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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 8/24/90 -- Vol. 9, No. 8
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
09/12 LZ: STAR MAKER by Olaf Stapledon (Formative Influences)
10/03 LZ: MICROMEGAS by Voltaire (Philosophy)
10/24 LZ: THE WORM OUROBOROS by E. R. Eddison (Classic Horror)
11/07 MT: WANDERING STARS ed. by Jack Dann (Jewish Science Fiction)
11/14 LZ: WAR WITH THE NEWTS by Karel Capek (Foreign SF)
_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.
09/08 NJSFS: New Jersey Science Fiction Society: TBA
(phone 201-432-5965 for details) (Saturday)
09/15 SFABC: Science Fiction Association of Bergen County: TBA
(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 3E-301 949-4488 hotld!tps
LZ Librarian: Lance Larsen LZ 3L-312 576-3346 mtunq!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. Yes, friends, I want to talk to you today about what we have
here in America that no other country can boast of--or would want
to. I'm talking about American culture. American culture is like
some strange fungus you find in the backyard that does not just
grow and thrive, it keeps changing its form, growing weird nodules
like nothing you have seen before. Well, those nodules are coming
faster and faster these days. We are living in what I call the
Weirding of America. The faster things change, the more you are
going to find people getting nostalgic for the quieter, simpler,
more understandable times of the previous month.
THE MT VOID Page 2
Well, let me tell you about the latest weirdness nodule. In times
long gone by--like 1989--if you were caught with your paw in the
till, you could not make money that way any more, so you told your
story to a ghost writer, he beefed it up with sex and turned it
into a book that would be bought by aspiring thieves who want to
know step-by-step 1) how to find their paws, 2) how to find the
till, 3) how to stick their paw into the till, and 4) how humans
reproduce.
But that was back in good old 1989. Back then, a lot more people
were willing to read and knew how. Because of the ever-increasing
market of cretins from the planet Mars, you no longer need to know
how to read in order to get sexy expose's. Yes, now Jessica Hahn
in her own words _w_r_i_t_t_e_n _e_s_p_e_c_i_a_l_l_y _f_o_r _h_e_r tells of her affair
with the Wrong Reverend Jim Bakker. And you don't even have to
read them! You can call Jessica Hahn's own 900 phone number. Just
pay $2 for the first minute and 50 cents for each additional
minute. The first minute is only vaguely tawdry; the second minute
is when it first starts being titillating. It doesn't really
become salacious until the seventh minute and you have to hold on a
full 15 minutes for it to become out-and-out slimey. But by then
you've spent something like $9. You could have bought two months'
of _P_e_n_t_h_o_u_s_e for that. But then I guess _P_e_n_t_h_o_u_s_e is aimed more at
the _l_i_t_e_r_a_t_i among us.
Mark Leeper
MT 3D-441 957-5619
...mtgzx!leeper
Without free speech no search for truth is possible ...
no discovery of truth is useful .... Better a
thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free
speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays
the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the
race.
-- Charles Bradlaugh
"Nuke Em Till They Glow"
Reviewed by Dale L. Skran Jr.
Copyright 1990 Dale L. Skran Jr.
I seem unable to escape the pull of reviewing nuclear war films,
even as they appear to be growing less and less relevant to reality with
the coming of Glasnost. Hence, I return, once again, with a review of
several films of nuclear disaster I have seen recently, including one
*classic,* _F_i_v_e.
_S_u_r_v_i_v_o_r
I mention this simply for completeness. Imagine the most
pretentious art film you've ever seen. Now imagine that its director
has decided to make a film with a post-nuclear setting. The result is
_S_u_r_v_i_v_o_r. I've never seen this film except in the TV cutting, so there
may exist versions where it all makes more sense, but I doubt it. Many
scenes are filmed in slow motion with the wind blowing, and an
occasional mutter of portentous dialog like "We blew it all up."
_S_u_r_v_i_v_o_r appears to concern an astronaut who is launched as part of
a SDI test, and returns to find the world turned into a desert, with
ships becalmed in the sand, and people living underground fighting over
water and other spoils. There are long, dull scenes of water dripping,
the wind blowing, and his hand built wind-sailing rail-road car whizzing
along. Nuff said. Leeper scale rating of (-2).
_F_i_v_e
This film is apparently one of the earliest nuclear war films ever made,
dating from 1951. It concerns a very small number (5, oddly enough) of
people who have, by some miracle, survived a nuclear war. _F_i_v_e suffers
from a confused and inaccurate understanding of how radiation kills.
Two men survive by being locked in a bank vault. Another is at the top
of a mountain. A woman survives in a photographic vault. The fifth
finds refuge *at the top* of the Empire State building!
One of the survivors is unable to deal with the post-war reality,
and dies peacefully on the beach, never having come to grips with the
new situation. However, the remaining three men fall to fighting over
survival tactics and the woman. The mountain climber wishes to live a
life of ease off the mountains of stored food in the cities, while the
others propose to eke out a living farming and hunting in the
countryside. The mountain climber kills one of the men, and tricks the
woman into coming into the city with him to look for her lost husband.
She brings along her new-born child by the missing husband. In the
city, they find the husband (dead), and the mountain climber (who
previously had entertained the bizarre theory that they were immune to
radiation) realizes he has radiation sickness and runs off. The woman
leaves the city and is re-united with the single remaining man. They
bury the child, who apparently has died of radiation sickness, but this
- 2 -
is never very clear. The music swells and Biblical verses fill the
screen. All is well.
Much of the early film is taken up with the woman wandering from
empty building to empty building while portentous music plays. One of
my major impressions of the film was a sense of nostalgia for the
melodramatic music of '50s horror films.
It is hard to evaluate _F_i_v_e. Surely a historical curiosity, it is
fairly dull, and not especially illuminating. The only interesting part
is the conflict over the "life of ease" versus the "let's learn to farm"
approach, which would surely be a real issue if the number of survivors
were extremely small. Rating is (0) on the Leeper-scale.
_W_h_e_n _t_h_e _W_i_n_d_s _B_l_o_w
This one torqued me off a fair amount. It is a professionally
made, animated, British anti-weapons propaganda film. To soften the
pill, it presents an extraordinarily dim-witted and loyal retired
British couple who live in the English countryside. The woman's cow-
like inability to comprehend even the simplest realities of modern life
and nuclear war is at once pitiful and manipulative. The man's constant
walk through memory lane back to World War II and the "good ol' days"
brings home the point the World War III will be different with all the
subtlety of a sledgehammer.
Having set this stage, the film presents the old couple trying to
understand "Protect and Survive," a British government handbook that
purports to explain nuclear war survival. The old couple do their best
to follow its guidelines, but their efforts are so dim-witted as to be
pointless. At times they almost make sense, and at others it appears
that they have not the slightest understanding of radiation or nuclear
war. The only sensible explanation I would even put on the film is that
the man knows better, and realizes they are doomed, but plays out a
charade to dupe his wife into believing all is well. She, in turn,
plays along with his awesome naivete since she, as well, prefers the
fantasy that all is well to the reality that they are doomed.
_W_h_e_n _W_i_n_d_s _B_l_o_w reminded me of _T_e_s_t_a_m_e_n_t in that it presents a lot
of people who just stand around and die, and then says this is the
horror of nuclear war. Nuclear war is plenty horrible enough without
this kind of absurd exaggeration. It has all the interest of placing a
blindfolded cow on railroad tracks and making a film of a train striking
it in slow motion.
Leeper-scale rating (+1), but NOT recommended.
_T_h_i_s _i_s _N_o_t _a _T_e_s_t
In spite of bad acting and poor production values, this 1962 film
is actually fairly interesting. An extremely low budget produces a
- 3 -
play-like atmosphere, with most of the action taking place near a road-
block in the desert. A policeman stops a group of typical citizens, and
eventually commands them to take shelter in a truck. The diverse set of
characters allows for the usual range of response to nuclear war, from a
sudden embrace of hedonism to despair to a determination to survive at
any cost.
Many of the actors are quite poor, but in an odd way, this only
makes them seem more genuine. Another plus for this film is the absence
of the radiation-induced mutants that became so popular in the late
'50s. Although we see the stupidity of taking shelter in what is
obviously a flimsy truck (the truck and most of the characters get
evaporated in the final scene), some people survive by striking off on
their own and hiding a deep mine. This avoids the "survival is
impossible and silly" theme some later films take.
Leeper-scale rating (-1), but interesting to nuke-war fans.
_B_y _D_a_w_n'_s _E_a_r_l_y _L_i_g_h_t
This made-for-HBO film is the only post-Glasnost nuclear war film
I've ever seen, and one of the better nuclear war films. Unlike _T_h_e _D_a_y
_A_f_t_e_r, it focuses on the relatively small dimensions of various command
bunkers and airplanes, following the American President and a bomber
crew as they struggle to either avert or fight Armageddon.
It all begins with Turkey launching a missile at the USSR, and the
USSR responding with a limited counterforce strike against the US, that
will only kill "a few millions." The Soviet Premier then asserts that
dissident elements in his own forces have contrived to have the missile
launched by terrorists in Turkey to bring about a full-scale nuclear
war, and begs the American President not to escalate. The President has
at most a few minutes to decide. One of the missiles is heading for
Washington, D.C.
This is just the beginning, and the story spirals outward as the
two war machines move closer and closer to unrestrained conflict. It
ends with a dramatic do-or-die struggle between the American President
and elements of the American armed forces that want to allow the US
submarines to launch their pre-programmed total response to Soviet
aggression. The film shows the sheer desperation of ultimate stakes
poker, a game where a few million lives can get snuffed at the flick of
a switch, a game where your own side may be working against you.
There is also some interesting air combat between a B-52 and some
MIG-29s (clever idea, using an A-Bomb that way!). One thing that
bothered me about the script was the use of the female B-52 co-pilot as
an advocate of not following the orders to bomb the Soviet Union. This
merely perpetuates the stereotype of women as being unable to follow
difficult orders. The audience knows the orders are coming from a
deranged American General and a far-right Secretary of Interior, but the
- 4 -
bomber crew doesn't. Another possible problem is the idea of an
"automatic total response" by the U.S. submarine fleet. I have
discussed this with someone who was a missile fire control officer on a
"boomer," and although he would not describe their actual orders, he
assured me that the orders and procedures used in the film *DO NOT*
correspond to those actually used.
Overall, however, _B_y _t_h_e _D_a_w_n'_s _E_a_r_l_y _L_i_g_h_t is a technically
accurate and well-made tale of a possible nuclear war that may yet lie
in our future. Recommended to all those who think the threat of nuclear
war has ended.
Leeper-sale rating (low +2) -- recommended.