@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @@@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society 12/26/25 -- Vol. 44, No. 26, Whole Number 2412
Table of Contents
Two weeks ago I asked:
What do Laos, Vietnam, Israel, Croatia, and possibly the United States have in common?
No one got it, last week I gave the hint is that it is geographical.
Implied in this sort of question is that it is something no other countries have in common with them so, no, it's not that they're all in the Northern Hemisphere, or that they're near active tectonic boundaries (which is more geologic than geographic).
It's that all have their geographic centers outside of their borders.
There are several other countries various people have suggested, based on their distant territories. The only one where the "mainland" of the country might qualify is France, since the major overseas parts (French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, and Reunion) are actual departments of France, not territories. However, even including these, the geographical center of France is thought to be in mainland France, near Auvergne.
(Apparently no one has calculated the geographic center of the United States and all its possessions and territories under various descriptive names. The geographic center of the fifty states is in North Dakota.)
[-ecl]
Middletown (NJ) Public Library Science Fiction Discussion Group:
Jan 8, 2026 HEART OF A DOG (1988) & novella by Mikhail Bulgakov
https://www.hoopladigital.com/ebook/a-dogs-heart-michael-bulgaria/13640560
[Yes, I know the author's name is misspelled. Apparently enough people have autocorrected change it to this that Hoopla has decided to have a redirect from it. The correct spelling also works:
https://www.hoopladigital.com/ebook/a-dogs-heart-mikhail-bulgakov/13640560 -ecl]
Turner Classic Movies seems to be starting the year off with many of the "basic classics": CITIZEN KANE, CASABLANCA, THE MALTESE FALCON, ..., but those have been recommended over and over.
So I'll pick a film that hasn't been "over-recommended": AVALON. Sam Krichinsky (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl) is remembering and relating to his grandchildren how he came to the United States in 1914 and settled in the beautiful city of Baltimore. He arrived on July 4th and he is telling the story before dinner on Thanksgiving, and the film returns to those two American holidays throughout, making it one of the few "holiday" films that doesn't focus on a religious holiday.
Mark said of it in his 1990 review, "A loving portrait of a Jewish family in post-World-War-II Baltimore makes AVALON one of Barry Levinson's best films to date. Levinson has a real talent for dialogue and for creating memorable characters. This is a film to be enjoyed more than once," gave it a 9/10, and named it "one of the most moving and best films [of 1990]."
[AVALON, Sunday, January 4, 10:15 PM]
There is also a full day of films, both narrative and documentary, in honor of Martin Luther King Day on Monday, January 19:
6:00 AM Edge of the City (1957) 7:30 AM Intruder in the Dust (1949) 9:00 AM Take a Giant Step (1959) 10:45 AM Say Amen, Somebody - The Good News Musical (1982) 12:30 PM Freedom on My Mind (1994) 2:30 PM The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974) 4:30 PM King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis (1970) 8:00 PM I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982) 10:00 PM Malcolm X (1992) 1:30 AM Uptight (1968) 3:30 AM Black Moderates and Black Militants (1968) 3:45 AM The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971) 5:15 AM Black Panthers (1968)
Other films of interest:
SATURDAY, January 3 10:00 AM Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946) 12:00 PM Camelot (1967) 8:00 PM When Worlds Collide (1951) 9:30 PM Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) 11:00 PM Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) SUNDAY, January 4 6:15 AM The Thief of Bagdad (1940) 8:30 AM Captain Sindbad (1963) THURSDAY, January 8 4:00 PM Queen of Outer Space (1958) SATURDAY, January 10 10:00 AM Tarzan and the Huntress (1947) SUNDAY, January 11 1:30 AM Gojira (1954) 3:30 AM Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964) WEDNESDAY, January 14 4:15 AM Modern Times (1936) SATURDAY, January 17 10:00 AM Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948) SUNDAY, January 18 10:00 PM Coma (1978) SATURDAY, January 24 10:00 AM Tarzan's Magic Fountain (1949) 5:15 PM 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) MONDAY, January 26 4:00 AM Woman in the Dunes (1964) SATURDAY, January 31 10:00 AM Tarzan and the Slave Girl (1950)
[-ecl]
DARK CITY [SPOILER] (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
Am I the only person who thinks of James Blish's "spindizzies" and cities in flight when I see the "pay-off scene" in DARK CITY? [-ecl]
THE MARTIAN CONTINGENCY by Mary Robinette Kowal (copyright 2025, Tor, 388pp, $18.99, trade paperback, ISBN 978-1-250-23705-7) (book review by Joe Karpierz):
It's hard to believe that the story that started the "Lady Astronaut of Mars" series, novelette "The Lady Astronaut of Mars", was originally published as part of an Audible anthology in 2012. It's almost just as hard to believe that it's been five years between the publication of the third book in the series, THE RELENTLESS MOON, and the publication of the latest entry, THE MARTIAN CONTINGENCY. There have also been a number of short fiction works in the universe between 2012 and now, and I know there's a Kickstarter story collection, SILENT SPACES, coming that has at least one new story in it (It is, by the way, the one and only Kickstarter that I have ever backed). So there's a lot of material available to read in the Lady Astronaut universe.
Elma York is now part of the command staff for the second Mars expedition. There's a lot to be done on this expedition, as there is at least one more coming from Earth to what will be, they hope, the completion of the Mars expeditions and the start of the permanent colony on the Red Planet. Many of the same characters from the first three books make appearances here in the fourth, including Elma's husband Nathaniel, Stetson Parker, Kam, Helen, Opal, and Leonard. Their inclusion provides a nice through line between THE CALCULATING STARS and THE MARTIAN CONTINGENCY. The story takes place in 1970, and this is important to know since the book puts on display the problems of race (and other) relations that Elma and her colleagues have to deal with throughout the book.
Early in the novel, Elma and others are sent to one of the sites where supplies were dropped in preparation for the second wave of settlers coming to Mars. The cargo container at this particular site, however, had essentially crash landed resulting in the supplies being rendered unavailable. Not long after, Elma makes a series of discoveries that leads her to believe that something wrong occurred during the first expedition, and Elma being Elma, she was bound and determined to find out what it was. And even though she is essentially second in command, no one wants to talk to her about it, including Leonard, the mission head. That something is the element that drives the plot of the story.
In and of itself, that is not enough to drive the book. What does drive the book is Kowal's examination of equality, racism, religion, colonialism, and gender equality, among other things in conjunction with whatever the thing was that happened during the first expedition. To me, all this does not feel enough to drive a good conflict and story. Well, at least not in this case. Something appears missing here (to me). Maybe it's the fact that there is just not enough drama to drive the story, not enough conflict. My memory tells me that the pace was much more frenetic in the first three books, while here it's much slower. Things unfold gradually, almost like the frog in the pot of water, in which the water starts out cold, and gradually gets hot. Not that the characters should die, mind you, but they should be hopping earlier and faster than they are here.
Kowal's desire to explore the social issues of the day may have something to do with that. Issues of abortion, antisemitism, transgender politics (interesting for 1970), among others take up quite a bit of the narrative (what is interesting is the discussion of calling the expedition members "colonists", as that term is offensive to certain members of the team). As Kowal is intentionally exploring an alternate history and how the people of that time experience those issues, relating how those issues affect the main conflict in the book is important to the story. It does feel, however, that the story is out of balance, and that there should be more of the exciting action that made the first three books compelling to read.
It feels as if this is the final book in the series. If so, the story comes to a fitting and reasonable end. It is difficult, sometimes, to stick the landing on the ending of a story or series. I'm sure most readers can think of several examples of where the ending just didn't feel right. This one does feel right. In any event, THE MARTIAN CONTINGENCY is a good, but not great, entry in the "Lady Astronaut of Mars" series. [-jak]
Why Hard SF May be Losing Its Audience (comments by Dale Skran):
For many decades now, hard SF fans have lamented that increasingly what passes for SF and wins awards is mostly or entirely fantasy, or at best implausible space opera. The amount of true "hard SF" being sold as "Science Fiction" can seem vanishingly small. I have a theory about this thought.
Personally, I have spent my career working at Bell Labs and other places on various kinds of advanced technology, including things like video phones that were at one point the essence of hard SF (i.e. "Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone"). At the same time, my hobby, which is now more like a second career, has been advocating for the settlement of space. Currently I am the COO of the National Space Society (nss.org), the leading non-partisan citizen group advocating for space exploration, development, and settlement. Just to give you the flavor of this, one of our recent minor projects was to work with Lifeship to put an art project containing our members' names on a robotic probe built by Astro Forge and targeted for a late 2026 launch to test asteroid mining. Making this more relevant, the NSS runs the Martine Rothblatt Space Settlement in Our Time Business Plan Competition, which a few years back was won by Lifeship.
The point of all this is that I am living in the hard SF world envisioned by writers like Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov. As a result, I do read more fantasy than I once did.
To conclude this essay, I entered this prompt into ChatGPT 5.2:
Consider the input text [above] and write a concluding paragraph. Speak personally as ChatGPT commenting on the point being made in text, and to what degree your existence is part of the point being made.
And ChatGPT answered with:
"As ChatGPT, I can't help noticing the quiet inversion at the heart of your argument: when "hard SF" becomes the texture of the daily paper--AI everywhere, robotics and drones reshaping conflict, billion-dollar bets on machine intelligence, and even space infrastructure being discussed in the same breath as corporate strategy--then the emotional function of hard SF changes. It stops being a portal to the possible and starts feeling like a dramatized version of your inbox. In that sense, my existence is uncomfortably on-theme: I'm a piece of once-speculative technology that now sits on a browser tab beside Photoshop and investment news, and that very normality steals some of the genre's old shock and wonder. If the future is already "here" in the form of tools that talk back, automate creativity, and reshape industries in real time, it makes sense that many readers go looking elsewhere--toward fantasy, surrealism, or softer space opera--not because they've stopped liking science, but because they still want the one thing hard SF used to reliably provide: distance."
The above response was not edited or corrected in any way. I rest my case. [-dls]
This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
This is more a "get ready to add to your reading list" column.
Works entering into the public domain in 2026 include Dashiell Hammett's THE MALTESE FALCON as a complete novel, Olaf Stapledon's novel LAST AND FIRST MEN, the first English translation of Franz Kafka's THE CASTLE, Agatha Christie's first Miss Marple novel THE MURDER AT THE VICARAGE, and THE MYSTERIOUS MR. QUIN, as well as works by several other mystery writers.
Plays include THE GREEN PASTURES by Marc Connelly. YA books include the original editions of the first four Nancy Drew mystery stories by house author Carolyn Keene: THE SECRET OF THE OLD CLOCK, THE HIDDEN STAIRCASE, THE BUNGALOW MYSTERY, and THE MYSTERY AT LILAC INN. Non-fiction includes THE MYSTERIOUS UNIVERSE by James Jeans.
Films include JUST IMAGINE, an early science fiction musical directed by David Butler.
One suspects that these books will appear in Project Gutenberg soon (for some loose definition of "soon").
A more complete list can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_in_public_domain#United_States
[-ecl]
Evelyn C. Leeper
evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com
Quote of the Week:
God grant me the company of those who seek the
truth, and God deliver me from those who have
found it.
--Isaac Newton
[whose birthday was yesterday]
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