@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @@@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society 09/11/26 -- Vol. 45, No. 11, Whole Number 2449
Table of Contents
Mini Reviews, Part 24 (film reviews by Evelyn C. Leeper):
ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1996): Unlike ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932), this seems to rely on an excess of flames, gunfire, and explosions, as well as having Montgomery be as crazy as Moreau. It's worth noting that while H. G. Wells was a believer in many of Francis Galton's theories, he seemed to draw some lines in the application of eugenics. Galton also suggested that the aristocracy and the lower classes were evolving into different breeds, and Wells seems to have taken this idea and developed it in the Eloi and the Morlocks of THE TIME MACHINE.
EDGE OF TOMORROW / LIVE DIE REPEAT (2015): William Goldman once said, "No one knows anything in Hollywood." Well, that is overly generalized. Whoever decided what to name this movie was clearly one example, but whoever designed the marketing campaign was a counterexample.
For reasons passing understanding, someone thought that "Edge of Tomorrow" would be a good name for this film. Never mind that it is meaningless, or that it sounds like the name of a soap opera. (In fact, it sounds like the love child of two actual soap opera names from the 1950s and 1960s: "The Edge of Night" and "Search for Tomorrow".)
But when they designed the marketing campaign, someone went back to an earlier suggestion for the title for the tag line: "Live. Die. Repeat." (like the shampoo add, "Lather. Rinse. Repeat."). This perfectly describes the plot. There is a future war. Something happens to Tom Cruise such that when he dies on the invasion beach, he wakes up the previous day at the base, from where he is sent to the invasion beach, where he dies, and ...
In fact, it was such a good tag line that viewers started calling the film by that name. Eventually even the studio fell in line. Although the studio claims the title was never changed, the spine of the DVD says "LIVE. DIE. REPEAT. / EDGE OF TOMORROW", the front says "LIVE DIE REPEAT" in big letters over the entire front and "EDGE OF TOMORROW" in small letters at the bottom, and the title on the DVD says "LIVE DIE REPEAT: EDGE OF TOMORROW".
THE FLY (1986): Mark had a great fondness for the original 1958 movie THE FLY. Part of that was that it was a part of his childhood, but he also found many of the scenes between Andre and Helene very touching. David Cronenberg's 1986 remake doesn't have that romantic element, but it does have a more believable explanation for the the engineering (i.e., a lot of the work for the various elements is contracted out), even if we still have the lone scientist in a lab building a working teleportation device. (This is the 1980s version of the lone scientist building a rocket to Mars in his backyard.)
One notable difference is that in the 1958 film, the transformation is "static": Andre gets a fly head and leg (somehow magically enlarged) and the fly get Andre's head and arm (somehow magically shrunk), and both creatures remain that way. Strangely. the large creature with the fly head still seems to have all Andre's memories and intelligence in the fly brain, but the small one also has some, since it is able to talk.
In the 1986 version, there is only one resultant creature, which starts out as overwhelmingly Seth, but gradually is taken over by the fly, or at at rate, the fly becomes a much more important component. One interesting result is that the voice recognition security that Seth used on his computer no longer recognizes his voice--a warning that biometric security has its own drawbacks. (As an aside, I would suggest pre-adolescent boys *not* use voice recognition as their only security into their computers. And for that matter, accidents can damage your fingerprint, or your retina.) So the change is continuous rather than static.
[-ecl]
Space Force Uniforms (pointer to article):
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/donald-trump-space-force-uniform-154532168.html>
Quote that summarizes it: "... the look of Space Force's revamped uniforms comes from none other than 1997's STARSHIP TROOPERS, which many have said draws on Nazi imagery."
Elaboration: "Trump didn't include a caption on his Truth Social post and let the graphic do the talking, which notes the design is 'inspired by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform, modernized for the guardians of the space domain.'"
[I wish I was making this up. See the article for more details, and drawings. -ecl]
FOLD CATASTROPHES by Peter Watts (copyright 2026, publication date September 22, 2026, Tachyon Publications, paperback, $18.95, 352pp, ISBN: 9781616964672) (book review by Joe Karpierz): I'm delighted when a new Peter Watts book is published. He's not particularly prolific when it comes to writing novels, but he does produce a fair amount of short fiction. Oh, and there's a collection of his blog posts as well, "Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor {{revenge fantasies and essays}}". But with regard to short fiction, while I like reading it, I don't get much of a chance to because it's scattered all over the place, and I can't keep up with all the places that publish short fiction nor can I keep track of just where he publishes. So, I wait for collections. The last one I read was BEYOND THE RIFT, from back in 2013. He's appeared in various anthologies over the years as well, a couple of which I've read, and it turns out that those stories appear in his latest collection FOLD CATASTROPHES. When I was given the opportunity to read an advance copy of FOLD CATASTROPHES, I jumped at it.
I've commented more than once when reviewing a collection or anthology that there will be some stories that are better than others, some that I love, and some that I just don't like. With FOLD CATASTROPHES, there are indeed some stories that are better than others, but they are all good stories. Great? Maybe. But every story in this collection packs a punch. And I think that's difficult to do with the type of hard, rigorous science fiction that Watts writes.
My favorite story here is the one that is published for the first time, "Game Theory". It has been revealed, through scientific investigation and discovery, that we are living in a digital simulation, much like a game. The knowledge has a gut-wrenching effect on society, as everything people know and experience is turned upside down, especially religion. The story's main character is a pedophile Catholic priest who must confront one of his victims. Is what he did even evil, since they are living in a simulation and nothing they do could be considered to be free will? An interesting thought is that if humanity is living in a simulation, are those who wrote the simulation subject to their own divine being? This is probably the most disturbing story in the book.
Another favorite is "The Wisdom of Crowds", in which something called the "Starfish Initiative" announces that it will detonate an orbiting warhead at a location as voted upon by a million randomly selected voters. The warhead will be detonated seven hours after the announcement. This is an interesting study of how a random group of people may or may not come to a conclusion as to how to pick someplace to potentially destroy.
A trio of stories that I previously read and enjoyed quite a bit are "Defective", a story about an intelligence living in another star which is invading our own sun, and the dilemma that ensues when the protagonist trying to communicate with the alien intelligence is in direct conflict with his lover who is part of a team that is setting out to destroy it; "ZeroS", in which selected dead people are reanimated into an elite fighting force; and "Test 4 Echo", in which a remote-controlled exploration rover (of a sort) crashes to the bottom of a sea of the moon Enceladus. The ship is crippled by the crash, but somehow manages to continue its investigation of an odd phenomenon.
Some lighter yet still intriguing stories include "Gut Feelings", in which a Google office deploys a gut bug via rain which causes the infected to become extremely violent when they see the Google logo. I'm not sure they'd actually do that, but the experiment is interesting. "Critical Mass" follows an aging architect/artist trying to determine who is going around destroying all his works. I was not expecting the ending, although I probably should have been.
"The Twenty-One Second God" tells of a network glitch that affects millions of people for 21 seconds and creates a hive mind. "Giants" tells of a deep space and deep time ship that can only survive a passage through a red giant by hiding within an ice giant planet. "The Colonel" ties in to BLINDSIGHT in that the main character, Colonel Jim Moore, is the father of the primary character in the novel. He is attempting to determine the fate of his son who was sent on a mission to contact an alien race, and at the same time he is trying to oppose hive minds that are becoming common on Earth. "Contracting Iris" follows the story of Iris who has a mysterious disease the symptoms of which cannot be attributed to anything she--or anyone else--is aware of.
FOLD CATASTROPHES is classic Peter Watts. Scientifically rigorous, relentless and riveting in its pace and storytelling, all the while very human and engaging. It's terrific stuff. Now I just need to find all of his other short work to get caught up, and find the novels I haven't read yet as well. It will be worth the time and the effort. [-jak]
Money (letters of comment by Gary McGath and Robert Woodward):
In response to Evelyn's comments on money in the 09/04/26 issue of the MT VOID, Gary McGath writes:
[Evelyn wrote,] "Older Americans (like me) remember when US and Canadian dollars were equal in value and not only could you spend bills relatively freely back and forth (at least when you were close to the border), you could spend coins the same way." [-ecl]
I can remember having to explain to a cashier why I didn't want a Canadian dime in my change. Canadian coins once turned up fairly often in New Hampshire, though they're much less common now. [-gmg]
[Evelyn wrote,] "I must remember to take my leftover European money to Montreal for the Worldcon, in case I can spend it in the Dealers Room with European vendors. In Edinburgh in 1995, I bought an alternate history fanzine from a German fan. It was DM8, and since I had some left-over DM from our stop-over on the way to India, I gave him DM10, getting 90p change. Thus is international finance carried out at conventions." [-ecl]
Good thought. I should remember to take my Euros to Montreal. I always have some because of my semi-regular trips to Germany. US money will also be useful, since undoubtedly many of the dealers will be from the US (if they can deal with whatever directives on cross-border trade are in effect then). [-gmg]
Robert Woodward writes:
I found a Russian 5-Kopek coin in my change once (it [was] about the size of a penny). About 2-3 decades ago, a then co-worker showed me some of the odd coins that showed up in the coffee fund (I remember a French 1-Franc coin and a coin from Malta). [-rw]
Evelyn adds:
One oddity I missed was the use of coins in luggage lockers in Latvia in 1994. They are 0.7 Lt (70 centai) each and work as follows: Pay the attendant 0.7 Lt. Get two 15-kopeck coins and a receipt. (The fact that they are 15-kopeck coins is meaningless. Think of them as tokens.) Save the receipt--you will be asked for it when you return. Find a free locker. Set the dials on the *inside* of the door to your combination--one Cyrillic letter and three numbers. Memorize or write down this combination. Also memorize or write down your locker number. (Good security practices indicate you shouldn't make them both the same, but it probably doesn't matter a whole lot.) Insert one token. Close the door. Randomize the dials on the *outside* of the door. (Well, you couldn't do the inside if you wanted to at this point.) When you return, set the *outside* dials to your combination. Insert the other token. Open the door. (Note: one saving grace is that it won't take the second token unless you get the combination right, so if you can't remember which of two numbers you used, you get to make multiple tries.) The reason the 15-kopeck coins are used, of course, is that the lockers were built during the Soviet occupation and used those coins. It's easier to keep the coins around as tokens now than to re-tool all the lockers. People are willing to put up with the hammer-and-sickles on the coins rather than spend as much as it would take to re-tool. [-ecl]
Typography (letters of comment by Lawrence D'Olivier, Gary McGath, and Sue Dominus):
In response to Evelyn's comments on A BASQUE HISTORY OF THE WORLD in the 09/04/26 issue of the MT VOID, Lawrence D'Olivier writes:
[Evelyn wrote,] "Francais" -ecl]
"Français" surely ...
On a related note, the Turks have now decreed that the official name of their country shall be "Türkiye". I guess they're fed up of jokes about the birds what go gobble-gobble ...
Admittedly, I'm not sure about the umlaut. [-ldo]
Evelyn responds:
[Above, for the text version of this MT VOID, I changed the actual letters Lawrence used to the HTML representations; I have done this throughout this article. -ecl]
Indeed, the umlaut in Turkish is not the same as the German umlaut. As Search Assist says (and other sites confirm), "In German, umlauts are diacritical marks ... that indicate specific vowel sound changes, while in Turkish, the two dots ... are used over the letters u and o to represent distinct vowel sounds."
The Turkish alphabet has seven letters not in the English alphabet; the German has four. All the "umlaut-ed" letters in both are considered separate letters in their own right. This is different from accented letters in (e.g.) Spanish, which are not considered separate letters, though the ñ is. [-ecl]
Gary McGath replied to an on-line comment by Evelyn:
[Evelyn wrote,] The only time *that I know of* when it changes meaning is in Spanish ("año" vs. "ano"), and I will just avoid that. [-ecl]
Several German words are distinguished by the presence or absence of an umlaut. For example, "schoen" is "beautiful," "schon" is "already." Fortunately, there's an ASCII workaround for German, as I've just illustrated. Putting an "e" after a vowel is an acceptable substitute for an umlaut. Similarly, the esszett, which looks a little like a lower-case Greek beta, can be replaced with "ss." [-gmg]
Sue Dominus replies:
This reminds me of something I saw on the Internet long ago. (I'll use "b" as that German letter.)
Someone wanted to have an awesome "signature", so he used that symbol in his name and ended up with "b"illy "b"ad ass. Someone pointed out what the pronunciation of that would be.
We can all also be annoyed at the Greekish signs (usually in a chiseled font) that use capital sigma for capital E. [-sd]
[There was a whole lot more discussion in rec.arts.sf.fandom about whether one should use Unicode to present the non-English-language letters, with some saying yes, and others saying when people did that, their news readers and/or mail agents showed them only gobbledy-gook. I am not going to include all that here, except to say that I produce the MT VOID in three formats: plain text, HTML, and a PDF generated from the HTML. I don't use smart quotes, and I strip the diacritical marks (and "transliterate" letters not in the English alphabet, such as ø). If I remember, I try to restore them in the HTML, which I create by hand; I don't always remember. I've been editing/publishing the MT VOID for 48 years this way, through 2448 issues, and I am not going to twist myself into knots for non-English-alphabet letters. Anyone who isn't happy with the result is free to stop reading it. -ecl]
This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
I watched the BBC mini-series of George Eliot's DANIEL DERONDA. In it, Daniel Deronda rescues Mirah when she is cold and wet, carries her to a house where she can recover, and asks if he can visit the next day to see how she is doing. Either this was a common trope in 19th century novels, or Eliot is taking Jane Austen's SENSE AND SENSIBILITY and flipping it around--instead of the "rescuer" being a totally selfish cad very concerned with position in society, Eliot makes him a noble and good person who is not concerned about position. [-ecl]
Evelyn C. Leeper
evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com
Quote of the Week:
On the war on terrorism: the liberals don't know that
the house has radon gas, and the conservatives do but
are trying to punch it.
--Mark R. Leeper
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