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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 08/28/92 -- Vol. 11, No. 9

MEETINGS UPCOMING:

Unless otherwise stated, all meetings are on Wednesdays at noon.

_D_A_T_E _T_O_P_I_C

09/16 HO: THE SILMARILLION by J.R.R. Tolkien (Alternate Mythologies)
(HO 4N-509)
10/07 HO: THE FORGE OF GOD and THE ANVIL OF STARS by Greg Bear
(The Fermi Paradox) (HO 4N-509)
10/28 HO: Book Swap (HO 4N-509)
11/18 HO: DOOMSDAY BOOK by Connie Willis (Plagues) (HO 4N-509)
12/09 HO: A FIRE ON THE DEEP by Vernor Vinge (HO 4N-509)

_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.
09/12 SFABC: Science Fiction Association of Bergen County: Michael
Kandel (author) (phone 201-933-2724 for details)
(Saturday)
09/19 NJSFS: New Jersey Science Fiction Society: TBA
(phone 201-432-5965 for details) (Saturday)

HO Chair: John Jetzt HO 1E-525 908-834-1563 hocpb!jetzt
LZ Chair: Rob Mitchell HO 1D-505A 908-834-1267 hocpb!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. Sorry, you are not an instant winner. But thank you for
playing.

2. Like most American men I tend to dread opening a new shirt.
There are a number of reasons why people hate the first wearing of
a new shirt. Of course, the first one is the social stigma. In
order to make the short look nice in the package, they put
something into it called shortening or sizing or something.
Anyway, it is intended to make the shirt look just gorgeous in the
package even if the shirt will after washing look like a fugitive
from a steam grate. I think this stuff they put in shirts was
invented by Mary Kay Cosmetics.

THE MT VOID Page 2

Then, of course, there's the danger to life and limb provided by
the pins in the shirt. They were always pretty scary, even in the
days before AIDS. But more recently they have gotten a lot worse.
They put little plastic heads on those babies to make them blend in
with the shirt. They apparently finally acted on this suggestion
which had been kicking around since 1965, when it was suggested by
a Mr. Nguygen Tran of Hanoi, North Vietnam. Only a camouflage
expert these days can actually find and remove every one of these
little beauties before actually putting on the shirt. Of course,
then they either rip holes in the shirt or stab the unwary
customer.

But the main thing I want to tell you about is those little slips
that say, "Inspected by #52." How do you interpret that? I mean,
I know you know what "inspected" means, but what do you know about
#52? Just how good is he (actually in this case, she). Well, so
far the government has protected the shirt industry's right not to
tell the public, but my staff of spies have collected the following
information, exclusive to readers of the MT VOID.

#5, #33, #52, #56, #57, and #67 are all pretty good. #63 is also
unless you get him on a Friday afternoon.

#36 drinks on the job. Try to avoid shirts she has inspected.

#25 is really good, in more ways than one apparently. He stole
#44's wife. There are rumors about romantic weekends in Racine.
#44's work has declined but, even worse, he has taken to sticking
pencil holes in shirts after #25 has inspected them. Best not to
get involved with either of them.

As their low numbers suggest, #3 and #16 have been on the job a
long time. They met and fell in love on the job. Their work was
once good, but their daughter, the former #74, after inspecting for
only six months, ran off to become a groupie for Iron Maiden.
Well, not much of a loss, because she never got the hang of
inspecting pocket stitching, but she broke #3's and #16's hearts.
They just don't have their hearts in inspecting shirts anymore.

#28 had printed up his own counterfeit "Inspected by #23 slips."
Why, I don't know. Informed sources say there isn't much
difference in the quality of their work. It sort of became an
industry joke. I will continue to investigate.

Nobody would talk to us about #49.

Mark Leeper
MT 3D-441 908-957-5619
...mtgzy!leeper

I can respect the men who argue that religion is true
and therefore ought to be believed, but I can only feel
profound moral reprobation for those that say that
religion ought to be believed because it is useful, and
that to ask whether it is true is a waste of time.

-- Bertrand Russell

STARFARERS by Vonda N. McIntyre
Ace, 1989, ISBN 0-441-78053-9, $3.95.
TRANSITION by Vonda N. McIntyre
Bantam Spectra, 1991, ISBN 0-553-28850-4, $4.95.
METAPHASE by Vonda N. McIntyre
Bantam Spectra, 1992, ISBN 0-553-29223-4, $4.99.
Book reviews by Evelyn C. Leeper
Copyright 1992 Evelyn C. Leeper

Ursula K. LeGuin describes this as "the most important series
in science fiction." It's not that good, but the series does have
a lot to offer. It's a mix of old-time space opera/alien contact
with modern-day politics and futuristic sensibilities thrown in.
(It is similar to some of Michael Kube-McDowell's works in this
regard.) This is a mixed blessing. While I think it's a good thing
to have alternate family structures in a novel set in the future
(the Republican Convention notwithstanding!), I found the picture
here overly optimistic in their acceptance. And would _a_l_l the main
characters be bisexual? In spite of my reservations about the total
believability of this, I found the characters to be complex and
fleshed out enough to be involving rather than just vehicles for the
alien contact plot. And the ship and its adventures bring back some
of that sense of wonder from the old space operas.

In _S_t_a_r_f_a_r_e_r_s we meet the crew of the Starfarer, Earth's first
interstellar craft (and biosphere). Earth politicians are trying to
convert the craft to military use, so the crew decides to leave by
jumping into another star system by following cosmic thread before
this can happen. In the process, they take along a few unwilling
"crew members" who happened to be there when the ship had to leave.
Oh, and Earth has fired an atomic warhead at them and their
artificial intelligence net has been sabotaged....

It's not spoiler to say that they solve these problems--if they
hadn't there wouldn't be _T_r_a_n_s_i_t_i_o_n and _M_e_t_a_p_h_a_s_e. In _T_r_a_n_s_i_t_i_o_n
the Starfarer meets aliens (sort of) and _a_g_a_i_n has its net
sabotaged, and ends by having to jump to yet another star system or
be stranded.... In _M_e_t_a_p_h_a_s_e there are yet more adventures, the
alien squidmoth, and a jump to _a_n_o_t_h_e_r star system at the end....

If by now you see a certain cyclic nature to the series, you're
right. To call this a series is, to my mind, inaccurate. It's a
single story of as yet indeterminate length, with each book picking
up where the previous one has left off. So unlike some other series
(such as Bujold's "Barrayar" or McCaffrey's "Dragon" series), you
cannot read individual books or read the books out of order. (Well,
you can, but it would be like reading the chapters in a novel in
random order, and the story would not be the better for it.)
Strangely enough, it also reads like something that would show up on

Starfarers August 23, 1992 Page 2

television, though television tends to stay away from series in
which the order matters--it's harder to syndicate them after their
first run. Still, the limited set of main characters, the episodic
nature of their adventures (combined with the on-going theme of
exploration), and so on make me wonder if this isn't at least
influenced by the structure of television series. (McIntyre is no
stranger to television-related material, having written several
"Star Trek" novels.)

So my recommendation on this has to be somewhat tempered by the
fact that this is an open-ended series. If you like your stories to
have a beginning, a middle, and an end, this is probably not for
you. The "Starfarers" has a beginning, a lot of middle, and no end
in sight. If you can accept that structure, I would recommend the
series.

Capsule review: Bizarre Gratia Bizarre. Brian
De Palma directs his own not-ready-for-primetime
script. He sew together big swaths from _P_e_e_p_i_n_g _T_o_m,
_P_s_y_c_h_o, and others, then does not have the plot
thread to hold them together in a decent story. Very
much a lesser effort of a decent filmmaker. Rating:
low 0 (-4 to +4). (Warning: some spoilers occur in
this review.)

At one point Brian De Palma was a clever and innovative
filmmaker. _P_h_a_n_t_o_m _o_f _t_h_e _P_a_r_a_d_i_s_e is a terrific _t_o_u_r _d_e _f_o_r_c_e.
Arguably it was De Palma who put Stephen King on the map with his
excellent adaptation of _C_a_r_r_i_e. De Palma also proved he could do
Hitchcock thrillers as well as Hitchcock himself. In fact, when De
Palma's _O_b_s_e_s_s_i_o_n played concurrently with Hitchcock's _F_a_m_i_l_y _P_l_o_t,
I claimed it was _O_b_s_e_s_s_i_o_n that Hitchcock should have been prouder
of. I also think that in spite of some of the obvious faults,
_S_c_a_r_f_a_c_e is probably the most exciting gangster film of the last ten
years. But De Palma borrowed too often from Hitchcock, and his
films like _B_o_d_y _D_o_u_b_l_e became too predictable. Also he was the
wrong director for _B_o_n_f_i_r_e _o_f _t_h_e _V_a_n_i_t_i_e_s. You have to be very
careful giving an escapist director a film of social comment. Now
he is back with a non-Hitchcockian thriller that he wrote himself.,
but he is making a mess of things. (It may be overstating things to
call it his script; De Palma heavily plunders other films such as
_S_y_b_i_l and _P_e_e_p_i_n_g _T_o_m.)

Carter Nix (played by John Lithgow) is a child psychologist who
so loves his baby daughter that he has taken two years off of his
practice just to study her. In fact, he constantly has cameras on
her so that she never has a private moment. (Yes, a directed steal
from Michael Powell's _P_e_e_p_i_n_g _T_o_m.) But we find out very quickly
that Carter is stealing babies for a psychological experiment. His
wife Jenny (played by Lolita Davidovich) knows nothing of this and
is carrying on her own secret life (with the accent on "carrying
on"). The first mild absurdity happens in the first sixty seconds
of the film, when a friend (played by Teri Austin) offers Carter and
daughter a ride and just happens to have a spare baby seat in the
car. This is only a tiny absurdity and De Palma could have
explained it, but chose not to in order to condition the viewer to
accept larger and larger absurdities without explanation. The
climax of the film is a flabbergasting lulu requiring precise
split-second timing to convince the audience that no events as shown
could ever occur on planet Earth.

Raising Cain August 23, 1992 Page 2

De Palma's script makes clear that he did not have enough story
to fill a film. While the _R_a_i_s_i_n_g _C_a_i_n length of 97 minutes is not
actually outlandishly short, the film is only that long due to a
lengthy sequence that is nothing but a throwaway adding zilch to the
story but a gratuitous car accident. At some point this film was
probably written to be a _t_o_u_r _d_e _f_o_r_c_e for John Lithgow playing
multiple roles, but in fact he just gives weak impressions of James
Spader and Max Von Sydow (with exaggerated Swedish accent while
playing a Norwegian). This new film makes De Palma appear to be no
so much raising cain as just being less able. I rate it a low 0 on
the -4 to +4 scale.