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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.

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.