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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 04/16/93 -- Vol. 11, No. 42

MEETINGS UPCOMING:

Unless otherwise stated, all meetings are in Holmdel 4N-509
Wednesdays at noon.

_D_A_T_E _T_O_P_I_C

04/21 ARISTOI by Walter Jon Williams
(If This--AI, Virtual Reality, Nanotech--Goes On)
05/12 THOMAS THE RHYMER by Ellen Kushner (Fantasy in a Modern Vein)
06/02 WORLD AT THE END OF TIME by Frederik Pohl
(Modern Stapledonian Fiction)
06/23 CONSIDER PHLEBAS by Iain Banks
(Space Opera with a Knife Twist)
07/14 SIGHT OF PROTEUS by Charles Sheffield (Human Metamorphosis)

Outside events:
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the second
Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call 201-933-2724 for
details. The New Jersey Science Fiction Society meets on the third
Saturday of every month in Belleville; call 201-432-5965 for details.

HO Chair: John Jetzt HO 1E-525 908-834-1563 holly!jetzt
LZ Chair: Rob Mitchell HO 1C-523 908-834-1267 holly!jrrt
MT Chair: Mark Leeper MT 3D-441 908-957-5619 mtgzfs3!leeper
HO Librarian: Nick Sauer HO 4F-427 908-949-7076 homxc!11366ns
LZ Librarian: Lance Larsen LZ 3L-312 908-576-3346 quartet!lfl
MT Librarian: Mark Leeper MT 3D-441 908-957-5619 mtgzfs3!leeper
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 1F-329 908-957-2070 mtgpfs1!ecl
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.

1. Evelyn tells me that punning is a terrible disease. She has
heard somewhere of some mental disorder that causes people to yell
obscenities uncontrollably. Actually, there might be a germ of
truth in what Evelyn says. Punning may actually be a manifestation
of a communication disorder. The human speech recognition center
is a pattern matching process. Your mind hears sounds and tries to
match them to possible meanings Actually, it matches to several
possible meanings and then chooses the one that makes the most
sense. There are even ambiguities when it has identified all the
words. "Time flies like an arrow" has six or seven meanings even

THE MT VOID Page 2

if each sound is correctly matched to the right word. Where the
disorder comes in is what happens if that old processor gives a
false positive, matching "Suez" to "sewers." That means that when
Palin says he is "spending the day in Suez," the mind does extra
processing, holding on to both "day in sewers" and "day in Suez"
until the final elimination. That is more processing, of course.
The punning mind is a little less efficient, but it compensates by
making use of the false matches. It turns them into jokes.

A pun is a special kind of joke. It actually is a small act of
sabotage against the mental process that interprets language. And
in sabotaging the process it reveals a little of how the processor
works. The processor thinks it has found a match on the first pass
but continues to check and finds contradictory information and
jumps to another interpretation. The mock anger one feels over a
pun is the anger of being intentionally betrayed.

When the mind gets a string of words it seems to process them in
parallel or at least not match them in parallel. I say that I am
happy that Evelyn is not too perturbed by my pleasant portliness
since, after all, a waist is a terrible thing to mind. Now, what
just happened? Your mind just matched that phrase with a familiar
phrase, then rejected it because the words are not in the correct
order. To do that, the order of the words must initially not have
been important. It is a later check that tells you that the first
match was a false match and the order of the words was important.
You also probably recognized that the first match--the false ones a
trap left intentionally for you.

2. I think it is going to be a real plus for our tourist industry
for the world to see how cooperatively, quickly, and efficiently
the United States pulls together to catch and punish people who
kill tourists.

Mark Leeper
MT 3D-441 908-957-5619
...mtgzfs3!leeper

If you attack stupidity you attack an entrenched interest
with friends in government and every walk of public life,
and you will make small progress against it.
-- Samuel Marchbanks

THE WHITECHAPEL HORRORS by Edward B. Hanna
Carroll & Graf, ISBN 0-88184-861-1, 1992, $19.95.
A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
Copyright 1993 Evelyn C. Leeper

While having Sherlock Holmes investigate Jack the Ripper seems
an obvious extension of the body of work about the Great Detective,
there have been surprisingly few such stories published. Of the
half dozen or so novels, only Ellery Queen's _S_t_u_d_y _i_n _T_e_r_r_o_r and
Robert Weverka's _M_u_r_d_e_r _b_y _D_e_c_r_e_e are at all well known. (The fact
that they were made into movies certainly helps.) And _T_h_e
_W_h_i_t_e_c_h_a_p_e_l _H_o_r_r_o_r_s is perhaps the best example of why this is so.

When writing a completely fictional Sherlock Holmes story, the
author can make all the clues fit his or her plot and s/he can make
sure all the necessary clues are there. In mathematical terms, all
the clues are necessary and sufficient. Occasionally there is a
false clue, but it is always explained. Very neat, very tidy.

Real life, however, doesn't work that way. And therein lies
the problem. The Ripper murders left a lot of clues, most of which
were useless and many of which were contradictory. Everyone has a
theory as to who did it (and the same was true at the time), but
they all run into some problem with the clues and in the end, no one
solution seems better than the others.

Given all this, and given that Hanna is more a stickler for
accuracy than most (at least in the details of the actual crimes),
it is not entirely surprising that his ending fails to satisfy the
reader. Hanna captures the feeling of a Holmes story, so the
reading enjoyable enough, but ultimately the ending causes the whole
experience to be diminished. In fact, more effort seems to be
expended on solving a completely different mystery--somewhat
related, perhaps, but not the main thrust of the book.

Hanna also does something that some people will undoubtedly
like, but I found annoying. He makes mistakes--intentionally. For
example, he will have Holmes quote from a play and then in a
footnote will explain that the play was actually not written until a
year after the story took place. This seems to be an attempt to
imitate William Baring-Gould's annotations to the original stories,
but that was one author trying to explain another's inadvertent
mistakes. Here Hanna is explaining Hanna--the book itself is not
written in the first person by Watson, but in the third person,
supposedly from notes by Watson. (Minor editorial nit: the
footnotes are all at the end instead of at the bottoms of their
respective pages. This makes them much harder to read; one has to
use two bookmarks and keep flipping back and forth.) Hanna also
makes unintentional mistakes: he uses the term "heir presumptive"

Whitechapel Horrors March 23, 1993 Page 2

incorrectly two or three times.

It's possible that Hanna chose to use the Ripper murders as the
basis for his book because they gave him most of the story prepared.
Unfortunately, he doesn't do much with what he has. I would have to
say I have mixed feelings on this, and would suggest waiting for the
paperback or reading the library's copy rather than buying the
hardcover.

Capsule review: Who would have expected a
subtle and very funny satire of bad movie making in
an Australian film about competition ballroom
dancers? This film may be more on-target than _T_h_e
_P_l_a_y_e_r. Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4).

Society has its rules. Because of these rules everybody knows
where they stand and what is expected of them. Who c Scott Hastings
started to go wrong. He came from a good family. His parents ran a
ballroom dancing studio. Scott himself had the makings of one of
Australia's great ballroom dancers. Then one day Scott broke
society's rules. In the middle of a minor ballroom competition
Scott just snapped. Suddenly he was dancing his own steps--steps
not accepted by the Australian Ballroom Dance Federation. Here in
Technicolor and stereophonic sound is the story of Australia's
Spartacus of ballroom dancing.

Here also is a delightful satire of really bad over-ripe
dramatic story-telling. It is all here: the boy with the dream, the
girl from the wrong side of the tracks, the pushy mother, the
conspiracy to fix the big dance competition, the dark secret from
the past, and, of course, the climatic dance competition. And not
one un-telegraphed plot twist. In fact, everything is here to make
the plot feel like an old friend. The target is contrived film
plotting and _S_t_r_i_c_t_l_y _B_a_l_l_r_o_o_m hits the mark with deadly accuracy.

The film stars Paul Mercurio as Scott Hastings, who
instinctively knows that a man has got to dance the way a man has
got to dance. Actually, this particular man _d_o_e_s dance very well,
not that that is really the point of the film. Scott's love is Fran
(played by Tara Morice). She has glasses and a bad complexion, and
is ugly and surprisingly clumsy, but inside she knows she has what
it takes to be beautiful and a great formal dancer. Bill Hunter
plays Barry Fife, who wrote the videocassette on ballroom dancing.
But does he hide a sinister secret?

This is a film that has echoes of what is wrong in even the
most popular films from _4_2_n_d _S_t_r_e_e_t to _R_o_c_k_y and _H_o_o_s_i_e_r_s. I give
this one a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale. It's a hoot!

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