THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
07/11/14 -- Vol. 33, No. 2, Whole Number 1814
Co-Editor: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Co-Editor: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
More Than Ice Cream Melts Away (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The Tenth Man Exists (Well, sort of.) (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
DREAMS AND SHADOWS by C. Robert Cargill (book review
by Gwendolyn Karpierz)
LAWRENCE IN ARABIA, Lowell Thomas, Churchill, and ARROWSMITH
(letter of comment by John Hertz)
Doctor Who (letters of comment by Paul Dormer
and Tim Bateman)
This Week's Reading (BLINDNESS, TIME TRAVELER, and THE
EXPLODING WHALE) (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: More Than Ice Cream Melts Away (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
We stopped at a Baskin-Robbins for ice cream and they had jammed it
together with a Dunkin Donuts. This meant they had a choice of 18
flavors. Evelyn told the girl behind the counter that she thought
that there were supposed to be 31 flavors. The girl said she
didn't know. There just wasn't room for more flavors. Then it hit
me. "Evelyn, your most recent memories of Baskin-Robbins were
probably from before she was born." [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: The Tenth Man Exists (Well, sort of.) (comments by Mark
R. Leeper)
I was watching the film WORLD WAR Z. This film was rather a
surprise to me when I first saw it. Frankly, I was not expecting
it to be very much. It is, of course, another horror film where
the dead are coming back to life en mass and attacking the living.
This is a horror idea that has been around since THE LAST MAN ON
EARTH (1964)--from nearly fifty years ago. With many cheap horror
films on this concept that have been made I was not expecting there
was much new thought behind another one. The idea of zombies has
been mined out. Luckily I was wrong. WORLD WAR Z was a better
film than I could have expected it to be. It takes look at an
international response to an epidemic of zombie attacks.
One of the plot points is that the country best prepared to fight
off the attack turned out to be Israel. While most countries were
first hearing about zombie attacks and laughing at them Israel was
very industriously preparing counter measures. No other country
was taking zombie war reports seriously, so why was Israel? Brad
Pitt plays a United Nations investigator who goes to Israel to find
out.
Well, it turns out Israel knew to be alarmed at the reports of
zombie attack because they officially have a policy of critical
thinking. The film mentions three times that Jews suffered
disasters because they did not see what was coming. Once it was
the Holocaust, once the Munich Massacre, and once the Yom Kippur
War. After the latter if nine people looked at a suggested threat
and dismiss it, it is the responsibility of the tenth man to
disagree and behave as if the threat is a real one. This way any
rumor will be taken seriously by someone even if it is at first
only by the tenth man. Now a team of ten people investigate any
threat. If the first nine people all say the fear is absurd, the
tenth man has the responsibility to take the threat seriously and
investigate.
Initially this sounds like a good idea. No possibility can be
overlooked. But it does not take very long to start seeing
problems that this system gives rise to. Suppose the group of ten
looks at the possibility of invasion by radioactive wombats.
Obviously one member of the council will have the responsibility to
assume the country is under such an attack. 10% of the council
will be dedicated to doing all he can to try to prove there are
radioactive wombats invading. The council would die a death of a
thousand cuts, each member out there countering some supposed
threat. Let us face it, the world has no shortage of crackpot
theories and even less of a shortage of crackpot theorists.
Now what happens to the tenth man when he has to advocate an idea
he really does not believe in? This is not the only place where
society tells someone to advocate a point of view he does not
believe in. I am certain that there are plenty of Public Defenders
assigned to cases they do not believe in. I suppose that is not a
lot different from a tenth man policy. A Public Defender must
defend a stranger from the very system that employs the public
defender.
Well, Israel probably is not so formal about it, but actually,
however, it turns out there is a similar policy that Israel has
implemented. This is reported in "Lessons from Israel's
Intelligence Reforms," a report by the Saban Center for Middle East
Policy at the Brookings Institution from October 2007:
http://tinyurl.com/mtv-devil
It says:
"The devil's advocate office ensures that AMAN's (Israel's
intelligence directorate) intelligence assessments are creative and
do not fall prey to group think. The office regularly criticizes
products coming from the analysis and production divisions, and
writes opinion papers that counter these departments' assessments.
The staff in the devil's advocate office is made up of extremely
experienced and talented officers who are known to have a creative,
'outside the box' way of thinking. Perhaps as important, they are
highly regarded by the analysts. As such, strong consideration is
given to their conclusions and their memos go directly to the
office of the Director of Military Intelligence, as well as to all
major decision makers. The devil's advocate office also proactively
combats group think and conventional wisdom by writing papers that
examine the possibility of a radical and negative change occurring
within the security environment. This is done even when the defense
establishment does not think that such a development is likely,
precisely to explore alternative assumptions and worst-case
scenarios."
"While the devil's advocate office is an institutional level
safeguard against group think, there is also an individual-level
safeguard. The analysts themselves are given venues for expressing
alternate opinions. Any analyst can author a 'different opinion'
memo in which he or she can critique the conclusions of his or her
department. Senior officers do not criticize analysts who choose to
write such memos."
That is kind of a nifty idea. And I had to hear about it in a
zombie movie. You never know. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: DREAMS AND SHADOWS by C. Robert Cargill (copyright 2013,
Harper Voyager, $24.99 hardcover, 433pp., ISBN 978-0-06-219042-0)
(excerpt from the Duel Fish Codices: a book review by Gwendolyn
Karpierz)
I could start with the disclaimer that I love Celtic and faerie
mythology, but it's more that it's ingrained into my very being.
Is there a time when I didn't know what a kelpie was? Was there a
point at which I learned the difference between seelie and
unseelie? No. I could hazard a guess as to which book first
introduced me to those terms, but really, it feels like I've always
known these things.
(Not to worry, though--if /you/ don't know any of those things,
your lack of knowledge will hurt you neither in reading this review
nor this novel.)
C. Robert Cargill's DREAMS AND SHADOWS has it all: the Wild Hunt,
seelie and unseelie, changelings, the Tithe, redcaps and nixies and
Sidhe. It has a few things that aren't as well-known, too--Leanan
Sidhe and Bogarts and Bendith Y Mamau (the last of which even /I/
hadn't heard of). And then it has a few things you wouldn't have
ever expected. Djinn. Coyote (you know, /the/ Coyote. Not just
coyotes). Fallen angels. None of these things seem forced,
though. There is simply a seamless blending of mythologies that
truly make this interesting.
DREAMS AND SHADOWS begins with the arrival of a changeling child
(Knocks), and shortly expands to follow several other children: the
boy the changeling replaced (Ewan), his crush (Mallaidh), and Colby
Stevens, who meets a djinn (Yashar) who just wants to be
remembered. The main problem with this first half of the book is
that reading from the point-of-view of children is really not my
favorite thing.
Furthermore, this beginning is peppered with extracts from books by
"Dr. Thaddeus Ray" (identity to become somewhat-but-not-really
important later) that explain certain aspects of the world, notes
of backstory, etc. What these essentially translate to are multi-
page info dumps that, for the most part, become /entirely useless/,
because nearly everything explained in them is reiterated in the
story. Why not just tell us how magic ("dreamstuff") works in the
book, instead of categorically explaining it as if it were written
by a Ph.D. in BORING? I mean I had to reread the section on
dreamstuff three times, and I still only absorbed half of it--but
considering how crucial to the functioning of the world it becomes,
I probably should have retained more of it. Fortunately, these
sections are usually only two or three pages long.
Even more fortunately, there was a point where I turned a page and
saw a beautiful thing: BOOK TWO.
In Book One, everyone is a child with a vaguely irritating
narration style. In Book Two, everyone has grown older and
developed gorgeously. Even the side characters are amazing. I
love Bill the Shadow, and Scraps, and Bertrand. I /adore/ the
utter bro-ness that has fostered between Colby and Yashar, it is
absolutely the best thing about this book. They both have such a
difficult, despairing path to walk--together--and the way they
interact over it is fantastic. Mallaidh and Knocks play out their
roles with something more standardized and not unsurprising, but
Ewan overcomes that by making a transition that I never would have
expected. The fairy he must become is a bold choice, I think, and
it's /so cool/ to me that Cargill branches out like that.
And, luckily, by Book Two, we're past most of the need for
explaining, so the excerpts from Dr. Ray dwindle to almost none
and stop interrupting the fabulous flow of the second half of this
book. DREAMS AND SHADOWS started out alright, but ended up
excelling. There is a second book (QUEEN OF THE DARK THINGS),
which I will certainly be reading. And Cargill does a rare thing--
he doesn't end the first book with any sort of cliffhanger.
Nothing is left so untied that you couldn't stop here. DREAMS AND
SHADOWS is self-contained, a novel unto itself. It doesn't demand
you read the next one in order to achieve the fullest experience.
Instead, it makes you /want/ to read the next one, just to see what
other wonders await. [-gmk]
==================================================================
TOPIC: LAWRENCE IN ARABIA, Lowell Thomas, Churchill, and ARROWSMITH
(letter of comment by John Hertz)
In response to Evelyn's comments on LAWRENCE IN ARABIA in the
04/11/14 issue of the MT VOID, John Hertz writes:
In VOID 1801--imagine how much I must love these numbers
reminiscent of the English Regency--E noting S. Anderson's LAWRENCE
IN ARABIA (2013) seems to take away that it shows how all involved
were a bunch of lying liars. Of course that may be true, we're on
Earth. A perspective you might want is GOOD EVENING EVERYBODY
(1976), the first half of Lowell Thomas' autobiography.
In his day (1892-1981) LT's name was a household word. He seems to
have invented the travelogue. After touring the world narrating
WITH ALLENBY IN PALESTINE AND LAWRENCE IN ARABIA to four million
people, he published a book WITH LAWRENCE IN ARABIA (1924); he went
on with a pioneering and long-successful career as a newsman,
mainly in radio, over four decades, with five dozen books. He made
Lawrence famous.
LT is said to have reached twenty-five million listeners. Today
GOOD EVENING EVERYBODY has three customer reviewers at Amazon.com,
where it is 1,176,427 in sales, and people know Lawrence, if at
all, through the 1962 film, acclaimed as an artwork and painful to
everyone acquainted with the man.
If I had to recommend one book about World War I, in the centenary
year of the war's wretched beginning, that would be Churchill's
memoir THE WORLD CRISIS, in his own 1931 one-volume abridgement.
He was in it, he had to do it over again twenty-five years later,
he was a great writer, and he was a marvel of magnanimity.
Sturgeon said, "Science fiction is knowledge fiction." He also, as
E quotes in VOID 1805, said it's "a story built around human
beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not
have happened at all without its scientific contents." E correctly
notes that ARROWSMITH (S. Lewis, 1925) is often made a counter-
example. But she seems to accept that. Are you so sure ARROWSMITH
is not science fiction? [-jh]
Evelyn responds:
When I was growing up one of the few books in the house was Lowell
Thomas's PAGEANT OF LIFE, apparently actually autographed by him.
The result was that to me, Lowell Thomas is literally a household
name. (Lest you think we were not a book-reading family, we all
had library cards, at both the Air Force base library and the
public library wherever we lived, but we were not a book-*buying*
family.)
Yes, Churchill had to do it over again twenty-five years later, but
note that that was *after* he had written THE WORLD CRISIS and
abridged it.
As for ARROWSMITH, the plot summary indicates that it could be
considered science fiction if plagues in fictional countries are
science fiction, but then one would have to include pretty much all
Ruritanian fiction as science fiction (or fantasy). ARROWSMITH is
on my "to-read" list, so I may have a better idea after I read it.
[-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Doctor Who (letters of comment by Paul Dormer and Tim
Bateman)
In response to Tim Bateman's comment in the 07/04/14 issue of the
MT VOID that "Doctor Who" episode "The Curse of Fenric" takes place
on "a small island (off the coast of Scotland, IIRR)", Paul Dormer
writes:
Northumbrian coast, according to Wikipedia, which is not in
Scotland. The vicar was played by Nicholas Parson, ninety last
year and still going. He was the voice of sheriff Tex Tucker in
the early Gerry Anderson fantasy western series "Four Feather
Falls" (of which I have fond memories,but I was about six when it
was broadcast) and about twenty years ago I saw him as the narrator
in the first London run of Sondheim's "Into the Woods." [-pd]
Tim responds:
Geography was never my strong suit. I had not realised that that
was Nicholas Parsons playing the Parson. I suppose it made a
change from playing "Mornington Crescent." [-tmb]
In response to Paul's geographic comment, Jette Goldie writes:
"disputed territory" :-)
[-jg]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
BLINDNESS by Jose Saramago (translated by Giovanni Pontiero and
Margaret Jull Costa) (ISBN 978-0-15-600775-7) was chosen as the
discussion book for both the science fiction group and the science
fiction book-and-movie group. (These are in two different
libraries, but at this point have almost identical memberships, so
the former will probably cover the book and the latter the film and
the transition process.) The premise is that there is a sudden
plague of blindness. How it starts is never explained; it is
contagious, but how is also never explained. Saramago also treats
his unnamed and unlocated city as isolated--there is no indication
of whether the plague exists outside the city, but also no
indication of help or even curiosity from outside. (There is
mention of an airplane crashing when both pilots when blind during
a landing, so theoretically the plague could have spread to the
rest of the world, but this is never examined or mentioned.)
Saramago asks, "What do names matter?" and says, "Names are of no
importance here." But he still occasionally has to identify
characters, and so he is reduced to descriptors such as "the
doctor's wife" or "the boy with the squint." But this is at least
one of the origins of names, at least of family names: "John
Taylor" was originally a tailor, "Tom Hunter" was a hunter, and so
on. Just because "Doctor", "Doctorswife", and "Squint" are not
capitalized does not mean they are not names. (All this is
reminiscent of my discussion about names in ANTHEM by Ayn Rand in
the 06/13/14 issue of the MT VOID.)
Saramago is limited by this lack of names. He starts with a half-
dozen major characters: Patient 0, Doctor, Doctor's Wife, Thief,
Boy with Squint, and Girl with Dark Glasses. He then adds five
more: Pharmacist's Assistant, Hotel Maid, Taxi Driver, Policeman,
and Patient 0's Wife. He briefly mentions the Employee from
Surgery, Man from Hotel, and Hotel Policeman, but after that hardly
any new characters are introduced, which is just as well
considering how difficult it is to keep track of characters with
long names, especially given Saramago's peculiar attitude toward
dialogue and punctuation. Hint: In long stretches of dialogue,
capitalization indicates a change of speaker.
Saramago's characters describe themselves as "blind in eyes and
blind in feelings, because the feelings with which we have lived
and which allowed us to live as we were, depended on our having the
eyes we were born with, without eyes feelings become something
different, we do not know how, we do not know what, you say we're
dead because we're blind, there you have it. Do you love your
husband, Yes, as I love myself, but should I turn blind, if after
turning blind I should no longer be the person I was, how would I
then be able to go on loving him, and with what love, Before, when
we could still see, there were also blind people, Few in
comparison, the feelings in use were those of someone who could
see, therefore blind people felt with the feelings of someone who
could see, therefore blind people felt with the feelings of others,
not as the blind people they were, now, certainly, what is emerging
are the real feelings of the blind, and we're still only at the
beginning, for the moment we still live on the memory of what we
felt, you don't need eyes to know what life has become today..."
[Due to Saramago's bizarre punctuation, this is actually a dialogue
between two characters.]
Now there are two ways of looking at Saramago's contention here (or
more precisely, his characters' contentions, but it seems clear
that Saramago is at least to some extent supporting them). One is
that the idea that blind people's feelings are qualitatively
different from seeing people's feelings. But this seems to make
blind people into almost another species, and hence not human in
the way sighted people are. This is the negative interpretation.
A more positive interpretation is that blindness leads to different
feelings, but they are just different--not better, not worse, not
more, not less. This is a more positive interpretation. The
problem with trying to apply the latter interpretation is that
Saramago has made the life of blind people so unpleasant, so
repulsive, that it is hard to say the feelings that go along with
this are not actually worse than those of the sighted people. (The
sighted people do not act in the noblest fashion either, but one
can argue that their existence does not end up as degraded as the
blind, whose "descent" from civilization is what Saramago is
portraying.
As I alluded to in the previous paragraph, Saramago paints a much
more horrific--and realistic--picture of the results of
(near-)universal plague of blindness than books such as John
Wyndham's THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS. Science fiction--at least
traditional science fiction of the ASTOUNDING/ANALOG variety--
prides itself on asking "what if?" and then using scientific
analysis and reasoning to come up with an answer. Yet no one
(except perhaps Tom Godwin) has been willing to accept the
"inconvenient truths" that this leads to, so we get science fiction
that somehow manages to avoid many of the obvious negative results
by hand-waving. (For example, in EARTH ABIDES, potable water
continues flowing through the plumbing system much longer than it
would in reality, and the effects of all the dead bodies seem
considerably muted.) Instead, we usually get what has been called
"cozy catastrophe."
The result of Saramago's unflinching look is a very unpleasant book
to read, much as realistic war films are unpleasant films to watch.
TIME TRAVELER: IN SEARCH OF DINOSAURS AND ANCIENT MAMMALS FROM
MONTANA TO MONGOLIA by Michael Novacek (ISBN 978-0-374-52876-8) is
a combination of autobiography, travelogue and paleontology
textbook. Novacek describes his life leading to, and at, the
American Museum of Natural History. The bulk of his description is
of his field trips in the United States, Baja California, Chile,
and Mongolia. This is heavily interleaved with information about
ancient life forms and geology, but because this information is
introduced as warranted by the various locations and discoveries,
it is very disorganized. As a result, I found that I never really
got a coherent view from the science lessons, and the only
interesting parts were his accounts of the field trips, full of
anecdotes of bandits, rattlesnakes, near-fatal accidents with
horses, and so on.
In November 1970 a dead sperm whale was washed up in Florence,
Oregon. After considering several ways to dispose of it--too
decomposed to drag away, too close to the water to bury
effectively, etc.--the state decided the best way would be to blow
it up, creating small enough pieces that gulls and other scavengers
would finish the clean-up. Reporter Paul Linnman and cameraman
Doug Brazil of KATU in Portland were sent out on November 12 to
cover the event. What happened that day and for the next quarter
century is laid out in great detail in THE EXPLODING WHALE AND
OTHER REMARKABLE STORIES FROM THE EVENING NEWS by Paul Linnman
(ISBN 978-1-55868-743-1). Even so, there is not enough to fill a
book, so Linnman also describes his career and some of the
inspirational stories he has covered over the years. (Mobility-
impaired race car drivers such as Mark wrote about in his review of
DRIVEN are not a new phenomenon, apparently.) Frankly, I skimmed
the rest and read mostly about the whale.
And in answer to your next question:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBgThvB_IDQ with 1,716,825 views
so far. [-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
I wear a necklace, cause I wanna know when
I'm upside down.
--Mitch Hedberg