@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @@@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@ Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society Club Notice - 06/02/89 -- Vol. 7, No. 49 MEETINGS UPCOMING: Unless otherwise stated, all meetings are on Wednesdays at noon. LZ meetings are in LZ 2R-158. MT meetings are in the cafeteria. _D_A_T_E _T_O_P_I_C 06/07 LZ: ON STRANGER TIDES by Tim Powers (Swashbuckling SF) 06/14 MT: The Japanese Influence in SF (Cyberpunk) _D_A_T_E _E_X_T_E_R_N_A_L _M_E_E_T_I_N_G_S/_C_O_N_V_E_N_T_I_O_N_S/_E_T_C. 06/10 Science Fiction Association of Bergen County: TBA (phone 201-933-2724 for details) (Saturday) 06/17 NJSFS New Jersey Science Fiction Society: Jael (phone 201-432-5965 for details) (Saturday) HO Chair: John Jetzt HO 1E-525 834-1563 hocpa!jetzt LZ Chair: Rob Mitchell LZ 1B-306 576-6106 mtuxo!jrrt MT Chair: Mark Leeper MT 3D-441 957-5619 mtgzx!leeper HO Librarian: Tim Schroeder HO 3M-420 949-5866 homxb!tps LZ Librarian: Lance Larsen LZ 3L-312 576-3346 lzfme!lfl MT Librarian: Evelyn Leeper MT 1F-329 957-2070 mtgzy!ecl Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 1F-329 957-2070 mtgzy!ecl All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted. 1. The following description of _O_f _S_t_r_a_n_g_e_r _T_i_d_e_s, the topic of the next Lincroft meeting (June 7), comes from Lance Larsen: First, I should admit that I am a big fan of swashbucklers -- or, if you prefer, historical romances. I grew up watching Errol Flynn and Leslie Howard. I grew up reading Dumas, de Orczy, and Sabatini. I already have an almost complete collection of Rafael Sabatini. And he was probably the most prolific author of swashbucklers in this century. So, when someone tells me that a living author has written a swashbuckler, I leave them in mid- sentence (wondering what that rush of air was, and where I've gone) and rush off to the book store. Tim Powers, who wrote _T_h_e _A_n_u_b_i_s _G_a_t_e_s, has written a swashbuckler. It has pirates, ships, battles and swordplay. But, it also has THE MT VOID Page 2 magic, spells, intrigue, rituals and greater powers (no pun intended). All of the elements are done well: the plot, the characters, the atmosphere, and the magic. Tim Powers has created a fully realized Caribbean in which he plays out his story. Since I abhor spoilers, there isn't much I can say about the plot. There are several subplots, including the required ones about love and loyalty. But there are others - about the pursuit of power, the battle between magic and technology, and and the price of knowledge - that make this far more than a standard swashbuckler. Powers adds a twist to the usual relationship between iron and magic and weaves it into the story so well that I expect to see it adopted by other authors. In fact the magical episodes are so good and so important to the story that I don't begrudge the time spent on them at the expense of the swordplay. Speaking of which, unlike Ellen Kushner's novel _S_w_o_r_d_s_p_o_i_n_t, _O_n _S_t_r_a_n_g_e_r _T_i_d_e_s does not cheat you out of the climactic swordfight towards which it progresses throughout. Tim Powers delivers a magical swashbuckler in every way. 2. There are in life just a handful of those moments, those instants when the chaos suddenly becomes order, when the planets line up, when understanding and enlightenment come, when suddenly you feel that the universe is in fact ordered and sane and perhaps no so far beyond the human intellect to comprehend. Martin Gardner calls it the "Aha!" experience. Colin Wilson claims these moments keep mathematicians young and is why some mathematicians lived extraordinarily long lives. It is the moment when all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. It is one brief instant of interstellar insight. It is the sortori! It is the blinding instant of truth, understanding, knowledge. I have had one of those instants. And, as so often happens with enlightenment, the instant was brought about by the least likely and most intellectually unpromising circumstances. In this case a woman friend of mine got her hair set in what is commonly known as a "permanent." And it was a particularly unflattering permanent. This is not usually the stuff of cosmic enlightenment, but what usually is? Now understand that I, myself, am a fairly conservative dresser. I have maybe seven or eight pairs of pants and perhaps twice that many shirts. So there are at most about 128 possible pairings of shirts and pants and of that number, probably over a hundred of the pairings give you a combination of shirt and pants that do not look too bad together. I have learned to recognize the handful of combinations that do not go together. My method of getting dressed is to hang the last pair of pants I wore (or got from the wash) on the left of the array of hanging pants and to take the pair on the far right and wear them. Then I pick a shirt, almost at random, double-check that it will not form one of the "forbidden pairings," THE MT VOID Page 3 and that's the shirt I wear. This makes for an ordered existence but let's face it, I'm not going to make the cover of _G_e_n_t_l_e_m_a_n'_s _Q_u_a_r_t_e_r_l_y. My wife Evelyn, on the other hand, dresses with what I once dared to call a "sense of humor." That, indeed, may be what it is, but there are better and safer ways to put the same idea to a woman. Evelyn seems to be able to wear (well!) a broad array of clothing, much of which would have made Salvador Dali seasick. She will wear to work a deerstalker cap (a sign of her great love of Sherlock Holmes), a jacket she got (used) from a Canadian Air Force Uniform, and/or a pair of baggy imitation leather pants that I have cautioned her on many occasions make her look like a patent leather tuning fork. Evelyn will put one of these combinations to wear to a party and ask if I think she should wear this outfit. I'll have to remind her, no, I don't drink. Well, as I say, Evelyn will occasionally ask my opinion of what she is wearing and I will give her as frank an opinion as I can with polite language. She will weigh and consider my opinion for approximately the half-life of a muon particle and then decide that she is going to wear whatever she damn well wants to wear. Okay, fine. So far I am not happy with the situation, but it does not have any deep philosophical implications. It is simply a disagreement about a small matter of taste. (Well, perhaps not so small.) But then when I see Evelyn later, say after she has worn said outfit to work, she tells me everybody told her how nice she looked. Everybody? Yes, just about everybody she ran into commented on what a pretty outfit she was wearing. Now it is conceivable that, say, near strong magnetic forces you could find a field that strongly distorts aesthetics. But if so it is a new force and one I know nothing about. And if so it is an effect that has not been catalogued in any work of physics I have ever heard of. Clearly there is some phenomenon going on here that goes beyond that which is known and accepted, or so I was afraid. This sort of event would happen periodically and fairly frequently over the length of our relationship and it began to bother me more and more. Then my friend came to work with a permanent. And there I stood looking, mouth open, at this hairdo that looked more like a three- dimensional map of the convection currents in a boiling pot of Oodles of Noodles. And she saw me staring at this thin on her head and asked, "What do you think of my new hair style?" "Uh...it's very attractive. It frames your face very nicely." "Well, thank you." THE MT VOID Page 4 And then came the flash. 3. While we are discussing physics, I would like to ask a question of the people who have a better understanding of it than I do. Much of our knowledge of the size and age of the universe has implicit in it the following assumption: if objects A and B are fixed in space and A is giving off light at a certain frequency, B will receive the light at the same frequency. It seems to be true over short distances within our experience, but the same was true of newton's laws. I guess if light shifts to the blue side over great distances, distant objects that are red-shifted really should be red-shifted more: they are traveling away from us faster than we think. Then they took less time than we think to get to their present position, so the universe would be younger than we think. Natural red-shifting of light would similarly make the universe older. I am aware Michelson-Morley showed the speed of light to be constant (at least in a vacuum), but are we sure the frequency of light is conserved by traveling great distances in a vacuum? Mark Leeper MT 3D-441 957-5619 ...mtgzx!leeper Egotists always have the last word. Once and for all they establish the fact that their minds cannot be changed. -- Marcel Proust INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE A film review by Mark R. Leeper Copyright 1989 Mark R. Leeper Capsule review: Forget that Indian thing. This is the _r_e_a_l _R_a_i_d_e_r_s _o_f _t_h_e _L_o_s_t _A_r_k _I_I. Slightly more realistic than _R_a_i_d_e_r_s, a little more concentration on character, and less on chases, this is a solid action adventure film putting the series back on track. George Lucas needs a hit and for the first time since _R_e_t_u_r_n _o_f _t_h_e _J_e_d_i he deserves one. Rating: high +2. It is no real secret. The Hollywood wonder-boy of twelve summers ago and much of the time since, George Lucas, is hurting for money. Things have not really panned out for him. _H_o_w_a_r_d _t_h_e _D_u_c_k, which featured the greatest technological duck special effects the screen has ever seen, laid an egg. And it was _n_o_t a golden egg. That was only one of several projects that have enhanced neither Lucas's fortune nor his reputation. Lucas needs a hit. That much seems to be fact. My opinion is that Lucas knows how to have a pit if all he wants is a hit rather than trying something new and original. He just makes another one of his series films. It takes too long to do a _S_t_a_r _W_a_r_s film, so he did another Indiana Jones film instead. The one drawback is _I_n_d_i_a_n_a _J_o_n_e_s _a_n_d _t_h_e _T_e_m_p_l_e _o_f _D_o_o_m was a disappointment and done much more in the Spielberg style than in the style Lucas put into _R_a_i_d_e_r_s _o_f _t_h_e _L_o_s_t _A_r_k. Spielberg directs all the Indy films, of course, but I suspect some of the exaggerated cartoonish feel of the second film was Spielberg's. And many of the fans preferred the style of the first film. All Lucas really needed for a hit was to do again what he did with _R_a_i_d_e_r_s. And he did. The style of the first film is back. Welcome back. _I_n_d_i_a_n_a _J_o_n_e_s _a_n_d _t_h_e _L_a_s_t _C_r_u_s_a_d_e semi-fulfills Lucas's unrealistic promise that each episode would be a prequel to the one made before it. Harrison Ford is not getting younger. So of the three films, this takes place the latest, but there is an extended flashback in which we learn a lot of H=how Indiana Jones became Indiana Jones. The young Indy is played by River Phoenix, who almost resembles a young Harrison Ford, and in fact played Ford's son in _M_o_s_q_u_i_t_o _C_o_a_s_t. In Indy's early adventure we see where he got a lot of what he becomes and even what he wears. When he gets older we also get introduced to his father (voiced, and in later scenes played, by Sean Connery). Indy is once again after a Biblical treasure. Earlier it was the greatest prize of the Old Testament, the Ark of the Covenant. This time it is the greatest prize of the New testament, the Holy Grail. Do you remember what you liked about the first film? If you said Karen Allen, you are out of luck. This time Indy's female sidekick is Elsa Schneider (played by Alison Doody), the most attractive of the Indiana Jones III May 26, 1989 Page 2 traveling companions of the three films, but also the one with the least real personality. That means in this aspect, as in most aspects, this is better than the second Indy film but not up to the original. If you said you liked just about anything else about the original--the gritty chases, the fights, the baroque Nazi military equipment, the ancient sites that are gamuts of booby traps, the snakes, whatever--you are in luck. It is all back and more. You also get Indy's love/hate relationship with his father. You get to see more of Sallah and Marcus Brody (played by John Rhys-Davies and Denholm Elliot respectively). One disappointment is that they did a Nigel-Bruce on Denholm Elliot's character (i.e., they turned a perfectly serious and interesting character into a buffoon). But for almost any reason that you liked the first Indy film, you will also like the third. On the -4 to +4 scale, I give _R_a_i_d_e_r_s _o_f _t_h_e _L_o_s_t _A_r_k a +3, _I_n_d_i_a_n_a _J_o_n_e_s _a_n_d _t_h_e _T_e_m_p_l_e _o_f _D_o_o_m a flat 0, and _I_n_d_i_a_n_a _J_o_n_e_s _a_n_d _t_h_e _L_a_s_t _C_r_u_s_a_d_e a high +2, missing a +3 only for its lack of originality.