Weekly Short Stories: More 1964 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here are my reactions to the next five stories appearing in the anthology World's Best Science Fiction for the year 1964, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr...  

FOR EVERY ACTION by C.C. MacApp

This is a brief Cold War era story set a couple decades into the future (c. 1987) about Soviet-American competition and distrust, even at the far reaches of our solar system as a Soviet ship encounters a lone American in orbit around Pluto, maintaining his position above that world by shooting stylized arrows while keeping in time by singing a ridiculous tune.  His explanation is that his American ship had been hit by strange, aggressive ball bearing pellets that seemed to be sentient and which disabled the ship...and would the Soviets please cautiously come down and rescue them all?  The Soviet spacemen think the American is crazy and are suspicious of his story, but their response is only indirectly revealed at the story's humorous conclusion. I thought the angle about the ball bearings to be intriguing, but it was basically a propaganda piece deriding the Soviets' tendency for censorship...

VAMPIRES, INC. by Joseph Nesvadba

A delegate from eastern Europe is attending a conference held in rural England.  He suddenly finds himself in possession of a racing-level automobile, and ends up discovering that it runs on his own blood as he presses the gas pedal.  This to me read not as much as a science fiction story but rather as one that horror writer Stephen King might have penned.  Still, it's in this anthology and I thought it was pretty cleverly written.  The English translation I read was probably originally written in the author's native Czech...

THE STAR PARTY by Robert Lory

This brief tale reminded me of a certain Twilight Zone episode...if I tell you which one it'll give the ending away.  On decadent Madison Avenue a young career man with his attractive wife attend one of the many annoying parties that ad execs tend to have...he would have avoided it but for one special attendee, a turbaned Asian man who turns out to profess a gift for discerning people's true natures through his own special interpretation of astrology.  After introducing his wife to the man, he comes up with some stark statements to the effect that she wasn't who she professed to be.  Upon reading this you might think the story is headed in one direction, but instead it shifts sharply in another...like that Twilight Zone episode I was referring to...

THE WEATHER IN THE UNDERWORLD by Colin Free

Off in the distant future the entire planet has undergone a deep freeze under advancing ice only seven years earlier, with only a select few able to descend deep under the frozen surface and survive.  Those who were able to make it down below have to regularly plug into memory-erasing-and-identity-creating machines to prevent them from undergoing the extreme trauma and guilt from remembering their aboveground experiences.  One man rebels and seeks truth and redemption...but as the ending shows this can be even more traumatic than what led up to it all...

OH, TO BE A BLOBEL! by Philip K. Dick

This is a farcical, humorous tale about humanity's war and rapprochement with the blobels, people-size one-celled, amoeba-like intelligent alien life that has settled among the outer planets in our solar system.  George Munster is one of a few heroic human spies who was operated on to assume blobel form in the war...now that it's over he's an outcast, not able to control when he's human and when he slips into being a big blob.  He marries a counterpart female blobel who, like himself, assumed the other specie's form during the war...and then they start having kids.  It's all utterly absurd, but I'd like to see how this story would be depicted on the screen...

Next week I conclude my look at short science fiction from 1964 as they appeared in Wollheim and Carr's anthology.  After that I'll jump back ahead the following week to where I had left off: the year 1968...

Observers of People

Admitting up front that we're all observers of people to some extent...heck, that's an essential element of being human, after all...what I want to address here are those who proudly take on the title as an exclusive role for themselves, as if they had some kind of gifted insight and privilege into monitoring and evaluating the actions and motivations of others.  This is true especially as they observe and comment on the behavior of people that has absolutely nothing to do with them...in other words, these busybodies make it their own business to mind the business of others.  I have another designation for this type: sideways people, for instead of focusing on their own personal agendas they concern themselves with looking sideways at others, more likely than not through a feigned enlightened filter of criticism.  Nearly thirty years ago I was in a Sunday school class at church, when the woman leading the group with her husband related an anecdote about how she once monitored in a restaurant how different men tended to briefly visually check out attractive women whenever they walked by...her rationale for this was that she was an "observer of people": hence this article's title.  I wonder, though, if she thought that bluntly eyeballing other people in public was only a role that she personally was entitled to and if she might react a bit negatively to find herself the pointed target of someone else's "observations".  Although I'm normal in that I keep myself aware of others around me in various settings during my day, I don't obsess on what they are doing and consciously avoid trying to compare myself to them or care if they are treated better than me. I'm perfectly okay with others engaging me in respectful mutual conversation...but the notion that they have any business judging me in any manner over what I'm doing when it violates no reasonable ethical or moral standards...and they themselves have absolutely no personal or professional standing in the matter...is completely unacceptable. Unfortunately, where I work I've had to deal with this sort of unwelcome interference, which I regard as tantamount to harassment, time and time again over the years.  Now if I went about my business like regrettably many of my colleagues and deliberately avoided wearing a mask and didn't practice social distancing in the middle of this deadly contagious pandemic, that would merit "sideways" scrutiny from others...but wouldn't that be a major lapse in ethical and moral behavior on my part?

Just Finished Reading The Source by James Michener

It took a while, but I've finally finished reading James Michener's lengthy 1965 historical novel The Source.  Its setting is a tell...which is a man-made mound in which are deposited layers of remnants of different human habitation going back in this case millennia...situated in northern Israel near the Sea of Galilee and called Makor.  An American archaeologist teams up with three of his Israeli counterparts...including a woman who becomes his romantic interest and another an Arab who formerly fought against the establishment of Israel in 1948.  As they make their digs at different sections of the uninhabited tell their relationships progress as they reveal aspects of their own lives and belief systems, many of the latter inspiring strong arguments.  These parts of the book are interspersed with a typically Michener-like exposition of the history (and prehistory) of Makor, expressed with stories of fictional characters at various crucial stages with an emphasis on the rise of Judaism and its evolution over the millennia up to the present day (i.e. 1965).  You experience the development of flint technology, the beginning of agriculture in the area, the worshipping of stone idols and sacrifice of the firstborn, the arrival of the Hebrews, David's Israel, the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions, the body-worshipping Greek Seleucid period and its conflicts with Jewish law, Herod the Great's final days, the revolt against Roman rule during Nero's reign along with the appearance of Josephus, the development of the Talmud, the introduction of a Christian church following Constantine's decree, the spread of Islam, the Crusades, the Mameluke destruction of fortified cities, the hegira of Jews to Palestine from European Christian lands, a new immigration wave of Jews from Europe during the last years of the crumbling Ottoman Empire...and the war to establish Israel as an independent state in 1948.  This was a very long book to read and it took me a while to get through it...finally I was able to finish it in audiobook form after reading the Kindle version about 75% through.  If you are a history buff like me, The Source provides an excellent framework to build a good sense of the attitudes of different people and societies in this area (while explaining how various expressions of Judaism came about), but at the same time there is the built-in confusion as to what specific events told in it really happened and which characters really existed.  So it's great as a starting point for further research...just keep in mind that some of your facts garnered from Michener's book (as in many of his other works) are liable to be fictional...albeit in all likelihood in close concordance with the trends he expounded upon.  If you've been considering this book, go for it...I'm glad I did and recommend it...

Great Old TV Episodes...from South Park

YOU'RE GETTING OLD...from South Park, first aired in June, 2011, is probably going to be the newest episode I feature on this blog for a while: most of the others go way back to twentieth century television.  I'd like to say that South Park is a favorite series of mine, but I honestly can't even though from time to time there is an episode that is spot-on with its message and humor...subtracting the last seven years in which there hasn't been anything on it I liked in the least. South Park, although animated and regrettably (like its predecessor Beavis and Butthead) marketed at minors,  has distinctly adult themes with an often over-the-top viciousness in its depictions of real people as well as being very satirical.  I'd estimate that I'd consider watching again maybe only 5-10% of its catalog of episodes, but then again there are those special ones that I check the TV listings for: You're Getting Old is one of these.  Stan Marsh, one of the four main South Park kid characters who live in a fictional, wacky Colorado town, has just turned ten and for his birthday his best friend Kyle Broflovski gives him a new "tween wave" CD: his mother, who thinks it sounds like shxt, prohibits him from using it, though.  But Stan figures out a way, and while lying in bed at night secretly plays it...and discovers like his mom that it's a lot of "crap".  As the ensuing days pass he increasingly sees everything around him that he used to enjoy in the same critical light, and the story progresses (or maybe I should say "regresses") from there.  It all intrigued me in that it covered two points: (1), the self-realization that hits people at different times in their lives that they're aging and that their lives will eventually wind down and come to an end, and (2) what it means to experience what is commonly referred to as a "sea change", which is a fundamentally altered way of perceiving the very reality to which one has been habitually been accustomed.  I may have been a special sort of kid in that long before I turned ten  I always sensed that I would age and eventually reach an end to it all, but that sea change experience has been a recurring element in my life, each time drastically changing how I felt about people and my own life and its priorities.  If you can manage to get past all the profanity and cartoon turds, this episode just might remind you of a few sea changes in your own life as well.  If I were you, though, I'd probably not try to get too used to watching South Park...

Just Finished Re-Reading First Five Books in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire Series

I know, I know, I wrote earlier on this blog that I was so frustrated at A Song of Ice and Fire (i.e., Game of Thrones) series author George R.R. Martin's slowness at finishing and finally publishing his sixth volume in the series...titled The Winds of Winter...that I had given up on him and his series: maybe I'll write my own ending to it.  Besides, with the gap between books 5 and 6 now going on a full decade, in the meantime the television adaptation presented the series' conclusion, with many viewers not respecting the desires of readers to avoid spoiling the ending for them.  But although I'm inclined to think that when (if ever) Martin finishes writing it all out he'll generally adhere to the TV version, I still greatly enjoyed his writing and characterizations and thought I'd patiently await that next book...and read a whole lot of books by other writers in the vast meantime.  I recently read on Wikipedia that Martin had expressed that he wanted to get The Winds of Winter out by some time in 2021, so in anticipation I went on a breakneck rereading spree of his first five volumes, making use of audiobooks I checked out from my public library and playing them on high speed...now if the next volume can just come out before I forget everything again...

As I mentioned last week, I also read his pretty dry 2018 prequel novel Fire and Blood: dude, you should have been working on the main body of your series instead.  Now let's see, I've been 64 since last October and George R.R. Martin has already stated that his last two books in the series are each around 1,500 pages long...and it has taken him at least ten years to write just one of them (and he's apparently still not finished).  Even if The Winds of Winter is released this year, does that mean I should expect to wait another ten years...until I'm 74...to get to read the concluding book, titled A Dream of Spring?  Martin is eight years older than me...I hope his health holds up.  There is another author whose readership became frustrated at his progress with an ongoing series.  You may be familiar with his name: Stephen King, and the series was The Dark Tower.  Folks back then were getting ticked off at having to wait four-to-six years between successive installments...until in 2003-04 King stunned everyone by producing all three very thick final volumes.  Maybe, just maybe, Martin can perform a similar feat with his A Song of Ice and Fire conclusion...I can entertain hope, can't I...

Quote of the Week...from President Joseph R. Biden

Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this: Bringing America together.  Uniting our people.  And uniting our nation.  I ask every American to join me in this cause.  

                                                                   President Joseph R. Biden

Congratulations to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as they were sworn in Wednesday as our new president and vice-president.  The above quote came from Biden's inaugural address...I'm all for national unity but only on the level of dealing with one another with grace and empathy as we work out expressing our legitimate differences with one another...denying the 2020 election results just because your idol-president lost is NOT one of them.  And can we please dispense with the wacko conspiracy theories and speak plainly with reality as a common basis for debate?  Hey, I realize that's probably not going to happen but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway... 

Speaking only of my own history following presidents, although I was born in 1956 during the Eisenhower administration and clearly remember the time of John Kennedy's assassination in 1963, I really didn't begin to take notice of the U.S. presidency until Lyndon Johnson began sending American troops to Vietnam in 1965...and would often preempt regular evening TV programming with his "My fellow Americans" speeches. After Johnson there were Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford...and then the first presidential election I voted in, 1976, between the latter and Jimmy Carter, who won it. Then came Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and finally Donald Trump. For the ten presidents I've followed over the past 55 years I've liked a few and disliked a few...but have never placed any of them on a special pedestal as an idol the way tens of millions of Trump supporters have over the past five years.  There has been no president for whom I couldn't find some things to both criticize and laud...and I confidently expect the same to be true with Mr. Biden.  I don't expect the fascist-leaning media talk jocks like Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin or Laura Ingraham to do anything other than demonize our new president in everything he says or does...if you're depending on these people for your information then you're deliberately bubbling yourself off from reality, in my opinion. I wish the new administration success in making our country stronger and managing crises, both the ones we are currently experiencing with the pandemic, economic displacement, racial inequity, fascist extremism and those to come.  I don't expect that much of the progressive agenda will be passed through Congress, and that's fine with me...let's see if the two parties can get that old spirit of compromise back into swing...at least in the Senate (the House Republicans are overwhelmingly fascist) and work out some meaningful ways forward to the country's benefit.  And I'm glad that, at least for the next two years, the President's party will (barely) control the Senate...meaning that his nominees for Cabinet, federal judges...and potential new Supreme Court justices...will be considered and voted upon.  I know that Mitch McConnell and Biden go back a long time together in the Senate...maybe ol' Joe can be more personally engaged and effective with those in Congress than Barack Obama was.  And then maybe I'm again throwing something out there that's probably not going to happen...

Collectors of People

One character that struck me hard in the J.K. Rowling's wonderful Harry Potter series was introduced in the sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  He is Professor Horace Slughorn of Slytherin House, brought out of retirement by Headmaster Dumbledore to shed light on archvillain Voldemort's early strategies when he was Slughorn's pupil at Hogwarts Academy many years before.  To this end Dumbledore asks Harry, a celebrity renowned throughout the magical world, to allow Slughorn to "collect" him...after explaining to him exactly what he means by "collect".  I'll try to do the same here, but maybe you already know what it means if you've read the book or saw the movie adaptation. This character made a big impression on me since he reminded me greatly of some of my old high school teachers.  First of all, you need to understand that where (and when) I went to high school they deliberately kept teachers more distant from the students, instead constructing the curricula around what they called Learning Activity Packages (or LAPs) which were pages stapled together and handed out to students.  The (erroneous) presumption here was that we students were all miniature, mature, and motivated adults who could be counted on to diligently and responsibly go through our LAPs on our own...and if we needed a "teacher" to help us on something they would theoretically be around to assist us.  Although not all of the courses were conducted this way, it did relieve the faculty of the burden of preparing individual lessons for each day in front of the class...and therefore made it more likely that many students who weren't doing too well would slip through the cracks.  I see all these pro-teacher union ads on TV and the teachers are always so personally engaged with each of their students...I wonder how many teachers I had over the course of my elementary and high school years who even were aware of me as one of their students, much less interested in my progress (or lack thereof).  But if one of us were to excel and become lauded for some accomplishment, such as acting, singing, playing a musical instrument, sports, or in a more academic area like debate or mathematics, then all of a sudden you'd see certain teachers rushing to the forefront to be identified with them.  Never mind that in some of these cases the students' accomplishments and skills were directly attributable to private classes away from the classroom or because of their own parents' occupations and tutelage.  And yes, a lot of the students' achievements were from their own hard efforts...but not necessarily that of their teachers...

In adulthood there are a couple more manifestations of this "collectors of people" phenomenon I'd like to discuss.  There are those who are seriously into name-dropping, apparently because they either think they need to insert their encounters with famous people into their conversations in order to be interesting or because they're of the false notion that they're important enough to be famous themselves.  Along with this are those compelled to stop celebrities on the street or in restaurants for selfies or autographs...I remember that one of the things John and Yoko Lennon liked about living in New York was that the locals respected their privacy in spite of their celebrityhood: it took a scumbag from Hawaii one Monday evening in December, 1980 to ruin all that, though.  Another "adult" element of people collection is the notion of networking, implicit in which is the belief that if one develops a tangle of connections around them then some bigshot corporate, academic or government leader will one day be more disposed to hiring them for a big bonanza job...the site LinkedIn is for those "collectors". And of course people collection figures heavily into social media like Facebook and Twitter and the number of friends, followers and likes and viewings...

I know we're all in community with one another and that's a good thing...even though my tendency is to shed people, not collect them.  But the idea that one is so insecure that they need to buttress their own lives with human trophies repels me, and I've seen it firsthand without the need to observe it in a make-believe Harry Potter character...  

Weekly Short Stories: More 1964 Science Fiction, Part 1

Recently, each Wednesday on this blog from September 30th through October 28th, I examined the "year's best" in short science fiction from the vantage point of editors Robert Silverberg and Martin Greenberg in their 2001 anthology Robert Silverberg Presents the Great SF Stories: 1964. However, there was already another "year's best" anthology series that had begun with coverage of short science fiction, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and which I'll be using while covering the years through 1989.  It came out in 1965 with its own selection of 64's top tales...all but three differed from Silverberg and Greenberg's picks 36 years later.  The Silverberg book promised to continue its year-by-year series but the first anthology turned out to be the final one.  So we're now left with two fine sci-fi short story anthologies for the year 1964: the following are my reactions to the first five stories included in the Wollheim anthology but missing from Silverberg's...

GREENPLACE by Tom Purdon

It's some time into the future and politics is as corrupt as ever...only with virtual immortality having been achieved, those in power tend to stay there endlessly.  With mind control methods perfected to manipulate the population, a "survey" taker for an opposition candidate enters a hostile suberban neighborhood to size up the people's attitudes.  Maybe from Silverberg's 2001 perspective this story didn't qualify for his anthology, but an editor from 2020 would surely see the application to today's crazy world of political spin in both social and broadcast media...

MEN OF GOOD WILL by Ben Bova and Myron R. Lewis

This very brief tale extends the rivalry between Russia and the U.S. to the moon's surface, where the two opposing camps have their stations built within eyesight of one another.  A visiting UN ambassador is marveling to the American base commander about how only on the moon is there peace between the two sides...and suddenly everyone has to duck as the bullets suddenly starting flying in.  The explanation is brilliant and unexpected...

BILL FOR DELIVERY by Christopher Anvil

It's a rough business out in open space as an interstellar shipper has his hands full of difficult assignments from his overly demanding, hypercritical boss.  This very funny story has the crew forced to transport 50 huge, cantankerous and dangerous birdlike creatures across vast space, with ridiculous instructions on handling them...

A NICHE IN TIME by William F. Temple

It is some time off into the future and backward time travel is feasible...not a good sign for a sci-fi story's premise, may I say.  Everard is from that future, a Visitor whose job involves going back in time to pivotal moments in different famous figures' lives...like Van Gogh, Shakespeare, and Bizet...and influence them just enough to get them over their troubles on their respective roads to greatness.  The contradictions implicit in this notion bring out the whole ludicrousness of the author's proposition...ultimately, Everard finds himself in need of a Visitor to assuage his own discouragement...what he chooses to do with it affirms my own stance against such tampering with time...

SEA WRACK by Edward Jesby

In the future a new amphibious subspecies of humanity has been developed...and, naturally, due to economic conflicts between those on land on those in the sea, a spirit of prejudice and animosity has arisen between the two groups.  When one of the sea people finds himself washed ashore and a decadent rich young woman plays him off against her land-bound boyfriend, the conflict becomes angry and physical...and the surrounding people sound off against the "intruder".  Another sci-fi tale about how humans could be physically altered to live underwater, as well as a sobering exposition of the inevitability of hostility whenever two groups with conflicting interests encounter one another...

Next week: more reviews of 1964 science fiction stories from Wollheim and Carr's anthology...

Zombies Among Us

I've never been a fan of zombie flicks...neither the movie Night of the Living Dead from 1968 nor the recent Walking Dead television series and its spinoffs.  The genre, which features reanimated, soulless corpses that infect others they encounter until hordes threaten humanity's very existence, never captured my imagination...until just recently, that is, when it occurred to me that in a figurative sense there are zombies among us in this real world.  These are people, "dead from the neck up" as the saying goes, who have voluntarily surrendered their own souls to unquestioningly idolize one mortal, flawed figure...namely Donald Trump...and to believe everything he says and follow his commands without reservation.  You cannot reason with these people any more than the human heroes of those zombie shows could with their counterparts...they are self-brainwashed personality cult followers on the same order as that freakish Heaven's Gate group in the nineties that committed collective suicide over the Hale-Bopp comet and the leftist People's Temple under the murderous Jim Jones in the seventies who forced his own people to commit mass "suicide" in Guyana.  In 2021 those in this version of the phenomenon are sustained and energized by the Internet and TV networks that deliberately seek to inflame their passions on behalf of their "lord master". Since Trump is a national political leader, the comparisons to fascist strongmen with cult followers such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler also come to mind.  The upshot is that even when our problematic president is finally out of office, he's still going to be out there and those tens of millions of Americans are going to still be slavishly following him as their idol, lord and source of "truth"...to this I add a major disclaimer that I don't believe that all who voted for Trump are like this...but sadly a large portion are, and keep in mind that on the day after the January 6th insurrection, a public opinion poll revealed that 45% of Republicans supported it.  When Trump finally does disappear from the scene (he is getting along in years, after all), the zombies will find another idol to latch themselves onto...someone who undoubtedly will use our very soon-to-be former president's demeanor and behavior as a template to build their own personality cult.  And these folks are everywhere, like the Matrix: in your workplace, when you're shopping, at your churches, on the roads, among the police and military, among your political representatives, and in your neighborhoods and schools.  Zombies.  Among us.

Festivus and the Airing of Grievances

An old Nova High alumnus living out on the west coast posted something on Facebook last month about Festivus, an alternative Christmas holiday season celebration held on December 23rd, created by writer Daniel O'Keefe and spotlighted on the Seinfeld episode The Strike.  It's secular in nature, although one aspect is to point out "miracles" that are clearly not miracles...much of Festivus is tongue-in-cheek fun, not meant to put down the spiritual side of Christmas but rather its runaway materialism and consumerism of today's world.  One of the rituals in Festivus is the dinner during which each person at the table airs their grievances...at the others or anything else, I suppose, that comes to mind.  Although I think it is generally ill-advised to put down another to their face...and even worse to do so in a public setting...I kind of like this concept: just do it some other time besides Christmas, please.  So in latching on to this "airing of grievances" about Festivus, I've transferred it all to the month of January...and I've been careful to avoid singling out people by name (unless they're public figures like celebrities or politicians).  But yeah, in case you haven't noticed I've been griping of late on this blog about various things in the news and in society in general...and I'm not finished: this just might spill over into the next month.  No, I haven't gone completely cynical, but with all this crap going on in the world around me can you blame me if I indulge in it for a little while?

Great Old TV Episodes...from The Honeymooners

YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN from The Honeymooners, originally aired in March, 1956

My mother was approaching three months of pregnancy with me when this episode was first shown...not that this has much to do with anything other than that I first saw it many years later as a syndicated rerun.  Ralph and Alice Kramden, played by Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows, live frugally in their bare New York City apartment with their upstairs neighbors Ed and Trixie Norton, played by Art Carney and Joyce Randolph, representing the rest of the show's regular cast. Ralph is a city bus driver and in this particular episode (warning: this article contains a plot spoiler) has gone on a self-improvement kick as he has his eyes set on an open civil service vacancy...but first he has to score high on the written exam and needs to study for it.  Ralph's push to get this better paying job has expanded to him bettering his life on a number of fronts...his assiduous goals and record-keeping even impress usually skeptical Alice, and that's something to behold.  In the end he doesn't pass the test and doesn't get the new job...but although he feels a failure and that everything he's done was for nothing, his wife consolingly tells him his changes have transformed him into a new Ralph Kramden...and the old one had better not show his face again.  As for the episode's title, Ralph has an old trumpet on which he has practiced for years but was never able to hit the "high" note...after Alice sweetly encourages him at the end, he picks up the horn for one more try. I always valued this episode among the brief Honeymooners "Classic" series...there were many more episodes and skits over the years about the Kramdens and Nortons.  Usually they featured Ralph with his pride and foolishness, but this one showed me that by pursuing worthwhile goals and disciplining myself to achieve them, I can transform my whole life in the process...and often if not usually it's the change in lifestyle and attitude that endures far beyond the immediate objective...

Constellation of the Month: Orion (the Hunter)

 

For January the obvious choice for constellation of the month is Orion, easily the most spectacular constellation in the night sky.  Its most visible structure is a rough rectangle with the bright stars Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, Rigel, and Saiph at the corners...with the center marked by the Belt: the three stars Mintaka, Alnilam, and Alnitak.  Orion can be found high in the southern evening sky, crossing the meridian this month around 9:00.  South of the belt are a number of deep space objects, chief of them the Great Orion Nebula, designated as M42 and M43 from the Messier catalogue.  As a kid I was taught that if you aim Orion's belt to the right (WNW) it roughly points toward Aldebaran, the brightest star in the zodiac constellation Taurus...aim to the left (ESE) and you find Sirius, the brightest star of the night sky, from the constellation Canis Minor.  Sooner or later I'm going to get my new telescope assembled and I'm looking forward to examining Orion through it, especially that area with all the nebulae.  The Greek letters you see on my above drawing are typically assigned to a constellation's stars, usually...but not always...in general order of brightness: for Orion Rigel, the brightest star, a blue supergiant, is "beta" while Betelgeuse, a red supergiant...though designated "alpha" is slightly dimmer.  Both are more than 600 lightyears distant.  The three Belt stars, all massive, are even farther away...

I've narrowed down my choice for February's constellation of the month to two prominent candidates: can you guess which ones they are...and what would your selection be?

Quote of the Week...from Martin Luther King, Jr.

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry.  He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, "here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well."

                                                                        ---Martin Luther King, Jr.

There are two important components to this wise quote from our great late civil rights leader whose birthday is marked by a national holiday this coming Monday.  One speaks to those in society who might think of themselves as "better" than others engaged in what they perceive as lower-rung jobs in their social hierarchy...the other speaks to that "street sweeper", emphasizing not only that their job is significant in the eyes of God, but that they should tackle it with the same conscientiousness that they would with an endeavor human society holds in greater esteem.  One of the problems I have experienced when getting to know others in adult society is the tendency for my newly-found acquaintances to puff themselves up extolling what important jobs and positions they have...in contrast, my revelation of being a postal clerk usually sounds more like that street sweeper.  I've even experienced, when conversing with colleagues at work, others doing the same self-aggrandizing...this time about their pasts since their present life tends to be on my "level".  Since I'm not into this one-upmanship that seems to be such an indispensable part of most people's social behavior, I tend to disengage, content with my own life. In my work life I've taken each assignment seriously and tried to perform it to the best of my abilities, and you should with your career, too.  Then, I suppose if you want to get arrogant with me about the relative significance of your title, experiences or background, go ahead...doesn't mean I have to hang around to hear it...

Just Finished Reading Fire and Blood by George R.R. Martin

 In 2018, while the reading world was eagerly expecting George R.R. Martin, acclaimed author of the fantasy A Song of Ice and Fire series...adapted to the HBO series Game of Thrones with seven years having elapsed since the last published book...to finally come out with volume number six, he surprised us with Fire and Blood, prequel novel to his ongoing series.  At the time I was miffed, thinking that the author could have better spent his writing time getting on with the next series book, The Winds of Winter...well, it's 2021 and I'm still waiting for that one...and after just reading Fire and Blood, I'm still miffed...

Once, after having read J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy masterpieces The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, I picked up a copy of his prequel The Silmarillion and was gravely disappointed, it being a rather dry chronicle of the history of Middle Earth with an overload of characters, geography and events.  But that's typically what a chronicle is, and Martin's Fire and Blood reads similarly, foregoing the very interesting personal perspectives of his compelling characters presented in the regular series and instead laying out in dry form the history of the Targaryen conquest and reign over the continent of Westeros.  In it you see the same old alliances and betrayals between the various noble houses of the land, and in the first half of their 300-year rule, with the indispensable aid of their dragons, a whole lot of cataclysmic war and brutal slaughter being played out with vast numbers of innocent people victimized, culminating in the "Dying of the Dragons" war between two rival Targaryen factions...who cares who won it.  This chronicle is only the first of two parts, the final one to be published God knows when.  HBO is going to have a series on Fire and Blood...let's see if they don't do like Game of Thrones and get far ahead of the actual author.  If you're a major fan of Martin's fantasy world and it's "history", then this book's for you...although lamentably it reads nothing like the five books published so far in A Song of Ice and Fire.  Still waiting on Book #6, George...George, are you there, George? Now where did that rascal go...

Weekly Short Stories: 1967 Science Fiction, Part 4

And here we come to my final article reviewing science fiction short stories from 1967 as they appeared in the anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and examining their selections published the preceding year.  For me, 1967 has to be one of the more interesting years in my recollection of my own life as I experienced it...part of this is probably due to me being ten going on eleven, and part of it pertains to some of the weird stuff going down back then around me...

THUS WE FRUSTRATE CHARLEMAGNE by R.A. Lafferty

Here is another of those (groan) time travel tales where the protagonists keep going back in time to change their own present time.  These experimenters perform the deed, than notice that nothing has changed...but from the reader's perspective everything's different.  They keep repeating the experiment and the outcomes get stranger and more comical while the principals are unaware of any anomalies...I'm glad this story was short or I would have fallen asleep reading it. I read another, earlier story along the same lines and think that Lafferty may have inadvertently ripped it off...

HANDICAP by Larry Niven

This, the most intriguing story of today's four, is set on a remote planet called Down as a maker of specially-designed hand prosthetics for "handicapped" intelligent species (like dolphins) seeks out a special sessile (immobile) creature in the desert.  Called a Grog, it doesn't stir from its spot and on the surface seems unintelligent with withered, vestigial arms ...but our protagonist senses something out of kilter with it and connects it to an older aggressive life form, thought to be extinct and which enslaved vast sections of the galaxy.  The ending is a classic presentation of a dilemma, with the reasoning contained within even suspect...

FULL SUN by Brian W. Aldiss

Way off in the distant future...or is it...man and machine are working together to end the scourge of werewolves around them.  Out in the wilderness of central Europe, Balank tracks down a renegade werewolf with the aid of his computer/machine partner called a "trundler".  He encounters a local resident who questions the harm of this growing offshoot of humanity, and the two examine the news on their wrist-TVs...looks like the machines are engaged in pretty heavy time travel and the ones dominating the world right now are from the distant future.  Eventually Balank begins to put it all together, but it is left to that renegade werewolf to lay it all out for us.  The ultimate question is: who is the real enemy?

IT'S SMART TO HAVE AN ENGLISH ADDRESS by D.G. Compton

In this futuristic story, an elderly concert pianist visits his old associate, a composer...at the latter's English home, naturally.  The composer has availed himself of the latest medical breakthroughs for longevity and rejuvenation, as well as a new technique whereby he can have his own mental activity recorded and sold as "art".  The pianist, having already made his peace with his own aging, lessening capabilities and eventual death, strongly resists his friend's attempts to coax him into joining in fighting the ravages of time.  I had mixed feelings about this story, being 64 myself.  If possible, I'd like to "live long and prosper" as the Vulcans might say and wouldn't oppose medical advances to that intent, but sometimes this new digital technology of ours does seem to permit a degree of "cheating" when it comes to producing things presented as art, especially in the field of music...just saying...

Next week I am going to backtrack three years and begin discussing other science fiction short stories from 1964, using this time around the first anthology from the Wollheim and Carr series that I've been using recently...

Social Movements Need to Display More Honesty in Their Approach

When I hear of different social movements going on around me I often get a little taken aback by what I perceive as an inherently dishonest approach taken by those promoting them.  This manifests in four different areas: retroactive political correctness, restricting public debate only to areas that serve the movement's goals, treating the movement as something that had better be accepted or else, and removing personal responsibility from those whose interests are being furthered.  If those in the movement are pursuing something worthwhile,  that means that if they are successful then today's world and people's accompanying attitudes toward the issue in question will be better than they were yesterday, so consequently in such a positive scenario the past...along with what people believed and did back then...will naturally seem less enlightened and more subject to criticism.   Some celebrity or politician may have said something in 2005 about an issue that has since moved on and now somebody else wants to call them to task for it, or this movie or that book uses language that since has been adjudged to be insensitive or hurtful to one group or another...and the temptation is to retroactively condemn the person and censor expression, right?  But shouldn't we instead, in an enlightened, supposedly educated society, have enough sophistication to place the past in its proper context and appreciate the change for the better?   Movements may insist on "necessary conversations", but what they really mean is that you can only say what they want you to say and any attempt at broadening the message of their narrative or mitigating its generalizations is impermissible...they'll say it's their debate right now and you're just being tone-deaf, insensitive, or worse if you disagree with or even just modify one or more of their cherished positions.  If they want to essentially take over sections in different cities with protests, even vandalizing businesses and homes while harassing residents, pedestrians and customers in the area, well, this is such an important issue in their minds that they feel justified that everything else must completely shut down until they get what they want.  And with these movements, usually a group is labeled as the "victim" of another group...in their narratives, the incidents of victimization almost always portray the victim as passive and blameless or severely downplay his or her behavior in the incident being spotlighted.  But an honest discussion of anything should involve the actions of all parties involved...

I know there's a lot of injustice going on around me on different fronts and believe that if you want to draw the whole population into honestly recognizing it and working to make our society a more equitable and fair place to live instead of dividing them along political battle lines, then you're going to have to learn to listen respectfully to others with a differing point of view from you if you want them to be willing in turn to respectfully hear out your own agenda.  You may discern that in this article I'm thinking primarily of one particular social movement, and I'm largely in sympathy with its message and aims, albeit incompletely expressed...so let's allow for a more open, honest and civilly-responsible discussion which I believe in the end will contribute to a more unified, constructive outcome... 

People With Connections

Everyone who isn't a complete hermit...and even a few of those, I suspect...has connections.  By this I mean that in their social, economic and family life they are in relationship with certain people who can do things for them, be they supplying protection, better economic, educational and social opportunities...or possibly even some things that are on the underside of society, maybe even beyond the law.  It's this last area that I'm referring to here today, and in doing so I must be oh-so-careful to tread very lightly...

Maybe you've seen the movie Forrest Gump starring Tom Hanks, in which a boy with a more limited intellectual capacity nevertheless grows up and enjoys a very fruitful and interesting life.  The people around him...other than his best friend Bubba...all seem to revel in their perceived higher relative intelligence to him and almost without exception seem determined to use their own "smarts" to underhanded means.  Time after time Forrest eschews the seamy connections that others foster and instead directs his own life cleanly, and on his terms.  That may have been one of the biggest lessons I drew from this film.  I don't want to be identified in the least with people I discern are connected with illegal or unethical networks...yet at the same time openly shunning them would seem to imply that I know what they're up to.  So instead I tend to operate in a benignly informal, but distanced manner around those who seem to be the unwarranted hub of social interest and who seem to always have a hand in everything (and everyone) around them that possessing an extroverted or winsome personality does not completely account for...then again, they might simply be constantly on the make.  If the result of this means that those "in the know" decide to regard me as naïve or simple then I suppose that's the way it will have to be. To give a couple more cinematic examples, in The Godfather and Taxi Driver singer Johnny Fontaine (played by Al Martino) and cabby Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro)...characters on opposite ends of society...nevertheless both contact their respective connections to get what they want. If this article reads like I'm dancing around the subject without directly addressing it, then I've succeeded: if I'm more explicit or detailed then I've missed the point, which is that this is a universal social phenomenon, present in virtually all of our institutions and which tends to corrupt them depending on the degree that leadership tolerates it: each of us has to deal with it in the manner that befits us best. Just keep in mind that behind some connections the system of justice has no due process, and once you're "in" it may be difficult to ever get yourself "out"...

Great Old TV Episodes: from The Andy Griffith Show

 ANDY DISCOVERS AMERICA from The Andy Griffith Show (1963)

The Andy Griffith Show is one of my all-time favorite comedy TV series...at least the episodes that featured Don Knotts as bumbling, fastidious Deputy Barney Fife.  This one was from Season 3 and originally broadcast in early 1963...Fife was a secondary character in this episode, but his contribution to it is what inspired me to pick it for this week's article.  In the mythical North Carolina town of Mayberry, Sheriff Andy Taylor's little boy Opie joins his classmates in rebelling against their new teacher Helen Crump after his dad makes a careless remark belittling the study of history.  When Helen angrily confronts Andy over the incident, he contritely decides to make the study of American history more interesting to his son.  Barney brings up the comic relief: after first bragging about his history prowess, Andy tests him about the Emancipation Proclamation...after hemming and hawing about what it is, he decides to make it "his" topic for the rest of the episode.  Poor Barney...it's obvious the words sounded impressive to him and he thought that dropping them around others would make him sound more learned.  But suppose he really was interested and knowledgeable about President Lincoln's 1863 executive decree during the Civil War, designed to outlaw slavery in seceding states while allowing it to remain in slave states loyal to the Union.  It's an interesting topic, but since it's something that was a typical part of school curricula, then adults tend to shun any discussion of it. Andy instead gets Opie enthusiastic about history by inventing a lot of exciting made-up stuff that only marginally rings of truth.  As for here and now, try bringing up in conversation with other adults the Emancipation Proclamation, foreign language grammar elements, math concepts like quadratic equations and techniques of integration, types of chemical reactions or anything else that may have been something that students in school had been assigned to learn...even with those adults whose fields coincide with the subject matter...and it is certain that you will be rebuffed.  Instead grownups are chiefly concerned in conversation about pridefully crowing over their own titles and wealth status along with career and academic milestones and awards they've received...not the actual things they devoted so much time and effort to learn in their youth: it's almost as if school-learned content were taboo in social intercourse...

 

I enjoyed this episode a lot in spite of Barney getting dissed on his adopted, treasured history topic: I feel your pain, bro... 

Both Pennsylvania NFL Teams Tank in Important Final Regular Season Games

Today the National Football League playoffs begin with three games today and three tomorrow.  Two teams, the Miami Dolphins and New York Giants, though, won't be participating, due in large part to the league's Pennsylvania teams, the Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles, tanking in their own respective ways in the final regular season game.  Pittsburgh, already assured of a first round home game, decided to sit out their star quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and other essential first team starters for their final contest against the Cleveland Browns, a team struggling to make the playoffs for the first time in many years.  In spite of the Steelers benching many of their best players, the Browns just barely won the game 24-22...the outcome doubtless would have gone to Pittsburgh had they taken this game seriously.  But they didn't, and by so doing gave Cleveland the final wildcard playoff spot over Miami, which would have had the tiebreaker advantage for the two teams had the Browns lost.  As for Philadelphia, in a close contest against the Washington Redskins Football Team who needed to avoid losing to them to get into the playoffs over the New York Giants, were into the fourth quarter when they refused to try a potential game-tying field goal and then benched their starting quarterback Jason Hurts and other offensive players for the team's final attempt of the game, now behind by six points.  The Eagles players were besides themselves in shock at their coach Doug Pederson's decision to tank (although he denied that intention) and a couple had to be restrained from approaching him.  The resulting loss gives Philadelphia higher draft picks, but it also ensured that the New York Giants wouldn't make the playoffs since they likewise would have beaten Washington with a tiebreaker advantage...

The Miami Dolphins are "my" team in the NFL, so Pittsburgh's actions disappointed me the most...I actually was pulling for Washington to beat Philadelphia based largely on my recent trip to that city and my respect for their veteran quarterback Alex Smith.  But it was disgusting to see what the Eagles' coach did at the end of that game and it made the "Football Team's" victory much less than sweet...

Quote of the Week...from Vito Corleone

I spent my whole life trying not to be careless.  Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.                                                                Don Vito Corleone, The Godfather

A  couple of years ago I wrote about another quote from the fictional organized crime magnate protagonist of The Godfather, so ably portrayed by Marlon Brando in the 1972 movie.  In that article I alluded to today's quote but didn't delve too deeply into it.  The quote is a product of the times and culture it would have supposedly been delivered in, when society's leaders...those who had the power and responsibility to make decisions that could impact others and themselves in either a positive...or sometimes very destructive...way, were by and large men with women largely excluded.  In today's world where women are becoming more of an active force within leadership, I would change Corleone's statement to "The rest can afford to be careless, but not adults in positions of authority."  Adults, especially in a leadership capacity, be it in a family, school, business, politics, or any other societal institution, make themselves a visible target of anyone "lower" than them who has built up a negative narrative and has some axes to grind...regardless whether the "leader" has ever done them any harm.  Once someone accuses someone in a position of authority of abusing their power or harassment, the individual in question sadly often stands ruined by the accusation...even when the produced evidence demonstrates their innocence.  There is in today's politically correct world a tendency to exalt the subjective testimony of the aggrieved and to impart greater validity to their charges when they either use emotional fervency or identify with a "victim" group to enhance the impact of their words.  To objectively and fairly treat the accused can then place those listening to the grievance in a setting where they themselves can be accused of covering up or having ulterior motives should they ultimately reject the charges, so they can find themselves tempted to excessively criticize the accused even when he or she has done nothing wrong besides possibly being careless.   I don't know of any way to change this state of affairs, but instead suggest that anyone who is a leader on any level...no matter how obscure...observe the Godfather's quote for themselves by restricting communication and interaction with others outside the immediate family and their established, close circle of friends and colleagues to public-based forums or at least assuring the presence of a third party.  That means nix it with one-on-one phone texting and Facebook Messenger outside your close circle of family and trusted friends and associates as well as delegating phoning of others to someone in a supportive position when you're dealing with people you don't really know all that well...and steer away from meeting...or even proposing meeting...with another you don't know well without someone else present.  It's sad to have to say that, but there are some real bad actors out there, even psychopaths who've become very adept at destroying other people's lives.  But there are even many, many more people who, due to their own often distorted personal narratives...in which false memory can play a role...or simply from honest misunderstandings, can misinterpret perfectly innocent communications and actions on a leader's part...better to protect yourself by being careful...