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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 9/2/94 -- Vol. 13, No. 10
MEETINGS UPCOMING:
Unless otherwise stated, all meetings are in Middletown 1R-400C
Wednesdays at noon.
_D_A_T_E _T_O_P_I_C
09/03 Movie: *No film this week*
09/10 Movie: WAR OF THE WORLDS (Saturday night, 8PM, RSVP)
09/14 Book: A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT by Mark Twain
(Classics)
09/17 Movie: INVADERS FROM MARS (Saturday night, 8PM, RSVP)
09/24 Movie: PHANTOM FROM SPACE (Saturday night, 8PM, RSVP)
10/05 Book: MINING THE OORT by Frederik Pohl (tentative)
10/26 Book: INTERVIEW IWTH A VAMPIRE by Anne Rice (movie tie-ins)
11/16 Book: FRANKENSTEIN (Classics *and* movies tie-ins)
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.
MT Chair: Mark Leeper MT 3D-441 908-957-5619 m.r.leeper@att.com
HO Chair: John Jetzt MT 2G-432 908-957-5087 j.j.jetzt@att.com
HO Co-Librarian: Nick Sauer HO 4F-427 908-949-7076 n.j.sauer@att.com
HO Co-Librarian: Lance Larsen HO 2C-318 908-949-4156 l.f.larsen@att.com
MT Librarian: Mark Leeper MT 3D-441 908-957-5619 m.r.leeper@att.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist:
Rob Mitchell MT 2D-536 908-957-6330 r.l.mitchell@att.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 1F-329 908-957-2070 e.c.leeper@att.com
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
1. With films like _T_o_o_t_s_i_e, _L_a _C_a_g_e _a_u_x _F_o_l_l_e_s, and _M_r_s. _D_o_u_b_t_f_i_r_e,
we are used to seeing men playing women on the screen. The
problem, as I was telling a friend, is that it is never convincing.
There are males who can play females on the screen in a convincing
fashion, but somehow it takes a particular quality to do it
correctly and most men just don't have that quality. If I saw
Dustin Hoffman on the street in drag, I would immediately assume
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that what I was seeing was man in drag. I certainly would be
suspicious. I saw a local production of the play _L_a _C_a_g_e _a_u_x
_F_o_l_l_e_s and about half of the men in drag were convincing and half
were not. So, my friend challenged, who do I think is better? Is
there any famous actor who does a really good job at cross-gender
actor? Well I was convinced by Linda Hunt in _T_h_e _Y_e_a_r _o_f _L_i_v_i_n_g
_D_a_n_g_e_r_o_u_s_l_y but as far as I am concerned the best cross-gender
actor is currently in a film. In fact he is from an acting family
that specializes in cross-gender roles and is so good, most people
do not realize that any of the actors in the family are male. And
yet they all are. Of course I am talking about that great acting
family, the Lassies. These guys have been pulling this deception
off for a long time. It is particularly impressive since when they
perform they are doing it almost totally nude. Yet nobody ever
notices that this is a female impersonator that is running to get
help to dig little Timmy out of the collapsed mine shaft.
Now I have always had a certain fondness in my heart for Lassie, be
it a male or a female. And when I was a kid, I always assumed
Lassie was a male, not being all that facile with languages at age
five. I only discovered as I was growing up that Lassie had a name
almost exclusively used by females. Sometimes ignorance can lead
you to the right conclusions. I don't know if you have noticed
that Lassie is one of only two continuing characters in film who
consistently get title credit for being intelligent. The other is,
of course, Sherlock Holmes. And when Lassie comes to the rescue
she comes alone. Sherlock Holmes usually has to bring along
Watson. Whether you call Lassie or Holmes and Watson you seem to
get four legs and about 250 IQ points.
But this bit of substituting a male for a female sounds like it is
grounds for an affirmative action complaint. Next thing you know
they will be having Jonathan Pryce playing Lassie. But if it seems
unfair to female dogs that a male gets to play in a female, realize
that they have already had their revenge. First of all there is a
famous canine role in which what everybody assumed was a male dog
was really a female. Any guesses who? Well, you should have been
reading this notice since I released the sordid fact here years
ago. Longtime readers of this column will know that only females
have ever appeared as Spuds Mackenzie. The reason has not so much
to do with actors' equity or quotas as that males usually play
long-haired dogs and females play short-haired dogs. I am not so
sure why the former is true, but the latter is for prudish,
Victorian reasons that I will leave to your imagination.
===================================================================
2. PARABLE OF THE SOWER by Octavia E. Butler (Four Walls Eight
Windows, ISBN 0-941423-99-9, October 1993, 299pp, $19.95) (a book
review by Evelyn C. Leeper):
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Post-holocaust stories have been with us for quite a while. Even
eliminating such classics as Noah and the Flood or Lot and his
daughters, the category dates back at least to Mary Shelley's _L_a_s_t
_M_a_n (1826), Richard Jeffries's _A_f_t_e_r _L_o_n_d_o_n (1885), Jack London's
_S_c_a_r_l_e_t _P_l_a_g_u_e (1915), and S. Fowler Wright's _D_e_l_u_g_e (1928), to
name some of the better-known works. In the 1950s the theme met up
with the atom bomb and, spurred perhaps by the recent success of
Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie's _W_h_e_n _W_o_r_l_d_s _C_o_l_l_i_d_e (1933) and
George Stewart's _E_a_r_t_h _A_b_i_d_e_s (1949), really took off. The most
enduring of this period's work is undoubtedly Walter M. Miller's
_C_a_n_t_i_c_l_e _f_o_r _L_e_i_b_o_w_i_t_z.
But in general post-holocaust, or post-apocalyptic, stories needed
an apocalypse--almost always one of the classic four: fire (in the
form of atomic radiation), flood, plague, or war. After all, with
the war behind us, the only way to go was up. Things were getting
better--everyone was moving up in the wold. So the only thing that
could produce a primitive set of conditions would be some sort of
natural disaster or, of course, the Bomb. But now it's the 90s.
Things don't look as rosy. Our cities are becoming more run-down,
less safe. And so it's not surprising that we are starting to see
more stories in which there are post-holocaust conditions without
an actual holocaust.
Which brings us to _P_a_r_a_b_l_e _o_f _t_h_e _S_o_w_e_r. There hasn't been a
plague, a flood, or a war, but by 2025 people are living in fenced
and guarded enclaves. A new street drug has turned people into
pyromaniacs, and those driven from their burned-out homes have
little choice but to go into slavery in the new border factories.
At the beginning of the story, Lauren Olamina is fifteen years old
and living in a small neighborhood, relatively safe (though
everyone is getting weapons training, and no one goes "outside"
unless they must). Her father is a minister, but Olamina finds
herself drawn away from his religion to a new religion/philosophy
called Earthseed which she is formulating based on her view of the
world. Earthseed seems to have two aspects: life is change and
humanity's destiny is the stars. Or to quote from the various
verses preceding each chapter, "All that you touch/You Change./All
that you Change/Changes you./The only lasting truth is
Change./God/Is Change," and, "We are all Godseed, but no more or
less so than any other aspect of the universe. Godseed is all
there is--all that Changes. Earthseed is all that spreads
Earthlife to other earths. The universe is Godseed. Only we are
Earthseed. And the Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the
stars. One character describes Earthseed as a "combination of
Buddhism, existentialism, Sufism, and I don't know what else."
But--not surprisingly--Olamina's neighborhood is destroyed and she
decides to head north in the hopes of starting a new community--an
Earthseed community. So we have a post-holocaust, coming-of-age,
new-religion, mutated-human novel. (Oh, yes, Olamina also has
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"hyper-empathy," or the ability to feel other's pain. This is
apparently the result of a drug her mother took when she was
pregnant with Olamina.) This is a lot of stuff to put in a three-
hundred-page novel, but Butler manages to do it by avoiding the
padding that so many authors put in their novels these days. She
writes in a very direct style which lets her cover more ground and
cover it well.
This is better than at least two of the Hugo nominees for its year
(in my opinion), but didn't make the ballot or receive much notice.
I suspect it's because it was published by a small press, and
wonder if Butler purposely chose this route. I can't imagine any
of the major publishers rejecting it, but I suppose in publishing
anything is possible. (On the other hand, the level of typos is
much higher here than would be usual for a major publisher,
especially in the use of opening or closing quotation marks. The
result is that you may think you're reading narration and suddenly
hit a close quotation mark that had no opener, or conversely.)
I _h_i_g_h_l_y recommend _P_a_r_a_b_l_e _o_f _t_h_e _S_o_w_e_r and I'm going to go on a
quest for Butler's other nine novels. (I've read some of them and
thought they were good also.) If your bookstore doesn't have
_P_a_r_a_b_l_e _o_f _t_h_e _S_o_w_e_r, you can order it from Four Walls Eight
Windows, 39 West 14th St. 3503, New York NY 10011.
===================================================================
4. MY DEAR HOLMES by Gavin Brend (Otto Penzler, ISBN 1-883402-69-7,
1994 (1951c), 183pp, $8) (a book review by Evelyn C. Leeper):
There is clearly a Sherlock Holmes revival going on--this is the
tenth Holmes-related book I've reviewed this year. Some are
pastiches or other fictional works, and some are non-fiction
studies. This one falls in the latter category and is a reprint of
a classic 1951 study in the chronology of the Holmes stories.
It's so classic, in fact, that when I started reading Baring-
Gould's annotations in parallel, I discovered that much of the
analysis I had been attributing to Baring-Gould was in fact a
compilation of the works of others such as Brend. (This is not to
belittle Baring-Gould--collecting and organizing all the various
sources is no mean task.) Brend also goes into the question of
Watson's marriages (two, according to Brend) and Watson's absences
from Baker Street. If you've enjoyed Baring-Gould's _A_n_n_o_t_a_t_e_d
_S_h_e_r_l_o_c_k _H_o_l_m_e_s, especially the chronological parts, you will
certainly enjoy this. One good touch is that Brend tries to
explain the various inconsistencies in Watson's chronology without
always resorting to saying Watson's hand-writing was unreadable.
No one could have hand-writing as bad as Baring-Gould leads one to
believe Watson's was--or if he did, nothing he wrote would be at
all readable, and we wouldn't have _a_n_y Sherlock Holmes stories at
all.
Mark Leeper
MT 3D-441 908-957-5619
m.r.leeper@att.com