@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @@@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society 10/16/26 -- Vol. 45, No. 16, Whole Number 2454
Table of Contents
The MT VOID Style Sheet on Space and Computing (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
As I explained in my Philcon 2025 report, I have decided that the whole question of "astronaut", "cosmonaut", and "taikonaut" is meaningless today, especially since we have people from fifty-two different countries who have flown in space. I know the terms supposedly refer to which of three countries trained them, but that is like always qualifying someone with a degree by the college or university that awarded it. So I am just going to revert to Isaac Asimov's classic term: they are all "spacers". I have also decided that for consistency's sake, I will refer to "Earth" and "Luna", rather than "the earth" and "the moon" (or "the Moon"). (However, I will take suggestions that it should be "Terra" rather than "Earth".)
And I will use "A.I." instead of just "AI" or (Lord help us) "SI".
Live with it. [-ecl]
Middletown (NJ) Public Library Science Fiction Discussion Group:
[This is running earlier than usual, because the list of readings was not available when the last announcement ran. Those wanting clickable links should go to the issue posted at http://leepers.us/mtvoid/VOID1016.htm, though this won't be available until Saturday (10/17/26).]
Nov 5: THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW
Rocky Horror Picture Show Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rocky_Horror_Picture_Show
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/10/is-the-rocky-horror-picture-show-good-for-the-gays.html
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tim-curry-tangles-accusations-rocky-152548817.html
https://darkskiesfilm.com/why-rocky-horror-picture-show-is-cult/
And lastly,
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/oct/19/rocky-horror-picture-show-fan-rituals-fox-remake
Two notes on the last article:
https://darkskiesfilm.com/what-does-the-audience-do-during-rocky-horror-picture-show/
[-ecl]
Thoughts on the Hercule Poirot Mysteries (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
Why do I find some of the Hercule Poirot stories enjoyable, and some annoying? For example, I could listen to the audio drama of MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA any time, but I find PERIL AT END HOUSE annoying. But I have no idea, in either case. If anything, the plot of MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA is harder to believe, and more full of coincidence, than that of PERIL AT END HOUSE. Maybe it's that the characters in MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA are more interesting and better developed than those in PERIL AT END HOUSE. PERIL AT END HOUSE was written in 1932, and MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA in 1936, so it wasn't that they were written in totally different periods of Christie's career. It is true that the archaeological setting of MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA was perhaps more interesting to Christie, since she had experience in such settings.
(I don't think it's because PERIL AT END HOUSE has Captain Hastings and MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA does not, because this doesn't apply to all my preferences. But I do find the general portrayal of Captain Hastings as a buffoon very annoying. The writers of the scripts have sometimes tried to compensate for the way Hastings is always slighted. In "The Cornish Mystery" when the script has Hastings looking out the window, seeing two men, and spontaneously convincing the suspect that 1) they are policemen waiting for him, and 2) he has signaled them to let the suspect to pass. In the original Story, Poirot does all this. A lot of this sort of thing is due to the writers attempting to put Hastings, Lemon, and Japp in all the episodes even when they were not in the original stories.)
As I said, it's not just these two. I find MURDER ON THE LINKS more interesting than either THE AFFAIR AT STYLES or THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD. DEAD MAN'S FOLLY is better than MRS MCGINTY'S DEAD. And so on. (And this applies to Miss Marple, or even--gasp!--Sherlock Holmes.)
Side note: There are two versions of the "Poirot Drinking Game": take a drink every time Poirot references his "little gray cells", and take a drink every time Hastings says, "Good Lord!" [-ecl]
Countries That Have Sent People into Space (pointer to article):
Summary: 52 countries have sent at least 746 people into space (including 112 women). The youngest spacer was 18, the oldest was 90. Somewhere between 80 and 90 people have been on privately funded spaceflights.
Source:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/5/world-space-week-which-countries-have-sent-people-to-space
Additional info:
https://sentinelmission.org/blog/how-many-people-have-paid-to-go-to-space/
Silent Sound Films (letters of comment by Scott Dorsey and Gary McGath):
In response to Evelyn's comments on CITY LIGHTS in the 10/09/26 issue of the MT VOID, Scott Dorsey writes:
Well into the Thirties people were making sound films with silent film photography and acting. One of my favorite examples is WHITE ZOMBIE, which has dialogue but doesn't use sound effectively and which uses very exaggerated stage-like acting. It is one of my favorites of the transitional films.
Chaplin continued with the silent film acting until his death, and THE GREAT DICTATOR is very much acted and framed like a silent film which is part of what makes it so effective.
SILENT MOVIE, on the other hand, is a silent movie that is acted and photographed for the most part like a modern sound picture. It is pretty much unique and as such it's kind of interesting as an outlier. [-sd]
Gary McGath responds:
I've accompanied CITY LIGHTS at the library. The structure is loose, especially with the boxing scene, but the power of the story is what holds it together. The ending is understated and very effective.
By the way, the next movie I'll accompany at the Plaistow Library is the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN. It's a talkie, of course, but it has very little music, just opening and closing music plus some poorly recorded dance music for Frankenstein's wedding. I'll add music where it's appropriate. I'm opening with the 1910 Edison "Frankenstein", which is about 10 minutes long and even more remote from the original than the Karloff version. [-gmg]
[Evelyn wrote,] "I suppose that these days someone would probably find fault with its portrayal of a blind person as causing all sorts of havoc: throwing water on someone, unraveling a piece of clothing--though that is very close to what The Tramp does when he accidentally eats a streamer thinking it was a piece of spaghetti." [-ecl]
Some people will find fault with anything. [-gmg]
This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
My library has gotten some new "Great Courses/Teaching Company" on DVD. (I'm not sure how, since they supposedly abandoned physical media last year, but maybe these were ordered before then, and took a while to catalog. They are copyrighted 2025.) The good news is that they have subtitles, rather than charging people extra for transcripts. The bad news is the production values have gone downhill. The one I am currently watching uses two cameras, and the editor switches back and forth. But the professor keeps looking at just one of the cameras, so half the time he seems to be talking to people off to the viewer's left. It's the same thing one sometimes sees with blind people, where they are not sure exactly in what direction their listener is. But it's not that, because the last course I got from the library had the same problem. Apparently the camera operators don't talk to the professors, even to the extent of telling them that the red light is lit on the camera that's taping.
"Unexpected Economics" with Professor Timothy Taylor (which I bought in a TTC binge at my local used bookstore covers a lot of things that people don't connect with economics, such as religion, the Prisoner's Dilemma, altruism, addiction, etc. And it certainly gives one new perspectives on these.
But if economics is about how we make choices (as Taylor defines it), then not all economic decisions revolves around money. The Prisoner's Dilemma (which most people reading this are probably familiar with) has nothing to do with money.
Each of the lectures covers a different area of choice, and I found it all interesting (except maybe some of the sports examples, because I don't understand the sports).
One caveat: it is also outdated in much of what it is discussing. (The course is from 2011.) Its discussion of natural disasters doesn't take into account the rise in numbers and intensity of natural disasters due to climate change. The lecture on voting talks about various ways to make voting easier, or less of an economic strain on people. (For example, the polls in Indiana close at 6PM, meaning people have to take time off from work to vote.) He mentions the possibility of Sunday voting, but says nothing about voting by mail, or early voting, or voting on-line. He talks about how a third-party candidate can result in a winner that the majority dislike, but doesn't even mention ranked-order voting. And the amounts he mentions being spent on elections by candidates has long since been considerably outstripped.
This is not to say that any of this invalidates the overall lessons, but it does occasionally catch one up short.
One older course I'm listening to on CD is "Europe and Western Civilization in the Modern Age" with Professor Thomas Childers, made sometime before 2000. Childers starts out talking about how we are living in momentous times, because we will see the changing of not just the century, but also the millennium. To which I respond, "Not if you're Jewish." To clarify, the calendar that says that now it is the year 2026 is very artificial (as are pretty much all calendars), and so the idea that the year 2001 as the start of a new millennium (or 2000 as the end of the old one) is special is very ethnocentric. In A.D. 1001, Chinese peasants were not talking about the new millennium. (The Jewish year 5700 *was* momentous, not because of the century roll-over, but because World War II had just started thirteen days earlier.)
This aside, though, I found this course one of the best of the many courses I have watched or listened to. As an example, Childers really explained the Congress of Vienna: the motivations of all the parties involved, the constraints on them, the results, and the unexpected consequences of those results. (One of the big ones was that Austria didn't want Prussia to have a border with France, so they gave Prussia a different territory that was very undeveloped and didn't seem all that important: the Ruhr Valley. Anyone who is familiar with the Ruhr Valley, even if just to the extent of seeing the film THE DAM BUSTERS, realizes this had totally unexpected results.)
"Einstein's Relativity and the Quantum Revolution" by Professor Richard Wolfson must be an older course, because Wolfson keeps making reference to the videotape or audiotape that the viewers/listeners are watching/listening to, and also to the cathode ray tubes they are watching it on(*).
Wolfson wants to give examples of how relativity says that the point of reference doesn't matter, so he starts by saying if you're playing tennis on a ship that's moving steadily through the water, you don't have to make adjustments for the movement--you just play tennis the way you've always played tennis because the laws of physics are the same. So far, so good. But then he says if you're on a base on Venus, in a protective dome, even though you're moving very fast relative to Terra, you just play tennis the way you've always played tennis because the laws of physics are the same.
But they're not--or at least their manifestation is not.
Venus's gravity is only 90% that of Terra's. When you play tennis, you have to adjust for that. (At least he picked Venus. Mars's gravity is only 38% of Terra's, in spite of what the film THE MARTIAN showed you. On an asteroid it would be even more noticeable: if you hit the ball as hard as you do on Terra, it would achieve escape velocity and leave the asteroid entirely.)
* This is similar to the book on Charles II that I recently read. In the Introduction, the author refers to the portrait of Charles II on the cover. There may have been a portrait on the hardcover (actually, I'm sure there was), but the paperback edition I was reading had no such portrait.
[-ecl]
Evelyn C. Leeper
evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com
Quote of the Week:
Listen, I completely understand why people are having
such a hard time deciding who to vote for in the
Midterms.
On one hand, you have Democrats who have disappointed
you, and on the other hand you have Child-Raping
Murderers Running Concentration Camps With Our Tax
Dollars Draining the US Treasury Directly into Their
Offshore Bank Accounts While Making The Planet
Uninhabitable for Human Life.
That's a tough call man.
--Patty Walker
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