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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 06/11/99 -- Vol. 17, No. 50
Chair/Librarian: Mark Leeper, 732-817-5619, mleeper@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper, 732-332-6218, eleeper@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist: Rob Mitchell, robmitchell@lucent.com
HO Chair Emeritus: John Jetzt, jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian Emeritus: Nick Sauer, njs@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-447-3652 for details. The Denver Area Science Fiction
Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of every month at
Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
===================================================================
1. There seems to be a real backlash against the new STAR WARS
movie as being over-hyped and a disappointment to many people. I
guess I just do not understand that attitude. First of all, if it
was over-hyped, I did not see that hype coming from or being
controlled by Lucasfilm. It seems to me the advertising campaign
for the film was really very low-key. Up until about a month
before the film was released, about the only ad I saw was boy on a
desertscape. Not even the words of the title. The trailers
contained scenes from the film (which people were dying to see) but
that did little more than show those scenes. If this is hyping the
film, there are a lot of films that are far more hyped. It may be
that there was some real hyping by Lucasfilm someplace, but if so I
am unaware of it. There definitely was some excitement over the
release of the film and some hyping, but NONE of what I saw was
under Lucasfilm's control.
Somehow I do not get really excited about upcoming films. My
attitude toward THE PHANTOM MENACE was that it was going to be an
enjoyable two hours, and not much more. I would like to think that
that attitude left me more objective to evaluate what I was seeing.
And what I did see was a film that I think on any objective scale
is fairly marvelous. I made the statement that it probably showed
the greatest visual imagination of any film ever made. That
statement has been criticised, but not by anybody who has offered
any serious contenders. So I stand by that evaluation. I have
heard people complain that the plot was too simple for the film to
get a high evaluation. Actually the film has two plots going on at
the same time. One is a simple children's film plot, one is a
fairly sophisticated plot involving a political chess game. I
think that keeps the film engaging for all levels of audience,
which was exactly what the film should be doing, but which is very
hard to do for most screenwriters. I think that the people who are
disappointed deluded themselves. Lucas did what Lucas does. And
he did it in fine style. I stand by my high rating for THE PHANTOM
MENACE. [-mrl]
===================================================================
2. Back when I was growing up and living in Western Massachusetts
my family would occasionally spend a weekend in Manhattan. We
would go to museums and maybe a play. I remember going to the
American Museum of Natural History. And we were pretty much like
any American family going to the American Museum of Natural
History. That means our first stop would be the fourth floor and
the two rooms known as the Hall of D*I*N*O*S*A*U*R*S. What? Did
you think we went to the museum to see some stupid stuffed leopard?
No, baby. Dinosaurs come first, then whatever else there was time
for. The dinosaurs are what everyone wants to see. I mean let's
face it, your admission covers the dinosaurs and everything else
comes free. Really it is the American Museum of Dinosaurs.
Everything else is sideshow. We would go through and I would in my
most scholarly way try to identify the fossils on the wall for my
father. And my father would pretend not to notice that I was
cheating by running ahead and reading the labels. One hall had the
Brontosaurus and the Stegosaurus skeleton; the other hall had the
Tyrannosaurus. And between them was that great painting of the
pterodactyls on the cliff.
Years later when I moved to New Jersey, I went back to the museum
and found the halls pretty much just as I had left them. Then came
the day of great disillusion. SCIENCE NEWS ran an article saying
that there was really no such thing as a Brontosaurus. What was
called a Brontosaurus was really an Apatosaurus with a Camarasaurus
head. Apatosauri had longer more graceful heads. What is more,
dinosaurs did not drag their tails on the ground. When I was a kid
dinosaurs were always shown dragging those heavy tails on the
ground. Then on day someone asked what should have been an obvious
question. We have lots of fossils of dinosaur footprints. So
where are all the tail tracks in those fossils? It was one of
those simple questions that rocked paleontology. Of course,
dinosaurs had been portrayed wrongly since the very beginning. It
was bad news for museums whose dinosaur skeletons were nice and
stable supported by two legs and a tail. Balancing them on two
legs alone was not nearly so easy. I know about this problem. One
of my hobbies is origami. You have any idea how tough it is to get
a paper dinosaur to stand on two feet without a tail on the group
to support it? But I had to do it with my origami and I expected
the museum to do the same. So I waited for the American Museum to
saw off the head of the Brontosaurus and replace it. And they were
supposed to get the tails off the ground also. And they were
supposed to call it by the right name. Years passed and the museum
kept what they must have known was an outdated view of a dinosaur.
They were spreading what they knew to be misinformation. Nothing
irritates me so much in what should be an educational institution.
You would be surprised how many museums and national parks have
souvenir shops selling things labeled like
So I had a snit against the American Museum of Natural History.
And I wrote a nasty editorial at one point complaining. Then came
IDY. That is International Dinosaur Year. Except it was not
called that. It was called 1993, the year JURASSIC PARK was
released. I think every museum in the world that did not have a
dinosaur exhibit legally had to get one somewhere or be shut down.
Well, that is only slightly an exaggeration. But when we were
travelling a little later we saw museums all over the country that
had dinosaur exhibits that never would have thought of it before.
History museums would put in a pre-history section with dinosaurs.
In Texas we saw two different museums of Science and History. It
is an odd combination but the science is more general science. Yet
both museums had as you entered their dinosaur exhibits. What is
the point of going to a museum if you are not going to see
dinosaurs? And that was four years after JURASSIC PARK.
Anyway, I decided to give the American Museum of Natural History
another try in that, the most dinosaur-ish of years. I paid my
admission and guess what? The dinosaur hall was closed for
renovation. How could they accept patrons' money and then tell
them they could not see the dinosaurs? But in my heart of hearts I
also thought that they may at least be getting the facts right.
They spent what seemed like years. And then even after they opened
it took me a while to come and look. I will discuss what I found
next week. Meanwhile Evelyn will discuss cladistics, the concept
around which the new museum is based. [-mrl]
===================================================================
3. Some comments on cladistics by Evelyn C. Leeper:
My Background: I have taken only two formal biology courses: high
school biology in 1965, and genetics in 1969. I have, however,
read a fair amount on the topic outside of school, so I am not a
rank beginner.
Description: Cladistics attempts to classify living organism based
on the notion of shared derived characteristics, or descent from a
common ancestor. Its major premise is that at various points, a
single "species" bifurcated when one member developed a
characteristic significantly different from the others and passed
that characteristic on to all its descendents. For example, out of
the millions of vertebrates swimming around, one developed a
watertight egg and passed this characteristic on to its
descendents, while the others did not. So it and its descendents
form a "clade." Later on, a member of this group developed another
"advanced" characteristic, splitting it into two separate clades,
and so on.
Notes:
1. This whole notion is firmly based on evolution in a way the
Linnaen system never was. This isn't surprising, as Linnaeus
predated Darwin by quite a bit. Linnaeus's classification was
based (so far as I can speculate) on the idea that God created an
orderly universe, with animals having some relationship to each
other. But the Linnaen system had its flaws. For example, its
definition of "species" seemed to be "animals that can interbreed
with each other and produce fertile offspring." Unfortunately,
time has shown that there are instances where it is possible for A
to interbreed with B, and B with C, but not A with C. So there
were problems. However, cladistics doesn't solve them all.
2. Cladistics does lead to some startling conclusions. For
example, the terms "reptile," "ape," and "zebra" are, if not
meaningless, then merely colloquial. All those things we call
reptiles, for example, are part of the same clade as birds, and do
not form a clade of their own. Setwise, this can be expressed as
{crocodiles, {saurischia, ornithiscia}}, where birds are a subclade
of ornithischia.
Similarly (at least in the cladogram used in the American Museum of
Natural History and in Stephen Jay Gould's essay "What, If
Anything, Is a Zebra?" in HEN'S TEETH AN HORSE'S TOES) chimpanzees
and gorillas form a clade based on certain chromosomal traits they
share but other primates do not. Chimpanzees, gorillas, and humans
form a larger clade. Chimpanzees, gorillas, humans, and orangutans
form a still larger clade. But chimpanzees, gorillas, and
orangutans alone do not form a clade. In set notation, this is
something like {orangutans, {humans, {chimpanzees, gorillas}}.
There is no single set that contains only chimpanzees, gorillas,
and orangutans. (Admittedly, this is much dispute about the
precise cladogram for primates.)
And similarly for zebras, as Stephen Jay Gould explains the same
essay. The Burchell and Grevy zebras form a clade, but the
mountain zebra does not join with them to form another clade, but
rather with the horse. Then these two clades join to form a larger
clade: {{mountain zebra, horse}, {Burchell zebra, Grevy zebra}}.
However, the cladogram for zebras and horses is even more unsure
than the primate one; see the essay for details.
3. On the cladogram as it currently exists, our closest non-primate
relative is ... the bat. This is certainly not intuitive!
4. One problem is that currently only bony characteristics are/can
be used for distinguishing the clades of extinct animals. Why is
obvious--that's what we have to look at. But, for example, we know
that crocodiles (the nearest relatives to the dinosaurs that are
not themselves dinosaurs) are cold-blooded. We know that birds,
which are the most recent clade of the dinosaurs, are warm-
blooded. It is reasonable to assume that somewhere in between, a
dinosaur was born that was warm-blooded and that passed this
characteristic on. But we have no way of knowing when, or which
dinosaurs are on which "side" of this split. and since we seem to
have an unbroken chain of bifurcations based on bony parts, one
wonders where we would shoehorn this in if we did know.
(Living animals are divided according to other characteristics as
well--for example, whether the stomach has three sections or four.)
5. One result of this is that mammals are distinguished, not by
bearing live young (always a problem when we talked about the
platypus and such), or having hair, or producing milk, but by the
fact that we have three bones in the inner ear. This is certainly
not an intuitive defintion!
6. Cladistics has a problem when it comes to parallel evolution (or
convergent evolution). The major difficulty is in deciding what a
"shared derived characteristic" is. Cladists (is that the term?)
have decided that four limbs are a shared derived characteristic,
for example, even in animals that no longer (?) have them (e.g.,
snakes). Grasping hands are not a shared derived characteristic at
a high level--dinosaurs and mammals both developed them, but not
from a single common ancestor who was distinguished from all his
relatives only by grasping hands. Stripes on the zebra would be
another characteristic that one might think would be a shared
derived characteristic, but in fact, two different clades within
the "horses" appear to have developed them independently. (For
that matter, so did the tiger.) Actually, whichever of several
characteristics you could use in constructing the zebra/horse
clades, you find that it appears to have also developed
independently in another part of the cladogram.
7. Cladistics has another problem, which is in some sense the
mirror-image of the parallel evolution problem. If a single
individual develops a characteristic--say, three bones in the inner
ear--not all his offspring will necessarily have that
characteristic. And even of those that do, not all of *their*
descendents will necessarily have that characteristic. This makes
the descriptions of clades as "all descendents of an ancestor with
a new trait" extremely questionable. If mammal Jane was the first
to have a placenta, but of her three offspring Tom, Dick, and
Harry, only Harry had one, and of his offspring Groucho, Chico,
Harpo, Zeppo, and Gummo, only Chico and Zeppo had one, how do you
draw the clade of placental mammals? Jane is the common ancestor
of Chico and Zeppo with the shared derived characteristic, but
including all her descendents in the clade is not correct.
What this seems to mean is that while the Linnaean system had
problems in that it often associated animals which were actually
distant from an evolutionary standpoint, the cladistic system has
problems in its assumption that change occurs "instantaneously" and
irrevocably. [-ecl]
===================================================================
4. DARWINIA by Robert Charles Wilson (Tor 1998, HC, $22.95, ISBN
0-312-86038-2, 320pp) (a book review by Joe Karpierz):
[Warning--SPOILERS]
DARWINIA is subtitled "A Novel of a Very Different Twentieth
Century". That, combined with the cover art, led me to be a little
skeptical about this novel. Boy, was I wrong.
DARWINIA starts out in 1912, when the Miracle, for lack of a better
word, causes all of civilized Europe to disappear, replacing it
with a continent that is completely primitive and natural. No one
knows where Europe went, or how it happened. We follow one
Guilford Law, 14 at the time of the Miracle, now an adult, as he is
a photographer on an expedition to explore Darwinia, as the new/old
continent is called. He leaves his wife and daughter behind in the
new London, and sets off for the continent with a band of
explorers. At this point, the novel looks as if it's going into
the straight adventure narrative about exploring a new land and
finding something wonderful and interesting. I was preparing to be
bored.
Like I said, was I wrong. I like my tales to have a bit of Cosmic
Stuff in them. Something that is so huge and big that it stretches
the mind and imagination, sometimes to their limits.
Anyway, I was preparing to be bored--then I got hit right between
the eyes with Cosmic Stuff. As you might have guessed, things were
not as they appeared. Turns out that our Guilford Law is the real
Guilford Law. He's a recreation of the real thing, part of a vast
archive put together by Cosmic Entities in an effort to preserve
all the knowledge and the happenings of the universe against the
heat death that will inevitably come. Our Guilford Law's earth is
an earth that was recreated so that any of the Entities wishing to
study earth may do so.
Problem is, there's a war on. There are the folks who built the
Archives, then the bad guys who are trying to infiltrate and
destroy them. The Miracle turns out to be the result of a not
completely successful attempt by the bad guys to destroy the
duplicate earth. Thus, the recorded history is changed, and, well,
all our characters turn out not to be what they should be.
Denizens of the duplicate earth are drafted into the war on BOTH
sides, and we meet characters on both.
This novel certainly doesn't chronicle all of the war; it wasn't
meant to. Nor do I think that this is the first in a series of
novels about this war. Wilson creates a vivid and compelling
setting and characters about a little piece of the war. And like
the best of science fiction, the story is about the characters, not
the surrounding trappings. This is a wonderful book that I highly
recommend, and in my mind a contender for this year's Hugo. [-jak]
===================================================================
5. NOTTING HILL (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, two
actors who tread the line between over-abundant
charm and the cloying saccharine star in a
princess-commoner love story from England. Can
the most popular actress in the world find
happiness with a handsome but modest bookstore
owner with Hugh Grant's callow good looks? The
film has a few nice sparks of wit but never
really catches on fire. Rating: 5 (0 to 10),
high 0 (-4 to +4).
The plot of NOTTING HILL is simple enough. William Thacker (played
by Hugh Grant) is the handsome owner of a small and failing travel
bookstore. He had a marriage that failed. And now he lives with a
self-absorbed troglodyte of a housemate named Spike (Rhys Ifans).
Spike is rude, stupid, and completely impossible to live with.
Into William's shop one day comes Anne Scott (Julia Roberts).
Scott is sort of a combination of Meryl Streep, Gwyneth Paltrow,
Emma Thompson, and, yes, even Julia Roberts. Her face is plastered
on double-decker busses all over London. After the requisite shaky
start, Anne and William begin to date and go through some
predictable comedic situations. What happens when a luckless
bachelor comes to dinner at a friend's house with his date of the
evening, one of the world's most glamorous movie stars? (There is
a somewhat similar and considerably funnier sequence in MY FAVORITE
YEAR.) What happens when a man thinking that he is going on a date
finds that it really is a press publicity junket for a film and for
some reason he pretends he is there to interview the star? The
latter sequence goes on much longer than need be and eventually
outstays its welcome.
I have liked my share of romantic comedies, but NOTTING HILL just
never really catches on for me. Perhaps the two leads seem just
too charming and empty. Hugh Grant's boyish stuttering as he finds
almost the right words is growing tiresome. And Julia Roberts has
such a wide infectious smile from back molar to shining back molar.
I wonder if she needed surgery to stretch that grin. Their dialog
ranges from serious to cute to attempted cute. The film could have
had a perceptive look contrasting how the super-famous and the
unknown see the world differently, but NOTTING HILL rarely rises to
that occasion. Much of the humorous dialog seems borrowed from
"Seinfeld" with Spike standing in for Kramer. ("I once saw Ringo
Starr. Or it might have been Topol." "But they don't look even
remotely alike." "Well, he was standing too far away.") There are
certainly places the film just does not ring true. The giant film
that actress Anne Scott is currently starring in appears to be on
the level of GALAXINA, a film that would be unlikely to have a big
$15,000,000 star. The script is by Richard Curtis who has mostly
written scripts for Rowan Atkinson playing either Blackadder or
Bean. Curtis did write FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL and now has
returned to Hugh Grant territory. But FOUR WEDDINGS had muxh more
human drama mixed in with the comedy.
Director Roger Michell is probably best known for PURSUASION. Here
he seems to be depending a bit much on the star power of his two
major actors. Too frequently he allows the camera to lovingly just
take in Julia Roberts while she just stands with a wide smile. He
is apparently hoping that her magic and allure will just
effortlessly win over the audience. Even Roberts does not look
that good. Just a little cuter is Hugh Grant as he boyishly
stammers and says the unexpected while he tries too hard to express
himself. But really as is often the case, many of the background
characters are of greater interest than those in the foreground.
William's circle of friends are more interesting characters with a
more real set of problems than the principals. (How frequently are
major characters in American films bound to wheelchairs?) The film
has one sequence in which William visits Anne on a production set
and just to see the circus that is required to make a film makes
this the most interesting sequence in the film.
NOTTING HILL tries to return to the territory of FOUR WEDDINGS AND
A FUNERAL, but never manages to capture the same romantic spark. I
would give it a 5 on the 0 to 10 scale and a high 0 on the -4 to +4
scale. [-mrl]