@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @@@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@ Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society Club Notice - 09/13/91 -- Vol. 10, No. 11 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 09/18 LZ: THE FALL OF HYPERION by Dan Simmons (Hugo nominee) 10/09 LZ: THE QUIET POOLS by Michael Kube-McDowell (Hugo nominee) 10/30 LZ: MINDBRIDGE by Joe Haldeman 11/13 MT: THE RED MAGICIAN by Lisa Goldstein (Jewish SF) 11/20 LZ: EON by Greg Bear 12/11 LZ: MIRKHEIM by Poul Anderson 12/18 MT: "The Star" by Arthur C. Clarke (Christian 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. 09/14 SFABC: Science Fiction Association of Bergen County: Bruce Coville (author of young adult and children's fiction) (phone 201-933-2724 for details) (Saturday) 09/15 New York Is Book Country: Booths, etc., on Fifth Avenue 09/21 NJSFS: New Jersey Science Fiction Society: TBA (phone 201-432-5965 for details) (Saturday) 09/25 Readings: Richard Curtis, Sharon Jarvis, Barry Malzberg (Barnes & Noble, Route 17, Paramus, 7:30 PM) (Wed) 10/12 Autographing: Margaret Bonanno, Michael Friedman, Janet Kagan (B. Dalton, Willowbrook Mall, Wayne, 1-5 PM) (Sat) 10/29 Readings: Michael Flynn and two other authors TBA (Barnes & Noble, Route 17, Paramus, 7:30 PM) (Tue) 11/09 Autographing: Ellen Datlow, Janet Kagan, Ellen Kushner, Melissa Scott, Jack Womack (B. Dalton, Willowbrook Mall, Wayne, 1-5 PM) (Sat) HO Chair: John Jetzt HO 1E-525 834-1563 hocpb!jetzt LZ Chair: Rob Mitchell LZ 1B-306 576-6106 mtuxo!jrrt MT Chair: Mark Leeper MT 3D-441 957-5619 mtgzy!leeper HO Librarian: Rebecca Schoenfeld HO 2K-430 949-6122 homxb!btfsd LZ Librarian: Lance Larsen LZ 3L-312 576-3346 mtunq!lfl MT Librarian: Mark Leeper MT 3D-441 957-5619 mtgzy!leeper Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 1F-329 957-2070 mtgzy!ecl All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted. THE MT VOID Page 2 1. The next book discussion in Lincroft will be about Dan Simmons's _T_h_e _F_a_l_l _o_f _H_y_p_e_r_i_o_n. Rather than reblurb it, I will include later in this MT VOID the comments I made about both _H_y_p_e_r_i_o_n and _T_h_e _F_a_l_l _o_f _H_y_p_e_r_i_o_n last year. 2. Picture the hero of a fast-paced film thriller. Yeah, I'm picturing him too. Ain't he somptin'? Look at those bulging muscles. Listen to him talk. Wow! I didn't think he even knew three-syllable words and he used one right there. Gee. At least I think it was a three-syllable word. Who can tell with that accent of his? And gosh, what's he doing? That's three-inch reinforced steel plate and he's kicking through it like it's cardboard. Holy Cow! Look at him. One man with the brute force of a bull and the cunning intellect of an ox. Boy, it sure is fun to watch him smash the bad guys, isn't it? That is real script-writing. Unfortunately, the films we are going to show at the next Leeperhouse fest (on Thursday, September 19, at 7 PM) are from the time before the really good thriller-heroes. These are thrillers about people who get bewildered and have to think rather than kick their way out of a tough spot. Sorry. No, I'm not. Pre-Schwarzenegger Thrillers THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962), dir. by John Frankenheimer MARATHON MAN (1976), dir. by John Schlesinger THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE is a great film with an interesting past. United Artists decided not to make the film because the company chief, Arthur Krim, thought the story was anti-American. Then President Kennedy, at the urging of Frank Sinatra, called Krim and expressed his admiration for the novel. The final film is said to have been one of Kennedy's favorite films. The film was later pulled from circulation, reportedly because of the Kennedy assassination. Whether what we see in the film was really possible or not has been hotly debated. For years the word was that the concept was pure fantasy. A year or so ago a non-fiction book called _T_h_e _S_e_a_r_c_h _f_o_r _t_h_e _M_a_n_c_h_u_r_i_a_n _C_a_n_d_i_d_a_t_e claimed that the film is not only plausible, it is conservative. Laurence Harvey, Angela Lansbury, Frank Sinatra, and Janet Leigh star in one of the great American film thrillers. THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE is a hard act to follow, but MARATHON MAN with Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, and Roy Scheider really is another edge-of-the-seat sort of film. You spend the first twenty minutes wondering what these story lines could possibly have to do with each other. Once you find out, you're hooked. People who saw this film years ago still cringe a little when they hear the question, "Is it safe?" Two comments: These films together total over four hours, so we will be starting promptly at 7 PM, and having only a short break. THE MT VOID Page 3 And the second film may, as they say, "be too intense for some viewers" (at least in part). Actually, the first film may be too intense for some viewers. If you draw a line in the sand in front of a chicken, it will hypnotize her, so even a line drawn in the sand is too intense for some viewers. Intensity is in the mind of the beholder. 3. There is something funny about the system for choosing Supreme Court Justices. You are choosing a candidate to be one of the absolute authorities on what the U. S. Constitution says. S/he supposedly understands the Consititution and its intent more than we mortals. Then for him to get in a lot of folks have to be sure that he interprets things the same way they do. It's like telling an doctor, "Okay, you can cure my headaches. But first you have to agree what is causing them is a sinus problem." Mark Leeper MT 3D-441 957-5619 ...mtgzy!leeper Every new truth which has ever been propounded has, for a time caused mischief; it has produced discomfort, and often unhappiness; sometimes disturbing social and religious arrangements.... And if the truth is very great as well as very new, the harm is serious. Men are made uneasy; they flinch; they cannot bear the sudden light; a general restlessness supervenes; the face of society is disturbed, or perhaps convulsed; old interests and old beliefs have been destroyed before new ones have been created. These symptoms are the precursors of revolution; they have preceded all the great changes through which the world has passed. -- Henry Thomas Buckle HYPERION by Dan Simmons Bantam Spectra, 1990 (1989c), ISBN 0-553-28368-5, $4.95. THE FALL OF HYPERION by Dan Simmons Doubleday Foundation, 1990, ISBN 0-385-24950-0, $19.95. A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper Copyright 1990 Evelyn C. Leeper What we have here is a glorious failure. You may notice that I have labeled this "a book review," not "two book reviews" as you might have expected. That is because, physical reality notwithstanding, this is a single book. I cannot imagine any reason, other than greed, for not publishing it as a single volume. Yes, I know publishers claim that they can't publish a book of a thousand pages because 1) no one will buy it, and 2) it is physically difficult to produce. Yet New American Library has published the 1000- page _D_o_n _Q_u_i_x_o_t_e and the 1400-page _L_e_s _M_i_s_e_r_a_b_l_e_s, people do purchase them, and they haven't fallen apart, even after repeated readings. The final death blow to this argument, of course, is that Doubleday is producing a book club edition with both "novels" in a single volume! Rumor has it that book stores don't like thick books because they can't display as many in the same volume. Life's tough. Issuing this novel as two volumes is doubly annoying because the second half is so long and drawn-out that I found myself saying, "Why didn't Simmons just add another hundred or so pages onto the first half and wrap the story up there?" (I am not the only person to make this observation.) Because it came out as a separate volume it had to be about the same length as the first half and this means padding, padding, and more padding. The first half (to begin at the beginning, as they say) has been compared to Chaucer's _C_a_n_t_e_r_b_u_r_y _T_a_l_e_s in that it is a group of pilgrims telling stories. But there is a basic difference. In _T_h_e _C_a_n_t_e_r_b_u_r_y _T_a_l_e_s, the stories are about other people; in _H_y_p_e_r_i_o_n they are about the story-tellers themselves. And in this area, Simmons does very well, managing to have each story _s_o_u_n_d as if the teller were telling it: the story told by the priest sounds the way a priest would talk, the story told by the soldier sounds the way a soldier would talk, etc. In addition, each story is interesting in itself. Each story is also almost novel-length in itself; any one of them, with an ending added on, could have been published as a stand-alone novel. (Why do I even suggest this?! Next we'll have _H_y_p_e_r_i_o_n: _T_h_e _S_p_e_c_i_a_l _E_d_i_t_i_o_n, redivided and sold as six novels!) The basic story begins with seven pilgrims traveling to the "Time Tombs," odd structures on the planet Hyperion which are traveling backwards in time and somehow connected with the Shrike. The Shrike is a monster that appears to be a humanoid made up of a large collection of Hyperion April 24, 1990 Page 2 knives and razor blades, leading a friend of mine to describe _H_y_p_e_r_i_o_n (the first half) as "Freddy Krueger on Mars." It turns out (in the second half) that there is a very good reason for the Shrike and its presence, and that this is more than just a desire to put in a slasher monster, but many people may be so turned off by the concept in the first half that they will not buy the second half and find out (never mind reading a thousand pages). In order to figure out what the Shrike is and the secret of the Time Tombs, the pilgrims tell their stories of how they are connected with Hyperion. Of these stories, I found the most interesting to be Sol Weintraub's (the philosopher's) story, full of questions about God and the nature of sacrifice. Sol's daughter Rachel has been caught in a "backwash" at the Time Tombs and is now living backwards. This is difficult to make consistent (Philip Dick didn't quite succeed in _C_o_u_n_t_e_r-_c_l_o_c_k _W_o_r_l_d either), and Simmons makes a few slips. To solve the problems of day-to-day living, Rachel's memory regresses only during sleep, so at least conversations can flow forward. But when towards the end Sol notices that Rachel's hair is getting shorter and thinning out, I found myself wondering, "But what about all those other years she was regressing? Wasn't her hair (and for that matter, her fingernails) getting shorter then?" And somehow the whole rationale Simmons had built up seemed to collapse. While the first half is the pilgrims' stories, the second half is a single story (though told from many points of view), full of space battles, politics, philosophy, poetry, and anything else Simmons had handy--as I said, it's heavily padded. Without giving too much away, I have to say that the religion expounded in the second half seems too trinitarian to me, given its origins. (You'll probably have to read the book to understand what I mean.) The padding becomes particularly evident in Sol and Rachel's story. Sol is convinced that the Time Tombs hold the answer to Rachel's problem, and therefore they must reach them before Rachel regresses to her "birth." So we hear him think, "Now Rachel is one day old." A few chapters later, he thinks, "Now Rachel is eight hours old." Then a few chapters more, "Now Rachel is two hours old." Then, "Now Rachel is one hour old." Then, "Now Rachel is thirty minutes old." And so on and so on. Like Zeno's arrow, we seem to be forever approaching the moment of Rachel's birth without actually having any chance of getting there. Simmons does have the ability to write in many different styles. (His _P_h_a_s_e_s _o_f _G_r_a_v_i_t_y, a much better work in my opinion than this, is written very differently than any of the pilgrims' stories here.) And he has a sly sense of humor. The interstellar society that exists in _H_y_p_e_r_i_o_n is the result of the Hegira--humanity's outpouring from Earth when it was destroyed. Throughout the novel, Simmons speaks of "pre- Hegira" and "post-Hegira" events, and so it is only a few lines later that you realize his reference to "pre-Hegira Muslims" on page 199 is a sort of historical pun. Hyperion April 24, 1990 Page 3 Simmons also seems to have a real understanding of how electronic bulletin boards work in his description of the All Thing, a communications network joining all of the Hegemony (also page 199 of _H_y_p_e_r_i_o_n): Days and nights would pass with me monitoring the Senate on farcaster cable or tapped into the All Thing. Someone once estimated that the All Thing deals with about a hundred active pieces of Hegemony legislation per day, and during my months spent screwed into the sensorium I missed none of them. My voice and name became well known on the debate channels. No bill was too small, no issue too simple or too complex for my input. The simple act of voting every few minutes gave me a false sense of having _a_c_c_o_m_p_l_i_s_h_e_d something. I finally gave up the political obsession only after I realized that accessing the All Thing regularly meant either staying home or turning into a walking zombie. A person constantly busy accessing on his implants makes a pitiful sight in public and it didn't take Helenda's decision to make me realize that if I stayed home I would turn into an All Thing sponge like so many millions of other slugs around the Web. If Simmons himself has made an awkward structure for his novel, the publisher has gilded the lily by managing to leave page 305 out entirely from both the hardcover and trade paperback editions of _T_h_e _F_a_l_l _o_f _H_y_p_e_r_i_o_n, and instead to provide _t_w_o copies of page 306! Naturally, a major plot element is revealed on the missing page (or would be revealed, were it there), so after reading eight hundred pages over a period of a year, the reader is _s_t_i_l_l left in the dark. And don't try blaming this on computers: back when a publisher set a book for publishing in the traditional way, s/he double-checked the films before sending them to the printer. S/he should still do this, computers notwithstanding. I think it's evident that this was not done in this case. This book is an example of a work in which the whole is less than the sum of the parts. This leads to an odd paradox: the first half has been nominated for a Hugo and may well win, though had the whole book been nominated, it might not have. It is only in the second half that the story becomes tedious. As far as its competition, one of the other nominees is volume three of a six (or seven) volume series of which the first two were both nominated for Hugos but didn't win, and another is volume two of a three-volume (at least) series of which the first one was nominated for a Hugo but didn't win. (Do you detect a pattern here? Norman Spinrad, in his column in the June 1990 _I_s_a_a_c _A_s_i_m_o_v'_s, has a lot to say about "seriesism," and much of it applies here.) In this sort of field, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see the first half of a book win a Hugo. THE COMMITMENTS A film review by Mark R. Leeper Copyright 1991 Mark R. Leeper Capsule review: The setting upstages the plot in this story of a group of working-class (or dole- class) Dubliners who form a rock band. Seeing all those Irish singing and immersing themselves in American popular music has a sort of whimsical irony akin to that of _T_h_e _S_i_n_g_i_n_g _N_u_n. But somehow a film set in this interesting city could focus on something more meaningful than its music. Rating: +1 (-4 to +4). Alan Parker has been a new filmmaker for eighteen years now through at least ten major films. The way he remains a new filmmaker is by making a clean break with the past and jumping off in a new direction every film he makes. The man made _B_u_g_s_y _M_a_l_o_n_e, _M_i_d_n_i_g_h_t _E_x_p_r_e_s_s, _F_a_m_e, _S_h_o_o_t _t_h_e _M_o_o_n, _P_i_n_k _F_l_o_y_d: _T_h_e _W_a_l_l, _B_i_r_d_y, _A_n_g_e_l _H_e_a_r_t, _M_i_s_s_i_s_s_i_p_p_i _B_u_r_n_i_n_g, _C_o_m_e _S_e_e _t_h_e _P_a_r_a_d_i_s_e, and now _T_h_e _C_o_m_m_i_t_m_e_n_t_s. At least superficially it is hard to find any sort of pattern in these films. This time around he is doing a bittersweet adaptation of Roddy Doyle's novel about the life and times of Dublin (Ireland)'s first soul band. The idea of an Irish band doing soul makes sense to the band's manager Jimmy Rabbitte (played by Robert Arkins) since he sees himself not just once but triply black. As he says, the Irish are the blacks of Europe, the Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland, and the northern Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So he pulls together a band of North Dubliners willing to say they are black and proud of it. As the film opens, Rabbitte is a hustler of cheap cassettes and T-shirts. His father places Elvis Presley just a bit lower than God and a bit higher than the Pope. With this minimal musical background, after pulling together a rather poor band for a wedding he is struck by the raw singing talent of a drunken guest who grabs the mike and starts belting out a song. With this dubious inspiration he starts to put together a band to feature the singing of Deco Cuffe (played by sixteen-year-old Andres Strong). In addition to Cuffe he finds an off-the-wall drummer, a frustrated jazz musician, and a forty-five-year-old trumpeter who may or may not have played with just about all the American greats. He also finds three feisty female backup singers. From there it is a toss- up if this mismatched group will tear itself apart or become a phenomenon. The real stars of this film are the music (big surprise) and the hard-edged working-class (and lower) settings in northern Dublin. One might say that the view of living conditions in Commitments September 8, 1991 Page 2 Ireland--with far too many filthy children and with so many of the adults on the dole--by far upstages the foreground story. (This may be more true for me than for other viewers because I do not really know soul music particularly well. I may have missed some of the jokes. On the other hand, a top-of-the-lung belting out of "Try a Little Tenderness" may not have been intended to be as humorous as I found it.) Some of the humor was a bit derivative and no longer as funny as it might have been. The humorous audition montage is getting over-used after _S_h_e'_s _G_o_t_t_a _H_a_v_e _I_t, _T_h_e _P_r_o_d_u_c_e_r_s, (the underrated) _S_o_u_p _f_o_r _O_n_e, and Robert Kline's (hilarious) "New National Anthem Auditions" routine. The realism of the film is undermined to very little positive effect by a pair of twins who always speak in unison. _T_h_e _C_o_m_m_i_t_m_e_n_t_s is a film that us amusing at times and well- textured, but one in which I strongly recommend looking around the characters and watching instead the scenery. For me the film rate a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.