Weekly Short Stories: 1973 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I finish my look back at short science fiction from the year 1973 as presented in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1974 Annual World's Best SF, featuring selections from the previous year.  Of the three I review below, the first and last are relatively brief while the middle one may be the lengthiest novella I've discussed in this year-by-year blog feature.  I remember back then watching the Senate Watergate hearings in the springtime at school in my morning Chemistry class...my teacher, a Nixon-hater who wanted to see him go down...constantly showed it during class while commenting profusely: what a character.  I had a revived interest in astronomy that year as well, but it seemed that at different points I was rebuffed in reaching out to others regarding it.  Oh well, that how it goes...here are my reactions to those final three tales...  

MOBY, TOO by Gordon Eklund

A story of apocalypse for both whales and humanity...presented in the first person by a intelligently-mutated whale...goes way off into the "future" to 1986 when he discovers he's alone in the sea and the people seem to be all gone, too.  Or is he all alone?  A strange story of hope and the replacement of hatred with mercy...

DEATH AND DESIGNATION AMONG THE ASADI by Michael Bishop

On an exploratory research mission to a distant world occupied by only one animal form, the intelligent Asadi, the scientist inserts himself right in the midst of their strange, inexplicable society and finds himself both repulsed by it and inexplicably attracted at the same time.  The story is presented in the form of different journal entries by the protagonist, an interesting literary device that I've enjoyed in other stories I've read...still, I thought it was way too long...  

CONSTRUCTION SHACK by Clifford Simak

As humans first start landing on Mars and exploring other worlds, a manned mission to Pluto is sent to follow up on a puzzling find of an earlier probe, showing it with a smooth, undifferentiated surface only distinguished by some dots appearing around its equator.  And the "planet" mysteriously proves to be much, much smaller than previously thought.  When the team gets there, they are astounded at their discoveries, which completely changes what they thought they knew about the origins of everything...

Next week I begin reviewing science fiction short stories from 1974...

Game of the Week: Ice Hockey

 

Ice hockey is not only a game I've never played...I've never even ice-skated: heck, I've never roller-skated to any degree, for that matter.  This shouldn't be surprising in that I've been a Florida resident since before I was one and water tends not to freeze outdoors in this neck of the woods, so unlike with other sports we never played ice hockey in school or as a "sandlot" sport.  And there's obviously no ice hockey presence in Florida athletics, either...but in the National Hockey League we have the defending champs Tampa Bay Lightning and the Florida Panthers for the Miami area. Over the decades I have kept up with hockey, both in the newspaper by keeping up with the National Hockey League standings and on television by occasionally watching games...especially during the Stanley Cup championship playoffs as they are currently taking place. And now it's down to the final series between defending champs Tampa Bay and the resurgent Montreal Canadiens to determine this year's league title. Hockey has always been difficult for me to follow...I think I have a better grasp on the sport, though, now that I understand its off-side rule where the attacking team has to have the remaining players behind the blue line on its offensive side before they can advance the puck.  I'm still unsure about icing, though, which sometimes seems to be more of a judgment call of the officials.  It's also amazing that any goals ever get scored, what with the goalie sitting there covering the net with all his protective gear ballooning out...I wonder if there's a size limit on goalies, otherwise you could just hire a pro wrestler of Man Mountain Mike's girth and get shutouts every game...I think I remember an insurance commercial where a bear played the goalie! I also think it's funny about the numerous fights that take place during the course of a game...and how, unlike in basketball, football, or baseball, the participants...faces often bloodied...usually don't seem too emotionally involved in it all, as if it's just a regular part of the sport.  No, there are many aspects of hockey that confuse me, but most of all my problem is keeping up with where the puck is at any given moment... 

Planning to Start Weekly All-Time Personal Favorite Movies Feature

Sometime in July I'm planning to start another weekly feature on this blog, this one a countdown of my all-time favorite full-length movies.  As was the case with my "Top 500" list of all-time favorite songs I revealed and discussed from August 2019 to the end of 2020, each movie will be selected for the personal effect it had on me and not always with the aim of evaluating its artistic value...although with many, I'm sure, both factors will be in play.  My interests in film are wide: westerns, action flicks, cartoons, documentaries, drama, comedy, mystery, dramatized history, science fiction, horror, and young adult, to name the more prominent categories.  It should be fun to brainstorm a bit and list all the movies I like, and then to sit down and figure their relative value.  I don't yet know how many movies I plan to list, but I think that when I do begin the weekly "countdown", I'll be confining my attention to one excellent, memorable film per week.  Hint: I'll be mentioning one of my top favorites in this week's Friday "quotes" article...

Great Old TV Episodes...from Perception

The episode NEMESIS, which I'm discussing today, is from a more recent TV series, Perception. It stars Eric McCormack (of Will and Grace fame) as neuroscientist Daniel Pierce, teaching at a university.  His special angle is that he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, including hallucinations...some of them welcome, like his imaginary girlfriend with whom he works out his problems...and some of them appearing spontaneously, often to assist in his solving of the particular episode's mystery.  To me it's an obvious ripoff of Ron Howard's use of hallucinations in the movie A Beautiful Mind, although that movie's schizophrenic protagonist, the late mathematician John Nash, in real life suffered from delusions, not hallucinations.  Until this episode, it bothered me that both Dr. Pierce and Nash gave the false impression that those with this mental illness were implicitly geniuses, while in truth the intelligence range among them reflects that of the general population.  In this episode I was gratified to see some focus on a character more of the norm in intellectual ability who, while schizophrenic, was not perceiving hallucinations but rather was, like the real Nash, severely deluded.  A newly installed judge has been found stabbed to death and this young schizophrenic man, who has been writing detailed letters to her with his rants about her being an avenging heroine from another world, instantly becomes the chief suspect...but Dr. Pierce and his sidekick FBI agent Kate Moretti (played by Rachel Leigh Cook) think the murderer is someone else. And so the show progresses until the culprit is uncovered.  Pierce also has hired an assistant, Max Lewicki (played by Arjay Smith), whose chief role is to tell him when he's hallucinating something or somebody.  Although the back story and romantic and academic intrigues abound in this series, each episode usually breaks down to Pierce playing the Sherlock Holmes role with Moretti aiding him as the Doctor Watson character. McCormack brings a lot of passion to his portrayal of Pierce, and the episodes tend to hone in on hot, controversial topics as well.  Perception lasted three seasons on TNT from 2012 to 2015 when it was cancelled...when it first came out I watched the first few episodes from the first season but was too taken aback at the derivations from A Beautiful Mind and abandoned it.  Now it's on Amazon Prime and I'm going through it one episode at a time.  One of my favorite features of Perception is that usually with each episode's opening and closing we see Professor Pierce lecturing on an intriguing topic in front of his class: those lecture snippets in themselves are worthy of discussion...   

Just Finished Reading The Terror by Dan Simmons

Having already gone through his four-volume science fiction series Hyperion Cantos and his historical novel about Dickens titled Drood, I already considered Dan Simmons to be a very good author.  His attention to detail in his stories shows the fruits of someone who has put in considerable research of his topic, and his 2007 novel The Terror...which I just finished reading...is a great example.  Another historical novel, it is based on the real, doomed voyage of two British ships Erebus and Terror in 1845-48 as they sailed through the icy waters of northern Canada, in search of the elusive Northwest Passage to the Pacific.  The ships get themselves stuck in ice and the mission becomes a matter of survival instead of discovery.  Besides the terrible cold, dwindling supplies including contaminated food, and mounting scurvy, they are bedeviled by a monstrous, murderous creature resembling a polar bear but much, much larger...and more intelligent.  The captains of Erebus and Terror, Sir John Franklin and Francis Crozier, respectively, present their experiences through alternating chapters that also include other characters, most notably surgeon Harry Goodsir.  Their first encounter with the native eskimos turns tragic as an old man is mistakenly shot and killed, leaving his young adult daughter...missing a tongue...for the explorers to care for.  As the story progresses it seems clear that the outside beast terrorizing the expedition has some sort of connection with "Lady Silence", as Captain Crozier calls her...and he seems to have an unspoken mental link with her through his dreams.  Without revealing what happens in detail, let me just say that it is a story of suffering and attrition, going into great detail about the various issues involved in surviving under the brutal conditions of the far north.  But the story does undergo a remarkable transformation toward its end, and brings forth a theme I've noticed in other fiction: that different cultures' myths have underlying literal truth to them.  You see this in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, Neil Gaiman's American Gods, Stephen King's Pet Sematary, and Harlan Ellison's short story The Whimper of Whipped Dogs, among many others.  Eskimo mythology figures into this story, which sharply contrasts their views on life and death with those of their European counterparts as well as their strategies for survival.  There is an awful lot of suffering in The Terror, but before long I realized what a noble, honest, and courageous character Francis Crozier was and that the story was worth pursuing to its end if only for his sake.  I recommend The Terror in spite of the misery contain within its pages...

Quote of the Week...from Carl Friedrich Gauss

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.                                          ---Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), from Germany, was the greatest mathematician of his time.  I picked his above quote because it illustrates the duality...and apparent contradiction...involved in areas like goal-planning and self-motivation.  You want to learn or accomplish something that currently is beyond your present means, be it not enough skill, connections, money...or whatever.  Fulfilling that goal requires a focused and consistent investment of your time and energy...with your future achievement always being forefront in your mind.  Yet when it has been attained, most likely you will look back and see that the journey to the goal's end was the meaningful aspect of it all...yet without the goal you would not have set out on that journey.  This also dovetails nicely with the message from Paolo Coelho's novel The Alchemist, which I read recently.  Gauss is referring to learning and indicates that while it's important to amass knowledge and enlightenment, the road to them is the true jewel of the process.  I get what he's saying: I've always liked to study stuff...yet my problem has always been a lack of focused, clear end goals.  Regarding mathematics, the true greats in that field...such as the late John Nash...realized that behind all of its complexity, mathematical reasoning can be broken down into a relativity simple...but sometimes elusive...pattern of principles known as "governing dynamics".  People like Gauss and Nash always seemed to have clear goals and projects before them, but it was getting down within those dynamics and learning that gave them their true joy.  So set clear goals, work to accomplish them...and revel in that process of work...

Just Finished Reading Start by Jon Acuff

Start's full title is Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work That Matters...after recently reading Jon Acuff's 2017 book Finish and since he referred to his earlier 2013 book a number of times in it...sometimes critically...it intrigued me enough to check it out myself.  It's all about self-motivation and how people can get hold of their purpose(s) in life and set out on the narrow road to "awesome" as opposed to the "average" path the vast majority of people take.  Start is loaded with all kinds of advice, as well as discussing the various stages to achieving mastery in an area: learning, editing, harvesting, and then guiding.  He says that we should be cognizant of the various irrational fears and notions obstructing us from setting out on accomplishing our goals and immediately write them down whenever we think of them.  He tends to be very numbers-oriented in his approach, drawing upon his personal experiences as a "success" in social media, blogging, and publishing...using the numbers of his followers and sales as a yardstick to that perceived success.  That emphasis to me was a little too self-centered and limited: many of us don't give a whit about that sort of thing, but we still have our own individual dreams.  In comparing the two Acuff books Start and Finish, I felt that the latter was much more profound and realistic, reflecting positively on the author's developing maturity and deeper understanding of the subject matter...if you read only one book, read Finish!  In Start I also grew increasingly irritated at Acuff's fawning compliments of financial advice media mogul Dave Ramsey, for whom he once worked and who greatly facilitated his career.  Although I agree that Ramsey has some sound ideas of personal money management, he was a pandemic-denying anti-masker when he had the opportunity with his radio show to contribute to the public's heath interests during this pandemic...I wonder what Acuff's take on Covid has been?  In Start, Jon Acuff stresses that there is no shortcut to mastery of a field...it takes hard, hard work as well as the need to put other things on the sideline and not spread one's self out too thinly or act like a jerk to others...not exactly stuff that was new to me.  It's not a bad book per se, but it doesn't hold a candle to his later work...and you can get plenty of inspiration (and sounder advice) for starting projects from Finish.  Acuff has written other books as well, his 2015 release Do Over to be my next reading project from him...

Weekly Short Stories: 1973 Science Fiction, Part 2

Below I review four more science fiction short stories from 1973 as they appeared in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1974 Annual World's Best SF, featuring selections from the previous year.  1973 is memorable to me for some of my favorite songs, like Love and Happiness by Al Green, Hummingbird by Seals and Crofts, Ramblin' Man by the Allman Brothers, and Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin...the last, although originally released in late '71 getting much play throughout the year on rock radio.  Secretariat broke the 25-year drought of horse racing's Triple Crown winners with its incredible 31-length victory in the Belmont Stakes, and "my" Miami Dolphins followed up on its perfect 1972 season with another championship in '73.  But back to those four stories...

WEED OF TIME by Norman Spinrad

What if you were immortal in the sense that you simultaneously experienced every single moment within you life span, from your entry into the world to your death?  This kind of mind experiment is embedded within this brief tale of a young man so afflicted, after eating of a weed brought in from a survey of another planet...the plant alters its users' perception of subjective time by creating the scenario I just described.  In the introduction to this story, the editor brought to mind a similarly-theme story, more famous story: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut...  

A MODEST GENIUS by Vadim Shefner

Shefner was a Russian writer and poet who wrote this satirical story apparently as a concealed commentary on conditions in his Soviet Union.  A remarkable, natural inventive genius gets no respect and much derision for his efforts and products while a woman who rejected him marries a man within the "system" who gets lauded for asinine, useless inventions such as a five-ton can opener that users must pay the State a fee to use.  This story, translated from Russian, probably made a lot more sense to readers in Shefner's home country.  Nevertheless the point is taken: here and now there's a lot of crap out there in the arts, literature, and mass media put out by uninspired and untalented people getting rich off their mediocre "works" while others are ignored for their own gifts...

THE DEATHBIRD by Harlan Ellison

The anthology's editor, in his introduction to this problematic story, called it "new wave" referring to the trendy type of cryptic fictional writing...it's still going on, sad to say.  Ellison alternates his short chapters between a college philosophy class exam, a exposition that reverses the Biblical story of Eden raising the Snake and diminishing God as a madman, someone's anecdotal memories, and a distantly-future, dying Earth as Nathan Stack is brought up from his long sleep in Earth's depths by Dira to meet his destiny.  Confusing? I thought so...I also thought that such a talented writer as Ellison could have done a better job of getting his message across without breaking up and obscuring his narrative.  Still, I think I got the gist of it all...it belongs to that genre of science fiction that tries to put a different spin on religion, not exactly my "cup of tea"...

EVANE by E.C. Tubb

An astronaut sent on a decades-long expedition to a distant new world for humanity to inhabit is alone in his ship...except for his talking shipboard computer, which he has name Evane. Stuck within his cramped quarters and desperately lonely, he eventually prods the computer into revealing his special role as one of the millions of spaceship pilots...since after all the process is basically automatic anyway.  In the Great Expansion of humanity, then, why is his long-term presence here so necessary?  The eventual answer is shocking...but cynically proves all too true to the genre of hard science fiction... 

Next week I conclude my reviews of 1973 science fiction short stories...

Game of the Week: Jigsaw Puzzles

I've been doing jigsaw puzzles from very early in my life and have never tired of it, my only limitation being having a large enough flat surface to lay out the pieces and put them together, a surface that doesn't need to serve any other function as I come and go from time to time to work on the puzzle.  I've tended of late to post photos of various puzzles I've finished...for this article I decided to go to the other end of the process...the beginning...and picture the scattered, unorganized pieces before the fun begins, and then take one of a puzzle in progress.  A jigsaw puzzle is a game in which score isn't kept and can either be done individually or communally, the latter with the implicit understanding that anyone passing by a puzzle-in-progress can work on it.  At the start it's a bit tedious separating and turning up all the pieces...while in this stage I almost always separate out the end pieces as well as those with similar patterns or colors.  When selecting a puzzle from a store I'm careful to avoid the ones with two much unmarked uniformity to the picture, such as one with a large section of cloudless sky. It's been a while since I last did a jigsaw puzzle...this one I did here last week was a lot of fun!

Just Finished Reading The Alienist by Caleb Carr

The Alienist is a short historical fiction mystery novel by Caleb Carr.  Published in 1996, he followed up on it by publishing two much more lengthy books featuring alienist psychiatrist/detective Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, whose designation "alienist" refers to his professional views that adult behavior is directly traceable and attributable to childhood events, relationships, and circumstances in their lives.  His method has brought great healing among many, and some of them count as his loyal assistants.  In The Alienist Kreizler teams up with newspaper report John Moore (first-person narrator) and Sarah Howard, a police secretary, to solve a series of grisly murders in New York City, mainly of boy prostitutes.  In this year 1896 the police of the time tend to ignore such victims, but the current police commissioner, none other than Theodore Roosevelt of later presidential renown is determined to end the killings and find the culprit: he hires Kreizler to secretly investigate the crimes.  The rest of the story goes into Kreizler's pinpointing of the suspect based on murder scene evidence, informal witness interviews and research of news and police archives.  And, of course, there is a very climactic scene at the end.  I picked The Alienist to read from one of the lists of "top 100 books" that somehow keep finding its way onto my social media newsfeed, so I decided to give it a try.  Carr portrayed a different New York City as it was 125 years ago, including a giant water reservoir in Mid-Manhattan where the New York Public Library now stands.  The story was later adapted to a television series...perhaps you've seen it (I haven't).  I was greatly impressed with Caleb Carr's attention to detail, as well as his depiction of the criminal underworld running rampant in that city during this era and which had its tentacles spread through the politics, police, and press of the time.  I'm looking forward to the next (and much longer) book in the series, titled The Angel of Darkness...

Great Old TV Episodes...from The Three Stooges

 

THREE SAPPY PEOPLE, from 1939, is one of my favorites from the slapstick comedy team of the Three Stooges: Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Curly Howard (later replaced by his brother Shemp).  During the 1930s, 40s and 50s they made many short films, originally shown in theaters before full-length movies but then easily adapted to television...which is how I watched them. I was always a big Three Stooges fan, but for some reason remember in particular watching them regularly in late 1975, weekday afternoons at 3 on Miami's Channel 6/WCIX-TV when they'd show an hour of their antics.  Among the many episodes I saw was this gem, which features the boys, working as phone company repairmen, intercepting a desperate call to three psychiatrists to visit a wealthy mansion where the husband is concerned for his impulsive wife's mental stability.  Assuming their identity, Moe, Larry and Curly arrive on the scene crashing their three-seat tandem bicycle and spilling out onto the curb in front of everyone...immediately endearing themselves to the fun-loving wife.  My favorite scene in it is pictured above: while sitting with many other stuffy, wealthy people around the large dinner table, a snobbish young woman next to Curly starts powdering her face...seeing this, he whips out his electric razor and starts shaving!  The gags follow in rapid succession until one of the great pie fight scenes on record ensues.  Although Shemp Howard was the "third Stooge" during in the act's early vaudeville years, his brother Curly replaced him for most of their movies, eventually leaving from declining health with Shemp returning for the later shorts.  After Shemp passed on in the late 1950s veteran comedian Joe Besser filled out the Stooges' lineup for their final few short films.  Later on the act would be revived for feature films using "Curly Joe" DeRita.  But for me I'm partial to the original Curly and the incredible comedic timing between him, Moe, and Larry.  By the way, I'll always believe that Moe had the original "Beatles haircut"...

Just Finished Reading The Case of the Fabulous Fake by Erle Stanley Gardner

Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970)  was the creator and author of the Perry Mason series of mystery/law novels, later adapted to the long-running fifties and sixties television series starring Raymond Burr as the tough-talking, meticulous, clever, courageous, ethical and persevering lawyer...the "Superman" of all attorneys.  Gardner wrote more than eighty Perry Mason books...my parents were big fans of both his books and the TV show.  My father's bookshelf had several old paperbacks of Gardner's works and it was common for me as a kid to lie in bed awake with that unmistakable Perry Mason Show musical theme booming through the thin walls of our home. The Case of the Fabulous Fake, from 1969, was his last published novel in the series before his death...it came three years after the TV series ended its own run.  It may have been Gardner's last, but for me it was my first...

Perry Mason is at his office when his assistant Della Street brings in the story's client, a mysterious young woman with a bag loaded with money bills and very little information to go on...and what "facts" she does share turn out to be lies.  Yet Mason, as he later regrets, takes on her case without pinpointing more directly exactly what her agenda is.  As the story unravels, it seems that she is working for a San Francisco-based import and export firm that keeps thousands of dollars of ready cash available to expedite possibly shady transactions of  restricted goods from overseas.  And it also seems that someone is apparently blackmailing her brother and she has taken it upon herself to deliver the payoff money herself after he is lying in the hospital in critical condition after a car accident.  Mason enlists the help of his friend and detective Paul Drake, who has her followed, as well as getting the blackmail agent to surface.  As with the other Perry Mason stories, there is eventually a murder committed in the midst of all this, but as this is a short, easy novel to read, why don't you get a copy for yourself and find out how it all ends?

I was very impressed with Erle Stanley Gardner's writing and plan to delve into more of his Perry Mason novels...it's no wonder that during Gardner's career it was the best-selling series in America.  I've written before that I seriously dislike anything about courtrooms and trials, this aversion arising from my multiple stints over the years on juries.  But the bulk of the story I just read is more like an Agatha Christie mystery novel, and it's got me interested in seeing what else is out there.  Who knows, I may just start watching the old TV show since it's being aired on one of the more obscure local channels...

Quote of the Week...from John Boehner

You'll never get into trouble for something you don't say.              ---John Boehner

Ohioan John Boehner was the Speaker of the House of Representatives from 2011 to 2015 and was prominent in the national news as an opposition leader to the then-Obama administration.  He's recently come out with a memoir book On the House, which I just read and reviewed on this blog this past Monday.  In it I mentioned that I like Boehner: I'll go further in stating that if the Republican Party's politicians had consisted mainly of people with John Boehner's character and philosophy then I would have been much more inclined to vote for them as I had done for conservative GOP candidates in earlier times...instead we've been inundated the last decade or so with those Boehner calls "the crazies", first from the Tea Party movement and now from the ongoing Trump personality cultists.  At the end of his book, the author listed a few of his own sayings, which he terms "Boehnerisms"...the above quote is one of these, along with others like "There's a fine line between stupidity and courage", "Never get into a pissing match with a skunk", and "It doesn't cost anything to be nice." The quote I picked to discuss doesn't necessarily imply that I should never say anything to avoid getting into trouble, but rather that I should choose my own battles, so to speak, and prioritize the situations that merit a reaction from me.  Boehner himself has often been very outspoken, often in a profanity-laced manner, but he also is a "live-and-let-live" kind of guy who values respectful relationships and can sort out the relevant from the petty...and nobody should let themselves get mired into petty confrontations.  Over the course of my 64+ years of life, I have...like just about everyone else...encountered times of adversity and injustice, but my regrets are almost always centered on my own responses to them.  This is especially true in those circumstances when I displayed lack of judgment and said things either hurtful to myself or others when I should have let time cool off my righteous anger and kept my mouth shut.  That's why these short quips like the above one from the former Speaker are helpful...they're a good little reference to keep mentally stored until the situation calls for them...  

Constellation of the Month: Ursa Minor

Lots of interesting objects in our solar system proceed from our terrestrial vantage point across the sky from east to west along the relativity thin strip of the celestial map called the Zodiac and which reflect the disc-like alignment of lunar and planetary orbits...so the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune traverse this ever-changing path along the course of a day.  But if you live in the Earth's northern hemisphere as do I (and most of you) and face north, relatively little changes and you're never going to see any of those celestial objects looking in that direction.  Where I live, the Celestial North Pole is always at the same point, exactly thirty degrees up from the northern horizon. Almost directly on it is the second-magnitude star Polaris of the constellation Ursa Minor (Latin for "little bear").  Technically, I regard this constellation, also known as the Little Dipper, as a June constellation because the rest of its visible stars (Polaris represents the end star in the handle) cross the meridian above the north pole at that time during the evening hours...yet I can actually see it year-round if I want.  Whenever we go to an Atlantic beach like Daytona, Ormond or St. Augustine and look out after sunset...supposedly eastward...from our oceanfront hotel balcony...I can always see Polaris to the left since the beach (and our room) doesn't face directly eastward, but rather east-northeastward, moving the North Star a few degrees to the right and into our view.  Ursa Minor is a small constellation marked by only one other second-magnitude star, Kochab or Beta Ursae Minoris (Polaris is Alpha), the top star in the "dipper" part of the configuration. Once you find Polaris and Kochab you can (unless you're inhibited by city lights) string together the rest of the constellation's fainter stars.  I've never been south of the Equator, but if I ever go there I won't be able to see Polaris...instead the Celestial South Pole will be "visible", continually lying the same number of degrees directly north of the southern horizon as that of my latitude south of the Equator.  I put "visible" in quotes, though, because regrettably the Celestial South Pole is devoid of any bright star to pinpoint it...instead you have to either have an remarkably clear night to see the very obscure constellation Octans on which it lies or interpolate the Pole's location from bright southern stars like Alpha Centuari, Acrux, Achernar, and Canopus.  Not that I've ever had the opportunity to do that, though.  By the way, Polaris is a supergiant triple-star system a whopping 432 light-years distant...

Next month I'll pick another constellation to spotlight...  

Weekly Short Stories...1973 Science Fiction, Part 1

This week I start a new "year's best" science fiction anthology with short stories from that genre: Donald A. Wollheim Presents the 1974 Annual World's Best SF, presenting the editor's picks for the best from 1973.  1973 historically is well known as the year American soldiers came home from Vietnam as well as the breakout of the Watergate scandal that would bring down the Nixon administration the following year.  Personally, I was transitioning from my junior to senior year in high school. In the winter/spring I tried out for my high school's track team with dubious immediate results, but that experience planted a seed within me for running that I revitalized 14 years ago...and I'm going strong.  Later that year I had my only surgery (so far), for a hernia. Overall, though, I thought '73 rocked! Here are my reactions to the first three stories in the book...

A SUPPLIANT IN SPACE by Robert Sheckley

A tongue-in-cheek story about a defiant reject from an alien society, banished from them for his open disrespect of their rigid rules...Detringer is quite the character.  He is able to land on a remote planet but without more fuel is stranded...enter a human exploratory expedition landing there.  The fastidious-but-honorable captain and the suspicious and ambitious colonel are in a power struggle, and their developing relationships with Detringer form an interesting triangle as the three vie with one another to accomplish their own aims...great ending, and it was very funny...

PARTHEN by R.A. Lafferty

On Earth men everywhere are happily losing their fortunes and livelihoods while marveling at the new wonderful, beautiful women around them.  At the same time a cryptic message has been received, only revealing that an alien race has infiltrated humanity and has decided that half the population is obsolete...with the other half to be their slaves. As a reader I thought the story was leading in one direction but quickly realized what was going on...

DOOMSHIP by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson

This collaborative novella effort by the two noted sci-fi authors examines the idea of 

"tachyon transmission" using faster-than-light tachyon particles (a fictional creation) as the driving force. From them an exact copy of someone can be transmitted almost instantaneously over vast reaches of space from one tachyon transmitter to a corresponding tachyon receiver...kind of like Star Trek's transporter but with the original person still intact.  This sets the stage for a deep space probe to an unknown approaching phenomenon outside the galaxy, with human Ben Pertin sending onto it a copy of himself to replace an earlier, dying "Ben"...doomed to perished from the ship's radiation...along with a genetically-altered chimpanzee for help, to join the various alien life forms there working for the probe's mission.  Only once he arrives, Ben quickly discovers a serious civil war going on and he must act quickly...

Next week I continue my look at old sci-fi short stories from 1973...

Game of the Week: Crossword Puzzles

 

Being someone who's typically pretty good at guessing the correct Jeopardy! answers questions, along with possessing a generous amount of stored-up trivia and knowledge of the English language, I should be better at doing crossword puzzles than I am...but I'm usually relegated to doing the easy ones, such as with the above photo.  My parents were whizzes at them, however, and I remember being impressed by the very difficult diagramless puzzles they would do.  As for myself, unless it's a book that has "easy" in its title or a Monday or Tuesday newspaper puzzle (they get harder as the week progresses), I know my limitations and steer clear of the more challenging crosswords. It's not exactly my favorite kind of puzzle you work out on paper: I greatly prefer Kakuro, Jumble, Hidato, Cryptograms, and Sudoku.  Of course, with a smartphone and that handy-dandy Google search engine, I can fudge a little on the game and conveniently help myself if a clue isn't bringing to mind the correct combo of letters in the designated length of row or column.  I've tried the more difficult crossword puzzles from time to time, but there's one type I refuse to do: puzzles in which some letters can only be accessed from one clue...you absolutely must be able to work on any unknown space from both directions or it isn't a legitimate crossword puzzle! 

Just Finished Reading On the House by John Boehner

Retired Ohio Representative and former Speaker of the House John Boehner has just published a memoir of his life and times in the U.S. House of Representatives, titled On the House, and which I just finished reading.  He wrote it with pretty colorful language, echoing his speaking style.  Boehner never pulled any punches as a politician: he said what he thought and I always respected him for that...much unlike the slimy worms slinking through the legislative halls of Congress and state legislatures nowadays: guess he's not the only one using colorful language!  The book's title is a play on words about a free drink, and the author, known for his drinking affection...at least for red wine...also hearkened back to his father's profession as a barkeeper and his own work decades before in the family business.  I was interested in this book because I remember Boehner from his House Speaker days when Obama was president...especially in regard to the two times he had to negotiate with the White House over continuing government funding resolutions.  It shed light on his frustration both with Obama...who would agree to a hard-slogged-out deal with Boehner and then back out on it...and with the Tea Party faction of his own caucus, spurred on in the 2013 negotiations that featured the interference of new senator Ted Cruz, for whom he shows nothing but the greatest contempt.  And of course the book wouldn't be complete without John Boehner's take on Donald Trump, with whom he had golfed before: like myself, he was taken aback at the massive reality denial...spurred by Trump...of most of the Republican Party, both politicians and members-at-large, of Joe Biden's legitimate 2020 election victory.  Boehner also blamed Texas representative Tom Delay for the GOP's move to impeach Bill Clinton...it was a cynically-designed ploy to give the Republicans election gains in 1998, which backfired.  Boehner himself, while decrying the "crazies" of the Tea Party movement and later of Trump's idolizers, started out in the House making waves by exposing its own banking scandal...but he admits up front that he's a "jackass": my opinion of Donald Trump would go up drastically were he ever to admit the same about himself.  I happen to like John Boehner and wish that his type of conservative politics were what the Republican Party stood for instead of the fascist personality cult going on there now.  It's a very funny, brutally honest book...I think you'll like it unless you're one of those Trump worshippers...

Great Old TV Episodes...from Beavis and Butt-Head

Animator Mike Judge's breakthrough into television fame was his MTV series Beavis and Butt-Head, which originally ran from 1993 to 1997.  One of my favorite episodes from it is CITIZENS ARREST,  from  '97...although it would be another ten years or so before I began to follow the series. The title characters are two boys in their early teens whose ignorant notions of what is "cool" revolve around anything sexual, violent or gross...I actually knew some kids around my neighborhood and school bus stop when I was growing up who had very similar personalities (and probably still do). When Beavis and Butt-Head was first being shown on MTV I had a problem with it as that channel seemed hell-bent on indoctrinating young viewers to the values it was promoting (like they did with their numerous, tedious reality TV series), and I've always felt that the series should have been targeted at a more mature, discerning audience...kids tend to copy what they see on the screen. After all, I never saw the Three Stooges as role models either, but rather a source of comedy both for their ridiculous behavior and beliefs and at the pretentions of society around them.  In Citizens Arrest, the boys are at work at Burger World when an armed robber comes into the store: of course Beavis and Butt-Head think it's all very cool.  When a policeman walks in on the holdup, Butt-Head's careless reactions to the robber inadvertently save the day and the cop praises the boys for making a "citizen's arrest".  The rest of the episode has them harassing customers in the name of security, including the above-pictured elderly gentleman who just pulled into the parking lot: the dialogue is side-splitting...how the two get carried away with their new "role" reminded me of the Hall Monitor episode in SpongeBob SquarePants.  Beavis and Butt-Head is a series you either love or hate...I've felt both ways at different times over the years.  The original series featured the two young losers sitting on their couch at home watching and analyzing various music videos during each episode. I thought that was hilarious, but the versions aired now (and on DVD) omit that section: too bad...

Ran Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning for First June Race in 11 Years

Now that the Parkrun 5K held (almost) every Saturday morning at 7:30 at Gainesville's Depot Park has resumed after a long layoff due to the Covid pandemic, I thought it would now be feasible to try to get in at least one race per month...at least for the time being.  So this morning I woke up uncomfortably early (I'm more a night owl) and drove on down there.  At race time it was warm and very muggy, 76 with 90% humidity...not my favorite running conditions.  I could tell early on that I would need to slow down and every four or five minutes I took brief walking breaks...until the last of the four laps, that is, when I slogged on through to a pretty slow 33:06 time.  Still, I ran the good race as they say and look forward to trying it all again in July, most likely under even hotter and more humid conditions (groan).  The Depot Parkrun is run by volunteers...once I get a number of races in I plan to join them.  It's also free...you sign up online and get your barcodes printed out, one of which you take to the race for them to scan to record your finishing time.  The website also has race results, past and present...today they warned me there was a glitch with the barcodes and that I might be listed a couple of places from where I finished...oh well, I know what my time is anyway.  Sometimes the race will skip a week here and there because the park is used for other events...next Saturday with be the celebration of Juneteenth there, so the next Parkrun will be June 26th.  This is the first June race I've run since the Chad Reed Memorial 5K in Cross City, Florida on 6/5/10....

Click on this link for the results from today's run...looks like they sorted out that glitch I mentioned earlier...

Quote of the Week...from Jon Acuff

If you want to finish, you've got to do all that you can to get rid of your perfectionism right out of the gate.  You've got to have fun, cut your goal in half, choose what things you'll bomb, and a few other actions you won't see coming at first.                                            ---Jon Acuff

The above quote is an excerpt from the introduction of Jon Acuff's 2017 book Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done.  Acuff, a motivational blogger and speaker, has built up a big following on social media and authored six books.  In the same introduction he referred back to his 2013 book Start, which had as its premise the importance of overcoming beginner's fear.  Later data he received, though, showed that many of his readers had no problem starting goals, but rather quickly dropped off from them when they fell prey to the fallacious need to be perfect...and no one's perfect when they start out on something new.  So Acuff decided to pen this book to help people stick with their endeavors and avoid the pitfall of perfection while providing some helpful hints.  Yes, fun is an essential element to a goal's fulfillment while sometimes the original regimen may prove too taxing: so cut the goal in half or extend the time you set to fulfill it.  Also, while focusing on a goal it will be necessary to find other areas of your life that you'll be willing to let slide...at least for a while...while not being ashamed of doing so.  This is why I chose the above quote since it pretty much capsulizes this book.  I greatly enjoyed reading Finish with Acuff presenting everything in a personally compelling way, and it's really true that for me I've started many goals only to abandon them when my sense of perfectionism placed unnecessary obstacles to their fulfillment.  As for that earlier book Start (full title Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average, and Do Work That Matters), I plan to read it soon...but I recommend that you finish Finish before you start Start, however counterintuitive that may seem...

My Take on Senator Manchin's Present Senate Role

West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin has lately been receiving his share of criticism...some of it excessively personal...from others in his party, including the President.  Although not addressing Manchin by name, Biden referred to him and colleague Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona as two senators who seem to vote more with Republicans than Democrats...a patently false statement: Manchin votes overwhelmingly with his party.  But in some matters he represents a lone voice, opposing any move to eliminate the legislative filibuster as well as his party's current For the People bill about voting and election reform.  As it is, I think that with just about any piece of legislation there is room of compromise, but in this climate of political gridlock with each party catering to their extreme wing, that word "compromise" is almost always depicted as betrayal instead of the logical result of elected officials recognizing the importance of getting things accomplished in a constructive manner for the American people and passing legislation that won't automatically be rescinded the next time the "other" party gains power...and it always eventually does.  Now Manchin is being depicted as some kind of racist for his principled stands...nothing that I know of the man, though, indicates anything of the sort. What many in his own party don't seem to "get" is that in an overwhelmingly red state he represents like West Virginia, Joe Manchin...its former governor...is nowadays probably the only Democrat they would elect to statewide office.  Instead of running him down, Democrats should be counting their blessings and realizing that his presence in the Senate is the reason they can get Biden's nominees brought to the floor and approved and their bills can be sent through committees and also brought up for votes... 

My overriding concern about voting and elections is the number of laws recently passed by Republican-run state legislatures that transfer the authority of certifying election results to those highly partisan legislatures, meaning that in any close election occurring under their jurisdiction they can let Republican victories pass unhindered while overturning Democratic wins under any pretext of false fraud charges.  The For the People Act doesn't seem to address this threat to our democracy, but rather tends to focus on making the act of voting much more a passive endeavor than one requiring the participant to make any sort of effort.  It also imposes a code of ethics on the Supreme Court and pushes for D.C. statehood, issues that are worthwhile to discuss but not directly germane to the bill's topic.  I personally oppose ballot harvesting, a process that this bill would impose nationally and which grants political operatives the opportunity to canvass neighborhoods for voters in their own party, pick up their ballots and deliver them to the elections office...all sorts of trouble can result from this.  And I'm also not a fan of universal vote-by-mail where the population regularly gets doused with mail-in ballots, as with the recent U.S. Census many of them to incorrect addresses.  To its credit, though, the bill does place restrictions on state officials purging voter rolls just before elections and gives such voters recourse to contest their removal. Senator Manchin has clearly stated that he objects to the For the People Act in its present form...in all likelihood he's seeing some of the same things I am.  There is no way I see him supporting eliminating the legislative filibuster, so the Democratic leadership has a choice: either work with the Republican opposition to come up with bills that can pass (and remain in law when power inevitably changes hands at some future time) or wait until the 2022 election and hope that they retain control of the House and expand their Senate majority to the point that Manchin and Sinema cannot thwart the move to end that 60-vote legislative threshold.  Will Joe Manchin disappoint me in the future by something he says or does? Almost certainly as he's already done so in the past, but unlike the millions of Trump idolaters and those who adoringly "feel the Bern" for Senator Sanders, I question elected officials and don't worship them...

Weekly Short Stories: 1972 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I finish up reviewing selected science fiction short stories from 1972 as they appearing in the following year's anthology The 1973 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim.  Historically, '72 was the time of the Vietnam War winding down (at least America's role in it), the Watergate break-in,  and a tough Democratic presidential primary season marked by an assassination attempt against candidate George Wallace and George McGovern's eventual nomination in a bitterly divided convention...eventually leading to an election day landslide by incumbent Republican Richard Nixon. TV comedies like M.A.S.H., Sanford and Son, and Bob Newhart began airing that year as well...I kind of dug 1972 in spite of its downsides.  Anyway, here are my reactions to the final four tales from that book...

CHANGING WOMAN by W. Macfarlane

The protagonist, a young Native American woman, plies her mapmaking drafting skills for her new employer, an eccentric woman who is assembling a minutely-detailed, massive map of the Earth within a huge west coast building.  Before long she begins to notice connections between her boss's activities around the emerging map and disasters occurring in the real world outside, and has to decide what to do about it.  The notion of "sympathetic magic", like that in voodoo, plays into this story that drastically raises the stakes for those who understand and possess it...

"WILLIE'S BLUES" by Robert J. Tilley

A time traveler from the late twenty-first century goes back to revisit the transition into fame, decadence, decline, and eventual early death of a remarkably talented and inspired early twentieth-century jazz/blues performer.  And then he discovers himself to be the unwittingly catalyst in bringing about that transformation, resulting in a lot of personal misgiving as he realizes that had he not intervened, Willie Turnhill most likely would have enjoyed a much longer and happier life in his relative obscurity.  This story is better read as a mood piece of the times and what aspiring black musicians had to go through back then to get a career break while undergoing pervasive racial discrimination... 

LONG SHOT by Vernor Vinge

It's hard not to give away this brief tale of an advanced spaceship whose intricately-designed circuits have unintentionally bestowed upon it sentience and identity as it is launched and carries out its lonely, ten-thousand-year mission to Alpha Centauri.  Its mission is explained in bits and pieces...by the story's end the reader knows what it's all about.  A good tale presenting a non-human's take on things that people would describe in different terms...

THUS LOVE BETRAYS US by Phyllis MacLennon

A man is a lonely castaway on a mold and fungus-ridden planet after the original ship dropping him off there for a temporary scientific mission is destroyed in a space accident...now he must make the best of his desperate situation with no rescue in sight.  Having earlier concluded that there was no intelligent life on this miserable world in which he must continually insulate himself from the indigenous native spores, he is surprised to find an entity that seems interested in befriending him...and who is fearful of others of his own kind.  This story makes the not-so-subtle point that it can be dangerous to assume that those from unfamiliar cultures automatically adhere to the same moral principles and social rules as oneself...

Next week I begin my look at science fiction short stories from 1973...

Game of the Week: Miniature Golf

 

Recently Melissa and I went back to an old haunt of ours: Pirate's Cove miniature golf course in Ormond Beach on A1A, where we would play along with our two children Will and Rebecca.  Having recently become an "expert" on golf by dint of sitting back on my couch and watching the pros play on CBS, I thought I had it within me to try my hand at the miniature version while on vacation.  The place we went to was great, with two separate courses of 18 holes each...we opted for the easier one.  While royally screwing up on a few holes, for the most part I kept up with "par", but we just enjoyed playing the elaborately-created, imaginative holes, each one markedly different from the previous with special obstacles, shapes, and sloping.  Since this particular attraction was about pirates, there were loudspeakers throughout the course pushing stories with that theme as well as signs discussing famous pirates in history.  In miniature golf it's all putting and no driving, so you don't need that kind of athletic training and back and arm strength the regular sport demands.  Still, on our outing we did walk up and down a lot of steps...the above photo is from the top of the course looking down.  I think the Gainesville area still has one or two miniature golf courses...maybe we'll try them out, although I don't think I'll be tackling full-blown golf anytime soon...

Just Finished Reading And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

And Then There Were None was a 1939 mystery novel by Agatha Christie, one of her most famous...and perhaps most vilified.  Ten people find themselves together on small Soldier Island off the coast of England...it has a mansion after an American businessmen bought it, but the present owner seems to be a mysterious "Mr. Owen" who has either invited the present guests or hired them on as staff.  Soon after their arrival it is revealed, through a record played to the assemblage, that each of them is guilty of murder and that justice will be served against them...and then their own murders begin, one by one.  Behind it all is an old nursery rhyme Ten Little Soldiers, that lists each one's manner of demise and concluding with "And then there were none". It's this verse that caused problems for Christie and the novel as the rhyme and the book originally had a rather racist title...not just for now but for back then as well.  Later on it was changed to "Ten Little Indians", but now "Soldiers" works well instead and doesn't have all the negative connotations.  Instead of an Inspector Poirot on the scene to unravel the mystery of who is doing the killings...only the ten targeted people are there...it is up to these to figure things out before one of them becomes the next victim.  It's all neatly explained at the tail end of the story.  An underlying premise here is that many, many murders are committed that never get reported as such, with the perpetrators getting off free and not even suspected or accused.  On the other hand, there were a couple of "murders" described in the story for which, in my estimation, it was a stretch to describe them as such (although the behavior was objectionable).  I can see why this novel has been so popular...soon after its publication it was made into a movie...

Great Old TV Episodes...from I Love Lucy

JOB SWITCHING, from the classic comedy series I Love Lucy, is one of the funniest episodes in television history. Originally airing in the series' second season in September 1952, four years before I was born,  as with most of the episodes it stars the foursome of Lucille Ball (as Lucy Ricardo), Desi Arnaz (Ricky Ricardo), Vivian Vance (Ethel Mertz) and William Frawley (Fred Mertz).  The wives get into a spat of sorts with their husbands, each "side" putting down the difficulty of the other's roles...in this traditional setting, then, Ricky and Fred take their turn at housekeeping while Lucy and Ethel get paid jobs at a chocolate factory.  It's the scene at the factory's conveyor belt where they're required to package every piece of chocolate candy whizzing by that is the most hilarious part of the show...see the above picture.  Lucille Ball was brilliant at slapstick comedy, and it doesn't get any funnier than this.  As a little kid I got to watch a lot of this series...after all, it was a favorite of my parents as well.  I always thought...even from early on...that it was pretty cool for Ricky to be a singer in his Cuban band and that Cuba itself was a pretty cool place.  Maybe this wasn't all that helpful, though, as there was a lot of disparity and corruption there at the time that would give rise to Castro's leftist revolution in the late 1950s...and more trouble afterwards.  But it was Lucy with her brashness and penchant for getting into the worst, most embarrassing situations that stole the show and made it the great success it was during its run from 1951 to 1957, followed in the next three years by several hour-long specials and later by new series focusing on just Lucille Ball.  If you haven't seen I Love Lucy before, you can't go wrong with the Job Switching episode...

Just Finished Reading Where are the Children? by Mary Higgins Clark

Mary Higgins Clark, the prolific and highly successful author of thriller novels, just passed away last year at age 92.  I had read three of her works, and just finished reading her breakthrough book Where are the Children? from 1975 that launched her writing career.  Loosely based on a news story she had followed about a woman accused of the deaths of her two missing young children, Clark expanded and fictionalized it by having her protagonist from California go through trial and conviction of murder, only to be released after that conviction is reversed on a technicality and her first husband gone after leaving a suicide note that expressed deep remorse over her crime.  Now it's seven years later and she had disappeared into the society, remarrying and with two new young children on the seashore at Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  But the anonymous peace she has gained over time is about to be harshly interrupted when a newspaper is delivered throughout town with a photo showing her as the original Nancy Harmon after conviction...and then her present children, Mike and Missy, go missing, making her once again the prime suspect.  I'm not giving anything away by stating that she is not guilty...the true culprit in all this has his own chapters, and early on as the reader I thought I knew his identity...but great mystery writers like this one are masters at throwing in "red herring" clues.  Eventually all is resolved, but to what end?  Guess you'll have to read it to find out: I did enjoy it, though.  These novels of Clark are written in plain language and short enough not to be a major reading commitment...they're thus perfectly suited to be inserted between some of my more serious reading ventures...

Quote of the Week...from Groucho Marx

Those are my principles, and if you don't like them...well, I have others.        ---Groucho Marx

Back when Citizen's United was being decided by the conservative wing of the United States Supreme Court more than a decade ago, justices bandied about concepts like "corporations are people" and "spending money is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment".  Yet it seems that whenever conservative politicians...who almost unanimously claim themselves to be highly principled advocates for freedom of businesses to make their own decisions without government interference...including what to do with their own money and how to conduct their affairs...it all goes out the window whenever convenient.  So Major League Baseball decides to move its All-Star Game from Atlanta after Georgia's new voting law was passed, and Senator Ted Cruz urges Congress to pass punitive legislation against them!  So cruise lines operating out of Florida have reasonably decided that crew and passengers need to provide a record of their COVID vaccination...our state's conservative governor has decided to interfere, decreeing that they are banned from doing that!  But Ron DeSantis' "principled when it suits him" mentality goes further: earlier he signed a law making participants in public protest demonstrations and marches potentially liable for the actions of others in those events, a direct violation of the First Amendment if I ever saw one.  And what about all these election laws passed by different "red" state legislatures and governors that give those partisan bodies the right to arbitrarily nullify any election they have a problem with (in other words, when Democrats win) while claiming the laws are necessary in principle to restore public confidence in elections?  Oh yeah, I'm "confident" that if a Republican wins an election in one of those states by 10 votes there's no problem but if a Democrat prevails by 10,000 somebody will dig up a bogus fraud charge, leading eventually to a partisan vote to overturn the results and install the losing Republican candidate...you just know this going to happen.  And what about all this bemoaning of "cancel culture" and criticism of Facebook and Twitter by Republican congressmen when these private companies fact-check their users' posts and remove the more habitual abusers, while overwhelmingly ostracizing one of their own...Liz Cheney...for simply telling the truth about the 2020 election and Trump's culpability in the Capitol riot on January 6th? I think this pronouncing and then shameless shirking of principle isn't just confined to politics, though: it is a sad trait of our universal human nature.  And only a master of cynical comedy like Groucho Marx could have put it so succinctly, as he did in the above quote... 

Just Finished Reading The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Little Prince, in its original French version Le petit prince, is a short 1943 novel by French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-44).  The author's profession comes out strongly here as the narrator has crash-landed his plane in the Sahara Desert and only has a few days...with his water supply dwindling...to repair it.  In the middle of the desolation he encounters a young boy who identifies himself as the prince of a very small planet.  The prince asks him to draw a sheep, to which the narrator replies that his drawings have never been good since when he himself was a boy and tried to draw a snake swallowing an elephant...all the grown-ups thought it was a picture of a hand.  He does the same with this new drawing and is surprised by the boy knowing it to be a snake and elephant.  And with this the story progresses to reveal the fundamental difference in thinking between children and adults, even translating to the narrator's highly technical focus on his means of locomotion while the Prince never mentions his, as if it is inconsequential to his own thought processes.  Instead the boy from space recounts about his own home planet with its three little volcanoes, his special talking flower, and the need for a sheep to keep a planet-destroying plant from proliferating.  He travels to other neighboring small planets, each populated by a single adult with personalities and attitudes reflecting those of vast groups of adults on Earth.  The narrator's reality is dominated by science and technical details, while the boy-prince has his own reality that reflects his own assumptions such as that he just "visits" other worlds and talks with plants and animals, among other fanciful ideas that fade away with growing older.  It's a very whimsical...and a bit sad...little tale and I can see why it became so popular.  I don't think the author meant for us to forsake our own maturity and dependence on science but rather to integrate the memories and essence of our own respective childhoods into our adult being, thereby keeping joy in our lives and preventing us from becoming like those misled grown-ups whom the Prince had visited...

Weekly Short Stories: 1972 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here are my reviews of three more stories from the anthology The 1973 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and featuring his selections from the previous year.  1972 for me in retrospect was a foundational year in which, despite some pretty severe personal depression during the spring and fall seasons when I went from age fifteen to sixteen and progressed from the tenth to eleventh grade in high school, I formed what I now regard as pretty much my outlook on the world and how I would want to live my life in it.  I think the marked slowing of my body metabolism in this period helped in this growth while at the same time contributing to my doldrums...in the preceding years I was an overly nervous sort, much like the Tweek character in South Park   But back to science fiction from that year: the first and third tales I discuss below would more properly be termed novellas than short stories...

THE GOLD AT THE STARBOW'S END by Frederik Pohl

In one of the most cynical ploys I've ever read in science fiction, a future president with his chief scientist send an astronaut crew on a deep space mission to what seems a habitable planet around Alpha Centauri...only unbeknownst to the crew, the planet doesn't really exist!  This whole mission, intended to be suicidal in nature without the astronauts' knowledge, is to get them in an isolated state and come up with great new ideas and scientific principles...which they transmit back to Earth while they speed closer and closer to the speed of light to their doomed destination.  The scheme naturally backfires on the perpetrators...this story structure of authority figures abusing their subordinates with their arrogance and presumptions carries over to the next two tales as well...

TO WALK A CITY'S STREET by Clifford D. Simak

A nondescript man who has lived his entire life in poverty in around others in the poorer side of town appears to have a strange gift: his simple presence around others heals them of whatever ailments they have been suffering.  Enter another group of arrogant authority figures who corral him into signing away his freedom on a contract and whisk him around from location to location as they study his effect on the people he encounters.  And yes, this strategy severely backfires...

RORQUAL MARU by T.J. Bass

It is far off in the distant future, so much ahead that humanity and other life forms have been genetically manipulated to the point that a stunted human variety, the Nebish, with four toes on each foot is the predominant form...yet these short-lived humanoids are essentially controlled by a network of advanced robots called "mecks".  The Rorqual Maru in the title refers to a giant whale that has been altered to the point where it is a large ship, accommodating people...I wonder whether the writers of Star Trek: the Next Generation used this concept for their wonderful Tin Man episode.  As the story develops the Rorqual Maru, having been in a deep sleep state due to the depletion of plankton and nutrients in the ocean, is revitalized when a meteor strike lets loose many nutrients.  This sets off a conflict between the oceanic humanoid race, the Benthic, and the Nebish, leading to the "mecks" concocting a plan to genetically create a warrior humanoid to combat the Benthic: good luck with that.  I thought the story's basic ideas were innovative but that the plot was a little bit convoluted... 

Next week I conclude my look back at 1972 science fiction short stories...

Game of the Week: Soccer

Starting in the summer of 2014, I became an avid fan of professional soccer when the World Cup was held in Brazil that year in which Germany won the championship with an exciting 1-0 overtime win over Argentina.  In the fall I began following the English Premier League and Mexico's Liga MX, both of which I could regularly view ongoing matches, the former on NBC-Sports and the latter on Univision.  For the EPL I started off as an Arsenal fan but gradually gravitated toward supporting Leicester City, while with Liga MX it was the Tigres of Monterrey-based UANL...I still consider these my two favorites to follow.  My soccer memories didn't just begin seven years ago, though: as with most kids when we were in recess, a.k.a. "physical education" class at school, soccer was often on the agenda.  Although the games weren't structured, we didn't use goal nets, and the balls weren't really official soccer balls but rather those commonplace maroon-colored all-purpose bouncy balls.  Still, it was a game in which I excelled, partially because I was such a fast runner at the time but also because I seemed to have an innate talent for predicting where the ball was going in a game and being there at the crucial moment, then breaking off and dribbling it toward the goal: I was also an accurate kicker.  I never did play the kind of highly structured, positional soccer they taught in youth leagues, though, where passing and teamwork are emphasized.  A few years ago I'd also play makeshift soccer games with my son and daughter in our back yard with segments of the surrounding fence marking off the goals...that was fun!  Like basketball and unlike baseball...and to an extent football, soccer is a game/sport that I have memories of not only participating in myself, but also of being reasonably good at.   Still, watching others play it on TV can be frustrating, especially when neither of the two teams in a game is very good at passing and controlling the ball.  But the English and Mexican premier league teams usually put on entertaining matches...alas, sometimes the same can't be said for the level of play in our American/Canadian league known as MLS (Major League Soccer)...