Weekly Short Stories: 1966 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I conclude my look back at the year of 1966 in science fiction short stories with the final entries in the retrospective anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1967...edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr.  While these stories were first appearing in various magazines I was nine years old...going on ten...living in Hollywood, Florida with my parents and sister and attending Nova Blanche Forman Elementary School in Davie, going from the fourth grade there into the fifth. In February we were blessed with a spunky little cockapoo puppy, which we named Michelle after the ongoing hit Beatles song...she would be with the family for fifteen wonderful years.  Lyndon Johnson was riding high in the presidency and seemed hellbent on getting the country inextricably drawn into an endless war of attrition in Vietnam with the military draft going on strong, sending non-volunteers into enemy-held territory to draw out their fire: what a cynical strategy. I remember earlier that year a "patriotism" class at Nova in which the idea of how noble it is to die for one's country was promoted...the librarian's son was in 'Nam at the time and she put in her two cents worth for the war. All I could think, at age nine, was is this what's in store for me in my life?  Well, here are my reactions to those four stories from the book...

 

THE WINGS OF A BAT by Paul Ash

Industrial mining meets time travel technology as such a firm finds itself doing just that, back in the Cretaceous Period when dinosaurs roamed and pterodons...winged dinosaurs...flew.  The physician on duty finds himself the nanny of a baby version of such a creature...wing spans up to twenty feet when grown.  It's a bit comical how the doc, who's telling the story, reluctantly puts up with the antics of this creature.  Fiona, she's called, grows up and eventually gets her flying instincts and skills going and flies away, never expected to return to the camp. Yet you know that somehow in the end it's all going to come back as a terrible storm is brewing and our physician hero is caught in the middle of it all.  Although it was (ugh) a time travel story, this one was set completely in the past so they didn't pull out all those annoying paradoxes that they do in other such tales.  Also, I thought it was kind of sweet... 

THE MAN FROM WHEN by Dannie Plachta

Speaking of annoying time travel stories, the only redeeming thing about this one is that it was very, very, short, taking up just a couple of pages.  Out in the country somewhere a man contemplates the scenery while about to mix his favorite drink.  Suddenly, just a few hundred yards away there's a big explosion...and a stranger emerges from the surrounding mist and approaches him: naturally he's from the future, performing a time travel experiment.  What he tells the dude standing there reveals what we sometimes think about doomsday predictions of our future: if they're far off ahead of us then we tend to shrug them off...otherwise...

AMEN AND OUT by Brian Aldiss

In a future Earth when a select few, through special injections, have become immortal and computers and machinery pretty much run people's lives with each person carrying around with them a computer-run shrine to pray to, one indigent outcast has a bold plan to rock the boat as he tries to convince one of the immortals to be the first one ever to leave their place of confinement for centuries.  This story delves into topics like how much people increasingly depend on their machines...and the reference to the shrines made me grin, thinking how much folks nowadays revere the smartphones they absolutely must have in their possession 24/7 and how much meaning they derive from them.  Also, it's a bit philosophical about the implications of immortality and how such people might see things differently from us mortals. The story's final line is a classic...

FOR A BREATH I TARRY by Roger Zelazny

Many thousands of years into the future there is no more human life on Earth, but the machines they built continue "living" on and have created new machines that serve them.  Originally there were two main machines, Solcom as a satellite orbiting Earth, and Divcom, deep underneath the surface, who are now vying for machine supremacy and trying to convert the planet's smaller machines to their respective sides.  On the North Pole dwells the huge, cubical machine Frost who, besides his assigned duties on behalf of Solcom, has an interesting hobby: the study of Man through his relics, books, and movies.  It is this quest to understand what humanity was all about and how they differed from machines that drives the flow of this interesting story.  Frost's fascination with humanity leads him to a wager of sorts with the other machines, leading to a most intriguing ending...

Next week I begin my look at science fiction short stories from 1967...

Just Finished Reading Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane by Suzanne Collins

After thoroughly enjoying reading the Hunger Games young adult science fiction trilogy by Suzanne Collins, I had decided a few weeks ago to go back further in her writing history and tackle her five-part children's fantasy series, titled The Underland Chronicles.  I just finished book two, Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane, from 2004.  Gregor is the name of the series' protagonist, a boy living in poverty in New York City with his family: his mother, father, and two sisters, one of whom, the baby "Boots", has accompanied Gregor in his odysseys far down below ground among the huge talking rats, bats, spiders, cockroaches...and other creatures living there with descendants of the humans who first voyaged there some three centuries earlier.  In this story Gregor is taking Boots out to the park...all he has to do is divert his eyes for a couple of seconds and she's gone...taken underground by giant, protective cockroaches.  You see, they have a scroll, the Prophecy of Bane, which states that the babe's life is in danger from the villainous rats.  Gregor has no choice but to return to the scene of his previous adventure to rescue his beloved little sister...and then is informed that the "Bane" in the prophecy is a huge, evil white rat that he must seek out and destroy on his own.  And the story goes on with some good twists and turns...I liked it and felt that there was a message here regarding using compassion and discernment even in the midst of perilous combat situations.  The ending leaves no doubt that there will be a sequel...which Collins dutifully wrote and published the next year.  I'll soon be reading this next installment, titled Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods...a story which, like the first two, is predicated on a different prophecy of the Underland.  No, I'm not a kid but this series is working for me..,

My #2 All-Time Favorite Song: Switchblade Smiles by Kasabian

SWITCHBLADE SMILES, by the English alternative rock band Kasabian, is my #2 favorite song of all-time.  It's from their 2011 fourth album, titled Velociraptor!, which is also one of the album's tracks...velociraptors, by the way, were a type of speedy, predatory dinosaur during the Cretaceous Period.  Although Kasabian made an interesting, dynamic performance video of Switchblade Smiles, it wasn't released as a single and remains as a deep track on the album, which didn't even chart in the United States (although Velociraptor! reached Number One in the United Kingdom).  Because I was already a Kasabian fan from some of their earlier songs like Reason is Treason, Test Transmission and  L.S.F.,  I soon picked up the album and put it on my MP3 player with all the others...in 2013 I was into listening to a shuffle of Kasabian songs while on my long-distance training runs, and that was how I noticed and grew to appreciate what a great, energetic song Switchblade Smiles was...I made it my "song of the year" seven years ago.  I'm partial to songs like this that fuse together different genres of music and make it all work.  The beginning sounds like it's going to be a techno piece with soft, soothing singing...until the heavy drums cut in and then a killer Led Zeppelin-like guitar rift sends the listener sharply in a different direction.  Add to that elements of punk/rap and eerie interludes sounding Middle Eastern and you have a very singular work.  The lyrics are almost impossible to decipher...even when you read them out, so I have interpreted the general message as one of defiance at all the BS going on around me, to put things as diplomatically as I can..it hits me like Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down in this respect .  It's a passionate song by a band that has sadly tapered off a bit with their last two albums...let's see if they can't pick up the pieces after their front man recently left them and bring back the earlier glory...

Just Finished Reading Solar Lottery by Philip K. Dick

Solar Lottery, a 1955 science fiction novel of Philip K. Dick and the thirteenth book of his I've read so far, creates a future world that I don't want to live in.  Mathematicians in government have devised a strategy of a worldwide society based on a lottery system...how people do depends on their "luck", which they can (and usually do) trade in for the benefit of contracting their labor (and ultimately, freedom) to different powerful employers.  The protagonist, a young engineer named Ted Benteley, one day finds himself out of a job when his employer he is contracted to has to lay off much of their workforce due to a fire.  Benteley wants to climb the ladder of success and seeks the current Quizmaster, i.e. the lottery-winning most-powerful person in the Solar System, to contract himself out to.  Unfortunately, after taking his loyalty oath he finds out that this individual, Verrick, is no longer Quizmaster and he is once again stuck working for a "lesser" employer.  Here the story takes a sharp turn, as the assassination of a Quizmaster is completely legal and Verrick schemes to knock off the new one, a guy named Cartwright.  Since Benteley is in contract to Verrick, he must go along with his new boss's plans...and there the story works it way through to a pretty interesting conclusion.  Throw into the mix that Cartwright is involved with a cult-like movement led by a man named Preston to colonize a yet-undiscovered outer planet, and you pretty much have a sketchy outline of this tale.  Oh, and telepathy plays a role here...causing me to groan a little on the inside since I'm sick and tired of sci-fi stories featuring the phenomenon as an integral element...I don't hanker much to time travel fiction, either (although Stephen King's excellent 11/22/63 is a striking exception).  But I need to consider that the author wrote it in 1955 and it was, according to Wikipedia, his first ever published novel.  As Philip K. Dick novels go, I thought it was one of his better works. From time to time I'll seek out another story of his...he wrote a lot of novels and not all of them were science fiction, although that is the genre for which he is best known... 

Constellation of the Month: Perseus

 

For December I picked as my Constellation of the Month Perseus, prominent for much of the year in northern nighttime skies, and which crosses the meridian around 9 pm this month.  It represents the Greek mythological hero who, riding the winged horse Pegasus, rescues the fair maiden Andromeda from the sea monster Cetus at Queen Cassiopeia's behest...all are represented by nearby constellations. The 1981 movie Clash of the Titans, starring Harry Hamlin as Perseus, presented one version of the story.  Perseus, although possessing no first magnitude stars, is nevertheless loaded with many bright ones, marked by Mirfak and Algol...the latter, "only" 93 light years away from us, is actually a triple star, with its variation in brightness caused by the stars taking turns eclipsing one another.  Mirfak is much further away and bigger.  Perseus is the focus of the annual Perseids, the most spectacular meteor shower of all and which takes place in the wee morning hours around August 11-13 as the Earth rotates into a cloud of dust particles along its orbit around the sun and ignites them within the atmosphere. I can't begin to count the times, though, in which I tried to watch it but for various reasons was thwarted...often from overcast skies, my schedule, or just falling asleep: let's see if I can't catch it in 2021! I've always welcomed seeing Perseus rising up in the northeastern sky (from my Florida latitude) as it presages the coming of the most interesting part of the celestial sky, that of the wintertime.  Next month there can be only one constellation that stands out above all others for January...well, even for the entire year, for that matter: can you guess which one it is?    

Quote of the Week...from Gail Sheehy

Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.                        ---Gail Sheehy

Gail Sheehy was an American journalist and writer who sadly passed away this past August from pneumonia at age 83...regrettably I haven't read any of her works, which deal with numerous ongoing topics in current society including many politically-themed pieces...but her most renowned books are the Passages series focusing on helping more elderly folks (like me) have more fulfilling lives.  I picked her above quote because it is so true, and on more than one level: let me explain...

On a political or national level, I hear a lot of talk these days about how people need to be secure in the areas of their lives that affect them the most...health care reigns prominently in these discussions. But in any industry that wants to grow and increase its quality of goods and services while making them available to the widest possible group of consumers, there is a need for those running the companies to be able to make free choices as to where they place their money and emphasis, based on the needs of those purchasing their products.  In times of emergencies like war or pandemic, successful companies built upon this freedom to grow have then been able to divert their goals to producing much-needed weapons, equipment, and, yes, vaccines: you don't build such organizations from scratch, by governmental decree.  But within all this is the element of the core, basic economic decision, based on scarcity of product and demand and the profit motive...and with it all comes an element of risk.  I'm one of those Americans who feel that health care should be affordable to all and reform of the system is a good thing...but you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater: profit-seeking, risk-taking companies have gotten us here to the point where effective vaccines for this ongoing scourge of this brand-new form of coronavirus have been developed in awe-inspiring, record time...

On a more personal level, I think that growth is both a process of construction and destruction.  Stress, which tears me down physically and mentally, can result in a replacement of body and mind that is stronger and more fulfilling than before if I go about it in an intelligent manner...but it does involve stepping out of that comfort zone and sometimes out on what seems to be a treacherous, narrow ledge up high. Physical exertion through exercise or labor can be seen as a temporary surrender of security as the body is taxed, but after recovery growth has occurred.  Facing down stressful personal storms and getting through them gives me a sense of lack of security when it's all going on, but on the other side I am more equipped to handle future crises.  And sometimes growth in career or relationships can be a little scary as they take me out of my routines and old habits and force me to subject myself to possible failure and rejection. There's nothing more secure, I suppose, than never trying anything new, but it's also stagnating...

Maybe I should try reading something Gail Sheehy has written...I'm sure some of her stuff is in the library...

Local Weather Finally Cools Down

The weather here in northern Florida in the last week or two has finally turned, it seems, toward more wintery, cool conditions...I'm not sure whether to say "thank you" or "oh, no".  Especially in the morning it's the latter choice as I simply do not like the general chill of the area and can't wait to get some hot coffee within me at the first opportunity.  Once the day is firmly underway, though, I tend to enjoy the coolness and dryness.  And with the nighttime, the stars are so much brighter...and then the cycle renews itself the next morning.  When the last cold front passed through, storms hitting my area during the dead of night, my front yard became covered with autumn leaves...guess I'll have to get the rake out before long (let's see if a few more don't come down first).  I'm also happy to see the end of this horrendous 2020 hurricane season...although Louisiana and other areas were hit hard, my own Gainesville vicinity was largely spared although Tropical Storm Eta did sweep through us a few weeks ago, again during the dead of night, knocking down a few branches.  With this colder weather the mosquito presence should subside as well...my workplace is basically situated on the edge of Paynes Prairie, a large wetlands area just south of Gainesville and as big as the city, serving as a vast mosquito incubation zone.  Now excuse me while I go get that crucial first cup of coffee...

Weekly Short Stories: 1966 Science Fiction, Part 2

Below are my reactions to four more short stories originally published in the year 1966 as they appeared in the anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1967 with Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr as editors.  Usually each week when I do this blog feature I can find at least one of the stories I'm examining to be likeable...unfortunately I couldn't this time around, and to make the matter worse the first three were excessively long.  Oh well, you can't win 'em all...

BIRCHER by A.A. Walde

Off sometime in the future when murder is very rare, a regional homicide chief investigator is stumped by an unidentifiable body...clearly the victim of a violent murder...that has been dumped within his district.  Since due to the highly advanced forensics and technology it is virtually impossible in his time to find a corpse without any trail of identifiable features, he finds himself in a situation that threatens his own job should he fail to discover the murderer, much less who the victim was.  It's a traditional whodunnit murder mystery in science fiction garb...nothing wrong with that, but as a reader I felt cheated by the extraneous "facts" the author provided at the end to explain it all...information that I would have no way of knowing since it was safely tucked away within Walde's fertile imagination...

BEHOLD THE MAN by Michael Moorcock

This story took the overdone sci-fi gimmick of time travel and used it to make a statement about religion.  A young amateur psychologist with bigtime neurotic and existential hang-ups finds himself presented with the opportunity to travel back in time by using a crackpot inventor's time machine...he goes back to the Sea of Galilee area around 28 A.D., where he plans to find Jesus and discern some ultimate truths.  The story goes back and forth between his experiences in the Holy Land and the events and discussions with others that led to his forsaking of the present.  If you're into the psychological theories of Carl Jung, you might get more from this story than I did.  I did appreciate that the author demonstrated how certain events can be twisted out of shape and exaggerated over time within popular culture to create myth...the time machine angle was absurd, though, and could only be used one time since any subsequent "trips" would have changed the outcome (although the recent Star Trek movie series seems to have figured a way around that)...

BUMBERBOOM by Avram Davidson

This story, written in a language the author projects far into the future on Earth (and is thus harder to understand), deals with a common theme in science fiction: the regression of humanity from an advanced technological state to a backwards, divided world with more genetically differentiated humanoid groups staking out their own territories and reverting to older social forms and norms.  The chief instigator in this change was something called the "Great Gene Shift" and left unexplained.  The story's protagonist, Mallian, High Man to the Hereditor of Land Qanaras, is a traveling adventurer who seeks his own power and fortune by manipulating those he encounters.  He runs across a huge ancient mobile weapon...perhaps it was a tank...called "Bumberboom" and decides to go about arming it and using it to achieve his ends.  The story resembles Don Quixote in its flow and characters, and Mallian even gets a Sancho Panza-like sidekick toward the end.  It's farcical and hard to decipher...if you can get through the muddled language it's kind of funny and sad at the same time...

DAY MILLION by Fredrik Pohl

This was a very short, snide little piece appearing at the time in the men's magazine Rogue, so its subject was heavily sexual and concerned the relationship between two humans of the future 10,000 years from now (1966, that is).  Pohl does throw in some intriguing ideas about the redesigning of people...on both genetic and cybernetic levels...to achieve longer and more active lives and specialized abilities to adapt to certain environments.  But the general aim of Day Million was to titillate the reader, which apparently worked well enough for anthology editors Wollheim and Carr to select it: I wouldn't have...

Next week I continue looking back at short science fiction from the year 1966...

Just Finished Reading Fall of Giants by Ken Follett

During the last decade Ken Follett wrote a historical fiction trilogy titled Century...Fall of Giants, which dealt with World War I and the years preceding and following it, is the first volume. It features the lives of fictional Welsh, English, German, Russian and American families as they find themselves at the forefront of monumental events in history.  Class divisions and struggles for equal rights vie with the war drums, ignited to actual conflict after Austria-Hungary's Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated by a Serbian nationalist in Bosnia in June of 1914 and the different mutual aid treaties entangling the great European powers drag them all into open hostilities, starting with Austria's invasion of Serbia and then expanding into the German-Russian theater in the east and German's incursion into France through neutral Belgium in the west, leading to a lengthy, disastrous trench warfare stalemate in northeastern France and Belgium between the Allies (first France and Britain and then with the United States entering later) and the Germans.  Before all this the narrative focuses on the Welsh mining family of the Williams, with young Billy entering the mines following in his father's footsteps, with the two adamantly opposed to the owner that Billy's sister Ether works for, a privileged wealthy nobleman named Edward Fitzherbert. Fitz's sister Maude finds herself falling in love with Walter von Ulrich, a visiting German nobleman: not good for them with a war coming on!  Add to the mix the Russian orphaned brothers Lev and Gregori Peshkov and the American official Gus Dewar and you have the book's principal fictional characters, destined to play their own significant roles among real people of the times like Vladimir Lenin, King George V of England, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, Leon Trotsky, Alexander Kerensky, and US President Woodrow Wilson...to name a few of the most important.  From what I already knew about this time and its tumultuous events, I felt that once you filter out the fictional characters, the narrative accurately recounts what really happened.  The only problem I had with it was that I felt the author tended to gloss over the calamitous Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918-19, which actually killed more people worldwide than the war itself. Had Follett written this story in 2020 during this coronavirus pandemic, I wonder whether he might have emphasized that time's horrible pestilence more.  I thought his characters were very compelling and believable, each of them with their own virtues and faults...and also having to deal with the prevailing social and political winds of their own time.  I'm looking forward to beginning the next book in Follett's series, titled Winter of the World... 

My #3 All-Time Favorite Song: Us by Regina Spektor

US, by the Russian-American piano virtuoso (and great singer) Regina Spektor, is from her 2004 third album, titled Soviet Kitsch...and happens to be my #3 favorite song of all time.  As is the case on almost all of her songs, it's basically Regina's voice and her piano...with a beautiful string background...as she delivers an epic performance that touches upon her old Soviet homeland and the many, many statues constructed there of the State's political heroes, as well as the renaming of cities.  The lyrics, unlike any other song I've heard, carry for me two separate meanings, one more literal and the other more applicable to people in general, as their exploits, good or bad, while at one time recognized and even widely lauded, become over the span of time tarnished...or, worse, forgotten: "They'll name a city after us and later say it's all our fault...then they'll give us a talking to, give us a talking to, 'cause they've got years of experience."  The lyrics about statues vividly brings to my mind that Russian statue graveyard scene in the 1995 James Bond movie Goldeneye.  In America of late they've been doing similar things with old statues of presidents and civil war figures, retroactively accused of terrible behavior from the convenient perspective of our enlightened standards of today.  On a broader interpretation, I feel that the trend today is to puncture anything about the past that speaks of greatness through condemnation...I have no problem with reasonable criticism...or simply to forget about it and let it all rust away as Regina alluded to in her song.  I keep thinking of the prolific writer Isaac Asimov, who passed away only 28 years ago and who published more than 500 books in his lifetime, many of them critically successful and popular.  But I wonder how many people, if you asked a random sample of the population, have even heard of him, much less any of his works?  The desire of immortality is often said to be expressed through people's achievements and the effects they have beyond their death...this dream seems to be becoming more and more difficult to realize, especially for those whose life works happened before the digital revolution came to preserve every absurd expressed thought by anybody with an online connection...now we're all being drowned out by each other's voices, and cancel culture reaches out to condemn anyone from the past who might have said or written something back then that offends somebody today.  I first heard Us in 2009 after I was introduced to Regina Spektor on an online alternative music radio channel...it quickly became a favorite of mine.  Can't wait for your next album, Regina!

My Sports Enthusiasm Cooling Down

In case you're wondering why I haven't been peppering this blog recently with sports articles as I have done in the past, this one's for you. I've still been watching sports on TV like usual, right through this pandemic.  I followed the end of the NBA and NHL resumed seasons as well as Major League Baseball's attenuated regular season and expanded playoffs.  I still keep up with professional league soccer, notably the Mexican premier league and Major League Soccer, and regularly watch football, both college and NFL.  But I'm nowhere near where I used to be as far as caring that much who wins or loses...even for my traditional favorites.  Part of the reason is that I've grown to see sports for what it is: entertainment, not something in which I should invest a large part of my emotions, and I never gamble on games.  Since I'm neither a player nor a coach, I have no input into the result of a game I'm watching, so I'm essentially helpless if I do care who wins...other than switch the channel or turn off the TV.  I'm also fed up with the trend on ESPN and other sports media to be full of their own perceived seriousness, as if they were some force in social consciousness with their political correctness and "historical" programming like that annoying series on Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls earlier this year.  I'm tired of sports talk show shock jocks like Stephen A. Smith taunting and deriding certain athletes and coaches they dislike.  But most of all I had an epiphany of sorts when, a few weeks ago following the University of Florida's football loss to Texas A&M, Gator coach Dan Mullen urged for Florida to "pack the Swamp" (their home stadium) in the following week's scheduled game against LSU...Mullen was roundly criticized in the midst of this dangerous COVID pandemic, UF players and staff (including, later, Mullen) tested positive, and the game was postponed. The way I see it, there are too many people in this country who would gladly trade off a few extra deaths in exchange for keeping their supply of sports addiction at the same level that they were used to seeing, flowing freely to them and with full stadiums and arenas...this kind of attitude makes me more inclined to forego even casual sports watching and boycott the entire industry... 

My Architecture Period as a Kid

When my sister Anita, older than me by four years, got hold of a textbook on architecture some time in the mid-to-late 1960s (I'm guessing around 1967-68), she introduced me to the subject and I became fascinated with the different types of buildings...chiefly those of houses...and began to look forward to the weekly Sunday newspaper, not for the comics or sports but rather for the real estate section.  In it were always floor plans of houses that were for sale, and I would imagine myself living in them.  Soon I was drawing up my own floor plans, which...following my sailing ship, world geography, and star map periods, began the next "big thing" for me...in between collecting stamps and trading cards, that is.  At the time, as far as I can remember, I was in the fifth or sixth grade at Nova Blanche Forman Elementary in Davie...Anita's school was across the field at Nova High.   By the way, back then I was fascinated by the pictures of Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural works, and I had always thought that the house at the end of Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 masterpiece thriller North by Northwest was a Wright home.  But after just looking it up, I discovered that instead of being a real building situated behind Mount Rushmore, it was only a movie set creation in California, built to look like something that the famous architect might have designed.  It was my recent subscription to online newspaper archives that brought my architecture period back to the forefront of my memory as I once again scanned through Sunday paper home sections...the above clip is from the June 19, 1966 Miami Herald: check out the prices!  Nowadays I'm more interested in big buildings, impressed by the towering skyscrapers during visits to New York and Chicago (including the Windy City's fantastic Architecture River Tour)...while equally taken aback by those block-long, shorter office monstrosities in Washington, D.C. (shorter due to the city's height restriction for buildings).  As for houses, you might think I'd be a big fan of the Home and Garden channel...but alas, my interest in house designs is no longer what it was more than fifty years ago...

Quote of the Week...from William Arthur Ward

 It is wise to direct your anger at problems, not people...to focus your energies on answers, not excuses.

                                                                             ---William Arthur Ward

I picked up the above quote off my Music Choice Soundscapes channel, provided by my cable TV company and which features positive and philosophical quotes to accompany their ambient music.  William Arthur Ward, whom I've quoted before on this blog, was a twentieth century Christian leader within the Methodist movement whose self-improvement maxims were widely published in newspapers and magazines of the time, most notably Reader's Digest.  I'm discussing it here because I agree with it, but as usual I feel the need to tweak it a little.  For after all, many people nowadays equate their problems with certain people, either in their personal lives or on the national stage in politics or the media. For me, sometimes those politicians in charge are the ones I voted for, sometimes not...that's the way it has always gone in this republic where people vote for their leaders: wait a few years and try it again...maybe "my" guy or gal will win next time if they didn't the last.  On the personal level I think a lot of us...myself included...have fallen into the trap of sitting back and judging those around us without taking into account that our own willful interactions (or non-interactions) with them play a big role in their own attitudes and behavior toward us.  For myself, it's important that with each situation I find myself in that I determine what I'm trying to get out of it and focus on getting my goals accomplished...this helps keep me from that nasty habit of "sideways thinking", i.e. devoting my attention to what others are up to and whether they're being treated better than me or getting away with something they shouldn't.  There's a way to address problems with others...like Ward said, focusing on the problem and not the person while, I would add, communicating during most of any interaction about how much I value that individual. Although it's fair and even recommended to honestly recognize the harm that certain people may have done to me when I was but a child and not to sugarcoat those times...I still have to take responsibility for my own life now. To make excuses or play the blame game when things don't go my way isn't just counterproductive...it also tends to create more problems...

Trying to Obtain Use from Basically Useless Resources

Like squeezing water from a rock, some of the media resources surrounding me offer little hope of positive, constructive use...yet in almost all of them there can be opportunities for enlightenment and application if I just apply myself and face the challenge of plowing through mostly meaningless...and often downright dishonest...drivel.  Take conservative talk radio, for example.  Shows like Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and Michael Savage depend on listeners plugging their brains into them for two to three hours daily and putting their own independent thinking to sleep as they voluntarily submit themselves to the hosts' brainwashing...but I don't have to go down that path: I can be a discerning listener, noticing when the host is being demagogic or dishonest and when he or she is expressing a reasonable opinion worth considering.  In almost every opinion show on radio or TV, be they from a conservative or liberal perspective, there is something worthwhile...even if it only is to figure out why certain individuals around me are believing the weird things they believe.  Still, with this I wouldn't rely on any of them as my primary source for news. As for other areas, I am regularly receiving company and union periodicals in the mail...I survey each of them and quickly dispose of them: maybe a little more intensive examination might reveal a useful tidbit of information I could use.  As for politicians, it's always a useful intellect and character-building exercise to take the ones I support and look for things to criticize while taking those I oppose and looking for something to praise.  Such an exercise doesn't create uncertainty within me, but rather strengthens my arguments pro and con about the issues and those espousing their positions on them.  In browsing through old newspapers online from years gone by, I have noticed that not only do editorial page columns provide insights into the time period being investigated, but also how regular articles are written, as well as advice columns, advertisements, the classifieds, entertainment section...and even the comic strips.  In a world in which the different political and self-identification factions of the population are bubbling themselves off into insulated spheres of feedback loops, each with their own "alternative facts" and subjective realities, I think it would be healthy for each of us to take at least one day every week or two (or month) and just immerse ourselves...as honestly and empathetically as possible...in the "opposition" bubble.  And also try to find some educational or useful experience in everything we encounter, even if it's generally regarded as junk... 

Weekly Short Stories: 1966 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I begin looking back at the year 1966 with sci-fi short short stories using the retrospective anthology World's Best Science Fiction: 1967, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr...the title year refers to its time of publication, not the stories contain therein. The first three stories I discuss below contain their own feasible innovations...implanted memories, time-capturing glass, genetically altered human forms to live on other planets...while the final one has a more philosophical (and humorous) bent to it.  Here they are...

WE CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE by Philip K. Dick

The is the Philip K. Dick tale on which the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall was based...which just a few years ago was remade with a different cast (with much worse reviews). The themes are similar, with a man on Earth doing menial work in the not-so-distant future while dreaming of having an adventurous life on Mars after it has just begun to be explored and settled.  There's a company that creates and implants intricate memories into its clients, and Douglas Quail goes there...with the discovery soon made that he's actually been to Mars.  From here on the written story diverges quite a bit from the movie and, in my opinion, has a more interesting, twisted ending...but you'll have to read it for yourself to discover what it is...

LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS by Bob Shaw

In this story Bob Shaw introduces his innovation of "slow glass", through which light takes years to pass ...and therefore provides a window into the past, capturing ongoing images of wherever it faced the measured number of years before.  An unhappily married, quarreling couple is driving through the countryside, where rows and rows of slow glass are up for sale.  The man stops where the owner is sitting to see about buying some of the glass and happens to see a young woman and her child looking out the nearby home's window without seeming to take any notice of them.  This tale has an amazing ending and puts life's petty squabbles and resentments into perspective...  

THE KEYS TO DECEMBER by Roger Zelazny

In a relatively distant future when humanity has explored and settled deep into the cosmos, biological science has naturally leaped ahead and genetically-designed humanoid varieties, suited for more extreme conditions on specified worlds, are being born to "normal" parents.  Jarry is such a "person", a Catform Coldworlder meant to live on a very cold planet with mining interests, but before he can be sent there its star turns supernova and he is stuck in cold hibernation until another home planet can be found.  Finally another is discovered, but it must be environmentally modified over the course of some thousands of years while Jarry and the other Catforms living there spend most of their time in suspended animation, coming out briefly every 200 years or so to make sure the process is running well.  Only one problem: the native life forms on this world are struggling to varying degrees to adapt to the much colder conditions and Jarry sees that one species is much more intelligent than the prospectors had thought.  I wonder whether this might be one of the more realistic scenarios for future space exploration and settlement...

NINE HUNDRED GRANDMOTHERS by R.A. Lafferty

On the asteroid Proavitus dwell a population claiming never to die.  A trading company, with its employees taking on menacing names like Manbreaker Crag and Blast Berg, lands to transact business there. One of its members, a young man named Ceran who has foresworn the toughguy nicknames of his fellow workers, decides to investigate the source of the native folk's immortality, leading on a quest deeper and deeper under the surface as he peels back generation after generation, talking to the sleepy ancestors.  The ending of this very short story is funny...and hints that the secret to never-ending physical life may be a lot simpler...and less important...than one might think...

Next week I'll be continuing my review of short science fiction from 1966...

My November 2020 Running & Walking Report

In November I ran for a total of 102 miles, missing three days of running and with 6 miles being my longest single run of the month.  I also began to record my walking mileage, amassing a total of 105 miles in November.  I expect the walking-to-running mileage ratio to increase as I get older, and will most likely eventually transition into a primarily walking exercise routine.  This doesn't mean that I am forgoing athletics: speed walking is definitely an option for me and might be something to pursue in shorter races, especially the 5K ones.  But for the immediate future I'm still running and the weather this first week in December has made a strong turn to cooler winter conditions, giving me impetus to go out once again on long weekend runs.  As for races, the coronavirus pandemic surge is precluding my participation, even for any races that are being held in defiance of recommendations.  Hopefully, in the not too distant future the vaccines will turn it all around and I'll be able to enter a few in 2021...we'll see...

My #4 All-Time Favorite Song: When the Levee Breaks by Led Zeppelin

WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS by Led Zeppelin, the #4 song on my list of 500 all-time favorites, had an interesting history with me.  Since it came out as the final track on the British hard rock band's fourth, untitled album in the early 1970s it had been a regular staple on album rock radio...I would often listen to the lengthy, relentless instrumental buildup at the start, only to switch stations when singer Robert Plant finally broke in.  This went on for years until the band...already broken up for a decade after the death of drummer John Bonham...came out with their box set CD compilation in late 1990.  My local rock station, WRUF/Rock 104, decided to play the entire set and I listened to much of it, realizing in the process what a remarkably talented and creative band Led Zeppelin was.  Among several of the tracks that I liked a lot, When the Levee Breaks stood out and quickly became a song I couldn't get enough of...I crowned it my "song of the year" for 1991 twenty years after it came out and afterward also had it as my number one top all-time favorite song for some two decades.  The song was originally written and recorded by blues artists Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie following the devastating Mississippi flood of 1927...the broken levees around New Orleans due to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 brought on a revival of the Led Zeppelin cover on TV and radio.  Their version features brilliant harmonica work throughout, and the drumming is echoing and booming.  Sometimes I'm irritated by Plant's forays into high-pitched, screeching singing on many of their songs, but he's more subdued on this piece and fits in perfectly with the instruments.  The song speaks of a flood and broken levees, but it extends to all of the storms people experience and this year's pandemic is no exception.  There isn't a weak moment in it, from the drum, harmonica and guitar intro, Plant's verses, the riveting mid-song instrumental break with one of the all-time greatest harmonica solos, and that long, trailing conclusion.  By the way, When the Levee Breaks may well be the only song in my all-time favorite Top Six that you've heard...I have never heard any of the upcoming three songs on my list played on either radio or TV, although in my estimation they all should have been monumental hits...

Newspaper Archives a Fun Portal into History

With my ability now to research old newspapers at different times in recent history, I am afforded the opportunity to investigate how different ongoing events were being reported.  I'm compiling a list of some interesting times that I'm looking into during the next few weeks:

--Sunday newspaper opinion pages just preceding each presidential election

--The summer of 1914 after Austrian Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Bosnia, with subsequent events leading to the outbreak of World War I.

--Stories about Japanese-American relations in the weeks before Pearl Harbor.

--The early weeks in the Korean War, 1950.

--Civil rights stories in the 1950s and 1960s.

--The American reaction to the Soviets' Sputnik launch in October 1957.

--The Cuban revolution under Castro and early events of his regime in 1959.

--The Cuban Missile Crisis of  October 1962.

--Lyndon Johnson's statements about Vietnam as president in 1964, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

--The Democratic Party presidential race in 1968 up to the California primary and Robert Kennedy's assassination.

--George Romney's candidacy for president in 1968 and his disastrous "brainwashing" comment.

--Stories about the breakup of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s.

--Any articles with "experts" predicting the future.

--Retroactively politically incorrect articles deemed acceptable in the times they were published.

Well, that's just a few of what I'm looking at...besides old comic strips, advertisements, and puzzles, that is.  Since I was a history major in college, this archival exploration is pure joy for me...must have been kind of like how old Gandalf felt in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring when he paid a visit to Minas Tirith's old library archives to read up about "magic rings" from the ancient past....

Some Pandemic Musings at Starbucks

Wednesday I was sitting at a Starbucks...the one here on NW 39th Avenue in northern Gainesville that I first frequented twenty years ago back in 2000 when it first opened.  As is the case around town...and I suspect throughout the country, Starbucks has for the time being banned indoor seating while keeping the outdoors open...my hindsight instincts tell me that this should have been their policy since the coronavirus outbreak in spring instead of completely closing down: of course, if local and state governments are mandating lockdowns, there's not a whole lot to be done about it.  The other Starbucks I go to...much closer to my home...a few weeks ago actually had gone as far as eliminating the spacing between their indoor seating that they had instituted after finally opening back up.  I had gone in there a few times and was taken aback at how close together people were sitting...always with several of them not wearing masks and no apparent limit on the number of indoor customers.  The last time I visited this place, though, they had closed their indoor area off.  I almost always order my coffee (venti iced with vanilla and cream) on my mobile app from home and then pick it up at the store, foregoing the line.  I also park as close to the store as possible...if all the outdoor seats are taken, I can just roll down the windows and drink (and write) in my car.  I'm hoping that these new vaccines will be effective and finally eliminate this need for distancing and mask wearing...although it seems that many people are still living their lives in a cloud of denial, social irresponsibility and callousness for their fellow Americans' health by refusing to do either.  It especially distresses me to see this utter disregard for others' lives with some people I regularly encounter who have stubbornly refused to wear protective face coverings, even though the number of positive cases around me and the country as a whole has drastically spiked. This pandemic experience has certainly opened up my eyes to the state of the society I'm living in as well as certain individuals I have to interact with, and I'm not liking what I'm seeing at all...  

Quote of the Week...from Carl Sagan

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.  We're no longer interested in finding out the truth.  The bamboozle has captured us.  It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken.  Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never give it back.                   ---Carl Sagan

One of the reasons I picked the above quote...which I once again first saw as a posting by WKTK Radio morning show personality Storm Roberts...is the frequent use of the word "bamboozle": I like it and plan to use it myself.  Carl Sagan was the astronomer who created the 1980s TV series Cosmos in its original run and did much to bring complex science to a level that the masses can understand.  He also seemed pretty adept at understanding how people think, for this quote of his directly applies in great measure to our present time here in 2020, 24 years after his death.  Last Sunday I was driving down NW 39th Avenue here in Gainesville...as I crossed over I-75 I saw several people on the sidewalk overlooking the Interstate, waving big Trump banners to the passing traffic below them.  Today it's more than three weeks after the election with state after state certifying Biden's victory over the sitting president, but Trump refuses to concede, claiming massive voter fraud although all of his legal challenges have been rebuffed in court.  Whether one voted for Donald Trump or not, any reasonable conclusion from his behavior is that he is a sore loser and never acknowledges defeat...but apparently some two thirds of his supporters are incapable of seeing what is right in front of them and have chosen to parrot the president's claim of mass election rigging.  This probably happens in every close election to some extent...I vividly remember disappointed people in 2016 after Trump won exclaiming "Not my president!"...but this year the degree of denial from the losing side seems to be have sharply accelerated. Why?  I think that, along with a very unhealthy personality cult here, it has a lot to do with what Sagan called "bamboozling". People have been fooled by politicians since time immemorable, but recently with the rise of social media like Facebook and Twitter many of the suckers have gone on public record with their views, for anyone to see.  While in previous times folks could just shrug off their betrayed faith in a political figure, nowadays it's probably too humiliating for someone, after so adamantly publicly supporting a con, to admit they were bamboozled.  So instead many just continue with their delusions, existing in an artificial social bubble of an alternate universe where Donald Trump easily won reelection and was cheated out of a second term by a vast, extremely elaborate conspiracy.  As someone generally skeptical of conspiracy theories, I agree with Sagan that it's probably a waste of time for anyone to attempt to steer any of these people back to reality...their pride is too painfully threatened...

Happy Thanksgiving Day to All

In the midst of a stormy time such as this, with the coronavirus pandemic causing so much death, suffering, worry and disruption among us here in America and in the world at large, as well as the seemingly polarized political divisions within our nation, it might seem a little unrealistic to take this day to express our gratitude for the blessings we have.  But it's precisely in such times of turmoil and despair that such an act is most needed to keep us grounded in our faith and values and to be able to continue walking down the straight and narrow path that will lead us through all the difficulties.  I am blessed and thankful for my wonderful wife Melissa as well as our two grown children Will and Rebecca, my sister Anita and her family, my extended relatives, my fantastic job with my amazing coworkers past and present, my church with its compassionate and caring congregation and leadership, my neighbors, and my old school classmates...what a blessing to see so many of them still around and enjoying the best of life!  With my gratitude for the good things in my life I extend it to a sense of hope that the future will contain many more things for which I can give thanks...including the multiple effective vaccines that have been recently developed to eliminate this pestilence from humanity.  So with gratitude comes hope, and a confidence that a much greater hand than we possess is shaping our destinies according to his purposes...

Weekly Short Stories: 1965 Science Fiction, Part 4

With my reviews of the following three stories I conclude my examination of some of 1965's finer sci-fi short stories, as selected by editors Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Clark for their anthology World's Best Science Fiction: 1966 (the series regrettably puts the year of publication in the title instead of the year of focus).  Unlike with the previous anthology series featuring Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg as editors which came out in the late 1980s and early 90s while covering much earlier stories (from 1939 through 1963), Wollheim's series offers no such distant hindsight, selecting their stories the very next year after they came out.  I bring this up because in a later article I'll be discussing the difference, but for now here are my reactions to the three final '65 tales...

MASQUE OF THE RED SHIFT by Fred Saberhagen

Yet another short story in Saberhagen's "berserker" series of ancient automated warships of mass destruction that have invaded our Milky Way galaxy, in this one there is a galactic human government with outbreaks of rebel planets fighting for independence.  While High Lord Nogora observes from his ship what can only be described as a black hole, a berserker has intercepted a ship transporting rebel prisoners to Nogora for interrogation.  Nogora's frozen, half-dead half-brother holds the key to this story of political intrigue while an incredibly Borg-like transformation of one of the prisoners steers it to its resolution...if I were into the series I probably would have liked this story more...

THE CAPTIVE DJINN by Christopher Anvil

A human mining engineer is being held prisoner on a planet populated by hostile feline humanoids who are at a lower technological level than humans and regard their enhanced abilities as magical.  The captive demonstrates this "magic" as he fools his captors into giving him all the ingredients by which he can make his escape.  I came away from Anvil's story thinking he was making an analogy to the attitudes many people have had toward modern technology and putting it out as a humorous satire.  This story had a Hogan's Heroes flavor to it, with the imprisoned running rings around the imprisoners without them knowing it...

THE GOOD NEW DAYS by Fritz Leiber

It's the future on Earth as the advent of robots and automation has created a situation among the swelling population where competition for useful jobs is prohibitive. The solution, instead of creating more leisure time among the population to pursue the arts, sciences, and other interests, is to create a plethora of new, essentially useless jobs with social status determined by how many jobs one has.  A family living in the slums...albeit provided with all the essentials to live...nevertheless cannot come to grips with the "way things are", especially the four grown brothers' feisty, stubborn mother.  And now it seems that the robots are beginning to malfunction...or is something ominous developing among a unified technology that humanity completely depends upon?  This story was difficult to read through, but its main points seem portentous...

Next week I begin my look back at the year 1966 in short science fiction...

Rereading George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire Series at High Speed

Anticipating, perhaps unrealistically, that George R.R. Martin's long-awaited next volume in his A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, titled The Winds of Winter, will come out some time next year as he has expressed, I decided to reread the series' first five rather lengthy books.  In doing this I'm checking each of them out from my library on audiobook and listening to them at high speed...sometimes as fast as 2.7 times normal speed.  I can do this because I already read through the same material before...what I'm essentially doing is bringing what I already knew back up to date in my memory.  I've already gone through A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords, and have just begun the fourth book, A Feast for Crows.  Had this series come out, say...40 years ago, I would have been unable to play the audiobooks on high speed since they all would have been in analog form and speeding them up would have made them sound too high-pitched.  I never did watch the Game of Thrones television series on HBO, which went far beyond Martin's progress in writing his books and concluded everything...apparently much to the chagrin of both viewers who disliked the outcome and those, like myself, who were holding out for the books.  I don't know whether the author will conform to the TV series version or digress from it but I do enjoy his narrative and characters a lot...maybe I will read that 2018 prequel novel of his titled Fire & Blood if his Winds of Winter publication is further postponed...it's already nine years since the publication of Book #5, titled A Dance with Dragons, and Martin needs to finally get on with it.  Maybe when I've finished rereading these first five books I'll get down to sharing my reactions...with a notice at the top of that article warning about some serious plot spoilers contained therein...

My #5 All-Time Favorite Song: Time to Pretend by MGMT

TIME TO PRETEND, by the Connecticut-based indie band MGMT, was the opening track to their debut album Oracular Spectacular, which came out in 2007...but didn't begin to catch my attention until the following year.  My local alternative rock station, WHHZ/100.5/"The Buzz" by 2008 had completely abandoned their earlier indie/alternative format in favor of mainstream rock acts like Nickelback and Shinedown, which they had previously ridiculed, so I in turn abandoned them and listened instead to my TV cable service's Music Choice alternative channel...which is where I was introduced to Time to Pretend.  Eventually I got the album...Kids was probably the most famous track from it.  MGMT is essentially the project of college roommates Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, with others hired to complete the band.  When I finally got around to watching the video to Time to Pretend I was swept away...it's one of the great music videos of all time, playing off more on the song's wistful title than its much darker and more somber lyrics.  On one level the song talks of the notion of sinking into a fantasy life while on another...accompanied by some explicit lyrics...it deals in ironic fashion with young music stars who jump unreservedly into a drug-drenched hedonistic lifestyle and pay for it all with an early death: the final line is a severe slap in the face and reminded me a little of Bad Company's similarly-themed hit Shooting Star.  But I was much more intrigued by Time to Pretend's unique instrumentation with its special synthesizer accompaniment.  The song starts out sounding like an anthem but ends as something completely different...there are a lot of ways the listener can treat it: I strongly recommend its far-out fantasy collage video.  Back in 2008 I deemed it as my top song of that year and have always held it in high regard ever since...

The United States Presidents Who Owned Slaves

As I've mentioned in a few of my recent blog articles, I now enjoy an Internet service that allows me to rummage through old newspapers online...I've been focusing on October, 1956...the month of my birth...using the Miami News as my source.  Beginning September 27th of that year, they had a daily feature focusing on the American presidents, starting with George Washington and ending with the then-current one, Dwight D. Eisenhower just before the presidential election.  The insets...the above one is of Andrew Jackson...summarized each succeeding president and not only informed me of their respective lives and administrations, but also of the prevailing social and political climate of 1956.  For example, in none of the articles was it mentioned that a president owned slaves...yet with the first 18 presidents, 12...or two thirds...were indeed slave owners at one time or another, not to mention 10 of the first 12.  Here's the list of presidents who in at least one point of their lives owned slaves, as it appeared in Wikipedia:

GEORGE WASHINGTON

THOMAS JEFFERSON

JAMES MADISON

JAMES MONROE

ANDREW JACKSON

MARTIN VAN BUREN

WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON

JOHN TYLER

JAMES KNOX POLK

ZACHARY TAYLOR

ANDREW JOHNSON

ULYSSES S. GRANT  

Of the above, Jackson, Harrison, Tyler, and Polk were the most unapologetically pro-slavery.  Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, while hypocritically benefitting materially from their slaves, either allowed for their freedom following their own deaths or wrote and spoke in opposition to this onerous institution that violated every principle of freedom and justice that they proclaimed as Founding Fathers...and to his discredit Jefferson actually fathered children with one of his slaves.  Others had a more marginal connection with slave ownership, some supporting slavery's expansion into US territories and new states while others pushed restraint.  I'm not writing this to condemn these men...they lived in a different era when values that decent and reasonable people today abhor were more accepted in society.  But it does bear noting that in none of the 1956 articles I read did slave ownership among some presidents seem worth mentioning...and that does bother me a lot.  It also bothers me that "originalist" conservatives who are always trying to return to the Founding Fathers' thoughts when arguing their constitutional priorities gloss over their slaveholding while trying to depict the simple wearing of a mask for the public's safety in the midst of this dangerous pandemic as some kind of violation of their high and holy rights...oh, please...

Just Finished Reading Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins

Before Suzanne Collins wrote her celebrated young adult science fiction series The Hunger Games, she produced a five-volume children's fantasy series titled The Underland Chronicles.  They feature young Gregor, a New York City boy who one day discovers a secret passageway to "Underland" through a hole in his family's basement laundry room.  This special hidden place under the Earth's surface is populated by humans and various human-sized, English-speaking animals like rats, bats, cockroaches and spiders...that aspect of it reminded me of Roald Dahl's 1961 children's novel  James and the Giant Peach while the underground secret world made me think of Neil Gaiman's 1996 adult book Neverwhere ...click on the titles' links to access my reviews of them.  I just finished reading the first book, Gregor the Overlander, from 2003.  Gregor, whose father mysteriously disappeared two years earlier, is stuck at home caring for his little baby sister Boots...the two accidentally fall through the hole and they're suddenly in the thick of all the ongoing drama, with a mysterious prophecy portending the unfolding of events.  I've always had a soft spot in my heart for stories with secret portals to other realities, but I wasn't too thrilled with talking roaches and rats...still, I get it: this is a children's series.  By far my favorite parts of the story were when Boots was featured, acting in such an endearing, spontaneous manner as a little baby full of wonder at the new world around her...and sometimes full of impetuous, selfish angry outbursts as well.  I'm planning on sweeping through this series in the next few weeks, spacing my readings between other books.  Collins wrote the installments quickly, to her credit: if you're a little kid and read the first book that came out, you don't need to be waiting three-to-five years for the next one: she finished writing the last book in 2007, a year before she began her Hunger Games project.  Yes, even at 64 years I'm a sucker for children's books and this series promises to be entertaining...

Quote of the Week...from Soren Kierkegaard

There are two ways to be fooled.  One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.                                                       Soren Kierkegaard

Soren Kierkegaard was an 19th century Danish existential philosopher, essayist and Christian scholar.  I found his above quote in a posting on Facebook by local radio (WKTK) announcer Storm Roberts: its message couldn't be more applicable in today's world of alternative facts, bizarre conspiracy theories, habitually-leveled accusations of hoaxes and rigging, insulated information bubbles within social and broadcast media, out-of-context reporting, gaslighting, cancel culture, retroactive political correctness, historical revisionism, and foreign-inspired disinformation campaigns...to name a few of the ongoing trends.  In his quote Kierkegaard distinguishes between two types of being fooled.  I think both are commonly in play in our contemporary society that is loaded with the aforementioned avenues through which deception is routinely conveyed.  But I think the Danish academic left out another important way to be fooled.  Talk show hosts on radio and TV...as well as Facebook and Twitter advocates...regularly present their own political and social philosophies in terms of well-grounded, appealing principles while attacking their opponents personally or through sound bites and anecdotes...the aim is present those "other guys" as having no principles at all.  The solution as I see it is for any broadcaster who wants to be seen as fair to allow for principled discussion of the issues in our time with an implicit understanding that the participants to lay off the personal invective.  We actually did have such shows in the past like William F. Buckley's Firing Line and the Dick Cavett Show...where the quests, regardless of their viewpoints, were afforded the time...without repeated interruption as is usually the case nowadays...to lay out their visions and philosophies.  I suggest that if you ever find yourself listening to talk radio or TV to practice discerning what they're up to...I actually am quite open to listening to people defending their worldviews by espousing the principles behind their beliefs. It's them tearing into their perceived adversaries that leaves me cold...a major reason why I steadfastly avoid late night "comedy" talk shows on TV. If you're letting them be your major source of news then you're fooling yourself...

Just Finished Reading Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick

Martian Time-Slip is a 1964 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, the twelfth book I've read of his so far.  Its time setting is 30 years into the future, i.e. 26 years ago in 1994.  Mars has been explored and settled for several years and it seems humanity has transported its nationalism, prejudices, and mental illness straight over to the new world...which they have discovered is already inhabited by a human race called the Bleekmen: apparently both Earth and Mars were seeded with humanity around the same time by an outside source hundreds of thousands of years ago.  A repairman recovering from a schizophrenic episode on Earth has moved to the Red Planet with his family in order to find some mental peace from the masses of people crowding his planet of origin.  He finds himself drawn into a complex web of relationships between a bigoted wealthy businessman, that man's wife, his neighbors which include a trader in the thriving black market and his autistic son...and the psychiatrist treating the boy.  The narrative is presented from the various characters' perspectives, and this becomes pretty interesting when the autistic boy is featured...he suffers from the problem of dealing with a time that flows much more quickly for him than for the "normal" people around him.  Also, he is a precog, which is someone who can see into the future.  This piques the businessman's interest and he seeks to use the boy's talents for his own purposes.  Mars is presented as a bleak, unfriendly world where no one in their right mind should want to live...in this at least I thought the author probably got it right.  Dick, however, treated schizophrenia and autism in this story as two forms of the same thing and presented them as vehicles for enlightenment...from what I've read about him he, too, suffered some some kind of mental illness.  That he would have Mars already being colonized by 1994 isn't really surprising since transportation technology and exploration had been in a state of explosive growth during the span of the previous few decades...it's more far-fetched...and much more disappointing...to me that we're now in the year 2020 and haven't left low Earth orbit in 48 years!  Martian Time-Slip wasn't one of my favorite Philip K. Dick stories, but the idea of somehow becoming disengaged from the normal flow of time is an intriguing subject that he treated very well here...

Weekly Short Stories: 1965 Science Fiction, Part 3

Here are my reactions to four more short stories from 1965 appearing in the anthology World's Best Science Fiction: 1966, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr.  I found the below tales to be most interesting, especially the first one which blew me away.  I've been generally impressed with the editors' picks for the year's best...I just wished they'd synced the year on the anthology's title with the actual year the stories were released.  In any event, here are my reviews for this week...

TRAVELER'S REST by David I. Masson

One of the more intriguing science fiction stories I've read, this tale of a world on which the rate of passage of time varies by the distance to time waves radiating from a singularity high up in the mountains...where a vicious stalemate of a war for survival is ongoing against a ruthless enemy.  A soldier at the front is informed of his "retirement" and gets to live years of his life in peace while raising his family in the idyllic lower lands...while hardly any time at all passes high up on the front.  The conclusion to it all made me want to shout, "What, WHAT!!!"...

UNCOLLECTED WORKS by Lin Carter

An elderly literary critic is being interviewed, and he has a lot to say.  His most significant memory, though, is of a man not of letters but rather an inventor of a device that he claimed produced all the works of literature going back from the beginning of writing and up to the present...and then on into the future.  The critic knows that nothing can be proven, but what the inventor told him about the past discoveries of lost works has convinced him...after he initially rebuffs his outlandish claims.  This story has the ring of fatalism, whereby the future is predetermined and can be known in detail and far in advance with enough accurate data and the ability to process it.  Maybe the critic was convinced, but I'm not...still, an interesting premise for a story...

VANISHING POINT by Jonathan Brand

The Galactic Federation (yes, that's what they called it) has invited Earth's ambassador to meet its representative on a special world where the environment has been specially manufactured to mirror conditions on our home planet.  The diplomat, ship engineer and three other crew members meet a human there who speaks on behalf of the Federation and tries to make the guests feel at home.  But the engineer...who is later relating his experiences as a bedtime story for his two little daughters...begins to feel something amiss, especially during those times their host retreats off into the distance to pick some fruit.  The author's main point in this story was a bit difficult for me to visualize, but I got the general gist and thought it pretty inspired.  It all has to due with visual perspective and its effects on distant objects...

IN OUR BLOCK by R.A. Lafferty

This is a brief, funny tale about a run-down old street and the decrepit shanties lining it.  Two townsfolk, Art and Jim, can't figure out why the businesses there can do what they do with their limited space and material.  It's their own lackadaisical attitude about the strange goings on around them that's as quizzical as the unusual people they encounter. The obvious answer to the mystery completely escapes them as they are too stuck in their own comfortable thought patterns... 

Next week I conclude my look back at the year 1965 in short science fiction...

Constellation of the Month: Cassiopeia (the Queen)

Last month I was standing out in our backyard with Melissa one clear evening, pointing out the visible planets and some stars with their constellations.  She looked around and pointed to a close group of moderately bright stars in the northern sky, roughly shaped like an "M".  I answered that it was Cassiopeia, representing the queen and mother of Andromeda in the Greek mythical tale of Perseus...several constellations from this story dominate the autumn evening sky.  I picked Cassiopeia as my constellation of the month for November for that reason: its easy visibility, at least from northern hemisphere skies.  It's not that large as constellations go, but it represents the northern seasonal counterpart to Ursa Major's asterism the Big Dipper, which dominates in the springtime.  As a kid, I always learned to draw it as a sort of upside-down chair or throne including one of the fainter stars...my above pictured drawing reflects this.  Star maps usually "connect the dots" with it looking like a "W"...or "M" when it reaches its peak above Polaris, the North Star.  As you can see, the five M or W stars of the constellation are designated by the first five letters of the Greek alphabet, something that Atlantic tropical storm followers are probably well acquainted with after this record-setting hurricane season of 2020.  The additional star I connected is Kappa, and just a few degrees from it is located the remnants of one of the greatest observed supernova explosions in recorded history.  Officially known as SN 1572 for its year of occurrence, or Tycho Brahe's supernova after the famous astronomer of that time, it was around 8-9,000 light years distant but its peak brilliance reached a magnitude of -4, making it as bright as Venus back then, 448 years ago...the remnant is now only detectable through strong optical, x-ray and radio telescopes.  There are a couple of other constellations I could have picked out for November...let's see how long I can string out this monthly blog feature: I'd like to eventually cover all 88 of them...

My #6 All-Time Favorite Song: Firewood by Regina Spektor

FIREWOOD, by Regina Spektor, is my #6 all-time favorite song, but I wonder whether you've even heard of it.  It's from her 2012 album What We Saw from the Cheap Seats.  I have never heard it played on the radio, although it should have been a huge number one hit for several weeks. As a child Regina immigrated with her family in the 1980s to America from Soviet Russia and is a classically-trained pianist...that instrument dominates her recordings, including this masterpiece.  Firewood's lyrics seemed aimed at an ailing soul, in a hospital and thought to be dying...but what kind of affliction is it, mental or physical?  "Rise from your cold hospital bed, you're not dying...everyone knows you're going to live, so you might as well start trying".  This song has always been a treasure for me to listen to, but it's also been painful as it is the sort of song that can remind listeners of people they personally know in their own lives who have gone through really tough, tough times...possibly themselves.  It's yet another slow-moving song on my top ten list...and not the last Regina Spektor piece on it, either: another one ranks higher!  To me, Regina Spektor is far and away my favorite solo musical artist of this century and has seven studio albums so far...of course I own them all and am impatiently awaiting her next one.  The melody to Firewood is the kind of listening experience that a you might find yourself doing a double take on...there's something timeless to it, as if it had always been out there instead of only for the past eight years...

Trump's Presence to be Felt Beyond the Election and Biden's Inauguration

The rumor going around is that President Trump will be staging more mass public rallies in the next few weeks as he legally contests Joe Biden's close victory over him in the 2020 presidential election.  To me, not a Trump supporter...although I do support his stances on certain specific issues...this makes eminently good sense as he has always built up a great deal of popular support with these gatherings and obviously loves getting all the adoring, unquestioning attention in front of his many idolizers. And don't be mistaken, Donald J. Trump is indeed an IDOL to tens of millions of Americans, while I firmly acknowledge that many, many who voted for him do not share in their exaltation of this ordinary human being with his own peculiar, individual mix of faults and virtues. Of course these rallies, should they happen, would all be super-spreader events compounding the worst spike in COVID-19 we've yet experienced, but our current president seems unconcerned. I have a prediction: after he leaves office, Donald Trump will continue to hold these types of rallies, constantly insulting President Biden and his administration and running down his efforts as president while continuing his Tweetstorms full of conspiracy theories and false accusations.  Add to that continuing trips to the golf course and you have much of what he already was doing as president...albeit with his finger no longer on the nuclear button and no more authority to issue executive decrees, nominate officials and judges, sign or veto legislation...or hold up military aid to a besieged ally until it produces damaging material on his main political opponent.  But just because Trump will be out of the White House, don't expect any letup in the divisive rhetoric among our politicians: I'm confident that he wants to maintain tight control over the Republican Party and its elected officials in Washington, including the Senate...after all, a thumbs-down by him on anyone he perceives as personally disloyal can just as easily spell doom for their reelection chances as if he were still in office.  And looking at 2024, who knows, he may just want to jump back into it again...or even play the easier role of "kingmaker" by sitting in the background and picking his chosen GOP candidate.  Another possibility is that large segments of the population will simply deny that Trump is no longer president, just as they now deny climate change and the COVID pandemic...talk about alternate realities! Of course, all this is speculation...but if you think that voting Trump out of office equates to getting rid of him or that his conservative supporters for the past five years will now return in floods to their ideological principles and forsake this creepy, blind hero-worship, I don't think you're being very realistic.  I'm not writing this because I've returned to following politics closely but because I don't want anyone out there to be terribly surprised when what I've laid out becomes the new reality.  If you want to allow the media to manipulate you into feeling offense against the "bad guys" in the political world as they fight your "good guys", no matter which side you think "bad" or "good", then it's all on you...you don't have to listen to that crap and it just might behoove you to make an effort to see things for a change from the other guy's perspective.  For myself, I tune in to the half-hour CBS or ABC evening news and sometimes the local late-night news show at 11:  I'm letting the rest of it all ride, recognizing that much of the media...both social and broadcasting...has a vested interest in heightening division and passions among users, viewers and listeners: if you're into all that, then good luck with your outrage, now and in the future.  As was the case with this particular article, I'll state my political opinions from time to time while trying to space them apart more...

Four Astronauts Slated for Space Launch from Cape Canaveral Sunday Evening

Tomorrow evening (Sunday)  Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, Michael Hopkins, and Soichi Noguchi (pictured from left to right)...the last from Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency...are scheduled to take off from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida in SpaceX's Crew Dragon craft, at the top of the Falcon 9 rocket as it represents the second manned flight launched from United States soil this year, after the earlier successful May 30th launch which returned August 2nd.  Like that mission, this one will transport the astronauts to the International Space Station...the plan is for them to stay there until their return to Earth in the spring.  The launch was delayed from October 31st due to engine issues within the Falcon 9 rocket, and then again from tonight's planned launch because of concerns that high winds would interfere with booster rocket recovery...tomorrow's launch time is set for 7:27 pm Eastern Time. I'm going to try to see it from my backyard here in northern Gainesville if the weather permits.  I am gratified that America is gearing back up again for space exploration with astronauts and look forward to future missions to the moon and Mars.  Hopefully, the incoming Biden administration won't mess with our space objectives and allow a continuity of missions that has been sorely lacking in the past whenever one president left office and another stepped in.  And what about that Space Force begun under Trump? We'll see...

The above picture of the four astronauts on this flight is a public domain release by NASA that appeared in the pertinent Wikipedia article...

Quote of the Week...from Alex Trebek

I think what makes 'Jeopardy!' special is that, among all the quiz and game shows out there, ours tends to encourage learning.                                               ---Alex Trebek

Alex Trebek, the host of the wonderful Jeopardy! game show since it was brought back in 1984, sadly died last Sunday of pancreatic cancer, a condition that he had shared with his faithful viewing audience long before...still, his passing doesn't make it any easier.  I had watched the original Jeopardy! series (1964-75) while growing up through childhood and my teen years...Art Fleming was its very capable host.  On both runs, Jeopardy! was structured the same, with three contestants playing two rounds with different subject categories in each of them and a final, single answer round: "answer", because this quiz show phrases its questions in the form of answers, to which the correct response is a question... I always had a problem with that.  Say the "answer" on the screen is "Its capital is Caracas".  The correct response is "What is Venezuela?", but if I walked up to someone and asked the same question, that answer wouldn't help me at all.  Still, it has been fun trying to beat the ultra-smart and knowledgeable contestants to the correct answer.  And even if the category at hand is on a subject with which I am totally unfamiliar, the clues sometimes will steer me to get the "question" right.  I don't watch Jeopardy! every day because of my schedule, but if college football permits I can view it Saturday evenings at 7:30 on my local Channel 4 station.  It has been clear to me that Jeopardy! was a labor of love for Alex Trebek, and my sympathies and wishes are for his family and friends.  As for his above quote, the wide gamut of topics discussed on the show demonstrate...as well or better than any encyclopedia can...interesting areas that people can involve themselves in, including science, technology, music, literature, history, geography, language, mathematics...it goes on and on.  I hope that this show will always stay true to its high standards and never sink into appealing to vulgarity as do shows like Family Feud and Match Game...

Eta Striking Through North Central Florida Today

I have an app on my phone called Wordscapes, which is a scrambled word game.  One of the three-letter word combinations is a-e-t, from which you can form tea, ate, eat...and the Greek letter eta (small η, capital Η).  And Eta, incidentally, is the name of the current tropical system (Greek letters being used for names after exhausting the traditional list) that had been situated in the eastern Gulf of Mexico...although its bands have been affecting us in north central Florida for the last five days with rain and gusty winds.  Because of a cold front descending from the northwest, Tuesday evening the hotshot weather forecasters changed their projection to having it hit today around Cedar Key and as a strong tropical storm and then make a beeline for my Gainesville area.  Tuesday night's forecast had Eta slowing down until possibly even Saturday after passing over us in northern Florida, but subsequent notifications have had it entering the Atlantic Thursday night. Also, they noted on The Weather Channel yesterday that it seems surrounding dry air has been entering the storm and weakening it...for a while early yesterday it was classified as a weak hurricane. I haven't been too thrilled with the weather we've been experiencing lately, but it could have been a lot worse: just ask the folks in south Florida and the Tampa area. Eta, which earlier had developed into a Class 4 hurricane with 150 mph winds and struck eastern Nicaragua before emerging into the Gulf out of Honduras, then wound its way...first eastward and then northward...through Cuba.  Then it brushed (and flooded) south Florida and swung back into the Gulf of Mexico...and here we are now, stuck with this Greek freak of a storm.  I hear there's another one, named Theta naturally, brewing out in the eastern Atlantic while a new area of tropical disturbance is in the Caribbean where Eta once began its twisted journey, following its original path toward Central America: let's all hope its trajectory is straighter than Eta's..

As I mentioned, it's currently 9 in the morning and Eta's center is slightly northwest of Gainesville as it heads toward Jacksonville at 13 mph.  The rain and winds at this time are nothing for concern, and I expect conditions to have improved before I set off for work in three hours...    

Weekly Short Stories: 1965 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here are my reactions to four more short stories from the year 1965 as they appeared in the retrospective anthology The World's Best Science Fiction: 1966, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr.  Within the sci-fi genre, these tales span a range of topics from time travel to interstellar war and espionage to a repressive dystopian future to the rules for respectful engagement with extraterrestrials.  I found each one significant in its own way...although I admit to being tired of time travel stories...

OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS by Clifford Simak

In 1896 an elderly couple live on their remote farm as two children, seemingly from nowhere, come up the lane and introduce themselves.  It's the identity of the children and their mission to these kindly people that may determine the world's fate.  Another one of those frustrating (to me) time travel stories that tend to handcuff people living in the past to a set fate, as opposed to them being allowed to exert their own free will in determining the future.  Still, I always love reading the tender way that Simak treated his characters...

PLANET OF FORGETTING by James H. Schmitz

There's another one of those interstellar wars going on with this story as the protagonist is sent on a mission to recover and send home to Earth a secret file detailing the enemy's strengths, weakness, and intentions.  Along the way he finds himself wandering around in an amnesiac haze on an unknown world where strange beasts are around him...gradually he recovers his memory as the pursuers from the other side close in on him.  And then he solves the mystery of his memory loss.  Reminds me of the the Gregory Peck movies Spellbound and Mirage...

"REPENT, HARLEQUIN!" SAID THE TICKTOCKMAN by Harlan Ellison

In a dystopian future when rigid punctuality is enforced with a shortened life span being the punishment, there is a free spirit, the "Harlequin", who deliberately goes about with his pranks designed to upset the extremely delicate and elaborate schedules that run the society.  The chief enforcer of the time rules, the "Ticktockman", is none too happy as he searches down his adversary.  I remember first reading this tale seated on a jet plane taking off down the runway...I think it was at Atlanta or Asheville in 2006...

THE DECISION MAKERS by Joseph Green

As humanity explores other star systems and settles their habitable planets in the future, there is a need for someone with the title of Practical Philosopher...having the ability to discern whether different new lifeforms encountered are intelligent.  If they are, the planet is to be left alone for them to develop for themselves without human interference.  On one planet, such an individual finds himself up against the established human economic interests there as he discovers that intelligence may transcend a certain indigenous otter-like animal's individual abilities.  I liked how this story presented a future in which humanity demonstrated respect for other life as they reached out into the cosmos while also acknowledging how economic expedience can cause some to compromise their values...

Next week: more about science fiction short stories from 1965...

Just Finished Reading Matilda by Roald Dahl

Ever since that Jeopardy! episode a few weeks ago that devoted an entire category to British children's books author Roald Dahl, I've been exploring his collected works, believing then that I was unfamiliar with anything he had done.  Sure, he wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, from which the early 70s movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was made, and I'd heard of his James and the Giant Peach.  But I'd never seen a movie or read a book of his...until the other night when I got out my own DVD of the 1967 James Bond thriller You Only Live Twice and discovered that Dahl had written the screenplay!  Well, I felt it was time for me to read another of his books, so I picked his 1988 novel Matilda...I wasn't disappointed.  Once again we have a Dahl story in which a child...Matilda, of course...is the heroic protagonist and a mixture of adults, some of whom are sweet and compassionate and some of whom are beyond nasty in their meanness. Matilda is a four-year old girl, a genius who has taught herself to read as well as a great deal of math.  She befriends the local librarian, who has introduced her to great books in literature and has already read many.  But her negligent parents belittle her and refuse to recognize her talents...when she finally starts out in school she discovers friends, a compassionate teacher...and a thoroughly abusive principal.  What distinguishes Matilda in this tale is her spunk and refusal to take any abuse lying down...here is someone who knows how to even the score!  It was all very entertaining...sadly, Dahl passed away back in 1990.  To me, he and Neil Gaiman are my two top favorite British contemporary authors...I plan to read all of their works.  In 1996 the film version of Matilda came out, but I haven't seen it or nor do I plan to...I don't want my own visualizations of Dahl's story and characters to become supplanted by an altered version...

My #7 All-Time Favorite Song: Building a Mystery by Sarah McLachlan

Number 7 on my list of all-time favorite songs is BUILDING A MYSTERY by Sarah McLachlan.  A singles hit in 1997, I grew to love it while listening in early 1998 to my local Gainesville alternative rock station, then on 97.7, and which played the song in its regular rotation back then.  Besides McLachlan's extraordinarily beautiful singing, this slow-moving song speaks of a woman's love interest whose fanatical sense of independence and wonder entrances her as well...while she bluntly acknowledges his glaring faults.  And aren't we all in the end deeply flawed individuals with our own special stories to tell?  Aside from the universal wisdom embedded within the lyrics...with a little unnecessary profanity thrown in for good measure...I got deeply within the "mystery" angle to it as the singer's boyfriend explores the frontiers of reality and beyond.  Sarah's singing to him...but she's singing to each of us as well.  It's a great love song, but not of a blind, possessive love but rather a more discerning, mature kind in which both share in their mutual affection and attraction while respecting the sometimes stark differences between them.  Sarah McLachlan has a couple of other songs that I liked a lot: Sweet Surrender which, like Building a Mystery, is from her excellent 1997 album Surfacing, and Fallen, from her 2003 Afterglow album.  I probably should explore this wonderfully talented artist's collected works at some time in the near future...