@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @@@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society 11/06/26 -- Vol. 45, No. 19, Whole Number 2457
Table of Contents
2010: ODYSSEY TWO (correction):
In response to my crediting the letter of comment on 2010: ODYSSEY TWO in the 10/30/26 issue of the MT VOID to Hal Heydt, Steve Coltrin writes:
Purely for the matter of the record and with no slight having been taken, the LoC is from me, not Hal. [-sc]
Mea culpa. Sometimes my cut-and-paste gets away from me. [-ecl]
Mini Reviews, Part 27 (film reviews by Evelyn C. Leeper): 55 DAYS AT PEKING (1963): This is yet another film that hasn't aged well. It is typical Orientalism of the time, with all the major Chinese characters played by white actors in yellow-face.
The Boxers are, not surprisingly, portrayed as total villains, even though the Empress does present the Chinese point of view--that European countries have seized land and ignored Chinese laws and customs.with impunity. In general, the historians' view of them is far more nuanced, but war films of the 1950s did not tend to nuance.
The Baroness in the film does call out the hypocrisy of the Westerners in having no problem with Western men taking Chinese women as wives (or concubines), but shun her as beyond the pale because she had an affair with a Chinese general. It also talks about how the mixed-race daughter of one of his soldiers would be treated as a freak back in the United States of 1900 if he were to take her home (her mother having died).
And I have to ask, why would a four-foot pile of sandbags, each smaller than a ten-pound sack of flour, seem at all sufficient to stop an angry charging mob? Maybe if they were big fifty-pond sandbags, and piled higher...
I think we're supposed to side with the Westerners in this film, but as with the idea of the Soviets in RED DAWN showing ALEXANDER NEVSKY in the movie theater, the message gets a little confused.
DUNKIRK (2017): Rewatching this, I naturally was reminded of the story I have related before. During Dunkirk when Titanic Second Officer Charles Lightoller was 66 years old, the Royal Navy requested the use of his yacht for the evacuation. He insisted on sailing it there himself (with the assistance of one of his sons and two crew members). In spite of the fact that the yacht had never held more than twenty-one people before, Lightoller loaded 130 soldiers on it and managed to dodge German shelling and get them safely back to England. I have said that I was sure in my own mind that when he was loading the yacht at Dunkirk, he remembered all the half-filled lifeboats of Titanic, and how many people died because of that, and loaded as many men as he possibly could. This time I actually looked up what happened with his lifeboat from the Titanic. The boat was rated to carry 65 people, but Lightoller actually got 75 people onto it, all of whom survived. So Dunkirk wasn't correcting an earlier mistake by him, but just another example of how he operated. (But I still think he was haunted by those half-empty boats from three decades earlier.)
DARKEST HOUR (2017): After watching DUNKIRK (2017), I naturally had to watch DARKEST HOUR (2017). I give the year for both of them because there is also a 2003 BBC documentary titled "Dunkirk" which uses a lot of re-creations. and there is a 2011 science fiction film titled "The Darkest Hour", which has nothing to do with the evacuation of Dunkirk and serves only to confuse viewers.
KEN BURNS'S NATIONAL PARKS: This should be uplifting and inspiring, but currently it is depressing as I keep reading about the destruction of parts of Big Bend National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and many others being targeted for drilling or mining or building a wall.
[-ecl]
More November Recommendations (NYC Area) (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
I see that not only TCM, but also WNET (Channel 13) is running NETWORK this month. WNET is running it Saturday, November 14, at 9PM.
WNET is also running a film that Mark gave 9/10 to back in 2007: AWAY FROM HER. Mark's capsule at the time:
"CAPSULE: A woman develops a new personality in the twilight stages as Alzheimer's Disease robs her of her memories and her old nature, but has not yet robbed her of mechanical function. Her affectionate husband is bewildered by the initial loss, by the new personality, and by choices she is making. Based on the story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" by Alice Munro, this very personal film is a deeply affecting work from Sarah Polley, a good actress becoming an even better writer and director. Rating: +3 (-4 to +4) or 9/10" [-mrl]
AWAY FROM HER is running on WNET Saturday, November 14, at 9PM. [-ecl]
Hercule Poirot (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
Yes, I'm still bingeing, and still commenting.
In EVIL UNDER SUN, the daughter became a son(*), one character was given a new back story that gave her an additional motive for murder, a suicide attempt was dropped, Poirot's method for testing his solution was omitted, but another character was involved in their proof instead, and while some characters were eliminated, two suspicious bird watchers were added. There's also a totally new framing story about Hastings's new Argentinian restaurant, including a new justification for Poirot's stay at the Jolly Roger, now also a health spa, along with a bunch of extra "humorous" scenes of the health spa aspect. Oh, and there was gunfire.
* After I wrote that the daughter became a son, I realize that these days that is ambiguous. What I mean is that the character that was written as a daughter in the book, was written as a son in the adaptation.
Again, in FIVE LITTLE PIGS there is a gun drawn at a key moment.
In DEATH ON THE NILE, the series continues its downward slide. In the first five minutes we have a sex scene--not the sort of thing you would find in Christie's novel--and a drug-taking scene. Yes, Christie had reference to sex and to drugs, but she never had them front and center, as it were. And they also made one of the characters gay (even though he was clearly straight in the book).
[SPOILERS] MYSTERY ON THE BLUE TRAIN has major plot changes, including a total restructuring of Van Aldin's family and relationships, and the changing of the personality of one of the characters. It also has the problem that one of the clues works when it is read in a book, but not when it is heard spoken on television (or on radio, for that matter). (It's like the reverse of those jokes that rely on word ambiguities that don't work in print: "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York;" has to commit to either "son" or "sun"--it can't have it both ways. [END SPOILERS]
And by the time we get to CARDS ON THE TABLE, the series keeps the characters but changes *every* person's background (even Poirot has moved to a new apartment), and personality, and motive, and ultimately changes both the murderer and the method. The same is true of TAKEN AT THE FLOOD.
This may be obvious, but there are two types of Agatha Christie murder mysteries: those in which the victim(s) are blameless, and those in which you can't wait to see them bumped off. For example, the dentist and the lady from India in ONE, TWO, BUCKLE MY SHOE are blameless (the Greek perhaps not so much), while the mother in APPOINTMENT WITH DEATH is so despicable that you can't wait to see her dead.
Even Christie realized the distinction, because on occasion, Poirot lets the murderer(s) go.
And I forgot to mention that first they changed the pace of the theme music to something much slower and sadder (a minor key rather than a major? I'm no musician), and then they dropped it entirely for different music for each episode. [-ecl]
A.I. Documentaries (letter of comment by Richie Bielak):
In response to Paul S. R. Chisholm's comments on A.I. documentaries in the 11/30/26 issue of the MT VOID, Richie Bielak writes:
There is another documentary, that I think is more realistic about current state of AI industry is called GHOST IN THE MACHINE. You can see it on PBS:
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/ghost-in-the-machine/
[-rb]
Facebook (letter of comment by Pete Rubinstein):
[The Facebook symbol of the lower-case 'f' in a circle has been rendered here as [f], and other symbols in obvious fashions.)
In response to Evelyn's comments on Facebook in the 11/30/26 issue of the MT VOID, Pete Rubinstein writes:
With respect to the Facebook issue:
According to Dom McMillan
[f] = Friends + updates + ads
But updates seem to get very trivial, so friends drop out, leaving
[f] = ads
We know that ads = Time * Money
Therefore, [f] = Time * Money
But in business Time = Money
Therefore, [f] = Money^2
But Money = sqrt(evil)
Therefore, Money^2 = evil
Therefore, [f] = evil
[-pr]
This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
ROME, BLOOD, AND POLITICS: REFORM, MURDER AND POPULAR POLITICS IN
THE LATE REPUBLIC 133-70 BC by Gareth C. Sampson (Pen & Sword
Books, ISBN 978-1-473-88732-9) is another one of those books that
reminds one all too frequently of current politics. For starters,
one of the main issues in the late Roman Republic was citizenship,
in particular, whether non-Roman, Latinate and Italianate groups
should have Roman citizenship or not. Complicating this was what
is an early version of gerrymandering: citizens voted by "tribes",
with each tribe having an equal vote. The proposal in 90 B.C.E.
was that the current thirty-five tribes of Roman citizens would be
supplemented by ten tribes of the newer Latinate and Italianate
citizens. The result was that the tens of thousands of Roman
voters controlled 35 votes, while the several million new voters
controlled only 10 votes. (Actually, I suppose it's less like
gerrymandering and more like the situation in the United States
Senate, where 26 states with a total population of only 18 million
out of over 200 million can control the Senate. With the Electoral
College, it is possible for someone to be elected President with
less than 23% of the popular vote; see
And since votes had to be cast in person, this further diluted their power, meaning only the wealthiest among them could afford to go to Rome to vote. (Again, there seem to be parallels with absentee and mail-in ballots today.)
Apparently there was concern that even before this proposal that since many men of Italian ancestry had been granted Roman citizenship, how could you tell who was a Roman citizen? There was no form of identification, and the citizen registers used for army recruitment were no update very often. As Sampson phrases it, among Roman citizens there was "the fear of 'immigrants' sharing the spoils of their 'hard work'."
Another major issue was effectively term limits, with (unsuccessful) attempts to prevent various officials from serving consecutive terms, or from serving before having achieved the necessary qualifications.
It is clear that these parallels do not escape Sampson, since he will occasionally refer to them, such as when he says, "It is useful to think of today's politicians and whether they are all striving to address social and economic ills that genuinely exist or whether a product is manufactured to fit their solution? For Tiberius and his allies, it was merely enough that there was the belief that this was true, that Italy was being overrun by hordes of barbarous slaves and that the 'virtuous' Roman peasant was being thrown off his land by unscrupulous aristocrats."
As usual, this book has plenty of misspellings and typos, enough that other reviewers have commented on it. At one point Samson writes, "Marius returned home a hero, hailed as the 'savour' of the Republic'." On one page, he twice quotes a source as saying, "When the Latins were going to kill the Consul Philippus on the Alban Mount, Drusus warned him to be on his gourd." These are signs of the unverified use of a spell-checker, which only flags *non*-words, not the *wrong* words.
Sampson also scorns commas, writing, "No one was ever tried for the murder of Drusus and the identity of the murderer or more importantly, who ordered the death is lost to history." (This needs a comma either after "or" or after "death".) Also, he writes, "Here he seems to have allied himself, albeit temporarily with Saturninus and Glaucia, forming a triumverate..." (Again, this either needs a comma after "temporarily", or no comma before "albeit", though the two commas are preferable.)
He also writes, "We know a number of measures that Saturninus passed this year, but as is common, not the order in which they were passed in." (I am reminded of the lyrics to "Live and Let Die", which are often heard as, "In this ever-changing world in which we live in", although apparently it is claimed to be "If this ever-changing world in which we're livin'". The published sheet music splits the difference: "If this ever-changing world in which we live in".) [-ecl]
Evelyn C. Leeper
evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com
Quote of the Week:
Many alligators will be slain, but the swamp will
remain.
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