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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 05/18/90 -- Vol. 8, No. 46
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
05/30 LZ: L. RON HUBBARD PRESENTS WRITERS OF THE FUTURE #5 (New authors)
_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.
05/19 NJSFS: New Jersey Science Fiction Society: Saul Jaffe (editor of
SF-LOVERS DIGEST (phone 201-432-5965 for details) (Saturday)
06/09 SFABC: Science Fiction Association of Bergen County: picnic
(phone 201-933-2724 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 3D-225A 949-5866 homxa!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. I was talking in the notice recently about the early years of my
life in sports--or more accurately, my life out of sports. I think
I was talking about how early on, my mother tried to seed in me an
interest in sports by giving me sports-related gifts. She was
somewhat more successful in applying this strategy to my brother.
I remember she gave him a baseball board game called "Line Drive."
This game was played on a board with a deck of special cards and
taught basic baseball skills such as shuffling disks and moving
plastic disks. When he became exhausted moving the plastic disk
players around the board, she got him Electric Baseball, in which
pitching was realistically simulated by putting a little square
magnet on a plastic springed catapult, while the other player hit
it back with a little springed bat. Then you flipped a switch and
the whole playing field vibrated and this caused little plastic
ballplayers to run.
THE MT VOID Page 2
Giving this last game was a mistake in my mother's philosophy.
Usually her gifts were only superficially related to sports. You
know and I know that playing baseball has almost nothing to do with
shuffling decks of cards or catapulting little square magnets. But
oddly enough, if you vibrate a ballfield, the players really do
run, as the last World Series proved.
Actually, my mother's strategy seems to have worked much better on
my brother than on me. He seems to have only a mild distaste for
sports where I have a genuine hatred. I think I have even heard he
plays tennis occasionally, though I am not sure I believe it.
Mark Leeper
MT 3D-441 957-5619
...mtgzx!leeper
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance
of those whom they suppress.
-- Frederick Douglass
THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS by Poul Anderson
Tor, 1989, ISBN 0-312-93199-9, $19.95.
A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Evelyn C. Leeper
Poul Anderson is a good writer and this isn't a bad book--it's just
not a great book.
It could have been. The idea (that there are a few immortals born
among us) has a lot of promise, and Anderson develops this idea through
the first 350 pages of the book. Unfortunately, the plot then takes a
90-degree turn with the immortals traveling off into deep space, meeting
aliens, and generally finding themselves in a totally different plot
than they started out in.
The book starts with Hanno the Phoenecian traveling to Thule
(Norway) and progresses through all of history up to our own time and
beyond. The earlier episodes--those set in the Mediterranean, the
Middle East, or Asia--are the most interesting. The reader really gets
a feel for these times and places, and for the problems an immortal
might face and how s/he might deal with them. When Anderson gets up to
more recent times, the stories become less interesting, or perhaps it's
just that the background is more mundane, and the problems of
immortality (and their solutions) more obvious to a modern reader. The
distribution of stories, unfortunately, is such that most of the book is
more recent--Anderson starts by skipping a few hundred years at a time
and gradually whittles that down to ten or twenty years between
episodes. Eventually the immortals all meet up (through some carefully
worded advertisements placed by Hanno in our time), though even before
this some have found each other. The two Asian immortals heard of each
other and arranged to meet, Hanno heard of another immortal (Rufus) in
ancient Rome and sought him out, and Hanno and another immortal met
accidentally about a thousand years ago and neither realized that the
other was immortal. The sort sort of coincidence represented by the
last meeting is what made the book unbelievable for me.
It isn't giving too much away to say that by the time the book gets
to the present (it starts in Phoenecia) we have a set of eight
immortals, four men and four women, displaying the sort of racial
balance that people dream of for a National Brotherhood Week committee.
The chances of eight randomly chosen people being split equally between
men and women, by the way, is only about 27%. But an imbalance would
make the "pairing off" of the interstellar crew impossible, which would
be inconvenient for the story. All this is perhaps minor, but
everything happens too conveniently; for example, the one immortal we
meet who dies is the fifth male, not the fourth woman. And the
characters are somewhat hard to tell apart, in part because they keep
changing their names. Tu Shan and Yukiko always have Chinese or
Japanese names, and Hanno has a one-handed companion for most of the
Boat of a Million Years May 10, 1990 Page 2
book, but I found it difficult to distinguish between Aliyat (the
Palmyran woman) and Svoboda (the Russian one) much of the time. And
that these individuals are born during a time when they are able to
travel and hence cover their immortality is also artificial. Macandal
(the black woman), for example, is not born into a tribe in Africa a few
thousand years ago, but in the South a hundred years before
Emancipation. Wanderer (the Amerind) is also born shortly before a
period of great upheaval. This allows them the freedom to travel around
to escape the stigma of immortality. I suppose one can argue that the
immortals who were born without this freedom didn't survive, and so we
never see them, but that would probably imply a larger number that we
would see. Patulcius's story of survival as an obscure civil servant
for thousands of years through dozens of empires would have been
interesting, but we don't really get much of that.
In that it made me want to know more about the main characters,
this was a good book. In that it didn't tell me enough, and took the
easy way out at times, I was disappointed.
AYESHA: THE RETURN OF "SHE"
Dover, 1978 (1904, 1905c), ISBN 0-486-23649-8, $3.
A book review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
Back in the 1960s, when I was a big fan of Hammer films of Britain,
they made a screen adaptation of H. Rider Haggard's _S_h_e. I am not sure
it is a great film, or even a particularly good one, but it captured my
imagination. _S_h_e was Ayesha, She Who Must Be Obeyed, an ancient
Egyptian sorceress of incredible beauty who had found the secret of
immortality. Ayesha set herself up as the monarch of an isolated land
in East Africa and had spent millennia looking for the reincarnation of
her lost love Kallikrates. The story is told from the point of view of
college professor Horace Holly and his student and ward Leo Vincey who,
as it turns out, is the reborn Kallikrates. At the end of _S_h_e, Ayesha
is dead and Leo is now the immortal. Hammer made a sequel to their
film, _T_h_e _V_e_n_g_e_a_n_c_e _o_f _S_h_e, and Haggard wrote a sequel, _A_y_e_s_h_a: _T_h_e
_R_e_t_u_r_n _o_f '_S_h_e'. I had more or less expected the film to be based on
the book. Just recently I finally had an opportunity to see _T_h_e
_V_e_n_g_e_a_n_c_e _o_f _S_h_e (and a pitiful sequel it was too), so I took the
opportunity to read _A_y_e_s_h_a.
The opening of _A_y_e_s_h_a finds Leo and Holly back in England, with
Leon haunted by the memories of his lost Ayesha. Then Leo has a vision
that Ayesha is in Thibet--uh, Tibet--living in the shadow of a great
_c_r_u_x _a_n_s_a_t_a. Not too surprisingly, it is not long before Leo and Holly
are climbing the mountains of Tibet on foot looking for the sites from
Leo's vision and for Ayesha herself.
The original _S_h_e was published in 1887. Haggard waited seventeen
years before writing his next "She" book. In 1904 and 1905 it was
serialized in _W_i_n_d_s_o_r magazine. In that seventeen years one would
expect that Haggard's writing might have improved and that he might have
been able to write a more entertaining adventure. Actually, much of the
reverse is true. Much of the mystic feel of the original is lacking in
the sequel. The adventure is just not as much fun without the long trek
through the Mountains of the Moon. The myth of Ayesha is worn a little
thin being stretched to another novel. In addition, besides some
oblique references to reincarnation, we are never actually told how
Ayesha came to be alive again after her spectacular end in _S_h_e. The
prose also seems to have gotten more stodgy and archaic, with lines such
as, "'Thou deniest me,' he went on with gathering strength; 'and that
thou canst not do, that thou mayest not do, for Ayesha, thou has sworn,
and I demand the fulfillment of thine oath.' 'Hark thou. I refuse thy
gifts....'" A quick look back at _S_h_e indicated there was considerably
less archaic language and more adventure. So _A_y_e_s_h_a is something of a
disappointment, being decent but not up to the original novel or up to
what one generally expects of Haggard.
Ayesha May 18, 19990 Page 2
With _A_y_e_s_h_a: _T_h_e _R_e_t_u_r_n _o_f "_S_h_e" haggard ended the story of Ayesha,
but had not yet begun it. In 1921 he wrote _S_h_e _a_n_d _A_l_l_a_n, a prequel to
the original novel in which his two most famous characters, Ayesha and
Allan Quatermain, meet. Finally in 1923 he wrote _W_i_s_d_o_m'_s _D_a_u_g_h_t_e_r,
which told the story of Ayesha and Kallikrates in ancient Egypt. There
have been at least two other "She" novels: _T_h_e _K_i_n_g _o_f _K_o_r (written in
1903 by Sidney J. Marshall) and _T_h_e _V_e_n_g_e_a_n_c_e _o_f _S_h_e (written in 1978 by
Peter Tremayne). _S_h_e was a popular story in silent film days and there
were seven different silent adaptations. There have been three sound
versions: a 1935 version set in Tibet and starring Helen Gahagan, and
Indian film made in 1953 called _M_a_l_i_k_a _S_a_l_o_m_i, and finally Hammer's
adaptation in 1965 starring Ursula Andress.
NATURAL HISTORY by Joan Perucho
translated by David H. Rosenthal
Alfred A. Knopf, 1988, ISBN 0-394-57058-8, $17.95.
(Ballantine, 1990, ISBN 0-345-36560-7, $4.95)
(originally published as LES HISTORIES NATURALS 1960)
A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Evelyn C. Leeper
This is the best vampire novel translated from the Catalan I have
ever read. In fact, this is the best novel of any sort translated from
the Catalan I have ever read. Actually, come to think of it, this is
the _o_n_l_y novel translated from the Catalan I have ever read.
It's not too surprising, actually. Though Catalan literature
flourished during the 1930s, in 1939 Franco's victory caused the
suppression of Catalan for almost twenty years. Only since the 1960s
have books been published openly again in the Catalan language.
Catalan, by way of explanation, is the language of Catalonia, an area of
Spain bordering on France, and is a Romance language more closely
related to French than to Castilian ("Spanish"). (This creates a bit of
a problem in the translation--the excerpts in French and Italian which
were probably intelligible to readers of the original Catalan are left
untranslated and therefore incomprehensible to most readers.) Catalonia
has produced such artists as Salvador Dali and Joan Miro, and one can
see echoes of their surrealism in this book.
While the history of this work is of interest, the novel itself is
disappointing, at least as a vampire novel. It takes a quarter of the
short (under 200-page) novel to get around even to mentioning the
vampire, and the search for the vampire and its ultimate destruction
(not really a spoiler as vampire fiction goes) is straight from every
vampire movie you've ever seen. The value of the book lies in its
humor, but whether it is intentional or not, I can't really say.
Consider the passage:
They say the vampire will be driven from Pratdip by a
"new force," then they vaguely mention an owl. It seems
they also refer to a fratricidal war in Spain. The owl
will serve a king; this "new force" will pursue and
defeat him. The force will already be known to the owl,
who will urge him, through premonitions, to desist from
his task. At last, the vampire will find peace.
A long silence followed Father Villanueva's speech. ...
Many previously impenetrable mysteries had now become
clear.
Surely this cannot be meant seriously. But when runs across a sentence
such as "Two sharp fangs pierced his neck, while children of the night
howled outside," one has to ask if this is intentionally parodying the
genre or not.
Natural History May 14, 1990 Page 2
On the other hand, the rewards from _N_a_t_u_r_a_l _H_i_s_t_o_r_y extend beyond
its genre. Perucho has a pen for florid description. In describing the
attendees at a dinner party, he describes "Oriol Mani and Josep Maria
Pasqual, two jurists who wore dark glasses; Francesc Escoda, the
postmaster, a great huntsman and singer of _j_o_t_a_s; Josep Sol, a rich
wholesaler and brilliant mathematician; and Pablo Ruiz, an apothecary
and amateur philosopher, one hundred percent Aragonese, who knew the
recipe for one of Spain's most delicate dishes: _e_s_p_e_d_o." And he spends
this much detail on people that you will see only this once.
So on the whole I'd have to say I recommend that you read this
book, not for the plot, but for the poetry; not for the vampirism, but
for the vividness. The prose reminds me, I suppose, of one of Salvador
Dali's paintings, brilliant, if not always coherent, images.
========================================================
STRANGE TOYS by Patricia Geary
Bantam Spectra, 1989 (1987c), ISBN 0-553-26872-4, $4.50.
A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Evelyn C. Leeper
Sometimes you read a book and it's wonderful and you want to
recommend it, but you find you can't describe it. This is such a book.
If I were to say it deals with a young girl growing up; having
strange dreams, visions, and premonitions; meeting with voudon in New
Orleans; and eventually coming to terms with the magical world around
her, it would convey just a small feel of what _S_t_r_a_n_g_e _T_o_y_s is like. I
could say it won the Philip K. Dick Award, and that would tell you
something as well. But this is one of those books that I find trying to
describe similar to trying "to nail Jell-O to the wall" (as Joe Haldeman
once put it).
All I can say is that you should read it. (And why wasn't this
book more featured or discussed at Nolacon in New Orleans? It might
have fit in at the "Ghosts Along the Mississippi" panel, for example.)
DANCING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD by Ursula K. LeGuin
Harper & Row, 1989, ISBN 0-6-097289-0, $8.95.
A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Evelyn C. Leeper
In 1978 Ursula LeGuin's first collection of essays, _T_h_e _L_a_n_g_u_a_g_e _o_f
_t_h_e _N_i_g_h_t: _E_s_s_a_y_s _o_n _F_a_n_t_a_s_y _a_n_d _S_c_i_e_n_c_e _F_i_c_t_i_o_n, appeared. (At least,
I think it was 1978--I can't find a copyright date on my copy, but the
LC number starts with "78-".) This has remained a major work in the
field of science fiction criticism, with such oft-cited articles as
"Dreams Must Explain Themselves," "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," and
"Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown." So when _D_a_n_c_i_n_g _a_t _t_h_e _E_d_g_e _o_f _t_h_e
_W_o_r_l_d appeared, I eagerly snatched it up--perhaps too eagerly, as the
subtitle "Thoughts on Words, Women, Places" should have given me a hint
that it was not more of the same. But it was nominated for a Hugo, so
it must have something to do with science fiction, right?
Well, there are a few articles and reviews connected with science
fiction here, perhaps comprising half the book. The rest deals more
with women and feminism and how repressive men are and how women have to
throw off the shackles and some science fiction, or that their (at
times) autobiographical nature means they refer to a science fiction
writer, or that they are important issues, but, unlike _T_h_e _L_a_n_g_u_a_g_e _o_f
_t_h_e _N_i_g_h_t, this is _n_o_t science-fictional enough to be nominated for a
Hugo. One might as well nominate any science fiction author's non-
fiction works. (In all honesty, I can't say I'm any more pleased with
most of the other nominees, though it's possible they all suffer in
comparison with the Panshins' book.)
Given that I consider this mainstream non-fiction, what then?
Well, many of the articles are actually speeches transcribed for
publication, and speeches are generally meant to be spoken. I found
almost all of the speeches hard to follow--the intonation and inflection
was lost. I also found much of the content too strident; you might have
guessed that from the preceding paragraph. There are some articles I
did enjoy: her travelogues, and her commentary on her eleven-year old
article "Is Gender Necessary?" But what does it say when one of the
most interesting pieces is a reworking of a piece from the previous
volume.
I know this collection wasn't meant to "entertain" me. I wasn't
supposed to "enjoy" it. I was supposed to read it and learn from it and
go out and change my life because of it. But I couldn't even get past
the first part--reading it--and in that regard for me it was a failure.
[It does strike me as odd how LeGuin appears to be putting herself
forward as an ardent feminist in this volume, while Sarah LeFanu in
_F_e_m_i_n_i_s_m _a_n_d _S_c_i_e_n_c_e _F_i_c_t_i_o_n (Indiana University Press, 1989) seems to
claim LeGuin's writing marks her as more a male chauvinist than a
feminist. But then LeGuin here does somewhat tear down her portrayal of
the default on Gethen being male rather than neuter or female, so
perhaps the inconsistency is not so strong as one might first imagine.]
THE BEAR by James Oliver Curwood
(originally published as THE GRIZZLY KING)
Newmarket Press, 1989 (1916c), ISBN 1-55704-054-0, $16.95.
A book review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
As some of you may remember, I was quite fond of Jean-Jacques
Annaud's film _T_h_e _B_e_a_r, based on James Curwood's 1916 novel _T_h_e _G_r_i_z_z_l_y
_K_i_n_g. At the time I tried to find the novel, to no avail. But as I
expected it _w_a_s republished shortly thereafter and also as I expected it
was retitled _T_h_e _B_e_a_r.
One of the critics of the film (who was otherwise very favorable)
said that the only time he really knew he was watching a film was when
the bear acted very unrealistically at the climax of the film. (I will
not say how, for anyone who does not know.) Curwood himself was a bear
hunter who had killed several bears. The scene that a major critic said
seemed so unbelievable actually happened to Curwood and it turned him
from a bear-hunter into a conservationist. Well, he continued to hunt
bear but with a camera rather than a gun. (Still, the book has a photo
of Curwood proudly holding a magnificent fish he has just killed. I do
hope he ate it at least!)
I suspect the "novel" would be better termed a "novella" being 190
pages of large print, widely spaced. This is generally what I would
consider a one-sitting book. As one-sitting books go this is not bad.
It is no _O_f _M_i_c_e _a_n_d _M_e_n but it certainly bears a reading. The book has
been out of print in English for many years but has been in print longer
in a French translation. It was a French edition that came to Annaud's
attention. So it was the French translation that kept the story from
being forgotten and has resulted in the book's new popularity. I was
not very pleased that as a literary expedient Curwood named his bears.
Much of the book tells what the bears are thinking, based, no doubt, on
Curwood's experiences with bears. But he perhaps was short-sighted and
over-anthropomorphized the bears. Naming the bears was just one
example. Unlike in the film, the adult bear (Curwood calls him Thor) is
the main character of the novel. Muskwa, the cub, does not enter into
the first fifth of the novel and it is not until much later that we
actually find out where he came from.
My impression of the novel is that it tells the story better than
the film does because the filmmaker could tell the bears' story only in
pantomime. On the other hand, I trust the film's limited interpretation
of bear emotion better than I trust Curwood's more detailed and probably
more fanciful interpretation. Still, the book is blessedly free of the
intoxicated bear scenes of the film. There is also no struggle with a
mountain lion. These were apparently Annaud's additions.
In summary, this is a pleasant novel, worth the reading. Its
message against sport killing is flawed only in its insufficient
vehemence.