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Table of Contents
Bell Labs Holmdel / Bell Works (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
Here is another article about the use of the Bell Labs building in Holmdel (now Bell Works) in the Apple TV series "Severance" and other media, with pictures of the facility:
[-ecl]
Mini Reviews, Part 7 (film reviews by Mark R. Leeper and Evelyn C. Leeper):
This is the seventh batch of mini-reviews, all films of the
fantastic.
NEXT EXIT: The opening of NEXT EXIT is reminiscent of the ALIEN
logo, but if it is trying to look science fictional, it does not
succeed. It is more fantasy, taking a new approach to life after
death. A man and a woman "meet cute" while trying to rent a car to
get to the center investigating this. He has a credit card but his
drivers license is almost expired; she has a drivers license but no
credit card, so they team up for a road trip. The dialogue is
amusing and worth a chuckle or two, but in the end the explanation
for what is happening is dissatisfying sci-fi, and it could have
used a better ending.
Released theatrically 4 November 2022. Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4)
or 7/10
Film Credits:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19595494/reference
What others are saying:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/next_exit_2022
SHE WILL: SHE WILL combines witchcraft revenge with the #MeToo era
in a psychological horror film that is more style than substance,
From the beginning, in order to create an atmosphere that some
might find threatening, the director uses an image of very simple
mathematics. Then director Charlotte Colbert and cinematographer
Jamie Ramsay create many surreal sequences which enhance the
atmosphere. But again, it's more a question of style than anything
else.
Released 15 July 2022 theatrically and streaming. Rating: high -1
(-4 to +4) or 7/10
Film Credits:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9340916/reference
What others are saying:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/she_will
THE INNOCENTS: The elevator pitch for THE INNOCENTS might have been
"'It's a Good Life!' meets VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED". So it is not a
remake of the 1960 film of the same name. In this Norwegian film,
there are four children with differing powers, who discover them
over the course of a summer. It is nothing special, and definitely
not for the squeamish.
Released theatrically 13 May 2022; available on various streaming
services. Rating: low -1 (-4 to +4) or 2/10
Film Credits:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4028464/reference
What others are saying:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_innocents_2022
[-mrl/ecl]
EVERSION by Alistair Reynolds (copyright 2022, Orbit, $17.99, trade paperback, 337pp, ISBN 978-0-316-46282-2) (book review by Joe Karpierz):
Alastair Reynolds has become a favorite author of mine ever since I
picked up three or four of the Revelation Space series books at a
Worldcon back in the Oughts--either Toronto or Denver (the memory
fades as the years roll by). Being a sucker for space opera,
Reynolds' books were right up my alley, and I read as many of them
as I could. I've read 9 of his 20 novels, and, astoundingly
enough, almost none of his short fiction (although I have three or
four of his collections on my to-be-read list). As I said, I'm a
sucker for space opera, and most of his work is space opera.
EVERSION is not space opera.
Well, there is a space ship. Eventually. After there are three
other kinds of vessels over a total of four time periods. But
while the vessels and the years change, the characters, mostly do
not. Well, except when they do.
Silas Coade is a doctor aboard a sailing ship called the Demeter on
an expedition to find the Ediface, a mysterious construct hidden
within a hard-to get-to location in Norway. His job is what any
other physician's job would be - keep the crew and passengers of
the ship alive. In his downtime he is writing a book of
"fantastical fiction", which we would probably call science
fiction. The expedition is financed by and the idea of a Russian
named Topolsky, who wishes to reach the Ediface at all costs.
Others in the cast of characters are Captain Van Vught, a soldier
named Coronel Ramos, a ship crewmember named Mortlock (who
encourages Coade to continue writing his book), a mathematician
named Dupin, and the enigmatic and annoying (at least to Coade) Ada
Cossile, who seems to know more than everyone else on the
expedition (In an amusing side story, Cossile is constantly
criticizing Coade's novel, sending him back to his pen and paper to
make revisions to the story. Coade complains that her many
suggestions and corrections are slowing him down, and he fears that
he may never get the book published because of her interference. I
can't help but have the feeling that Reynolds was poking some fun
at editors and the publishing business). The Demeter finds and
approaches the Ediface, and discover that a ship has already been
there, but it is a wreck as it has crashed. Eventually, the
Demeter meets the same fate, and the crew is killed.
Or so we think. We turn the page, and the crew is back with us, on
the steamship Demeter a number of years later than the first time,
looking for the Ediface. The pattern is the same, with the Demeter
locating the Ediface, discovering a crashed ship, crashing
themselves, and dying. And then the same crew is on a dirigible,
and then finally on a space ship. The pattern is the same,
although the stories for each crew are different in each time
period. Nevertheless, the outcome is the same, but with a
difference. Coade is piecing together bits of information that
only he is aware of, and he realizes that all this has happened
before. And all the while, Ada Cossile is teasing him, tantalizing
him, and even scolding him for not figuring out what's going on.
At one point she tells him that she is disappointed, and that he's
going to die again, and will keep dying until he figures it out.
EVERSION is a mystery, a puzzle. It's a puzzle that both the
reader and Silas Coade are to figure out as the novel progresses.
Each segment of the novel is written in an appropriate tone and
language for the time period it's set in. This gives each story
quite an authentic feel as the characters as well as the readers
advance through time. This also serves to keep the reader in the
story; it's tough to keep the reader invested when language and
vernacular is out of place. That is not a problem here. There's a
bit of Burroughs and Verne here, among others. The most amusing is
the section of the story in which the characters are obviously in a
1930s or 1940s pulp era story, complete with absolutely absurd
characters and dialog. I couldn't keep the smile off my face as I
read this section, although at the same time I did a bit of
cringing when it crossed my mind that this was what science fiction
used to be; it's no wonder it used to be considered a ghetto.
In the end, the puzzle is not just figuring out what is going on
with the different incarnations of the story; the Ediface itself is
a puzzle, a kind of inside out structure--hence the title EVERSION
- that must be navigated in order to resolve the situation the
characters find themselves in. Of course, there's another puzzle
at work here, but one that only affects the reviewer. The trick is
to review the book without giving too much away. To be fair, we've
seen this kind of story before, but maybe not quite like this one.
I guess in that respect we're all a bit like Silas Coade,
remembering a story we've experienced before, just a little
different than the one we're reading and experiencing now. [-jak]
WHY DOES E=MC^2 ? (AND WHY SHOULD WE CARE?) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw (book review by Gregory Frederick):
In WHY DOES E=MC^2 ?, Professors Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw go on a
journey to the far reaches of twenty-first-century science to
understand Einstein's famous equation. They explain and simplify
the notions of energy, mass, and light. They demonstrate how the
structure of the Universe is contained within this small equation.
They visit the site of one of the largest scientific experiments
ever conducted. That site is the now-famous Large Hadron Collider,
a gigantic particle accelerator capable of recreating conditions
that existed fractions of a second after the Big Bang. Overall
this book gets into the details of some math needed to explain
concepts presented but it never gets beyond simple algebra. So,
this book is an interesting read but some math knowledge is needed.
[-gf]
What Are Your Passenger Rights in Space? (letter of comment by Hal Heydt):
In response to Scott Dorsey's comments on baggage in the 12/02/22
issue of the MT VOID, Hal Heydt writes:
Shades of Flanders & Swann description of their tour of Canada.
"Coming back, he had 120 lbs. of excess baggage. In the end, he
had to leave her behind." [-hh]
Sound Barrier (letters of comment by Richie Bielak and Scott Dorsey):
In response to Evelyn's comments on breaking the sound barrier in
the 12/09/22 issue of the MT VOID, Richie Bielak writes:
There seems to be a lot of evidence that the sound barrier was
broken by other aircraft prior to Chuck Yeager and the X-1.
Technically X-1 was the first to break the sound barrier in level
flight.
There is a book I reviewed long time ago about this:
http://richieb.from-nj.com/aces.html. [-rb]
And Scott Dorsey writes:
If you're going to be that picky, then you have to be even more
specific. There were many occasions where propeller-driven
aircraft were run up to engine speeds where the tips of the
propellers were going faster than sound. The resulting shock wave,
of course, caused rapid failure. You will notice
through the 1940s a general increase in the number of blades per
propeller in an attempt to keep rotational velocity down. [-sd]
GUILLERMO DEL TORO'S PINOCCHIO (letter of comment by Scott Dorsey):
In response to Mark and Evelyn's review of GUILLERMO DEL TORO'S
PINOCCHIO in the 12/09/22 issue of the MT VOID, Scott Dorsey writes:
Given the massive-sounding changes, they should have called it
"Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio," in the spirit of "Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein" and "Bram Stoker's Dracula." [-sd]
DC LEAGUE OF SUPER-PETS (letter of comment by Jay E. Morris):
In response to Mark and Evelyn's review of DC LEAGUE OF SUPER-PETS
in the 12/09/22 issue of the MT VOID, Scott Dorsey writes:
It's a DC project, not Marvel, and in the MCU the Deadpool movies
did receive R ratings. [-jem]
Evelyn responds:
Mea maxima culpa. I wrote that in what was either a brain fart or
a senior moment. But then again, I don't know which characters are
in which universe anyway (even if the title does give it away). :-)
[-ecl]
This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
I started listening to "Literature and History", a podcast by Doug
Metzger, but in the first episode he claims that the meaning of
"Two sheep go Inana" would seem obscure to the people listening.
Not for anyone who has read SNOW CRASH, that's for sure.
In the third lecture, he talked about THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH. in
the epic of Gilgamesh, "When the gods created Gilgamesh, ... [t]wo
thirds they made him god and one third man." [N. K. Sandars
translation] At first this seems an impossibility, since genetics
works with dyatic fractions. But, hey--they're gods. They could
actually build Gilgamesh's genetic code from scratch, with each
gene hand-picked, and so could have one third of the genes godlike
and one third human (assuming the number of genes is divisible by
3, of course). All this is on the assumption that godhood is
somehow contained in one's genetic code, of course.
Then we meet Enkidu, who "ate grass in the hills with the gazelle
and jostled with wild beasts at the water-holes." A trapper
decides to subdue Enkidu (who is interfering with his trapping),
and sends a harlot to seduce Enkidu. But "when he was satisfied he
went back to the wild beasts. Then, when the gazelle saw him, they
bolted away; when the wild beasts saw him they fled." This is the
first appearance of the "virgin/unicorn" trope in literature.
And of course, the flood story originates at least as far back as
Gilgamesh, which predates the writing of the Book of Genesis by a
thousand years. (THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH was written around 2100
B.C.E.; the Book of Genesis was primarily written around 1050
B.C.E., with some revisions a few hundred years later.) On the
other hand, there is some support for the idea that a catastrophic
flood in the Black Sea about 5600 B.C.E. is what is remembered in
both THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH and the Book of Genesis.
There was another interesting parallel between THE EPIC OF
GILGAMESH and Judaism, in this case involving the Passover Haggadah
rather than any of the scriptural writings. In THE EPIC OF
GILGAMESH account of the Flood Ea rages against Enlil, who sent the
Flood:
This structure seems copied in "Dayenu" ("It would have been enough
for us"):
[-ecl]
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Would that a lion had ravaged mankind
Rather than the flood,
Would that a wolf had ravaged mankind
Rather than the flood,
Would that famine had wasted the world
Rather than the flood,
Would that pestilence had wasted mankind
Rather than the flood,
If He had brought us out of Egypt
It would have been enough for us.
If He had executed justice upon the Egyptians
It would have been enough for us.
If He had executed justice upon their gods
It would have been enough for us.
If He had slain their first-born
It would have been enough for us.
If He had given to us their health and wealth
It would have been enough for us.
...
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Quote of the Week:
Once you've put one of [Henry James's] books down,
you simply can't pick it up again.
--Mark Twain