@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @@@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society 06/05/26 -- Vol. 44, No. 49, Whole Number 2435
Table of Contents
Mini-Reviews Change (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
Unless I hear a groundswell of opinion that I should continue, I will be dropping the release dates and IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes links from the film reviews. [-ecl]
Mini Reviews, Part 17 (film reviews by Evelyn C. Leeper):
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III: This was a DVD that I got as part of a "buy two, get three" deal on swapadvd.com site. There was a very limited selection after the ONE I actually wanted (MIDNIGHT IN PARIS). Still, four DVDs for effectively $1 each made it worthwhile, even though this one was a pan-and scan.
The problem with the "Mission Impossible" films (other than that they got ludicrously long) is they have too much Tom Cruise and not enough Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg. (This is something I have commented on with other series: Spock was more popular than Kirk, and Ilya was more popular than Napoleon.)
I wonder how long the movie would be without all the chase senes and action scenes in general. I don't care enough to spend the time to check it. (On establishing characters, in the commentary director J. J. Abrams says, "Get to the action of it as soon as you can."
[SPOILER] The "Mission Impossible" franchise has learned from the James Bond franchise's "mistake." Bond got married, and almost immediately his wife was killed. (They also did that with Felix Leiter.) The MI franchise has avoided that--several times. One can argue, however, that the constant repetition of "his wife is in danger and he has to rescue her *and* save the world" can be tiresome.
LADIES IN LAVENDER: With Judi Dench and Maggie Smith as the leads, and Miriam Margolies and Toby Jones in the supporting cast (although Jones's part is actually very small), how could I pass it up? Especially as part of a "buy-two-get-three-free" deal on the DVD swap site,
Where films often make characters younger than what they were in the original source (see THE BIG PICTURE for a great example of this), in this case writer/director Charles Dance made the two women older--the story had them in their forties, while in fact Dench and Smith were seventy at the time. (They were actually born less than three weeks apart in December 1934.)
THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE (1969): Once again, the egotism and self-centeredness of Jean Brodie is portrayed beautifully by novel author Muriel Spark, screenwriter Jay Presson Allen, and actor Maggie Smith.
Jean Brodie says that Michelangelo is not the greatest Italian painter--Giotti is. "He is my favorite," she explains, as if being her favorite automatically makes him the greatest.
Jean Brodie says that Franco is called "El Jefe", which she pronounces "HEH-feh", saying, "The J is silent." But it isn't silent; it is pronounced as an 'H'.
Jean Brodie is also trying to have Jenny become Teddy Lloyd's lover--except Jane is probably 16, or at most 17. These days that would make her a "groomer", and frankly, that would have been true then (although the term "groomer" is too recent, and "procurer" might have been the most polite term applied).
The time span of the film is not clear. Jean Brodie pegs the age of the girls who write the fake letter as "eleven or twelve". At the end they are graduating as seniors, making them (one presumes) about seventeen or eighteen. Yet the storyline of Jean Brodie and Mr. Lowther is not one that can be sustained through five years.
[-ecl]
The Rest of June on TCM (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
Worth noting is the Mel Brooks "festival" on June 28 of five of his films:
2:30 PM The Twelve Chairs (1970)
4:15 PM The Producers (1967)
6:00 PM Spaceballs (1987)
8:00 PM Blazing Saddles (1974)
10:00 PM Young Frankenstein (1974)
I'll also point out the little-seen THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT, of which Mark wrote in 1994, "The story is of three drag queens making a journey across the Australian desert from Sydney to Alice Springs to make a performance engagement. ... Unless you reject the well-labeled premise from the start, you will probably find this a surprisingly wholesome feel-good sort of film, a little strong on manipulation and weak on credibility in spots, but rarely failing to entertain."
Other films of interest:
SATURDAY, June 27 7:45 AM Eye of the Devil (1966) 2:00 PM Forbidden Planet (1956) SUNDAY, June 28 12:00 AM Stolen Face (1952) 10:00 AM Stolen Face (1952) TUESDAY, June 30 1:00 AM The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) 4:30 AM Orpheus (1950) 10:15 PM Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)
[-ecl]
"Foundling Fathers" by Meg Elison (copyright 2026, Tachyon Publications, publication date June 23 2026, ISBN: 978-1-61696-458-0 (print); 978-1-61696-459-7 (digital)) (book review by Joe Karpierz):
There is much fiction currently being written, both inside the sff fields and outside, that are in conversation with our current political situation. Thomas Ha's "In My Country", a Hugo finalist for Best Short Story comes immediately to mind (largely because I'm currently reading it), and Meg Elison's upcoming novella from Tachyon Publications, "Foundling Fathers" is another. As I fished around for how to start this review, several ways came to mind. What I settled upon, however, is what I believe is quite possibly the best first line of any novella (or maybe any other piece of fiction) I've ever read:
"It took Benjamin Franklin twenty-seven minutes and fourteen seconds to discover there was pornography on the internet."
I don't know what a sentence like that says about me--that it drew me into the book completely and utterly--but I feel that if that doesn't draw in the reader, well, I'm sure there's something else that would, but I find it difficult to believe.
The year, as far as Ben Franklin knows, is 1750. What he has discovered is a smartphone that someone left in a "privy". Like any intelligent and curious teenage boy, he started poking around, and well, you know. He immediately takes the device to his brothers: Tom, John, and George (who of course are Jefferson, Adams, and Washington). This is one more piece of evidence that not all is what it seems to be. What are those things that fly in the sky? Why do they never see the boat that comes to bring them supplies? Why does their calendar not match up with what they learn from the device about Ptolemy (among other things)?
Let's back up a bit. The boys, their "parents" Jeff Hancock and Mary Libertas, and a bunch of "slaves" there to serve their every need, are part of an elaborate scheme by the Antediluvian Society, a group of right wing billionaires who (and where have you heard this before?) want to make America what it was, bring it back to the glory of yesteryear. The boys are being brought up with Christian values (as the society sees them), manners, and other behaviors of 1750. They are living on an island in isolation so they don't know anything about the outside "real world". The Saratoga plan (there's always a plan, and like most plans, this one does not survive contact with the enemy), is to introduce the clones (I mean, did I have to tell you they were clones, and thus this novella becomes science fiction?) to society and return America to its former (in the society's eyes) glory.
Of course, the boys aren't supposed to know it's 2026 and not 1750, but they were raised to be as intelligent as the originals, and once they found the smartphone they started putting two and two together and really did get four and demanded to know what was really going on and what their part is in the whole thing.
As I finished the book, I didn't know what to think of it. But the more I thought about it, the better it got. The fact that the right wing cabal's plan was going awry feels like it parallels what is going on in the real world in the U.S. today, and it really is sweet and delicious. To be fair, we don't know how things really end up in the novella, just as we don't know how things are going to end up in the real world we are living in today. It's not necessarily easy to predict where we're going to end up in our timeline, and so Elison didn't predict where the Fab Four (John, Ben, Tom, and George), as I've come to think about them, are going to end up. This is a terrific read, and one that I heartily recommend. Just don't leave your cellphone laying around where people who aren't supposed to see it will find it. You never know what will happen. [-jak]
QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (letters of comment by Paul Dormer and Scott Dorsey):
In response to Evelyn's comments on Nicholas Cage and QUATERMASS AND THE PIT in the 05/29/26 issue of the MT VOID, Paul Dormer writes:
"Quatermass and the Pit" was originally a TV series on the BBC in the Fifties. My mother said she watched alone whilst my father was out and me and my sisters were in bed. Scared her, too. [-pd]
Scott Dorsey adds:
Most of those shows are now lost but there are three or four that were preserved. They are very different than the movie due to the constraints of live TV, and they are interesting in themselves. [-sd]
Evelyn notes:
The TV series "Quatermass II" and "Quatermass and the Pit" exist in complete form (all six episodes each). (I know, because I have them.) Of "The Quatermass Experiment" I believe only Chapter 2 remains. [-ecl]
Paul adds:
"Quatermass and the Pit" was shown, I recall, at the UK Worldcon in 1979.
I note that the first two films have been shown on Talking Pictures TV in the last couple of weeks. [-pd]
This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
In the 08/04/23 issue of the MT VOID, I discussed Winston Churchill's views on the Richard III controversy from A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLES: THE BIRTH OF BRITAIN (Bloomsbury USA Academic, ISBN 978-1-472-58524-0), and mentioned Josephine Tey's THE DAUGHTER OF TIME (Scribner, ISBN 978-0-684-80386-9), although I said at the time that I realized the latter was a work of fiction, and therefore based my conclusions on facts that I could verify in real sources, and logical conclusions from them, rather than citations from (possibly) fictitious sources (e.g., Sir Cuthbert Oliphant).
Well, Oliphant may be fictitious, but Tey seems to have patterned him after James Gairdner as described in RICHARD III--HIS LIFE & CHARACTER by Clements R. Markham (Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36451, 1903). Of Gairdner, Markham writes, "His Richard III. is a prince, headlong and reckless as to consequences, but of rare gifts and with many redeeming qualities. He was wise and able, brave, generous, religious, fascinating, and yet had committed two very cowardly assassinations before he was nineteen, murdered his defenceless nephews, and gratuitously slandered his mother. Such a monster is an impossibility in real life."
And Tey writes of (the fictitious) Oliphant, "He is, to be honest, in a sad muddle himself about Richard. On the same page he says that he was an admirable administrator and general, with an excellent reputation, staid and good-living, very popular by contrast with the Woodville upstarts (the Queen's relations) and that he was 'perfectly unscrupulous and ready to wade through any depth of bloodshed to the crown which lay within his grasp'. On one page he says grudgingly: 'There are reasons for supposing that he was not destitute of a conscience' and then on a later page reports More's picture of a man so tormented by his own deed that he could not sleep. And so on.'"
(Gairdner wrote his HISTORY OF THE LIFE AND REIGN OF RICHARD III in 1878; there was a second edition in 1898, as well as a life of Henry VII in 1889.)
And much of the evidence Tey has her narrator and his assistant Brent Carradine discover is also given in Markham's book. It isn't plagiarism in the strict sense, because Markham is quoting various primary and secondary sources, and Tey is also quoting them. But it does seem as Markham did a lot of the "heavy lifting" for Tey. However, Tey does pick up Markham's own description of Thomas More's account as being a "party pamphlet."
I can see why Markham might have been Tey's inspiration, because the previous defender of Richard III, Horace Walpole in HISTORIC DOUBTS ON THE LIFE AND REIGN OF KING RICHARD III (published in 1768), does not lay out a very clear or comprehensible defense. Large portions of his evidence from primary sources are quoted in the original French or Latin, rather than translated (as Markham does). I suppose in 1768 it was assumed that his audience would be fluent in those languages; by 1878, Markham could make no such assumption. And the structure of Walpole's argument is not as straightforward as Markham's; I felt he was jumping around without any particular order.
This is not to say his writing style isn't engaging. For example, in the Preface he writes, "So incompetent has the generality of historians been for the province they have undertaken, that it is almost a question, whether, if the dead of past ages could revive, they would be able to reconnoitre the events of their own times, as transmitted to us by ignorance and misrepresentation. All very ancient history, except that of the illuminated Jews, is a perfect fable. It was written by priests, or collected from their reports; and calculated solely to raise lofty ideas of the origin of each nation. Gods and demi-gods were the principal actors; and truth is seldom to be expected where the personages are supernatural." Given that he is about to criticize the veracity of Christian historians, it seems odd to blame misrepresentation on the facts that the historians were pagans, and for that matter, was not God considered supernatural as well?
He is also sometimes snarky: "Sir Thomas More has exhausted all his eloquence and imagination to work up a piteous scene, in which the queen [Elizabeth Woodville] is made to excite our compassion in the highest degree, and is furnished by that able pen with strains of pathetic oratory, which no part of her conduct affords us reason to believe she possessed."
In the matter of the claim that Richard had his own mother accused of adultery, Walpole writes, "The doubts on the validity of Edward's marriage were better grounds for Richard's proceedings than aspersion of his mother's honour. On that invalidity he claimed the crown, and obtained it; and with such universal concurrence, that the nation undoubtedly was on his side--but as he could not deprive his nephews, on that foundation, without bastardizing their sisters too, no wonder, the historians, who wrote under the Lancastrian domination, have used all their art and industry to misrepresent the fact. If the marriage of Edward the Fourth with the widow Grey was bigamy, and consequently null, what became of the title of Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry the Seventh? What became of it? Why a bastard branch of Lancaster, matched with a bastard of York, were obtruded on the nation as the right heirs of the crown! and, as far as two negatives can make an affirmative, they were so." First Walpole disposes of that claim, and then he turns mathematically snarky as well.
And note his use of the understated "unlucky" here: "It happens unluckily too, that great part of the time Ratcliffe was absent, Sir Thomas More himself telling us that Sir Richard Ratcliffe had the custody of the prisoners at Pontefract, and presided at their execution there. But a much more unlucky circumstance is, that James Tirrel, said to be knighted for this horrid service, was not only a knight before, but a great or very considerable officer of the crown; and in that situation had walked at Richard's preceding coronation." I think he uses "unlucky" in the sense of "oops!"
One thing he notes that I don't recall in Markham is that "no prosecution of the supposed assassins was even thought of till eleven years afterwards, on the appearance of Perkin Warbeck." Perkin Warbeck claimed to be Richard of Gloucester, the younger of the two (supposedly murdered) princes, so when he showed up, clearly in line for the throne *before* Henry VII, Henry had to do something to discredit him, and what better way than by claiming Richard of Gloucester had been murdered before Henry claimed the crown.
So there are portions to be gleaned from Walpole, but on the whole, I recommend Markham.
(Sir George Buck published the first defense of Richard III with THE HISTORY OF THE LIFE AND REIGNE OF RICHARD THE THIRD in 1646, but I cannot find a copy of this.) [-ecl]
Evelyn C. Leeper
evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com
Quote of the Week:
I would be most content if my children grew up to be the
kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of
building enough bookcases.
--Anna Quindlen
Go to our home page