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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 02/21/92 -- Vol. 10, No. 34
MEETINGS UPCOMING:
Unless otherwise stated, all meetings are on Wednesdays at noon.
LZ meetings are in LZ 2R-158.
_D_A_T_E _T_O_P_I_C
03/11 LZ: THE FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS by Stanislaw Lem (Who defines
reality?)
04/01 LZ: HELLCON, IA. by Brian Allthis (alien worlds: SF cons, Iowa, ...)
04/22 LZ: WONDERFUL LIFE by Stephen Jay Gould (Science non-fiction as a
source of ideas)
05/13 LZ: ONLY BEGOTTEN DAUGHTER by James Morrow (Books we heard are
very good)
_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.
02/23 Film Fest: EMPIRE OF THE AIR/RADIO DAYS (1 PM)
03/14 SFABC: Science Fiction Association of Bergen County: Barbara
Hare (computer gaming) (phone 201-933-2724 for details)
(Saturday)
02/21 NJSFS: New Jersey Science Fiction Society: TBA
(phone 201-432-5965 for details) (Saturday)
03/30 Hugo Nomination Forms due
HO Chair: John Jetzt HO 1E-525 908-834-1563 hocpb!jetzt
LZ Chair: Rob Mitchell LZ 1B-306 908-576-6106 mtuxo!jrrt
MT Chair: Mark Leeper MT 3D-441 908-957-5619 mtgzy!leeper
HO Librarian: Nick Sauer HO 4F-427 908-949-7076 homxc!11366ns
LZ Librarian: Lance Larsen LZ 3L-312 908-576-3346 mtfme!lfl
MT Librarian: Mark Leeper MT 3D-441 908-957-5619 mtgzy!leeper
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 1F-329 908-957-2070 mtgzy!ecl
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
1. I see that once again somebody is suggesting that there be a
National Lottery. This would probably be the last straw and all
fifty states would secede from the Union and declare war on
Washington, D.C. I think we need a Constitutional amendment saying
that the right to suck dry the stupid via games of chance shall
revert to the individual states. The Federal government must limit
itself to sucking dry the stupid with taxes.
THE MT VOID Page 2
We all know that lotteries were historically a gift by the Federal
government to the states. The Feds recognized that numbers
racketeers were sucking the stupid dry with lotteries. To be nice
to the states they suppressed the non-governmental numbers runners
and handed the right to run a numbers racket over to the states.
They also supported the principle that if something appears to be a
crime, government has the option of wiping it out or taking it
over. It is like Britain fighting a war for the right to push
opium in China or Congressmen giving themselves the right to bounce
checks. The government gave the suck-the-stupid-dry concession to
the states who have been happily running it except where the
churches have been muscling in with a lottery called BINGO.
Then things were okay for awhile between the states and the Feds
until we got in a certain President. So as not to point any
fingers we will designate this party "R." This President said, "A
lot of my best friends are rich and a lot of the states' governors
are from Party D. Here is my plan: come out for cutting taxes--
everybody likes it when you cut taxes--and we will just fund the
states less." So that's what he did. At which point Congress
stood up in anger and indignation and said, "We need cheaper
haircuts at the Congressional barbershop." If a Congressperson was
asked about whether it was fair to cut all those Federal programs
to help states, the response was, "Son, nobody votes against a tax
cut.... Oh fudge, .... I was talking to you and just missed a
chance to vote against a Congressional pay hike. Darn it all!"
So the governors complained to the Fed about the funding cut and
the Fed suggested the states increase the number of digits in their
lottery numbers. The states did that but they also had to raise
taxes. Suddenly it was discovered that Americans were now spending
fewer dollars on education per capita than they were on bumpers
stickers complaining about their governors. This, of course,
cheered everybody up because they never really liked education
anyway and they love it when they learn spending on education is
surpassed by spending on something stupid like cosmetics or Madonna
records. But still nationwide the governors who had to raise taxes
are seeing bumper stickers mention their name and doing something
with hot pincers. They are just about ready to declare war on the
Federal government and a National Lottery might be just the spark
that would be needed.
2. Well, the time travel contest didn't get very many entries. In
fact, it got two. Or rather one and a half, since Bill Higgins
says that his should only count as a half, when he says:
"Here's a contest entry for you, or half of one at any
rate. I would go back to the debate between the arrogant
young Arthur C. Clarke and the erudite don C. S. Lewis, in
the Eastgate Pub, Oxford. It was around 1947 or 1948; I
don't have the exact date, but research ought to pin it
down. I quote from Clarke's "Memoirs of an Armchair
THE MT VOID Page 3
Astronaut (Retired)," in his 1965 book _V_o_i_c_e_s _f_r_o_m _t_h_e
_S_k_y: 'Both of these fine books [_O_u_t _o_f _t_h_e _S_i_l_e_n_t _P_l_a_n_e_t
and _P_e_r_e_l_a_n_d_r_a] contained attacks on scientists in
general, and astronauts in particular, which aroused my
ire. I was especially incensed by a passage in _P_e_r_e_l_a_n_d_r_a
referring to "little rocket societies" that hoped to
spread the crimes of mankind to other planets. And at the
words: "The destruction or enslavement of other species in
the universe, if such there are, is to these minds a
welcome corollary," I really saw red. An extensive
correspondence with Dr. Lewis led to a meeting in a famous
Oxford pub, the Eastgate. Seconding me was my friend, Val
Cleaver, a space buff from way back (and now chief
engineer of the Rolls-Royce Rocket Division). Supporting
Lewis was Professor J. R. R. Tolkien, whose trilogy _T_h_e
_L_o_r_d _o_f _t_h_e _R_i_n_g_s created a considerable stir a few years
ago. Needless to say, neither side converted the other,
and we refused to abandon our diabolical schemes of
interplanetary conquest. But a fine time was had by all,
and when, some hours later, we emerged a little unsteadily
from the Eastgate, Dr. Lewis's parting words were "I'm
sure you're very wicked people--but how dull it would be
if everyone was good."'
I have always thought that a videotape of this debate
would be a really neat thing to have. I find both of the
principals fascinating, and I'm pretty interested in their
seconds, too. In particular, Lewis's criticism of British
scientific materialists was ignored by most of them, but
it seemed to disturb Clarke deeply. I'd like to see them
meet and debate each other.
(To pin down the date, you need to burgle the papers of
the golden-throated Willis Conover, the Voice of America
jazz DJ. Conover was a fanzine editor in the 1930s, and
"For the last twenty years," according to a footnote in
Clarke's _A_s_t_o_u_n_d_i_n_g _D_a_y_s, "the wretch has been sitting on
my own extensive correspondence with C. S. Lewis and Lord
Dunsany, promising to edit it real soon.")
I'm not really up to the second challenge yet. I'll let
you know if I think of nine more events."
Tom Russell, on the other hand, did think of ten events. Actually,
he came up with several:
"Ten-Trip Plan 31: I would start a new business: "Have
G.U.T., Will Time Travel," and sell quantum leap-frog
trips to guys in white hats and women in red dresses (it's
my business). Of course I really have grand unified
nothing (gun) in case I run out of guts on some trip
THE MT VOID Page 4
opportunities.
Ten-Trip Plan 42: I would produce a new television series,
"Lifestyles of Infamous Bitches," a reeeeally offensive
program which takes you to see some of history's
temptresses and seductresses. On our program will be the
likes of: Delilah (The Barber of Philistia), Helen (of
1000 Love Boats), Cleopatra (Real Jewel of the Nile), and
Mata Hari (The Spy Who Loved A to Z). What is our secret
for getting those really great scenes on tape, when we
have only one "take" for each siren we're visiting? The
answer is in the near future ...
Ten-Trip Plan 53: Another TV Show, "Solved Mysteries: This
Was Your Life, You Were There When It Could Be Told to
America's Least Wanted." On this show viewers call 900
numbers to choose which Kennedy fiasco they want to learn
the truth about on one week; on another they get to choose
which Bermuda triangle disaster to unravel; on the third
they get to select which alleged Close Encounter of the
Third Kind gets tested; etc. We select one caller at
random from those selecting the winning choice to join our
host as the videotape is removed from the time machine for
its live replay to the television audience. Geraldo, eat
your heart out.
To make the show a guaranteed success, we don't go back in
time to the actual time and place: rather, we send the
machine into the very recent past to a Hollywood sound
stage where actors and actresses recreate history the way
we want it to have been. Some help from the special
effects department can be added to doctor up the
videotapes for ETs and yetis. No need to worry about
getting to the right place and time, much less having the
proper lighting ...
Looking-Back Glass: Well, after rereading the user's
manual on my time machine, it turns out not to be a time
machine after all. It's more like one of those pay
telescopes on the top of the Empire State Building. You
get to look, but you aren't really there. This isn't at
all like H. G. Wells' or Christopher LLoyd's machines,
which actually went somewhen. More like a one-way time
window that I can put at any time and place, and then zoom
around: like using a microfiche reader to spy on Flatland,
but in three dimensions. Spying on our universe, as we
know it.
Now the really neat thing about this concept is that I
need not worry about how much fuel I'll need to get to my
destination (or about polluting the time highways with my
THE MT VOID Page 5
exhaust). Also, I can't be harmed in any way by the scene
that I'm viewing. Great! (But let's think about this:
how is it, given the duality of everything, that photons
can come through the window, but stray bullets cannot?
I would use this time machine for SETI. Not that I'm a
Carl Sagan fan, I just want to know for myself. I would
spend the first 24-hour trip looking around our
neighborhood. Set the clock for the minimum delta T into
the past, just enough to activate the window, and then
look around. In one trip I should be able to cover the
neighborhood: start at the center of the Sun, proceed out
to Mercury for a quick look around, then on to Venus, the
Moon, Mars, Charon, Jupiter, Europa, and all the way out
to the Oort region. It shouldn't take but a few minutes
in each stop to see if there are any artifacts of
intelligent life. After all, isn't the Earth covered with
empty soda bottles and beer cans?
I would, of course, not be too quick to dismiss an entire
planet. I'm thinking of the individual who criticized
NASA for sending the Mars probe to land in the desert
instead of in the cities.
After the Solar System, then on to the Pleiades, the
Magellenic clouds, the local galactic group, etc. Keep
expanding the scope of the search.
If ruins of civilization are all that is found, then the
time travel capability is what is needed. Go back. How
far? Estimate, based on parallels with ruins on Earth:
could be 300 years or 3000 years. But be prepared to go
back 300 million years.
Ten trips should easily be enough to find intelligent life
out there. How can I know for sure? The existence of the
time window is enough. It answers two of the most
profound questions of cosmology:
Q - "Where are they?"
A - They aren't coming here, they're just looking in the window.
Q - "Where is the missing mass from the universe?"
A - It went out the window.
Of course we don't want to find anybody out there who's
too intelligent. That's why looking for beer cans as
signs of civilization fits just right."
Mark Leeper
MT 3D-441 908-957-5619
...mtgzy!leeper
DOWN THE BRIGHT WAY by Ralph Reed
Bantam Spectra, 1991, ISBN 0-553-28923-3, $4.50.
A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
Copyright 1992 Evelyn C. Leeper
Another reviewer has recently suggested this as a possible Hugo
contender. Well, in this world anything is possible, but I have to
disagree on this one. This novel suffers (for me, at any rate) from
the same fault as Reed's other novel, _B_l_a_c_k _M_i_l_k. (Each, by the
way, contains an excerpt from the other at the end of the book,
possibly to confuse anyone who might skip to the end to find out
what happened.) This fault is that after setting up an interesting
premise with a lot of promise, Reed does nothing with it. In _D_o_w_n
_t_h_e _B_r_i_g_h_t _W_a_y, Reed postulates an infinite number (more or less) of
parallel Earths connected by the Bright, a sort of highway that one
can travel between them. Millions of years after the creation of
the Bright, the Wanderers send out two parties, one in each
direction of the Bright, to try to find the Makers who created it.
(I find myself asking why the Bright is linear. Some ordering of
Earths along a line--a single dimension doesn't seem to make a lot
of sense.)
Now to my mind the most exciting possibilities of this story
are in the parallel Earths. But these are almost entirely glossed
over so that all the rivalries and conspiracies among the Wanderers
can be developed. The only time the parallel Earths become
important is when Reed needs something to menace the entire set-up.
But for that, this seems more like a spy thriller than a sweeping
science fiction novel. There's nothing wrong with spy thrillers,
but why bother with the science fiction part? It's as though you
sent a team of time travelers back to ancient Egypt and then had
them sit in their tent arguing about who was the team leader the
whole time, pausing only briefly to notice a huge number of frogs,
swarms of flies, a rain of fire, a swarm of locusts, and finally
what seems to be a large number of people walking by. The team
interactions might normally be interesting, but the reader wants to
rip open the tent door and go outside.