THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
09/10/10 -- Vol. 29, No. 11, Whole Number 1614
C3PO: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
R2D2: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Hugo Awards
Salute (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Do We Need Manned Spaceflight? (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
BELLWETHER by Connie Willis (audiobook review
by Joe Karpierz)
WATER WARS (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Education and Careers (letter of comment by Charles Harris)
TCM Suggestions (letter of comment by Kip Williams)
This Week's Reading (Hugo Awards and "The Precedent")
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: Hugo Awards
Best Novel: (tie) THE CITY & THE CITY, China Miéville;
THE WINDUP GIRL, Paolo Bacigalupi
Best Novella: "Palimpsest", Charles Stross
Best Novelette: "The Island", Peter Watts
Best Short Story: "Bridesicle", Will McIntosh
Best Related Book: THIS IS ME, JACK VANCE! (OR, MORE PROPERLY,
THIS IS "I"), Jack Vance
Best Graphic Story: GIRL GENIUS, VOLUME 9: AGATHA HETERODYNE AND
THE HEIRS OF THE STORM, written by Kaja and Phil Foglio;
art by Phil Foglio; colours by Cheyenne Wright
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: MOON
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Who: "The Waters of
Mars"
Best Editor Short Form: Ellen Datlow
Best Editor Long Form: Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Best Professional Artist: Shaun Tan
Best Semiprozine: CLARKESWORLD
Best Fan Writer: Frederik Pohl
Best Fanzine: Starshipsofa edited by Tony C. Smith
Best Fan Artist: Brad W. Foster
John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: Seanan McGuire
[With Jack Vance at 94 and Fred Pohl at 90 on the list, this
year's Hugo winners may have the oldest average age of any year's.
-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Salute (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
This week's VOID is a salute to Parmesan, the cheese that made
Italy grate. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Do We Need Manned Spaceflight? (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
In the space of about a week I have read three thought-provoking
articles about the future of humanity in space. Each was written
by an Englishman, coincidentally, and taken as a whole they are a
whole lot more than the sum of their parts. We have opinions by
Martin Rees, officially Britain's Astronomer Royal; we have
opinions by Charles Stross, one of the leaders of the current
generation of science fiction writers; and we have Stephen Hawking
who is... well... Stephen Hawking.
Martin Rees sees spaceflight as a means toward bringing
astronomical data to the Earth. Now what do you want to send to
collect that information? Do you want to send instruments, which
are fairly robust and durable and these days can also be made
fairly miniature and robotic. Or do you want to send humans in
these big high-maintenance bodies? What humans can usefully do is
eventually dwarfed by what instruments can do. The instruments can
even be controlled and redirected remotely by real breathing humans
one Earth. The effort to actually put humans in space is just not
cost-effective if you want to collect data.
If I may expand on what Rees is saying: the resources required to
keep humans alive off-world are far greater and more complex that
that which are needed to maintain robots and keep them useful.
Machines do not have private lives, which means that retrieving
them and bringing them back to Earth is much less necessary than it
is with humans. The complexity of the life support systems for (a)
human(s) were probably much more to put a man in orbit than those
which were required for just sending a man up into space for a few
minutes and bringing him back. Sending a crew to the moon required
much more life support. And let's face it. Sending people to Mars
is going to require two years travel time out and, if the crew is
coming back, two years of travel time coming back. That is
probably about as much sacrifice as we can ask a Mars mission crew
to make. But that is just the next rung on the ladder.
Just in our solar system the ladder to the stars has rungs that
increase greater and greater in their distance apart. Our economy
is (at least currently) crumbling while the costs of sending crews
further out will increase exponentially. We are limited in the
potential for what we can hope to accomplish in space if we have to
tend humans along the way. It is just too expensive to have the
life preservation systems that humans will need. Rees sees putting
humans on Mars as more of a stunt than a real scientific endeavor.
"I hope indeed that some people now living will walk on Mars, but I
think they will do this with the same motive as those who climb
Everest or the pioneer explorers," he says. If we are serious
about increasing knowledge we would send instruments.
Stross does not like the brand of thinking that expanding into
space is equivalent of the expansion into the American West. The
simple difference is that in the American West you could breathe
the air and you could plant grain. In the 19th and 20th century
you could move to the West and get more out of the environment than
you put in getting there. That is not true of any destination
outside of Earth. Colonization will require extreme dependence on
being supplied from Earth.
Stephen Hawking's article, however, says more that it is sending
humans into space that is the necessity. The abstract scientific
knowledge may be important to him, but even more so he sees space
as a necessary refuge from what is happening right here on Earth
currently. He is thinking more about what will be the effects of
global warming, nuclear proliferation, and any of a huge assortment
of other threats we face. We can have a huge compendium of data
collected from space probes, but if, for example, we are still
stuck on Earth and climactic warming evaporates off the oceans, all
that data will do us little good. Hawking tells the editors of the
Big Think website that "it will be difficult enough to avoid
disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the
next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its
eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid
dropping the basket until we have spread the load."
So which opinion do you believe? I think they are all correct.
And that is very scary. Unless conditions change a very great deal
it looks like getting civilization off the planet is not really an
option and the same time failure to do so is also not an option if
the human race is to survive.
What do I conclude from all this? As the Earth warms up and as a
very possible result we are getting floods, melting ice, fires,
monsoons, and more disasters, as the Phytoplankton die off, as the
oceans have smaller and smaller stocks that can be used for food,
as there are dozens of more trends just as troubling, it looks like
we might be running out of options. We either have to preserve the
Earth or be able to survive without it. Actually we need to do
both, and realistically we probably cannot do either.
Martin Rees's opinions at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jul/26/martin-rees-space.
Charles Stross's opinions at http://tinyurl.com/35ss5en.
Stephen Hawking's opinions at http://bigthink.com/ideas/21570.
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: BELLWETHER by Connie Willis (copyright 1996 Connie Willis,
2009 Blackstone Audio Inc.; 6 hours, 30 minutes; narrated by Kate
Reading) (audiobook review by Joe Karpierz)
Anyone who has met Connie willis knows that she is a funny,
personable, and friendly human being. Anyone who has listened to
her speak, whether at panels at conventions, a lecture at a high
school auditorium (she came to our town many years ago to do just
that), or as a Mistress of Ceremonies at various big time events
knows that she is an extremely funny lady. And anyone who has read
any of her work knows that she is one of the most talented (and
decorated) writers in our field today.
And thus we come to BELLWETHER.
Dr. Sandra Foster is a statistician investigating the origins of
trends and fads for the corporation known as HiTek. HiTek has her
researching trends in order to determine how trends start, so that
they can start one and thus capitalize on the knowledge. She is
currently attempting to discover the origins of hair bobbing. Dr.
Bennett O'Reilly is a researcher specializing in chaos theory who
ends up studying monkey behavior for HiTek. They meet at HiTek
when Flip, the fairly useless and insolent office assistant, mis-
delivers a package to Foster that is intended for someone else
entirely. Things go wrong for both Foster and O'Reilly. Much hi-
jinks and hilarity follows.
But you knew that might happen. This is a Connie Willis book. No,
not all of her books are funny. This one is. Those of you who work
in cubicle/corporate land know HiTek. Pointless meetings, led by
"management" (whose name we never discover, but that's okay, it's
"management", complete with new silly acronyms, sensitivity
exercises, and simplified funding forms. We've got office
politics, office romance, and office incompetence. We've got
birthday parties, coffee houses, personal ads in the paper. And we
have Flip.
At one time or another in our lives, we have worked at a
corporation where the office assistant (he/she may not have had
that title, but you know what I'm talking about, is completely and
utterly incompetent, disrespectful, and insolent. Flip rolls her
eyes, wears duct tape, has her hair cut weird (to which you might
say "so what?", and be right, but it's important to the story), and
in fact seems to be at the center of every current trend. And she
is in the middle of every problem that our characters encounter
during the course of the novel.
Willis sprinkles pop culture references and the history of certain
trends throughout the book. Many of you will probably remember
some of them--she talks about fads back in the 1800s through to the
present day. She talks about current trends that come and go
quicker than you can turn a page. It's entertaining and
informative, and she clearly did her research in that area.
So, what was the book *about*, you may ask. I don't rightly know.
It's about silly corporations trying to dictate how science should
work in order to win a grant that will set the researchers free for
life. It's about fads, trends, love in the workplace, and
discovery (speaking of discovery, there's a cool little revelation
near the end of the book that was quite surprising to me, and thus
elevated my opinion of the book higher than it was at that point).
And most of all, it was about *fun*. Which is not what most of
this year's Hugo nominated novels were about. *This* is a book to
read. Go out and get it. Read it. Laugh with it. Enjoy it.
I also can't say enough about the reader, Kate Reading. She reads
all the parts mostly to perfection, but I think she steals the show
when it comes to Flip. I could just see the rolling of the eyes,
the exasperated look, and the whole lazy person persona (does that
make sense) just through Reading's, well, reading. Go read this.
It's good. [-jak]
==================================================================
TOPIC: WATER WARS (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Focusing predominantly on Bangladesh Jim Burroughs
examines the water crises in countries facing floods and drought.
Bangladesh's problems are particularly severe because they are
heavily influenced and in large part caused by damming and human
manipulation of rivers in India with insufficient concern for the
country that is so dependent on that water downstream. Martin
Sheen narrates a 55-minute documentary examining a country that
before long may be simply washed away. This is a serious and
worrying documentary. Rating: +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10
Second only to air, the substance that the human body most urgently
requires is water. Where clean drinking water is not available it
is impossible for people to live for long. Civilizations' fates
are frequently determined by the rivers that run through them.
Here in the United States the source of most of our water comes
from rain falling on our own country. The Mississippi contains
some water from Canada, but most of the Mississippi River Basin is
in the United States. The Brahmaputra River, on the other hand,
follows a course that starts in Tibet, continues through China,
flows into India, and then flows into Bangladesh where it is
desperately needed for survival. The river provides 65% of
Bangladesh's fresh water. That means that the river water has been
through two industrialized countries before it reaches Bangladesh.
Both India and China are building dams for electrical power and
general water control the river. Bangladesh is a small country
bordered on the west, north, and east by India. Its rivers are its
lifeblood and they consist entirely of water that has flowed
through India.
Lack of control of its water's sources places Bangladesh in a
particularly vulnerable position. Without consulting Bangladesh
the dams of India can cut off that water, causing drought, or open
the floodgates and release a flood on Bangladesh. As a very low-
lying country--essentially a delta--Bangladesh is subject to huge
floods and droughts, not from nature, not from global warming, but
from India controlling the waters running through its country. As
India opens its floodgates the floods frequently come without
warning in Bangladesh. When India closes its floodgates or
redirects its water, rivers in Bangladesh dry up and droughts
follow. But Bangladesh is not the only victim of less than careful
water management in India. Indian villages are also flooded and
inundated by rising waters caused by damming. People from
Bangladesh and from India politically protest India's water
management policies. Between water manipulation to the north and
rising water levels in the Bay of Bengal to the south low-lying
Bangladesh can flood covering as much as 70% of the country,
displacing large percentages of its population. Making matters
worse for the dry times, while the Brahmaputra supplies 65% of
Bangladesh's fresh water, in 2006 India announced a mammoth river-
interlinking project that would draw off 70% of that water.
Jim Burroughs spent two years in Bangladesh examining that
country's water issues and the increasingly political responses.
WATER WARS--subtitled WHEN DROUGHT, FLOOD AND GREED COLLIDE--was
the result of that study. To give his viewers a little more of a
feeling they have a stake in these issues, Burroughs shows us
water issues of two other countries. One is the Netherlands, which
had a disastrous flood in 1953, but now can boast preeminent
expertise in the technology of controlling water and preventing
flooding. The Dutch were more immediately ready to help remove the
waters after the Katrina flood than our own government was, which
brings up the other country with water control problems. That is,
of course, the United States, not just for the problems from
Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed so much of New Orleans. The
United States also faces massive ongoing droughts in its Southwest.
There simply is not enough fresh water to supply the large
population areas of that region.
These are matters of life and death. Nobody can survive for long
without fresh water, and these are issues that could lead to some
very serious wars. It is important to know about what is happening
and track how serious the problem is becoming. I rate WATER WARS a
+2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10.
Film Credits: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1509836/combined
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/water_wars/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Education and Careers (letter of comment by Charles Harris)
In response to Mark's comments on the dental fraternity in the
09/03/10 issue of the MT VOID, Charles Harries writes, "A high
school classmate of mine, Lewis Smoller, swears that his career
choice was dictated by his name. A friend told him: 'Lew Smoller--
with that name, you've *got* to become a dentist!' [Say it out
loud; the last name rhymes with 'roller'.]" [-csh]
Mark replies, "I got it before you told me to pronounce it.
However it works better spoken *orally*. " [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: TCM Suggestions (letter of comment by Kip Williams)
In response to Mark's comments on the movies on Turner Classic
Movies in September in the 09/03/10 issue of the MT VOID, Kip
Williams writes:
One thing that really gets me about TOUCH OF EVIL (which I agree is
a neat and very watchable movie) is how much Orson Welles reminds
me of an over-the-top William Shatner. His expressions are like the
ones Shatner would later use, for instance, when portraying the
'bad' side of Captain Kirk (which the series managed to contrive
more than once).
My favorite thing about THE MOUSE THAT ROARED is just watching
Peter Sellers as the Grand Duchess, doing a letter-perfect
impression of the Queen, as s/he drives through the countryside in
an ancient car, graciously giving the Royal Wave to all and sundry
with one hand.
John Williams, the detective in DIAL M FOR MURDER, used to do the
TV ads for a collection of 'moments' from great classical music. He
shares a name with the film composer. I sometimes imagine the
latter doing his own version of the ad, saying, "I'm sure you all
recognize these lovely melodies from all the times I lifted them
for my own movie music..." [-kw]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
The Hugo Awards were announced at Aussiecon 4 last weekend, and are
listed elsewhere in this issue. The tie for Best Novel is
interesting--it is not easy to have a tie, given the "instant run-
off" voting method used. For novels, it has happened only twice
before: 1966 (THIS IMMORTAL by Roger Zelazny and DUNE by Frank
Herbert) and 1993 (A FIRE UPON THE DEEP by Vernor Vinge and
DOOMSDAY BOOK by Connie Willis). (And in fact, there is a theory
that the 1966 tie may have been more a very close result that was
treated as a tie, since there was less glasnost about the voting
back then.) For short fiction, there have been three ties: 1968
Novella ("Riders of the Purple Wage" by Philip Jose Farmer and
"Weyr Search" by Anne McCaffrey), 1973 Short Story ("Eurema's Dam"
by R. A. Lafferty and "The Meeting" by Frederik Pohl), and 1977
Novella ("By Any Other Name" by Spider Robinson and "Houston,
Houston, Do You Read?" by James Tiptree, Jr.). Given the large
number of ties in nominations (three of the four fiction
categories, plus the related book and fanzine categories), one
suspects that forensic mathematicians might find this year a bit
unlikely.
Also of note are some of the other winners. At 90, Frederik Pohl
must be the oldest Fan Writer winner, but he's not even the oldest
overall winner this year--that would be Jack Vance at 94. Vance
also holds the record for oldest Hugo winner, beating out Jack
Williamson (who won at age 92 a few years ago). Does this make
this year's average Hugo-winner age the highest ever?
[Evelyn raises an interesting question. Are ties less likely with
the instant run-off system? My intuition is that going to
instant run-off does not affect the probability of a tie. The
event that causes a tie is that in the final run-off as many people
either voted A over B or voted for just A as voted B over A or
voted for just B. I assume the previous system is just giving book
A 5 pointsfor everyone who voted it in first place, 4 if in second
place, etc. Then A and B just get an equal number of points. I
would say the point system is actually more complex, but probably
has the same probability of a tie. Anybody out there want to take
a stab at this one? Keith Lynch, maybe? -mrl]
On to current works, "The Precedent" by Sean McMullen (F&SF,
Jul/Aug 2010) is a rather over-the-top story about climate change.
Set in 2035, it is all about "climate crime", where basically
everyone born before the turn of the millenium ends up on trial for
such specific crimes as denial, squandering, greed, and gluttony.
McMullen does think up all sorts of apropos Dantesque punishments,
and indeed there are explicit references to Dante in the story. I
suppose if one takes it as a parable one might accept it, but it
still has a somewhat weak ending. I will say, though, that it is
memorable. [-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Life is one long process of getting tired.
-- Samuel Butler