Weekly Short Stories: 1950 Science Fiction, Part 1

This past week I began to examine some of the best in short science fiction from the year 1950, though the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 12 (1950).  Harry S. Truman was our president at the time, I wouldn't be born for another six years (my sister another two), and my parents...living in Albany, Georgia with my future dad working as a mailman and mom as a telephone operator...were just a year into their marriage.  Later on that year North Korea would invade South Korea and nearly conquered the peninsula before we countered them with a bold amphibious landing at Inchon.  In the world of science fiction short stories, numerous pulp magazines spread the talent and some mainstream magazines began to publish them as well.  Here are my reactions to the first four stories, all of which paint a gloomy picture of humanity's future and three of which are apocalyptic...

NOT WITH A BANG by Damon Knight

Rolf Smith is a man who had believed he was the lone worldwide survivor of a nuclear war, but discovers that there is another still alive...and a woman at that: he realizes that for the survival of the species they must become a couple.  But she still holds to her conservative religious beliefs about the sanctity of marriage...and there is no one left around to marry them!  Rolf knows he himself hasn't long to live since he has come down with a condition that sporadically paralyzes him, so he must quickly court this woman and cajole her into finding reason in their unique circumstance.  The ending makes the story's title to appear as a double-meaning...

SPECTATOR SPORT by John D. MacDonald

A time traveling professor finds himself in a dystopian, crumbling future society in which everyone is plugged into vicarious, alternative realities where they can live out their personal fantasies.  When he reveals that he is a time traveler from the past, the authorities assume he has overdosed on one of their programs and is scheduled for a "lob job" against his will.  Everyone in this society assumes that the ultimate way of living is to be completely immersed in a fantasy world...an eerie tale foreshadowing our current "reality" of video game mania and the rise of virtual reality... 

THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS by Ray Bradbury

There are no people in this very short story of an automatically-run house a little off into the future...the only building left standing in the area after a nuclear strike.  Bradbury goes into great detail, for example, describing how the breakfast is cooked, presented on the table...and after a while when no one is there to eat it...taken back up, scraped, and cleaned.  But even inanimate houses have their own life spans...

DEAR DEVIL by Eric Frank Russell

Human-size Martians, slithering and with tentacles, are nevertheless the "good guys" in this tale of neighborly goodwill and redemption.  On a exploratory fly-by of Earth off into the future...many years after nuclear war had decimated the planet...a Martian poet is let off to take in the surroundings and live there.  He encounters a broken humanity where the adults, riddled by plague and fearing their children's susceptibility, abandon them and leave them to forage in groups for themselves.  The Martian, little by little, befriends the little boys and girls and gains their trust...they affectionately call him "Devil".  Where does this all lead?  Well, unlike the first three stories I reviewed, this one presents an optimistic outlook on humanity's future although I hope we'll neither destroy ourselves in nuclear conflagrations nor need Martians to come save the day...

More about science fiction short stories from 1950 next week...

Just Finished Reading Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express

Perhaps the most well-known of legendary mystery writer Agatha Christie's stories is her 1934 Murder on the Orient Express, but I never did get around to reading it until just now...resisting the temptation to watch either the 1974, 2001 or 2017 movie adaptations.  It's another Hercule Poirot novel, featuring the amiable but psychologically discerning Belgian detective as this time he is traveling on a train though the Balkans toward his eventual destination of England.  In his coach are several passengers, including a disagreeable wealthy American man who is fearful for his life and who earlier had unsuccessfully tried to hire Poirot to protect him.  His true identity...and his subsequent murder as the train gets stuck late at night in a snowdrift...exposes the other passengers to scrutiny as to their own identities, backgrounds and possible motivations as the murderer.  Poirot questions each one differently and sees important clues...some as seemingly insignificant as a grease smudge on a Hungarian countess's passport or an offhand comment by an official about the unusual diversity among the passengers...as he comes to an amazing conclusion about the guilty party.  In the movies this story has been a vehicle to present all-star casts...that was especially the case in the 1974 version, which I'm planning to watch now that I've read the book.  If you haven't read it yet, I recommend it...I'll need to watch the film adaptations first before I endorse any of them.  Speaking of movies, I can think offhand of only four other train-based films I've enjoyed: Terror by Night with Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, Silver Streak with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, From Russia with Love featuring Sean Connery as James Bond, and my favorite, The Polar Express with Tom Hanks in multiple roles.  I never did see Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train...can you come up with some "train" films you liked?

Wordscapes and Word Stacks Apps: Pretty Fun

For years I've enjoyed doing the Jumble word-scramble puzzle in the daily newspaper.  Each puzzle features four five-letter scrambled words and two with six letters (the Sunday edition features all six words with six letters).  Unscramble each word and take the circled letters to form a scrambled daily phrase, for which the inset picture provides a clever clue.  My local newspaper has become so worthless that the only thing left in it with any use for me is its Jumble puzzle...so instead of blowing my money on that I have switched to a phone app called Wordscapes, another work-scramble puzzle.  It was Melissa who introduced me to it...she had it on her phone and sometimes would ask me to help her when she got stumped.  Well, every weekend from Friday evening through Sunday evening Wordscapes holds its own tournament, something that I got hooked on a couple of months ago.  For the last few weeks I had consistently finished in the top three, actually winning the thing once.  But this past Friday evening, for some reason everybody else decided to become a Wordscapes tourney champion and the scores went through the roof.  Let's see, with only about six hours to go I'm in 38th place...think I'll pass up on the rest of this week's tournament...

This fun type of activity reminded me of the fledgling years on the Internet when we had an AOL account and would play in their various trivia games...those were the days, you know, when getting online meant undergoing eardrum-piercing, torturous sounds from the modem.  Wordscapes has an associated game app called Word Stacks, which is a much more complicated version of the word search puzzle...the letters shift positions as you find the words, pretty challenging at times!  I haven't seen any tournaments for Word Stacks yet, but maybe it's just a matter of time...

Upcoming New Blog Feature Listing My All-Time Favorite Songs

One of the perks to a blog such as this is that I can occasionally be a little self-indulgent about my chosen topics, and one I tend to pursue is the listing of my personal favorites in different areas, most particularly in music. As I approach my 4,000th published article on this blog stretching back to April of 2007, I recall that in those early months I had decided to list (and discuss) my 30 all-time favorite popular songs...a theme that I stretched out song-by-song from April through July that year.  Now composing one's "all-time" list of anything inevitably involves some temporal conceit biased toward current, ongoing favorites, and that list I made 12 years ago was no exception. Well, I think it's now high time I composed a new list of favorites, this time with an eye not only on my current inclinations but also on how different songs in the past had a big effect on my life...even if my interest in them might have waned of late.  And instead of just 30, I'm extending it to 500 songs! Starting from the bottom of the list, I'll discuss 10 songs at a time on a weekly basis, making this a 50-week project. Now you might think that listing a song at, say, #493 would mean that I don't care that much for it.  But the opposite is true, since I'm going to have a difficult time deciding which wonderful pieces of music to keep off the list.  I'm planning on my first article on this theme coming out on Monday, August 26th.  Just keep in mind with the songs I list that I'm judging them subjectively by my own liking and not by any academic criteria of their artistic value...in other words, your own "Top 500" list would doubtless be vastly different from mine. By the way, here's that list...which most likely will be considerably modified...of my all-time favorites from early 2007...if you dig back in my blog archives from that period you can read what I wrote about them...

1 WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS by Led Zeppelin, 1971
2 BUILDING A MYSTERY by Sarah McLachlan, 1997
3 FLAMING By Pink Floyd, 1967
4 LANDSLIDE by Fleetwood Mac, 1975
5 NOVOCAINE FOR THE SOUL by the Eels, 1996
6 FATHER AND SON by Cat Stevens, 1970
7 DIALOGUE (Part 1 & 2), 1972
8 INVISIBLE SUN by the Police, 1982
9 FOR MY LADY by the Moody Blues, 1972
10 CLOSE TO THE EDGE by Yes, 1973
11 NUMBER NINE DREAM  by John Lennon, 1974
12 DESTINATION UNKNOWN by Missing Persons, 1982
13 IMITATION OF LIFE by R.E.M., 2001
14 MESSAGE OF LOVE by the Pretenders, 1981
15 BOTH SIDES NOW by Judy Collins, 1967
16 NO MILK TODAY by Herman's Hermits, 1967
17 AMERICA by Simon & Garfunkel, 1968
18 CLOSE TO ME by the Cure, 1985
19 12:51 by the Strokes, 2003
20 THE GOOD'S GONE by the Who, 1966
21 NOT ENOUGH TIME by INXS, 1992
22 THE WASP (TEXAS RADIO & THE BIG BEAT) by the Doors, 1971
23 PRESSURE by Billy Joel, 1982
24 I WON'T BACK DOWN by Tom Petty, 1989
25 THE LITTLE BLACK EGG by the Nightcrawlers, 1967
26 OCEANS by Pearl Jam, 1992
27 FOR NO ONE by the Beatles, 1966
28 LIVING FOR THE CITY (long version) by Stevie Wonder, 1973
29 FALL OF THE PEACEMAKERS by Molly Hatchet, 1982
30 YOU by George Harrison, 1976

Quote of the Week...from Vladimir Putin

Traditional values are more stable and more important for millions of people than the liberal idea, which, in my opinion, is really ceasing to exist.                    ---Vladimir Putin, Russian President

The other day on his nightly radio talk show following the Mueller House hearings, Mark Levin, who unlike some other conservative opinion makers fully acknowledges Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, nevertheless asked why should their president, Vladimir Putin, go against the Democrats since, after all, they had been able to practice aggressive land-grabbing (Crimea, eastern Ukraine) and successfully challenged President Obama in Syria by militarily supporting its dictator Assad.  Of course, those convinced that Donald Trump, the intended beneficiary of those election meddling efforts, was somehow compromised and would be used by the Russians as their puppet president have a ready answer to Levin's question.  But there is a more fundamental reason, in my opinion, and Putin hinted at it a month ago in a Financial Times interview, highlighted by the above quote about the "liberal idea"...

I don't share the authoritarian Russian leader's view on liberalism, but he obviously deeply understands that he rules over a society whose population is primarily socially conservative with a substantial minority of liberal-minded citizens more oriented to western Democracy and progressivism. Putin also knows that his core of internal political opposition comes from that liberal source, and over the years he has worked to suppress it through repressive laws and reportedly even assassinations.  On the other hand, he has fostered closeness with his country's Orthodox Church and presents himself as a defender of traditional values.  Abroad, Putin makes common cause with other nations that have authoritarian-leaning leaders supporting his conservative social outlook, recognizing in these that they also tend to shun international alliances, alliances some of which have participated in sanctions against his country as well as maintaining a strong military presence to restrict his ambitions regarding the recovery of former Soviet territory.  This is not the world of the Cold War when conservatives in the West were the most strident opponents of the USSR with its extreme left ideology.  Now Russia tends to support conservative regimes like those in Turkey, Poland, and Hungary...and backs political parties in other western countries that embrace social conservativism and a more isolationist foreign policy.  So it's not necessary to automatically assume that Putin had something on Trump and that's the reason for Russia trying to get him elected in '16...Trump's creed of social conservatism and a combination of more American unilateralism in its foreign policy with a knee-jerk skepticism of international alliances and agreements presented a most attractive picture to the Russian president...

My Problem with Robert Mueller's Testimony

I heard some of the Robert Mueller testimony yesterday before two House of Representative committees and was dismayed at his apparent lack of knowledge of passages in his own report, his evasiveness to often simple questions from either party, and his general presentation as somebody who simply did not want to be there.  Charges of feeblemindedness and figurehead are now cropping up about him, and I wonder whether, during these past three years his public image, with television continually depicting him as a sharp professional who was completely on top of things, wasn't monumentally inflated.  How much input did he actually have in this report of his...or was he just somebody put up there "in charge" to legitimize it?  And about this exoneration issue: when someone is investigated and prosecution is not recommended, those performing the investigation are supposed to abide by the principal that the target of that investigation is to be presumed innocent in the absence of any charges.  To not affirmatively assert that Trump committed obstruction during the investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign places should translate into a return to the default position of innocence on the part of the President, legally and professionally speaking.  Now you and I as private citizens can differ on how much Trump is guilty of this or that...and he can still be impeached since that process is a political one...but from the perspective of a Justice Department counsel claiming possible guilt after refusing to press for charges is, in my lay opinion, unethical.  Not that I care a whit for Trump, mind you...but this reminds me of something that happened in Gainesville's tragic past...

In the late summer of 1990, a succession of grisly murders of young people occurred in my hometown.  The pressure was on the police to quickly nab a suspect, and conveniently for them a suspicious, mentally disturbed young man was available to present to the public as the likely murderer.  Only one problem: he was innocent, and later on they discovered the true murderer, who at the time was in a Marion County jail and had audio-recorded his own diary of his crimes.  But even though the first suspect was subsequently released and not charged, the Gainesville police chief at the time publicly claimed that he still believed that this individual was somehow tied in with the murders even though he was legally exonerated, damaging his reputation in an entirely unprofessional way.  So since then I've been sensitive to this notion that if an investigator won't recommend charges against someone then they should refrain from expressing their own personal biases.  Then-FBI Director James Comey violated this principle in July 2016 when he went on a public rant against presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for her unsecured emails while not pushing for her prosecution.  Now coming back to the present, I'm always hearing how upstanding and professional Robert Mueller is...but he's doing the same thing, in my estimation, with Donald Trump that Comey did with Clinton...

Weekly Short Stories: 1949 Science Fiction, Part 4

I conclude my look back at the year 1949 in the realm of short science fiction, by means of the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 11 (1949) with three more stories.  By the way, almost all of the stories in this retrospective year-by-year series of the best in this genre were first published in monthly science fiction pulp magazines, and Astounding Science Fiction...edited by John Campbell...had dominated this field for years.  But by the end of the 1940s other publications were cutting in on Astounding, which is reflected in this book's selected stories.  Campbell, in the early 1950s, would become enamored with L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics, something that turned established writers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein away from him.  And now, here are my reactions to those final three tales...

DEFENSE MECHANISM by Katherine MacLean
Jake, young father, who early in his life recalls having E.S.P. before it faded away, is keenly aware that his baby boy is endowed with the same talent, greatly multiplied to the extent that little Ted is continually expressing his thoughts inside daddy's mind.  Ted also likes to mentally follow wild rabbits, and one day there's one in distress...Jake goes out to investigate and the story climaxes from there.  To me, Defense Mechanism made a big point: little children are often imbued with great potential and talents, but traumatic events in their very impressionable young lives can destroy the development of these skills to the point where they become faint memories.  This story's title says it all...

COLD WAR by Henry Kuttner
A few weeks ago I reviewed Kuttner's story Exit the Professor, which also concerned itself with a backwoods family reminiscent of the Beverly Hillbillies but who were extraordinarily talented, knowledgeable, and long-lived: the Hogbens.  They're back, this time combating the Pughs, a neighboring family bent on conquering the world through little Junior, who has the ability to hex people.  Not as good as the first story, but still good enough for a few laughs...

THE WITCHES OF KARRES by James H. Schmitz
A space trading captain...who kind of reminded me of Hans Solo...is trying to make enough money to impress his own planet's skeptical ruler to allow him to marry his daughter.  On a different planet he finds himself unwittingly rescuing three girls...all sisters...from their plight of slavery there.  They are the "witches" and each has her own special personality and talents.  As the captain tries to return them to their home world of Karres, the girls keep causing mishaps along the way...getting him further and further into trouble.  A funny, rather long story, the shenanigans here reminded me a little of another great old 1960s sit-com, this one I Dream of Jeannie, where the title character keeps "blinking" poor Major Nelson into one predicament after another...

Next week I'll start looking at science fiction short stories from 1950...

Future Nature Park North of Mile Run in Gainesville

I'm hearing of a proposed new nature wetlands park, about 700 acres, north of the end of NW 37th Street in far northern Gainesville where Mile Run, Rosemont-Vista Palms, Sutter's Landing and Alive Church are located.  Its entrance, with available parking, will be at the current dead end of that road, about a mile from NW 53rd Avenue...not far from where I live.  The park will supposedly have a 2 1/2 mile walking trail and a walkers' entrance on the north side near 441 at Turkey Creek Forest.  I don't know the timetable for its development and opening...the information I am passing on I just received from my local Nextdoor social media site.  When I used to go out on my extended training runs, I would often to go down NW 37th Street to that dead end and turn back...wonder if the park will be runner-friendly.  Should be interesting following this news item...

The Barriers of Space Exploration

As I have mentioned a few days earlier here, I'm now in the process of rereading many of the late science fiction writer Isaac Asimov's book series about robots, the Empire, and Foundation...which he wrote over a span of four decades and number around fifteen volumes.  Their unifying theme is the advancement of humanity in space travel and settlement, something necessitating an innovation that current science...according to the theory of general relativity...says is impossible: travel at faster than the speed of light. The common belief that the light barrier can be somehow circumvented is partially due to the earlier notion of a sound "barrier", which never really existed and was disproven after aircraft first "broke" it decades ago.  In reality, space exploration is still possible while slower-than-light travel drastically restricts our ability to reach even nearby star systems, but in my opinion there are two another barriers almost as formidable as the light barrier, and which have hampered our space program ever since the mid-1960s: the boredom and budget barriers...

While the Gemini phase of the Apollo program to the moon was going on in the mid-sixties, TV networks would preempt their regular programming for hours-on-end and...along with merciful interruptions for commercials...would show on-screen simulations of what was going on, with the scratchy sounds of astronauts and ground control communicating back and forth. In the meantime, Star Trek was a popular alternative and showed a different picture of space travel using the warp drive to get around all that wasted time and always having suspense and character drama to rivet the viewer's attention.  Even when the moon landing first happened on July 20, 1969, and millions across the world were watching the events live, once the astronauts got out there on the surface and made their statements, there wasn't really much to report on...or stay tuned in for.  By the time of the Apollo 13 mission in early 1970, the networks began to curb their coverage due to lack of viewer interest.  Then-President Nixon cancelled the final three Apollo moon missions (18, 19, and 20) and was going to cancel Apollo 16 and 17 as well when Caspar Weinberger, budget director at the time, persuaded him not to.  Since then we've been in low-Earth orbit...when we could actually shoot a rocket up into space, that is.  President George W. Bush laid out an ambitious plan to return to the moon and establish a more permanent presence, but his successor Barack Obama scrubbed that plan, stating that "we've already been there".  And the current president, Donald Trump, has reset the focus to go back to the moon.  But suppose he loses in 2020?  His successor would doubtless change everything once again...

The public at-large wants Star Wars, Star Trek, and space-themed video games, but the reality of space travel can challenge their patience and ever-dwindling attention spans.  And with success inevitably comes the political fallout...from both conservatives and liberals...as people ask whether the money spent for the space program could be better used in other areas.  In a speech the other day commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, Vice-President Pence said that the return mission to the moon will take place in 2024.  Sure, unless another president comes along and turns everything upside-down. Sigh...here we go again...

Democratic Party Unity in 2020 Might Not Translate Into Votes

Talk show hosts are like washing machines...in a way.  Sometimes they're in full spin cycle, showing their highly partisan and ideological colors as they go off on their rantings to their faithful audience of true believers.  But sometimes they're in a different cycle, one in which they may go off-topic or even be a little personal...it's these times that I like the most whenever I happen to tune in to one of them.  Usually, though, they're putting a spin on different subject matters...but even with this they can sometimes bring up interesting points and not cause me to switch the station.  Case in point: the other day while driving to work I checked in to see what ol' Rush Limbaugh was up to and whether he was doing a "heavy spin".  No, but he was giving his audience of loyal Trump supporters some advice: you may think that the Democrats are self-destructing with this rift between the "Squad" of four progressive congresswomen and party leadership, along with the various candidates for president going after each other during the debates.  But Limbaugh maintained that the Democrats are all united by their hatred for Donald Trump and that, come the fall of 2020 as the election approaches, the President will have his hands full trying to win reelection.  And I get what he was saying...just that I disagree a bit with it...

If you just go by the registered voters for Republicans vs. Democrats in each state, then the Democrats should win the Electoral College for president each and every election with no problem.  Also, there are many independent voters not affiliated with either party, many of them this way because they feel that neither major party represents them and their interests.  It is the disaffected Democrats and independents who turned the 2016 election against Clinton and in favor of Trump, and it is the same groups that can return him to office in 2020 should the Democrats nominate someone whose ideology and attitude betrays their interests or insults them.  So whatever the Democratic Party leadership and their candidates say or do in 2020 to heal the rifts among them after the convention and a nominee is selected, this in itself does not mean that the voters at large will buy into this so-called unity...and even I, having voted Democrat in the past four elections, will not automatically fall in behind leadership if they nominate someone who ignores my interests in favor of political correctness and pie-in-the-sky policies.  And right now I'm looking at a number of such candidates among the crowded field that I would have a great difficulty voting for...

Ahh...Here Comes a Nice Little Storm

It was a pleasant, hot and sunny Saturday afternoon here in northern Gainesville...and then I heard a little distant thunder.  Next thing I know the power is flickering off and on...and the thunder is getting more intense.  So I walked out my front door and shot the above photo.  Since then we are being deluged and lightening and very high winds are coming down all around...pretty awesome...

Quote of the Week...from George McGovern

The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plain.                            ---George McGovern

In this era when civility has so disintegrated that crowds of people rise up at a Trump rally to chant "Send her back!" regarding one of his political opponents whom he has just spoken against, the late Senator McGovern's above quote is worth taking into account.  Now I understand that those who defend our country in the military...sometimes laying their lives down in times and places of international conflict...do have to strictly follow orders and believe in their missions as it all goes down the chain of command.  But that's not what McGovern, himself a decorated fighter pilot in World War II (35 missions, Distinguished Flying Cross), was talking about.  For it's those brave soldiers who do what they do not only to defend the "homeland", but also our precious freedoms we hold so dear here.  And of them all, perhaps the most valuable is our freedom to express our opinions openly without the fear of persecution.  That does not imply, of course, that what we say or write won't have consequences...but the state should not be in the business of shaming and intimidating people it disagrees with, and the president is the personification of the state in our country.  The great late conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia once remarked that he never put down other people...just their ideas.  And that's what's so disturbingly wrong with the atmosphere pervading our political world today.  A lot of Trump fans accuse his opponents of hating on him but they need to acknowledge that he set the pattern with his continual insults against anyone he regarded as a critic or adversary.  I do not like the attitude of the four freshman representatives dubbed "The Squad" because they also tend to personify their criticisms of others instead of focusing on their ideas and philosophies.  One of these stated recently that if your skin color is like hers and you don't support her agenda, then you need to shut up.  Another claimed in essence that criticizing any of them amounted to racism.  And I am getting so tired of politicians and supposedly unbiased media figures hanging the terms "racist" or "bigot" so freely on people who are expressing a different opinion on one of the many important issues facing us.  It's getting so bad now that politicians who are not saying anything are being so accused by their silence.  I did not like Donald Trump's recent tweets suggesting the four maverick representatives go back to  their old countries and believe they displayed his ignorance to the world: one of them is the descendant of American slaves, one has Puerto Rican ancestry...which means she and her family as American citizens go back further than Trump's family, one...of Palestinian parentage...was born in the USA, and the other is a naturalized citizen from Somalia.  ALL are American citizens and were duly elected by their constituents to represent them.  I don't agree with a lot of what they have to say, but let's concentrate on their ideas and not them as people, please.  And it would help for them to do likewise...

Just Finished Reading Forward the Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Forward the Foundation was the final book written by prolific science fiction and popular science author Isaac Asimov, published a year after his 1992 death.  It is the second prequel to his five-volume Foundation series and the only one of the seven I hadn't gotten around to read...until now.  Since I pretty much know how the "first" book, Foundation, begins and I just finished reading the first prequel, Prelude to Foundation, I knew how this book would begin and end...it was just a matter of filling in the intervening years.  On Trantor, the capital planet of the Galactic Empire more than 20 thousand years into the future with its 40 billion people, mathematician Hari Seldon is continuing his founding work on psychohistory, which postulates that the Empire is in steep decline and when it ends, a 30 thousand year of galaxy-wide chaos and turmoil will ensue.  His task is to devise a plan in which the post-Empire transition period to a new Empire is reduced to only about a thousand years.  In Forward the Foundation he is struggling with both his theory and plan, and enlists the help of others, including another mathematician, Yugo Amaryl, and adopted family members Dors, Raych, and Wanda.  He also must struggle against the political forces of the time, including the Emperor as well as bureaucrats and insurrectionists from areas embedded within Trantor.  I didn't have high expectations when I began reading it since the narrative basically was about what happened to the characters from the previous prequel and how the ending would neatly dovetail with the start of Foundation...much like way the ending of the later-made prequel Revenge of the Sith slid right into the start of the original Star Wars movie...

Asimov's seven-part Foundation series ties in several of his other science fiction books and series, most notably the ones about robots and the Empire.  I've now begun...for the third time...to read his first robot novel, titled Caves of Steel.  Compared to the other works by Isaac Asimov...even his nonfiction books...I wasn't all that impressed with Forward the Foundation but am glad I finally read it after all these years although I don't think I'll be rereading it anytime soon, if ever...

Weekly Short Stories: 1949 Science Fiction, Part 3

I continued reading through the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 11 (1949) as I explored some of the best in short science fiction from that year.  Today I'll be looking at five more tales, which I remember first reading about fourteen years ago.  Here are my reactions...

ETERNITY LOST by Clifford Simak
It's a bit off in the future and society is developing life-prolongation treatments...only problem is that they need to find and develop more "real estate" on other worlds on which to settle a future population that will never die...in the meantime only a select few are permitted the treatment.  A senator whose life has been extended is one of these privileged few...and it looks as if his party will not support him for reelection, meaning that he will soon have to live out the remainder of his natural life and die.  The discussion here in this story centers around who gets special treatment and benefit from groundbreaking discoveries while the rest either have to wait or suffer knowing that they will be excluded.  I'm looking at what's going on in this country with its inequitable health care system and see some glaring parallels...

THE ONLY THING WE LEARN by Cyril Kornbluth
The title is based on the notion that history's lessons are almost always ignored and the mistakes are doomed to be repeated.  Earth sends out settlers into outer space, who then return with a vengeance to attack their home planet.  But the aggressors seem to have forgotten the lessons from their own example...

PRIVATE--KEEP OUT by Philip MacDonald
My all-time favorite Twilight Zone episode, And When the Sky Was Opened, is said to be based on a 1953 Richard Matheson short story titled Disappearing Act.  Yet Philip MacDonald predated that tale by four years with almost the exact same premise...except that those retroactively disappearing weren't astronauts returning from an enigmatic space flight but rather people dreaming of nearly hitting upon the solution to all the universe's mysteries.  This was my favorite of the five stories here and looks into that hazy world of dreaming-transitioning-into-wakefulness that I myself find so intriguing...

THE HURKLE IS A HAPPY BEAST by Theodore Sturgeon
On another world a "hurkle", a cuddly kitten-like animal used there as pets, accidentally gets transferred across space and dimension to our world and time.  It's cute enough as its presence on the windowsill disrupts a small classroom of kids...only two problems: it unconsciously sends out vibration waves that cause horrible itching and...it's about to reproduce.  A short, short story that in my estimation didn't rise to the level of the others...

KALEIDOSCOPE by Ray Bradbury
My second favorite story of this group after Private--Keep Out, Kaleidoscope exhibits the extraordinary writing talent of Ray Bradbury as he chronicles the dwindling radio conversations between a crew of astronauts...all spinning off in different directions in their insulated spacesuits after something in their ship exploded and sent each of them hurtling helplessly into empty space.  Each knows he has only a brief time to live until the air runs out or he burns up over Earth or the Sun, and as such the words exchanged among them are of a desperate, very emotional nature.  It's hard to read a story where you know up front that all of the characters are doomed...yet I highly recommend it because of those intense exchanges...

Next week I'll conclude with my look at science fiction short stories from 1949...

Gainesville's Cheesecake Factory to Open in September

When our son Will was attending the University of North Florida in Jacksonville a few years ago, we'd visit often, and while there in the pretty southeastern section of the city near the campus, frequented their excellent Town Center with its many stores and restaurants (and multiple Starbucks). One area we tended to concentrate on was their huge Barnes & Nobles bookstore (with an embedded Starbucks, naturally) and the adjacent Cheesecake Factory restaurant. Since then our own local, smaller Barnes & Noble off Archer Road closed down and we've been long anticipating a brand new Gainesville Cheesecake Factory somewhere in the newly developed store area off Archer as well.  Well, we're not getting B&N back, but I just read on my local newsfeed that on September 17th our own Cheesecake Factory will open its doors.  It is said to be located next to the Whole Foods store, which is in the lot where Wal-Mart and Lowes used to be before they both closed and moved further west.  I love their dinner menu and even more their extensive list of specialty cheesecakes...can't wait! H-m-m, let's see...I think I'll try their tiramisu cheesecake first...

Will Tom Steyer Influence Presidential Campaign as a Candidate?

Hedge fund billionaire and long-time Democratic Party political donor and activist Tom Steyer has just declared himself as a candidate for president and will join the already heavily crowded field jockeying for media attention and name recognition.  Steyer has the advantage of having placed nationwide television ads throughout the past two-plus years calling for Donald Trump's impeachment and has built up a large database of supporters from which he may draw upon to obtain the necessary diverse source of contributions that the party demands in order to qualify for its televised debates.  It is doubtful that he will make tomorrow's cut to qualify for the second round of the debates to be held at the end of this month, but he's probably looking further ahead anyway and has plenty of his own money he can spend on television ads.  Steyer, besides his "Impeach Trump" movement, is known as a long-time advocate for the environment, especially when it comes to fighting climate change and developing alternative sources of energy.  Besides that, he should be more of a moderate along the lines of current frontrunner Joe Biden and might end up cutting into the former vice-president's support. I'd like to see him on the stage next to the other candidates and hear what he has to say, but then again I thought there were already way too many participants and the number needs to be whittled down.  But don't expect that to happen with the second round at the end of this month...it will be the same format with two debates, each featuring ten randomly selected candidates.  As for Tom Steyer, his being very wealthy doesn't bother me in the least, but I'm afraid that this won't fly very far with many other Democratic voters who are wary after real estate mogul and reality TV celebrity Trump's election...

Just Finished Reading John Lennon's In His Own Write

John Lennon of the Beatles wrote a few books along the way of his musical career, the first being In His Own Write, which came out at the height of Beatlemania in 1964.  Although it received popular press at the time, this small collection of nonsensical and ironic stories and poems probably wasn't read by many people.  After having just finished reading this rather short book, I think I know why...

I just checked out James Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake, from the library.  In it words and phraseology are deliberately distorted in their spelling and application, making it pretty difficult to figure out what the [expletive] he's talking out almost all of the time. Apparently, Lennon had read some of Joyce since he employed the same strategy of misspelling and such...but he still was able to slyly get his meanings across and concocted some wickedly humorous short stories in the process.  His intentionally muddled writing is one reason I think few people ever got around to reading this book, which is loaded with overwhelming irreverence at many of society's institutions, including religion, ethnicities, genders, politics, and more.  Just two years later people would be burning Beatles records in protest after Lennon, in an interview, had simply stated in passing that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ, yet In His Own Write contains some pretty explosive material in itself.  Why not check it out for yourself...you can search and read it online in pdf now.  I thought it was pretty clever and imaginative for him to have come up with this stuff, and he was only around 24 when it was published.  A warning before you read it, though: some of the humor is really dark, and the political incorrectness here is often way over the top...

Hurricane Barry Strikes Louisiana with Massive Flooding Ahead

Last Monday I mentioned in passing on this blog that an anomalous tropical storm system...anomalous because it originated in the mainland U.S. instead of western Africa...was forecast to possibly become a tropical depression toward the end of the week and drift westward once it entered the Gulf of Mexico through the Florida panhandle.  Well, almost all of that came true...except for the fact that it's now the end of the week and the storm system has developed into a full-blown hurricane, Barry, which is now (early Saturday afternoon) entering the southern coast of Louisiana.  Already there are reports of flooding and malfunctioning levees while the worst of the storm by far is still offshore in the Gulf.  By the time all of it has crossed over to the mainland, there will in all likelihood be catastrophic flooding throughout Louisiana as well as Arkansas and those parts of the South bordering the Mississippi River...the fact that this system is slow-moving is aggravating the situation...

Quote of the Week...from Isaac Asimov

To succeed, planning alone is insufficient.  One must improvise as well.  ---Isaac Asimov.

Somehow I regrettably inadvertently erased this original article, so here's a short summary instead of what I wrote.  Isaac Asimov, who passed away in 1992, wrote a famous science fiction series of novels titled Foundation in which humanity populates millions of worlds in the galaxy thousands of years into the future, under the rule of a centralized empire...which itself is crumbling.  Hari Seldon, a mathematician, has invented the field of psychohistory through which he plans the quick recovery of the empire after its demise...if certain important steps are taken at the right times decades and even hundreds of years down the line.  Its a good plan...initially...but unfortunately the way reality goes, unexpected occurrences happen that disrupt the Seldon Plan and those adhering to it must improvise to the best of their ability.  I'm not sure whether Asimov had this in mind when he made the above quote, but it dovetails well with his series, which I just finished reading again and am now working on his Foundation prequel novels.  The quote has a universal application: while planning in most endeavors is recommended, even essential, there almost inevitably comes the time when something comes up to throw a monkey wrench into everything.   The coach of a sports team can lay out the strategies for a game, the manager of a business can have their schedule and staffing down on paper...and I can have my own personal day set out before me in an organized, structured way.  Yet injuries happen, delivery trucks are delayed, employees call in sick...and all sorts of annoying things happen to me over the course of the day that disrupt my plans.  So it's important to incorporate allowances for some occasional chaos and value its management so that, even if it isn't until the next day or soon thereafter, the original (or slightly modified) plan can continue.  As ol' Forrest Gump once said just after he stepped in a big pile, "stuff" happens....such as my previous accidental erasure of this article...

The Four Public Faces of Donald Trump

This is not a pro-Trump or anti-Trump article...although in all frankness after hearing what's been going down with the 2020 alternatives offered by the Democrats, especially from that last debate with Kamala Harris figuratively kicking Joe Biden in the knee over retroactive political correctness, the current president is starting to look better by contrast.  No, this is about his public persona and how he chooses to present himself.  So without further ado, here are the four public faces of Donald Trump as I see them...

1 TRUMP'S TWEETING
It's no-holds-barred with the President and his Twitter habit of immediately responding in emotion-laden and insulting terms to public figures expressing criticism or opposition to him, often referring to them as losers and whatever organization they might be affiliated with as failing.  It's a bad example of vindictiveness and a sad lack of grace that I'm afraid will negatively influence how people in general respond to negativity from others in their own personal lives, even if they don't like Trump...

2 TRUMP'S RALLIES
When Donald Trump is preaching to the choir of his devotees, he reminds me of rock stars Mick Jagger or Steve Tyler when they are onstage in concert performing their act as he contorts his facial expression and gestures while amplifying much of what he Tweets about others.  He also reminds me...when he's in this setting...of early twentieth-century Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: just go on YouTube and watch how that dude looked when he got up in front of a crowd.  The overwhelming majority of the negative reaction to Trump is due to this act of his along with his Twitter habits, which may please some of his most solid supporters but causes just about everyone else to cringe in revulsion...

3 TRUMP ON SCRIPT
I was truly impressed by our President when he gave his first State of the Union address back in January, 2018.  He had his prepared script and delivered one reasoned, rational argument for his policy proposals after another and set the tone...had he stuck to script...for a productive presidency that could have brought the country together...or at least forged a center-right majority behind him and his efforts as Ronald Reagan had been able to do.  He's great when reading prepared material and it saddens me that he doesn't do it more...

4 TRUMP IN INTERVIEWS
Donald Trump the Debater is what we get when he submits to interviews like the ones with Lester Holt or George Stephanopoulos or one of his many impromptu press conferences while standing outside Air Force One or the White House.  Usually lacking here is the ridiculous self-caricature that typifies his rallies, as well as most of the more extreme personal bashing.  Instead, in these settings Trump focuses on directly addressing the questions posed him and bluntly gives his answers, laying out his reasons and why the other side is wrong.  To me, this is Trump at his best...with "Trump on Script" a close second...

At this stage in the game, I don't think that Donald Trump is going to lose his hard-core base of support as he runs for reelection...especially with what's been coming out from the Democratic candidates with their obsession over political correctness.  But instead of acting like a contrived stage act, he would greatly enhance his prospects if he were to coax moderate Democrats by simply doing what he has already clearly shown that he is good at: sticking to scripts during speeches and staying open and available for interviews...the Tweets and rallies are not aimed at the people he needs to attract for victory next year...

Weekly Short Stories: 1949 Science Fiction, Part 2

As I continued looking at what editors Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg chose to included in their anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 11 (1949), I realized that all of them came out years before I was born in 1956. Each of us has this "zero" point in the chronology of years, with the history predating our existence on Earth somehow seeming not quite as real as that through which we have personally lived. Science fiction stories aren't limited in time as to their content, but their writers are since they write them in the context of the current time setting, in this case seventy years ago in 1949.  I always have to keep this in mind when reading these stories as the language can sometimes get a little politically incorrect, especially with regard to women's roles in society.  Here are my reactions to four more stories in the book...

MANNA by Peter Phillips
A company has created and is marketing a new kind of superfood-in-a-can and has built one of its factories on the site of an old monastery...which is incidentally the dwelling place of the ghosts of two monks deceased centuries earlier.  In order to fulfill their obligations for ascendency, Brothers James and Gregory secretly "spirit" away can after can of Miracle Meal back to their original century when the local population is suffering badly from famine.  In the meantime, the home corporation is puzzled at the food's inexplicable disappearance and the story goes on from there.  I thought this story was kind of silly in that it attempted to merge the ideas of ghosts, spiritual ascendency, and subatomic physics into something that made a kind of sense...which it failed to do for me...

THE PRISONER IN THE SKULL by Lewis Padgett
This is what I would call a "loop" story, in which the ending leads back to the story's beginning.  John Fowler, a morally-compromised, shallow, and materialistic young man answers his doorbell one day thinking it is his almost-as-shallow girlfriend.  Instead, a gaunt, featureless man with a haunted demeanor and inability to formulate words enters.  Fowler at first tries to rid himself of the unwelcome and troubled intruder, but soon discovers that he is gifted with technology and is continually coming up with new inventions that Fowler tries to get patent rights for himself.  He keeps the man, whom he dubs "Norman", confined in a room as he exploits his abilities while refusing to help him in his quest for a cure.  This is a story where the protagonist is the villain...but justice will prevail nonetheless in the end. Or is there an end?

ALIEN EARTH by Edmund Hamilton
In my opinion by far the best of these four stories, Alien Earth takes place in the present (around 1949, that is) as a teak merchant explores a remote area of Indo-China before it later became the nation of Laos.  He and his guide encounter an indigenous man whose motions and even bodily functions are at one hundredth the rate of normal people.  He appears at first to be motionless but then is shown to be purposefully moving...at a tremendously slow speed.  Our protagonist discovers him to be just one in a cult of plant worshippers...the adherents consume a special drug that slows their processes and perceptions down to this level...a level at which they can perceive trees and other plant forms as active, sentient beings.  Indeed, what they experience is an alien earth and a fantastic concept.  But what are the trees are going to have to say about this tree-killer when they find him down at their level? Thank you, Edmund Hamilton, this tale is worth remembering...

HISTORY LESSON by Arthur C. Clarke
My sister Anita, older than me by four years, while still in high school one evening decided to read me a few short stories she encountered...tales like Ray Bradbury's The Small Assassin, Bram Stoker's The Iron Maiden, and this one by Arthur C. Clarke.  It is the final line that makes this brief story memorable for most, but upon rereading it many years later I was more interested in the first part, which relates the final extinction of a much-declined humanity eons into the future as the last remnants find themselves trapped between fast-moving, converging glaciers from the north and south.  This group, at the very end, sets up an area to safely store and protect from the glaciers items from their distant past, including an old, never-used-but functional asteroid beacon and something in a disc-shaped container.  Much later, Venusians travel to Earth and discover the beacon and objects.  Clarke wrote many of these kinds of very short stories with zingers at the end.  If there is a lesson to History Lesson, I think it's that it's way too easy to make erroneous assumptions about the past based upon fragmentary evidence...

Next week I'll cover some more science fiction short stories from 1949...

Wimbleton Tennis and Tour de France Bicycle Race Ongoing

It's early July again, which means that two usually ignored sports are in the headlines once again: tennis and bicycle racing.  England's Wimbleton, one of the major Grand Slam tournaments in professional tennis, is underway as well as the Tour de France multi-stage bicycle epic that crisscrosses that country with a different course each year.  I haven't gotten around to viewing any of the tennis, which basically consists of players grunting, shrieking, and moaning as they swing and hit the ball back and forth in a very structured and delineating setting...kind of boring if you ask me.  The bikers aren't much better...that is, if what I'm focusing on is the race itself.  But my attention when I'm watching the Tour de France (which is shown on NBCSports) is mainly on the scenery as the contestants, all pretty much looking the same in their tights and alien-ish helmets, pedal up and down hills and around curves, through countryside and village, as onlookers on the roadside cheer them on.  I caught a little of it this morning, and I can say with the utmost confidence that I have no idea whatsoever who is currently in the lead, which is probably just as well since I wouldn't recognize any of the names anyway.  Four-time Tour champion Chris Froome, whom I would have recognized, isn't participating after suffering a horrible wall crash in a race last month that caused multiple fractures...

I think I'll start watching some of Wimbleton in the days to come...probably with the sound down to avoid those annoying sounds coming out of the players' mouths.  One of the interesting things about these two events is that since they're both from western Europe, they take place live in the morning hours and also get replay coverage later on in the day.  I can't say I'm a terrific fan of either sport, but sometimes it's fun to switch from time to time and watch something different...

New Tropical System Forming from Mainland U.S.

A tropical low weather system, currently over the southern U.S. mainland, is expected to reach the Gulf of Mexico south of the Florida peninsula in the next couple of days, strengthen at least to tropical depression level, and consequently dump a lot of rain and stormy weather on northern Florida later on this week.  The "experts" generally expect it to drift in a more westward direction, away from us in north central Florida. Normally I wouldn't even mention this on my blog, but I read on social media where one meteorologist...name unknown since I can't recover the post...noted that this phenomenon of a tropical system originally coming off the U.S. mainland is unprecedented in his experience. All the other Atlantic systems that got their start over land have originated in western Africa, even those that eventually made their way into the Gulf of Mexico.  Since that area in western Africa is essentially scorched hot and dry desert land, I'm not sure what this says about what's in store for us in the southeastern U.S....who knows, maybe this will "blow over" and just be a rare curiosity.  Then again, if this begins a new recurring trend, then I want to record its beginnings here on this blog.  After all, can you remember plotting the course of a tropical system by starting with Georgia?

USA Women's National Soccer Team Wins Another World Cup

Congratulations to the United States women's national soccer team, led by Megan Rapinoe, Carli Lloyd, and Alex Morgan, for winning the 2019 Women's World Cup today after defeating Netherlands in the final match, 2-0.  Rapinoe scored the Americans' first goal on a penalty kick in the second half and Rose Lavelle kicked in a spectacular shot just a few minutes later.  They're celebrating now in France with their second straight World Cup and fourth overall, while the U.S. men's team is playing Mexico right now in Chicago for the CONCACAF Gold Cup.  CONCACAF...international soccer really likes to go overboard with the acronyms...is the division of FIFA (the umbrella soccer organization) that encompasses the nations of North America.  Mexico would rather be playing in CONMEBOL, which is just a ridiculous way of saying South American soccer, since the teams there are more competitive and would challenge them more in their training for the next Men's World Cup tournament in 2022.  The CONMEBOL Copa America match between Brazil and Peru was also played today with the heavily-favored Brazilians prevailing 3-1.  Rapinoe was very critical of FIFA for having scheduled the finals for both men's national team tournaments on the very same day as the Women's World Cup championship match...and I have to agree with her viewpoint on this.  Still, it's rather handy for me, being off from work and all today, to be able to follow the action at my leisure...although I couldn't find any stations broadcasting the Brazil-Peru match.  As for the Mexico-USA contest, I hope I don't sound too unpatriotic but I'm finding myself rooting for our friends from south of the border since I follow their premier professional league more closely than our own Major League Soccer, the UANL Tigres from Monterrey being my favorite team (and the current league champion).  It will be fun to see how this match turns out...it's still scoreless in the early going...

Currently Rereading Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series

I'm not sure if this is the third or fourth time around, but I am currently rereading the late Isaac Asimov's celebrated science fiction series Foundation, which he began writing as a 1942 short story but didn't publish the first three novel-length volumes until the 1950s...and then finished the main five-part series much later during the 1980s, along with a couple of prequel novels.  I just finished book number two, titled Foundation and Empire, and am now reading Second Foundation.  I did review these books earlier in this blog...here are links to those articles:

#1 FOUNDATION
#2 FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE
#3 SECOND FOUNDATION
#4 FOUNDATION'S EDGE
#5 FOUNDATION AND EARTH

Other: PRELUDE TO FOUNDATION

I haven't yet read the other prequel, title Forward the Foundation, nor have I read any of the spinoff Foundation novels written by other science fiction writers after Asimov's death in 1992.  For now, I'm content with going through the books I've already read...

Quote of the Week...from Epictetus

Be careful whom you associate with.  It is human to imitate the habits of those with whom we interact. We inadvertently adopt their interests, their opinions, their values, and their habit of interpreting events.                          Epictetus

Epictetus was a Greek Stoic philosopher from the late-first to early-second century A.D. and whose quotes are full of wisdom...here's a link to another of his I discussed three years ago: [link]. It seems that it's very popular nowadays to encourage people to be introspective about their childhood, paying attention to any early traumas they might have experienced that would lead to negative manifestations in adulthood.  I, on the other hand, believe more significant than this is that as children we unconsciously imprint ourselves after the personalities and habits not only of our own parents...be they beneficial or harmful...but also after others in our family as well as our friends, teachers...and even enemies.  And furthermore, with our age of mass media in full swing, by simply viewing them and listening to them regularly we can "associate" with complete strangers and emulate their worldview and demeanor, often without even knowing the source of what we are doing.  That's one reason why I have issues with what I see on my television screen with politics.  On one hand we have a president who takes everything said about him personally...positive or negative...and "doubles down" by attacking any critics in the most insulting personal terms.  You can object to his character and still unconsciously adopt some of his behavioral patterns...after all, he is the model of a success story in this world that exalts celebrity, politics and wealth.  On the other hand, we have a slew of people who repeatedly demonstrate their inability to discern the context of some of the more legitimate statements that Trump and others often make, commonly applying political correctness standards to them in order to condemn them as "racist" or some other condemnatory appellation...Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro's recent accusation of conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham as "a white supremacist" is just one example of many.  I don't want to be like either Trump or Castro...both model a kind of knee-jerk reactiveness to others with aggressive and demeaning speech...it's kind of hard, though, to avoid them if I'm a regular follower of the news.  Still, I think that much more pervasive than these media figures are those with whom we personally associate as a matter of course in our daily lives.  I've said it before that in interactions with others I tend to remember much more clearly my own part in them other than others' contributions...yet I need to keep in mind that as a human being I am wired, as the great Greek philosopher has intimated, to emulate those around me whether I like them or not and whether I know what I'm doing or not.  Consciously avoiding loud and aggressive people, as Max Ehrmann wrote in his prose poem Desiderata, is a good step toward protecting myself in this regard...

Just Finished Reading Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming was a British naval intelligence officer who, after World War II, became the highly celebrated creator and author of the James Bond spy series in the 1950s and 60s, which became an incredibly popular and long-lasting movie franchise with other writers continuing the exploits of Secret Agent 007 long after Fleming's death in 1964.  His first novel, the 1953 Casino Royale, was initially made into a puzzling satirical movie in 1967 having little relation to the book and later on with another same-titled movie, starring Daniel Craig as Bond, that followed the story line more closely.  Still, the characters, settings, and plot of Craig's Casino Royale sometimes diverge quite a bit from Fleming's original novel.  For one, the author characterizes his protagonist as more naïve and prone to mistakes and self-doubt than the cinematic version.  In Fleming's story, Bond plays a high-stakes baccarat card game against villain Le Chiffre, a double agent for the Soviets, at a French casino...in the movie the game is poker, Le Chiffre is more of a free-lancer with a debt to a shadow organization (later identified as "Quantum"), and the setting is Montenegro.  Timewise Fleming's book is the middle of the Cold War while Craig's movie is in the present time, loaded with advanced computer technology. Little of the movie's background story leading up to the casino drama is in the book, and Rene Mathis, here a French intelligence officer, like Felix Leiter of the CIA is shown with no suspicion about his unimpeachable integrity.  Some of the scenes are eerily the same, though, and the enigmatic figure of Vesper Lynn leads our hero astray in both stories.  I liked both versions and look forward to reading Ian Fleming's second James Bond book, Live and Let Die...

Weekly Short Stories: 1949 Science Fiction, Part 1

I began my look at some of the best in short science fiction from seventy years ago, according to the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 11 (1949).  Today I'll be reacting to the first three tales in the book from the year in which NATO was formed, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic weapon, and Harry S. Truman was beginning his first and only elected term as U.S. President after he served almost all of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt's fourth term.  Here they are...

THE RED QUEEN'S RACE by Isaac Asimov
I just finished reading Asimov's 1955 novel The End of Eternity, which examines travel back in time and the paradoxes it can produce.  In The Red Queen's Race, a idealist scientist devises a method to send a modern chemistry text, translated to ancient Greek, back to that era in hopes of redirecting the flow of history away from the devastating wars experienced in the twentieth century...and to forestall the threat of nuclear warfare.  The ending reveals the results of his efforts...which kind of reminds me of what happened when Harry Potter and Hermione Granger tried their own version of time travel in J.K. Rowling's third book of her series, The Prisoner of Azkaban...

FLAW by John D. MacDonald
A short, short story with a major knockout revelation at the end, Flaw is about the first mission to send men to Mars and back.  Like our Apollo 10 flight around the moon, this one will circle the Red Planet and return to Earth.  A young woman, engaged to one of the astronauts on the mission, anxiously awaits his return...they've exchanged rings and he's wearing hers with a ruby and a flawed design.  That ostensibly insignificant fact turns into a major factor at story's end as we're informed of very somber news about our place in the universe...

PRIVATE EVE by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore)
If my memory serves me correctly, the People's Republic of China has set up a surveillance state in which hundreds of millions of cameras are currently spying on the population, setting up an essentially totalitarian society.  But even here in America it's difficult to go into public...at least in more urban areas...where the cameras around aren't recording your movements as well.  Private Eye is set in a future where the walls themselves record everything everybody does...but there are privacy laws and only those charged with serious crimes are subject to having their past actions reviewed and scrutinized.  The protagonist in the story wants to commit a murder but knows that in the future, once it's over, the authorities will be able to see his every past action leading up to it and hear everything he has said along the way. So given this almost omnipresent surveillance, how does he plan out and execute his crime?  Even more than a sci-fi crime tale, this is an examination of adult psychology...but that's not surprising since the authors, actually the married writing team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. "Catherine" Moore, were probably the greatest at probing into people's personalities and motivations in a science fiction context...

Next week: more short science fiction from 1949...

Just Finished Reading The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov

The End of Eternity is a 1955 science fiction novel by Isaac Asimov, technically unconnected with his many other works about the rise and fall of the robots, the Empire, and Foundation.  In it there is a clandestine organization on Earth called Eternity that operates outside the normal rules of time and whose operators...recruited and trained humans called "Eternals"...observe and analyze over the centuries of time the different societies and make small changes to affect the progression of human history in a benign direction, with their means of temporal transport involving rapidly traveling up and down the time spectrum in something called a "kettle".  The problem is what constitutes "benign" and ultimately leads to the story's climactic crisis.  The catalyst for critically examining Eternity's role in determining the fate of humanity is Andrew Harlan, a young man who has just recently become an Eternal and pretty much has the run of time itself as a Technician, i.e. an Eternal who actually effects the needed changes.  He finds in the course of his work that Noyes, his love interest from a much different century than his own of origin, will never have existed if a planned change is made...so he spirits her away to a hidden time far off in the future and the trouble starts to mount.  There is a very important lesson of analogy about our own growing Nanny State here in America where the government seems determined to tell us what we can produce, consume, and engage in based on their determination of what is good or bad for us...Asimov's story makes the point that danger, risk, and crisis are crucial elements to a society's growth and even its very survival: take them away and it will stagnate, weaken, and ultimately die...

I've read books by Isaac Asimov and Stephen King, both wildly successful writers, on how they set about to write a story.  King likes to take ordinary people that the reader can identify with and place them in extraordinary circumstances from which they must struggle to overcome and survive...he rarely outlines in advance how he will end a story and has stated that he often does not know its conclusion before he actually writes it.  Asimov, on the other hand, outlined his fiction, which in the case of The End of Eternity was absolutely indispensable: there's no way he could have come up with such a satisfactory, conclusive ending had he employed King's "let's just see where this goes" writing strategy.  I guess there's room for both approaches to writing: a loose outline with allowances made for divergent forks in the road.  As it is, I happen to like both Isaac Asimov and Stephen King as fiction writers...and The End of Eternity is a big "thumbs up"...

Obstructive Ornamental Horticulture

I realize that even if I do everything I can while driving to be safe, there will still be a risk of something happening beyond my control.  Yet it angers me when I consider the strange phenomenon of ornamental horticulture in parking lots that seem to deliberately obstruct my view of moving traffic when I have to make a decision while at a stop sign whether to go or not.  The above two photos I took this afternoon at my local Publix shopping plaza illustrate my point: one moment it's clear and then suddenly here comes this vehicle barreling down past the hedge row...which seemed to be consciously planted in such a fashion as to obstruct my view and is continuing to be trimmed to maintain that concealment of potential traffic.  I don't get it...I myself love ornamental horticulture and the cultivating and shaping of plants is something that I appreciate seeing, especially in what would otherwise be barren, desolate asphalt lots.  But why can't those contracted out to design and maintain this horticulture show some common sense consideration for drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians and be careful to make sure that the view is clear at intersections and that vision of oncoming cars isn't blocked?  Yet I never hear anyone but myself complain...backing up just two or three feet further from the road before they start with the shrubbery would greatly enhance safety and still beautify the area.  I've seen much worse obstruction than in these two pictures, and my workplace employee parking lot is ridiculous in this regard.  You'd think that with all the regulations that businesses have to undergo at the local level that there would be ordinances to restrict this sort of thing...especially here in Gainesville where the local government seems to have some sort of phobia about businesses displaying signs.  Go figure...