take a look at a Disney film
with a princess. Early on you will have a song in which the
princess announces what she wants. And the rest of the story is
about her getting what she wants. She wins no victories for
humanity along the way. She knows what she wants and she always
gets it. Her job is to make herself the best prize possible for
the guy who is rescuing her.
Generally in these cartoons the princess sleeps through the real
action of the film or she imposes herself on a band of little ugly
men who are just as pleased as pitch because one of the pretty
people will condescend to look upon their ugly dwarfish continence.
Today so many little girls wanted to become useless princesses and
dreamed of the day it would happen to them and Prince Charming
would come tap-tap-tapping at their door.
Now, the princes that they love are not a whole lot better than the
princesses are, but they are better. They also make it on their
good looks and because of who they are. But they must also prove
they are brave of heart. While Sleeping Beauty is getting her
beauty sleep, Prince Charming is out sticking a sword in some
dragon. The prince and princess each get the same reward: each
other and a right to be half of the end-of-film breeding pair.
Each of these Disney films has a breeding pair of prince and
princess who come together at the end, presumably to breed, though
Disney generally tastefully does not emphasize that point too
strongly for the little children who would be seeing the film. And
you have a lot of the little girls in out world who dream of being
princesses. That was true even though about half were below
average in the good looks department and almost none of them had
courtiers who were anxious to serve her. Still, this was a
constant dream for the little ladies. Boys have fewer cinematic
role models who are just attractive parasites; however, Dracula was
definitely one. Sadly Dracula had to die to become what he was.
But boys died all the time and none came back as Dracula. There
are some tiny set of girls who are or become princesses.
I hear you saying that this princess fixation goes away as the
little girls get older. But I suspect it is part of the reason
that bigger girls love Jane Austen novels. Jane Austen novels are
frequently just Cinderella for adults. In a Jane Austen novel
the main character loves a man and later discovers that the man she
loves is rich, and when she gets him she also gets a mansion. Real
estate was really important to Jane Austen. Or the plot is that
that she discovers she detests that man who is rich, but later
realizes she loved him all along and when she gets him she also
gets a mansion. Now I have had people tell me that these really
were important novels because they showed how insecure life was for
a woman in early 19th century England. Perhaps, but an Austen
heroine seems most often to end up with a handsome dude and a very
large mansion. She has beaten the odds and has fallen into wealth.
And along the way she has not vanquished evil or won any sort of
victory for humankind. She certainly has not helped other woman
like herself. She has just claimed one handsome dude and claimed
one mansion, hurting the odds for all other women in the same
position.
You also see the Disney princess story showing up in films like
PRETTY WOMAN where the pretty prostitute ends up being courted by
the rich, handsome Richard Gere type. That really is a reframing
of Cinderella. This really has its downside. In Eastern Europe a
lot of women were convinced by the film that the success route to a
romantic happy ending was via the detour of becoming a prostitute.
This was not a good thing.
In any case, I think we need to have better heroes for little girls
these days. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Norman Rockwell Museum (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
On our recent trip to western Massachusetts, we visited the Norman
Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge. This is a fairly small museum;
although Rockwell painted thousands of pictures, most are held by
other people or organizations.
Rockwell started out on "Boys Life", but is primarily known for his
"Saturday Evening Post" covers. These focus on small town life,
home, and family. Even his scenes set in the big city look like
small towns. This, combined (I suspect) with restrictions from the
"Saturday Evening Post" based on not offending their readership,
resulted in an almost complete lack of diversity. There is a black
stable boy (03/17/34 cover), an American Indian (04/23/38), a black
as a redcap in a train station (12/23/44), and a black waiter
(12/07/46). That is the total extent of non-whites on the Post
covers. Even crowd scenes of people waiting for a train are all
white. It is not just the Post covers; the "Four Freedoms" have
all-white casts, even the one illustrating freedom of religion
(though that at least has ethnic diversity). (In fact, the most
important paintings Rockwell did are probably the "Four Freedoms",
which were used in a War Bond effort that sold $132,000,000 worth.)
What gets overlooked is that Rockwell's work after he left the Post
changed. "The Golden Rule" is certainly a picture of diversity.
He did civil rights paintings for "Look" magazine in the 1960s.
And he did work for movies, and also in the commercial art field
(for Upjohn, Coca-Cola, and others). But he never lost the
reputation achieved over four decades at the Post, and much of his
commercial work followed that style. (It is also true that in
terms of social awareness, a painting done late in his career was
labeled "Our Indian House Boy", when it portrayed a man at least
seventy years old.)
While the museum had only a small percentage of Rockwell's
paintings, the downstairs gallery has a display of all the
"Saturday Evening Post" covers he had done. A few notable Post
covers were:
The March 1, 1941, cover shows a definite Magritte influence.
The April 3, 1943; March 31, 1945; and April 3, 1948 issues were
April Fool's Day issues. These have "puzzle" pictures, the sort of
thing you'd see in a magazine with "Find 27 things wrong with this
picture." The coves have things like a cat with a raccoon tail, or
a clock with a backwards face.
The May 26, 1945, cover was "Hasten the Homecoming", which had
previously been used as a poster for War Bonds. It is probably
best known to the post-World-War-II generation from its use in the
film BROADCAST NEWS.
There was also a temporary exhibit, "Ice Age to the Digital Age:
The 3D Animation Art of Blue Sky Studios". Yes, it is about art,
but other than that it has nothing to do with Norman Rockwell that
I could see. I can only guess it was there in an attempt to get
younger people to come to the museum, or at least to find something
interesting when their parents drag them there. This included
computers that let you do some CGI character design, and a room
running all the "Scrat" cartoons. (One docent describing the
Rockwell paintings was hard to hear because of the sound of the
cartoons.) [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: FEED by Mira Grant (copyright 2010, Orbit, 571pp, ISBN
978-0-356-50056-0) (book review by Joe Karpierz)
I continue to be surprised by this year's crop of Hugo nominees.
Of course, I've reviewed both CRYOBURN and BLACKOUT before the
nominations were out and generally liked them, although they both
had problems. Then THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS surprised me, as
I typically don't care all that much for fantasy. Now FEED comes
along and turns out to be an entertaining zombie novel.
Or is it a zombie novel? Well, yes it is--it has zombies, and they
are the bad guys. So, sure it is. But I think it's more than
that.
It's the second decade of the 21 century. A combination of a cure
for cancer and the common cold is accidentally (well, maybe not
accidentally, but that's another story) released into the
atmosphere, infecting people with what's known as the Kellis-
Amberlee virus. *Everyone* is infected. The virus sits dormant
until one of two things happens: the person dies, at which point
that person becomes a zombie, or a person is bitten by a zombie, at
which point the person that was bitten becomes a zombie. The
country is changed forever. Areas are given ratings that indicate
how dangerous they are for non-zombies to enter or occupy. In
order to enter these zones, a person has to have a license,
typically attained by training and testing (what else, right?).
Certain areas have been abandoned--Alaska, for example, because it
was too big to clean up of zombies.
And bloggers are now big time news reporters. Hence our story.
Shaun and Georgia Mason, along with a third blogger who goes by the
name of Buffy (with a nice little nod to Joss Whedon's program)
apply to cover one of the big presidential candidates in the
upcoming 2040 presidential election. They get the job and are
assigned to travel all over the country with Senator Peter Ryman to
follow and report on his campaign as objectively as possible. The
name of the game for the bloggers, whose blog is called "After the
End Times", is to get as high a rating as possible while still
telling the truth.
There's a lot of background here. There appear to be three kinds
of bloggers: Newsies, Irwins, and Fictionals. Shaun's the Irwin--
he likes to take crazy and dangerous chances, all in the name of
the story. These chances typically involve him getting up close
and personal with "live" zombies. Georgia (or George), is a
Newsie. She reports the facts as she sees them, and tries to put
out a good, clean, honest product. Buffy is the Fictional, and she
writes all sorts of poems and stories related to what they are
covering. She is also the techie in the bunch. She knows their
equipment inside and out, and does all the set up, teardown, and
maintenance of the recording devices the bloggers use. And they
use a *ton*.
The problem is that the poop hits the fan as zombies attack the
campaign caravan in places where there shouldn't be any attacks.
People are dying as a result, and as you might guess, these attacks
are no accident. There's a bad guy here too, one of Ryman's
opponents who withdraws from the campaign to become Ryman's running
mate, the idea being that if both major ideologies are on the same
ticket, said ticket is a shoo-in for the White House. Mayhem
ensues.
This is Mira Grant's first novel. Then again, Mira Grant is really
Seanan McGuire, so only sort of, and it is also the first book in a
trilogy. And it's a good one. It's fast-paced, lots of stuff
happens, and it doesn't try to bang you over the head with any kind
of message. It's not complicated-- it's really an adventure story.
Heck, I like all that stuff.
No, it's *not* what I would normally read. Here's the news
bulletin that everyone already has read, probably several times:
Most of the Hugo nominees over the last several years are not what
I would normally read. But here's the odd twist: unlike THE
HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS, I plan on reading the next book in the
series. *That's* something I wouldn't have thought I'd do, but I
like this book that much.
So, is FEED a novel worthy of a Hugo? I don't think so. It's
pretty good, and it has some faults (most books do), but when I
think of Hugo-winning novels, I don't think of this one. It just
doesn't match up to past winners. I have to say I do like it
better than both CRYOBURN and THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS, and
the jury is still out on the Willis doorstop. So, while I so far
have actually enjoyed all the nominees, I don't think any of the
books that I've completed are Hugo quality.
Next up is ALL CLEAR, the conclusion of the story started in
BLACKOUT by Connie Willis. I took it along on my trip to Colorado
because I knew I would have time to read it on the airplane and
thus maybe make a dent in it. Hopefully the story will get better
with part 2. [-jak]
==================================================================
TOPIC: MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Woody Allen has returned to writing light and fun comedy
for this whimsical fantasy of Paris past. Gil, a talented writer,
is soon to marry a beautiful woman from a rich family. Visiting
France with his fiancée's parents, he dreams of Paris of the 1920s
with some of history's greatest artists. Woody Allen has made many
films since his excellent CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, most of which are
at best only partially successful. This is his most satisfying
film in decades, a film with wit and ideas that is primarily about
romanticism, illusion, and nostalgia. Rating: +2 (-4 to +4) or
7/10
Spoiler-free: I have tried to avoid spoilers, though telling the
main premise of the film is itself a spoiler.
Woody Allen is a comic turned writer and filmmaker. As a writer
his forte was a sort of tall tale written with an intellectual
setting and titles like "The Whore of Mensa". Eventually he proved
to be a major talent as a filmmaker for a streak of films. That
streak culminated with CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS (1989). Since that
film he has flailed about, making many rather minor films. Most
people I talk to say he did two or three good films in that time,
but there is no strong consensus on just which films those are. I
rather liked his BULLETS OVER BROADWAY (1984), a tall tale of a
Broadway actor so bad that a gangland-related play producer has him
murdered. MIDNIGHT IN PARIS is another tall tale, this one with a
both literary and sci-fi touch. This one could almost be an
episode of "The Twilight Zone", but with the sophisticated humor of
Woody Allen.
The film opens with an extended photo-essay of the beauty of Paris
filmed by Darius Khondji. It is important for the story for the
viewer to be convinced that Paris is the most beautiful and
romantic city in the world. And Woody Allen has a knack for
romanticizing settings in big cities that is convincing. One might
almost believe for the course of this film that he loves Paris now
more than his beloved Manhattan.
Gil (played by Owen Wilson) is a successful screenwriter, but he is
also an aspiring and talented novelist. He has more talent than
taste, apparently, since he is engaged to Inez (Rachel McAdams), a
beautiful but spoiled and selfish daughter of a nouveau riche Tea
Party member. Gil's liberal viewpoint brings him to clash with his
soon-to-be father-in-law. Gil is fascinated by the vanished world
of Paris of the 1920s, which was a magnet for international
luminaries like Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein,
and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He is nostalgic for this Paris that he
knows but he never really saw, and the materialistic Inez does not
understand his attraction. But the disagreement may be coming to a
crisis as Gil is thinking of throwing over his wealthy lifestyle
built on studio money and coming to Paris to write novels like his
literary heroes did.
This is the basis for a fantasy that Allen mines for some of his
best humor in years. He has assembled a good cast of supporting
characters including Michael Sheen who seems to have been tempted
away from playing Tony Blair. Particularly fun are Corey Stoll,
Alison Pill, Kathy Bates, and especially Adrien Brody.
Woody Allen has given us a constantly engaging fantasy, light and
funny. It is as if he has reached into the past and pulled out the
writer he was in his younger days. Young Woody Allen, it is great
to see you again. Rating +2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10.
Film Credits: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1605783/
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/midnight_in_paris/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Tuna, International Space Development Conference, SUPER 8,
GREEN LANTERN, THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING 2009,
and Birthers (letter of comment by Taras Wolansky)
In response to Mark's comments on tuna fish in the 05/27/11 issue
of the MT VOID, Taras Wolansky writes:
Mark's commentary on tuna fish made me wonder if he's bucking for
Andy Rooney's old spot on "60 Minutes"--or maybe Emily Litella on
"Saturday Night Live"... [-tw]
Mark replies, "I have never seen Emily Litella. Andy Rooney would
not be a bad role model." [-mrl]
In response to Dale Skran's ISDC report in the 06/10/11 issue,
Taras writes:
One error in Dale Skran's interesting ISDC 2011 report: the name
of the NASA bigwig (and SF fan) is Jesco von Puttkamer, not
Puttakmer.
Privatizing manned space travel sounds like a good idea, but I'm
uneasy about giving up existing launch vehicles in favor of things
that don't exist yet. We may be buying a pig in a poke. [-tw]
In response to Mark's review of SUPER 8 in the 06/17/11 issue,
Taras writes:
J. J. Abrams's screenplay to SUPER 8 seemed slapdash to me. A man
derails a military train (designed to carry nuclear weapons?!) by
running a small pickup head-on into it. And the pickup driver is
not even very seriously injured.
Sometimes sloppy filmmakers hope the audience doesn't notice
something. For example, in RAGTIME (1981), Coalhouse Walker
murders several policemen with a bomb. But we're supposed to
sympathize with him, so the policemen are very, very far away and
very, very small when they are killed. In SUPER 8, we're supposed
to sympathize with the driver of the pickup, so we have this wildly
spectacular train wreck in which absolutely no one is hurt or
killed, as far as we can see (though the kids are clearly put at
risk).
In a richly absurd scene, the sympathetic pickup driver is being
questioned in his hospital bed by members of the U.S. military. He
is slow to answer their questions, so they--kill him by injecting
poison into his IV. Terrific interrogation technique, guys!
Mark replies, "The film is a mismatched set of some things that are
good and some not so good. You do bring up some good points. But
I interpreted the scene that they had gotten all that the
interrogators could get from the man and were just silencing him.
Poison IV? Isn't that what I have growing in my back yard. [-mrl]
Taras continues:
In another absurd scene, the town Deputy Sheriff does not hesitate
to assault several soldiers to escape from military custody, as if
he were an OSS agent in occupied France.
Which raises another issue. Mark writes, "It is just the sort of
film that Spielberg might have made around 1979." Would he,
really? In RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, set in the 1930s, the villains
are Nazis, who are evil, evil, evil so that anything you do to them
is okay. But in a movie set in 1979, would he have dared to treat
American soldiers as his cardboard Nazis, who murder a helpless man
tied to a hospital bed? ("Adolf Hitler, Jimmy Carter, what's the
difference?")
It's significant, and tells you something about the ideological
divide in America today, that it didn't occur to Abrams that
treating American soldiers as the equivalent of Nazis might offend
some Americans, of a more patriotic persuasion than he. [-tw]
In response to Dale Skran's review of GREEN LANTERN in the 06/24/11
issue, Taras writes:
About GREEN LANTERN, the movie and the comic book: just 3600
members of the Green Lantern corps to watch over the entire
Universe? Check my arithmetic, but that sounds like about 100
million galaxies apiece. Hal Jordan won't be rescuing too many
cats in trees, or ladies in distress. Then again, in comic books
the Universe often seems to be about the size of Connecticut.
[-tw]
In response to Evelyn's comments on THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND
NATURE WRITING 2009 in the 07/01/11 issue, Taras writes:
The problem with THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING 2009
is that the information goes out of date pretty fast.
I read part of the Wendell Berry essay on "Faustian Economics",
enough to make me curious about the author. Here you have an essay
on energy economics written by someone who seems ignorant of the
subject. Turns out Berry is a 77-year-old poet and "man of
letters" rather than an expert.
According to a recent article in "Scientific American", a huge wave
of fossil fuels is about to hit, destroying the premise of Berry's
lengthy essay--but perhaps this was less well-known three years
ago. (Something I didn't know: when an oil field "runs dry", it
still contains two-thirds of the oil it ever did. Technologies to
tap into that are constantly improving.)
The "Wired" article about reassembling torn-up Stasi documents
reminded me of Vernor Vinge's RAINBOW'S END, which features the
(preposterous) notion that libraries will be intentionally shredded
and computer-scanned. One passage in the article made me smile.
It seems that the computer scientist who developed the reassembly
software "came to West Berlin's Technical University in 1974 to
study engineering... A Christian, he felt out of place on a campus
still full of leftist radicals praising East German communism and
cursing the US."
The "National Geographic" article on Neanderthals shows its age
(October 2008). It's missing all the recent DNA findings about
non-Africans having Neanderthal ancestry, and Melanesians, ancestry
from Denisovans, hitherto-unknown cousins of the Neanderthals.
It's hard to know how much of what is in the article is still to be
trusted. [-tw]
And on a new topic, Taras writes:
About Obama's handling of the birth certificate "controversy", I
thought he was being clever, letting it go on as long as it made
some of his critics look silly, and then putting the kibosh on it
as soon as Donald Trump's celebrity began to inflate it into a real
issue. (However, Karl Rove has said that, in real life, White
House staff are too busy just keeping their heads above water, so
anything that looks like a clever plot is just sheer luck.)
Before that, I heard Rush Limbaugh try to throw cold water on the
thing. (I got the impression this happened several times a week,
but I don't listen to Rush that often.) While he would find it
vastly amusing if Obama were shown to be Constitutionally
unqualified to be President, he explained, it was not in the cards.
To which the caller replied that, if Trump thought it was
important, there must be something there.
Around the same time, I saw Trump on the Bill O'Reilly show.
O'Reilly displayed Obama's birth announcement in a Honolulu
newspaper. Trump mumbled something about "they're able to fake
anything these days."
Of course, the Obama myths pale next to George Bush's. His IQ of
95 (125 according to his military entrance exam). The "stolen"
2000 election (which a later recount showed he would have won
anyway). The (forged) Air National Guard letter accusing him of
shirking his duty. Lying us into the Iraq War (Sens. Kerry and
Clinton said the same things, conventional wisdom at the time).
And, of course, the "truthers" still accuse him of leading a vast
conspiracy to fake the 9/11 attacks (for which Osama bin Laden
repeatedly took credit).
Thank you for another great bunch of issues! [-tw]
Mark responds, "Issues of the VOID or political issues?" [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Once again, I sally forth to do battle with this year's Hugo
nominees for short fiction. Why "battle"? Because while they are
all available, several of them are available (to me) only in
electronic form, which is *not* my preferred medium. My palmtop is
okay for the short stories, but not for the novelette and novella
lengths, and reading them on my desktop is just not comfortable.
(And, no, I don't feel like printing out the stories.) It used to
be that most of the stories were available in the major magazines
(ANALOG, ASIMOV'S, and F&SF) and I either had or could get those.
But now several are from webzines that have no hard-copy form and
there is no other choice.
On the other hand, the electronic availability of the stories means
that more of the voters can actually read the stories and vote on
them.
Anyway, here goes.
Best Novella
I previously reviewed THE LIFECYCLE OF SOFTWARE OBJECTS
by Ted Chiang (published in book form), saying: Having said how
uninterested I was in the adventures of the protagonists in the
virtual reality world in Greg Egan's ZENDEGI, I find it ironic (or
something) that I enjoyed THE LIFECYCLE OF SOFTWARE OBJECTS by Ted
Chiang, which is almost entirely about adventures of the
protagonists in a V.R. world. Maybe it is because Chiang focuses
more on the interactions of characters in our world with the
constructs, while Egan spends too much time in the detailed
construction of virtual reality scenarios.
"The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon" by Elizabeth Hand (in
the anthology STORIES edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio) is
a sentimental secret history of aviation sort of story. There's a
fragment of a nitrate film showing some unknown flying machine, and
all sorts of nostalgia for the early days of flight. Eh.
If you didn't know that "The Sultan of the Clouds" was written by
Geoffrey A. Landis (in ASIMOV'S 09/10) you might guess Charles
Stross from the subject matter. It is a story very much based on
economics and social class (as determined by wealth and commercial
power), with some odd fantasy tropes on the marital arrangements.
There is also a hard science element, making it a very motley story
indeed. But it all works somehow. Is it Hugo-level? That's hard
to say, but it is better than most of its competition.
"Troika" by Alastair Reynolds (published in the anthology GODLIKE
MACHINES) is about an alien artifact that appears in a comet-like
orbit around our sun. Three attempts are made to investigate, but
it is so alien that even trying to study it causes unexpected
problems. Reynolds has his characters all part of the Russian
space program because in the future they are the main presence in
space. There are echoes of Clarke's Rama in this, but while in
some sense it goes beyond Rama, it is also less satisfying.
"The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen's Window",
Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Summer 2010) is "fantasy with an
agenda." The narrator is from a society in which women rule, and
men are "worms", and more along that vein, and a lot of the story
reinforces the validity of all this. It is true that eventually
there is some question about whether this is good, but my feeling
is that Swirsky ultimately says that it is, or rather that the
alternative is bad. Combine that for my general disinterest in
high fantasy, and you have a story that does very little for me.
My voting order is: "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", "The
Sultan of the Clouds", "Troika", (no award), "The Lady Who Plucked
Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window", "The Maiden Flight of
McCauley's Bellerophon"
Next week I will cover the novelettes and short stories (assuming I
finish them all). [-ecl]
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Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file
has already earned my contempt. He has been given
a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal
cord would fully suffice.
-- Albert Einstein