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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 05/07/93 -- Vol. 11, No. 45

MEETINGS UPCOMING:

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

_D_A_T_E _T_O_P_I_C

05/12 THOMAS THE RHYMER by Ellen Kushner (Fantasy in a Modern Vein)
06/02 RED MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson
(Politics in Space Colonization)
06/23 CHINA MOUNTAIN ZHANG by Maureen McHugh
(Non-European Futures)
07/14 SIGHT OF PROTEUS by Charles Sheffield (Human Metamorphosis)
08/04 Hugo Short Story Nominees
08/25 CONSIDER PHLEBAS by Iain Banks
(Space Opera with a Knife Twist)
09/15 WORLD AT THE END OF TIME by Frederik Pohl
(Modern Stapledonian Fiction)

Outside events:
07/31 Deadline for Hugo Ballots to be postmarked
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. The discussion book for the next meeting is _T_h_o_m_a_s _t_h_e _R_h_y_m_e_r by
Ellen Kushner, and the topic is "Fantasy in a Modern Vein." There
are a small group of authors today working in the fantasy field who
are not writing Tolkien rip-offs, but who have gone back to the
classic fairy tales and legends and are re-telling them in a modern
setting, or at least with modern sensibilities. Robin McKinley

THE MT VOID Page 2

started in this direction this several years ago with _B_e_a_u_t_y, and
Sheri Tepper did something along these lines recently with her
_B_e_a_u_t_y as well. (The former is "Beauty and the Beast"; the latter
is "Sleeping Beauty.") The best-known works of this sort, though,
are in the "Fairy Tale" series. Jane Yolen's _B_r_i_a_r _R_o_s_e, for
example, takes the story of Sleeping Beauty and sets it in the
Holocaust, Pamela Dean's _T_a_m _L_i_m is set on a college campus, and so
on. This use of an old and mostly abandoned genre in new and
unusual ways will form the basis of our discussion.

Nick Sauer adds the following: "I have not read _T_h_o_m_a_s _t_h_e _R_h_y_m_e_r,
which Evelyn tells me is the latest in the Fairy Tale series [it
isn't; Evelyn was confused -ecl]. However, since the topic for the
next meeting is fantasy in a modern vein, I will talk about one of
the other books in the same series which covers this same topic.
_J_a_c_k _t_h_e _G_i_a_n_t _K_i_l_l_e_r by Charles DeLint is an excellent modern
fantasy story set in Ottowa. The lead character is Jackie who,
after being dumped by her boyfriend in the first chapter, rather
accidentally stumbles into the world of the fairy folk in modern
day Canada. I tend to like stories that show a world that is all
around us and, yet, invisible to most people. The idea is
certainly not a new one (_T_h_e_y _L_i_v_e/_E_i_g_h_t _O'_C_l_o_c_k _i_n _t_h_e _M_o_r_n_i_n_g
being a more common example of the same idea) but, Charles DeLint
does a spectacular job making the fairy world's presence in our own
world believable. At the same time he keeps the giants and other
fey folk characters very close to the way they were presented in
the fairy tales that I was told/read as a child. In addition, he
weaves all of this into a story that picks up from the first
chapter and doesn't stop moving until the last one. Jack the Giant
Killer is a very hard book to put down once you get started and, I
highly recommend it as an example of how a modern fairy tale story
should work. Now, if only I could find a copy of the sequel _D_r_i_n_k
_D_o_w_n _t_h_e _M_o_o_n.... [-ns]

2. Okay, I admit it. There isn't a whole lot of theme in common
connecting the next two films at the Leeperhouse film fest. They
are both about putting on shows, I guess. Both are good films (one
I have been trying to work into a film fest for years). On
Thursday, May 13, at 7 PM we will show:

THE GIG (1985) dir. by Frank D. Gilroy
HEAR MY SONG (1992) dir. by Peter Chelsom

In _T_h_e _G_i_g, five New York City businessmen who get together once a
week to play Dixieland jazz harbor a dream of going professional.
Then they get a shot. A Catskills resort agrees to hire them. As
the story begins, the five men are faced with actually achieving
their dream and each reacts differently. When one drops out and a
Black stranger is brought into the group, new tensions arise. _T_h_e
_G_i_g is a very funny, perceptive, and entertaining film, very
different from what would come from the Hollywood mill. Wayne

THE MT VOID Page 3

Rogers and Cleavon Little star.

_H_e_a_r _M_y _S_o_n_g is the story of a music promoter about to be put out
of business who thinks he can save the day if he can locate a famed
Irish tenor who is a tax exile from England. Josef Locke fled
England in 1958. (That part of the story is true, by the way--
Josef Locke is real.) Adrian Dunbar stars as the irrepressible
promoter. The story is up-beat, fast-paced, and for the most part
unpredictable. A full review is included elsewhere in this issue.
I do recommend both these films, neither of which got wide
releases.

3. Lance Larsen reports that Marcia Chomitz just donated
_T_w_e_n_t_i_e_t_h-_C_e_n_t_u_r_y _S_c_i_e_n_c_e-_F_i_c_t_i_o_n _W_r_i_t_e_r_s, 2nd ed. (edited by
Curtis C. Smith, St. James Press, Chicago and London, 1986) to the
SF Club Library. This is in the Lincroft branch; people at other
locations should contact him via e-mail to borrow it. [-ecl]

4. Hugo Factoid of the Week: Robert Silverberg has been nominated
23 times (and won 3), Harlan Ellison has been nominated 17 (and won
7), and Poul Anderson has been nominated 16 times (and won 7).
Next week: who has been nominated the most times in the fiction
categories _w_i_t_h_o_u_t _w_i_n_n_i_n_g? [-ecl]

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

John W. Campbell Award Nominee Bibliographies

- Barbara Delaplace

- "No Other Choice" (_A_l_t_e_r_n_a_t_e _P_r_e_s_i_d_e_n_t_s)
- "Freedom" (_A_l_t_e_r_n_a_t_e _K_e_n_n_e_d_y_s)
- "Wings" (_H_o_r_s_e _F_a_n_t_a_s_t_i_c)
- "Hidden Dragon" (_D_r_a_g_o_n _F_a_n_t_a_s_t_i_c)
- "The Last Sphinx" (_A _C_h_r_i_s_t_m_a_s _B_e_s_t_i_a_r_y)
- "Black Ice" (_A_l_a_d_d_i_n: _M_a_s_t_e_r _o_f _t_h_e _L_a_m_p)
- "Lost Lamb" (_W_h_a_t_d_u_n_n_i_t_s)

- Nicholas DiChario

- "The Power of Love" (_F&_S_F Sep 1991)
- "Red Poppy" (_S_t_a_r_s_h_o_r_e)
- "Forty at the Kiosk" (_U_n_i_v_e_r_s_e _2)
- "The Winterberry" (_A_l_t_e_r_n_a_t_e _K_e_n_n_e_d_y_s)
- "Fizz" (_A_l_a_d_d_i_n: _M_a_s_t_e_r _o_f _t_h_e _L_a_m_p)

- Holly Lisle

- _F_i_r_e _i_n _t_h_e _M_i_s_t
- _B_o_n_e_s _o_f _t_h_e _P_a_s_t
- _W_h_e_n _t_h_e _B_o_u_g_h _B_r_e_a_k_s (with Mercedes Lackey)
- a novelette in the last collection of new Harold Shea
stories

- Laura Resnick

- "We Are Not Amused" (_A_l_t_e_r_n_a_t_e _P_r_e_s_i_d_e_n_t_s)
- "A Fleeting Wisp of Glory" (_A_l_t_e_r_n_a_t_e _K_e_n_n_e_d_y_s)
- "No Room for the Unicorn" (_H_o_r_s_e _F_a_n_t_a_s_t_i_c)
- "Fluff, the Tragic Dragon" (_D_r_a_g_o_n _F_a_n_t_a_s_t_i_c)
- (title unknown) (_A _C_h_r_i_s_t_m_a_s _B_e_s_t_i_a_r_y)
- "Yasmine" (_A_l_a_d_d_i_n: _M_a_s_t_e_r _o_f _t_h_e _L_a_m_p)
- (title unknown) (_W_h_a_t_d_u_n_n_i_t_s)

- Carrie Richerson

- "A Dying Breed" (_F&_S_F Oct/Nov 1992)

- Michelle Sagara

- _I_n_t_o _t_h_e _D_a_r_k _L_a_n_d_s
- _C_h_i_l_d_r_e_n _o_f _t_h_e _B_l_o_o_d
- "Birthknight" (_A _C_h_r_i_s_t_m_a_s _B_e_s_t_i_a_r_y)
- "Gifted" (_A_l_a_d_d_i_n: _M_a_s_t_e_r _o_f _t_h_e _L_a_m_p)
- (title unknown) (_W_h_a_t_d_u_n_n_i_t_s)

SARAH CANARY by Karen Joy Fowler
Zebra, ISBN 0-8217-4088-1, 1993, $5.99.
A book review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1993 Mark R. Leeper

There is a bookstore in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is, I am
sure, not unlike bookstores in a lot of college towns. The store
stocks books that as nearly as the managers can arrange apparently
represent one consistent political viewpoint. In the store's
repertoire you can learn just about all you want to know about that
one viewpoint. But if you want to compare it with other ideas of
people who do not ascribe to that viewpoint, you have to go
elsewhere. It is not that I disagree with that viewpoint--
politically it is close to my own--but as far as diversity of
opinion, I find I do better at the average airport newsstand.
Ironically, the store calls itself "Food for Thought." But it is
sort of the literary equivalent of the "House of Toast." "Food for
Thought" is a good name for a bookstore, but if I ran a bookstore
with that name it would have _D_a_s _K_a_p_i_t_a_l and _M_e_i_n _K_a_m_p_f, not because
I agree with either, but because I don't. It would have Spinoza and
Plato and Mishima. A store with that name should have Hawking and
Velikovsky. It would have Jeremy Rifkin and Frank Lloyd Wright and
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Marshall McLuhan. As food for thought, this
place is pretty slim pickings particularly if you are not interested
in their one social viewpoint, but they are smart enough to know
that there is a ready market for books written in this narrow band
of political thought. I guess people feel secure with reading
matter that agrees with their own way of thinking. Authors writing
from that viewpoint will have as ready a market as they would if
they were writing in the "Star Trek" universe. I thought of "Food
for Thought" many times when I was reading _S_a_r_a_h _C_a_n_a_r_y. It was
written for their market.

A nameless woman mysteriously shows up in a Chinese railroad
labor camp in the Washington Territory in mid-winter 1873. The
woman is dressed in black and speaks no intelligible tongue. If
abandoned to the cold, she will surely die. Chin Ah Kim, a
surprisingly erudite laborer, decides to adopt the woman in black,
at least until he can get her to a place of safety. In grand
adventure style, the simple trip to take Sarah Canary, as the woman
comes to be called, to safety becomes a far greater adventure than
Chin Ah Kim could have expected.

Superficially at least, _S_a_r_a_h _C_a_n_a_r_y resembles _H_u_c_k_l_e_b_e_r_r_y
_F_i_n_n. We have a set of fugitives running across a stretch of
America and while the travelers themselves are of some interest,
really it is the backdrop, the portrait of the world of 1872 and
1873 in the Pacific Northwest, that is the focus of Fowler's
attention. Most of what Fowler sees in this period is injustice and

Sarah Canary May 1, 1993 Page 2

ignorance. Undoubtedly that is not too far from the truth, but what
our characters see is mostly a very 1990s view of the injustice. We
see white male injustice against Chinese, Indians, blacks, and
especially women, but Fowler never has a white woman being cruel to
an Indian. Fowler is describing a world in which there are the
oppressors and the oppressed. The oppressed all basically have
sympathy for each other. And the choice of the oppressed seems to
have come from a 1990s checklist: women, Chinese, blacks. Now, I
cannot imagine that this not being a time of a tremendous reliance
on animals and certainly there would have been no small amount of
animal abuse that the characters would have seen on their journey.
That is not where Fowler's sympathies lie, apparently, so no
descriptions of animal abuse are mentioned. Fowler, on the other
hand, has a good deal of interest in feminism and so, as a result,
do all the 19th Century women in the book.

Not having a time machine or being able to read minds, it is
for me impossible to tell you what was on most people's minds in the
Washington Territory of the 1870s, but I certainly felt while I was
reading this book that Fowler misrepresents the situation. She
takes the attitudes of a very small number of women--the pioneers of
the women's movement--and spreads them liberally over the minds of
the women in this novel. My suspicion is that more women were
concerned with the issue "Will there be food enough for my family
this winter?" than "Don't I have the right to as much sexual
pleasure as a man gets?" Does this sound more like an 1870s or a
1990s woman? Just worrying about sexual pleasure implies a much
more affluent society, one like our own, than one like was present
in Fowler's setting. While there may have been a few men who sat
around like Fowler's men do and spat and complained about uppity
women, far more were worried about issues like "Will there be food
enough for my family this winter?" When you are scratching your
existence out of the ground as much of the population of the Pacific
Northwest were, trying to get enough food to eat, food and shelter
are the major issues on both men's and women's minds. Sexual
politics is a long way down on the list. At least that is my
impression. And it is considerably different from Fowler's
impression apparently. Fowler writes as if she knows the history of
the women's movement and believes that is all that is necessary to
understand the period. If the history we learned in schools is
indeed just white men's history, Fowler's history is certainly no
broader or more inclusive. When she has a character say, "Someday
we will learn that when one woman is wronged, we all are wronged,"
she is not writing in the 1870s I picture. That was probably a very
rare sentiment in the 1870s. You would find far more women
believing "Blood is thicker than water." (Actually I might question
that even as a principle for the 1990s. Do I feel, for example,
that when one New Jerseyite is wronged, we all are, or when one
science fiction fan is wronged, we all are? Unless I was going to
spread the sentiment to everybody, I am not sure it is an idea I
would buy.)

Sarah Canary May 1, 1993 Page 3

Time and again, Fowler's characters turn out to be warped just
a bit out of the reality of the setting. Just about everybody in
the novel seems to have an unrealistically broad knowledge of the
world. Chin is a Chinese railroad worker laborer who knows not just
about the folklore of China, but also of India. He speaks fluent
English and German. It is eventually explained that he was, in
fact, more high-born than the other laborers. But his views are as
far from those of a high-born Cantonese of the time as they are from
those of a Cantonese laborer.

Another character considers the possibility than Sarah Canary
is a vampire, having read some LeFanu. Yes, it is possible that
someone might have read about vampires, but it is very unlikely and
such a person would know other creatures of folklore that they would
be equally likely to choose. It is only since Bram Stoker wrote
_D_r_a_c_u_l_a that vampires have become so central in popular folklore.
Perhaps a little more realistic is a self-styled scientist who is a
font of amusing misinformation; some of it includes a sexist belief
that women are more primitive than men. Fowler smugly pokes fun at
all the strange and unscientific beliefs the man holds. Of course,
Fowler comes from a time when reliable scientific knowledge is
readily and cheaply available. It is easy for her to laugh at the
misimpressions of people who have not had her opportunities.

However, my impressions of _S_a_r_a_h _C_a_n_a_r_y are certainly not all
negative. Fowler's prose style is actually what attracted me to
this book in the first place, and it is what I liked best about the
book. She has a short, clean writing style. She never lets the
writing get in the way of the story-telling. She tells a story that
involves the reader quickly and has a plot that moves well. She has
sprinkled in a good deal of historical detail, though not all of
which I would rely on. For example, there was indeed historically
a mechanical device that supposedly played chess (and which really
was operated by a midget chess player inside), but she associated
the device with P. T. Barnum. That is just not true.

Fowler does have one stylistic quirk. She mixes story chapters
with chapters of historical background, usually with a didactic
bent. But the story chapter headings are spelled out (like "Chapter
Two"), while the historical essays are numbered separately with
Roman numerals. Why? It is never clear.

_S_a_r_a_h _C_a_n_a_r_y is an enjoyable book to read, with interesting
nuggets of history, but occasionally you want to ask Fowler her if
she seriously believes this very weird and eccentric view of the
period.

Capsule review: A bunch of newcomers to feature
filmmaking make a highly impressive debut in this
very original and funny comedy about a young
impresario and a legendary Irish singer. You may
have to go some distance to find _H_e_a_r _M_y _S_o_n_g, but it
is well worth seeking out. Rating: low +2 (-4 to
+4).

_H_e_a_r _M_y _S_o_n_g is the first film directed by Peter Chelsom. It is
based on a screenplay Chelsom co-authored with Adrian Dunbar, the
actor who plays the film's main character. It is a spectacular
start for two major talents. British Chelsom is starting out with
more talent than 90% of American directors and with a skill that it
took Bill Forsyth two or three films to attain. I choose Forsyth
because Chelsom and Forsyth are both British and each has a loving
feel for the personalities of minor characters and local color.
_H_e_a_r _M_y _S_o_n_g is constantly doing the unexpected. Only in the last
ten minutes does the film get a bit sugary.

Mickey O'Neill (played by Dunbar) is a thirty-year-old concert
promoter in an Irish neighborhood in England. He wants little more
from life than to put on successful concerts and to woo his
girlfriend Nancy. Tara Fitzgerald, who plays Nancy, has the sort of
pristine beauty that Grace Kelly had. There is absolutely no need
for the film to explain why Mickey is anxious to win Nancy. Mickey,
however, is having problems, both with Nancy and with his
promotions. He finds himself promoting sleazier and sleazier
singers to ever-shrinking audiences. Then he manages to book a
legendary Irish singer who has been a tax exile from England since
1958. That sparks unexpected events and a quest in Ireland.

Chelsom's style of story-telling is brisk and usually
intelligent. Plot details are not overly explained. Some
concentration is required and there is the feeling that the plot
could take a right-angle turn at any moment. Unusual camera angles
abound. Chelsom and Dunbar pack the film with comic situations and
dialogue. Some mention should be made of the films only two
recognizable stars. Top billing goes to Ned Beatty as a reclusive
Irishman who could be the key to Mickey's success. His singing is
one of the few negative touches as his singing voice--dubbed by
Vernon Midgley--just does not seem to go with his speaking voice.
David McCallum is largely wasted as a police inspector and as a
heavy.

This is a genuinely funny comedy and well worth looking for. I
rate this a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.