Weekly Short Stories: 1972 Science Fiction, Part 3

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

CHANGING WOMAN by W. Macfarlane

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

"WILLIE'S BLUES" by Robert J. Tilley

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

LONG SHOT by Vernor Vinge

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

THUS LOVE BETRAYS US by Phyllis MacLennon

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

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

Game of the Week: Miniature Golf

 

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

Just Finished Reading And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

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

Great Old TV Episodes...from I Love Lucy

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

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

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

Quote of the Week...from Groucho Marx

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

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

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

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

Weekly Short Stories: 1972 Science Fiction, Part 2

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

THE GOLD AT THE STARBOW'S END by Frederik Pohl

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

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

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

RORQUAL MARU by T.J. Bass

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

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

Game of the Week: Soccer

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

My May 2021 Running and Walking Report

For May I ran a total of 107 miles with 5.2 miles being my longest single run...I missed but one day running for the month.  At the same time I amassed 124 walking miles, much of it from my normal workplace activity and several long walks on Daytona Beach with Melissa on our vacation stay there late in May. Already a Florida Track Club member, I had signed up to participate in the track meet they held on Friday evening, May 7th, at Fred Cone Park in eastern Gainesville.  But upon further examining their schedule of events within the meet, I felt they were bunched too closely together and didn't allow for a slower, 64-year-old runner as myself: the 5,000 meter race on their website was purportedly for runners at their own pace but they only allowed 30 minutes before the next one was to start.  From this I got the impression, possibly erroneously, that the FTC was focusing on this event more as one for the more elite runners...so I skipped it.  However, later in the month I found out that the free weekly 5K Saturday morning runs at Gainesville's Depot Park were resuming...I completed the race on 5/29 with an average (for me, lately) time of 30:50.  If you want to participate in this "Depot Parkrun", as they call it, get on that website, preregister, and print off the barcodes they provide.  Then bring one with you to the next race and your time will be recorded and posted online: pretty good deal!  For June, I see myself continuing my running in moderation and trying out another Parkrun, trying to get my finishing time below 30 minutes.  As for walking, it seems that just going about my usual daily business automatically produces the miles...

Great Old TV Episodes...from Through the Wormhole

This week's featured episode is IS TIME TRAVEL POSSIBLE? from the popular science series Through the Wormhole, specifically #3 from Season 1, originally aired in June, 2010. A few years ago I had The Science Channel as part of my cable television premium service...eventually one day I reevaluated some of what we were paying for and decided to delete the package of channels that included it.  But while we still received it from 2010 through 2017 this channel featured the series Through the Wormhole, narrated by actor Morgan Freeman, that probed into different deep topics of cosmology, physics, and even metaphysics.  To me this was a step up from the Cosmos series and which, while avoiding the high mathematics and science in these areas, still provided a nexus between the scientific community researching them and people at large...something our society, so much of it in science denial and ignorance, desperately needs.  One of the topics often covered is time, and one of my favorite episodes is this one on time travel.  As usual, Morgan introduces it with a poignant memory, this one from his childhood days with his grandmother, and then one supposition after another about the nature of time gets scientifically laid out, ideas many of which I had been maintaining as a non-scientist for years: it was an episode of personal affirmation for me! The two most prominent points the show made in this regard were (1) that all that ever happened, is happening, and will happen are equally a fundamental, transcendentally existing part of reality and (2) the concept of "now" is a subjective...not objectively discernible or provable...element of time.  As for the series Through the Wormhole as a whole, I always rejoiced (and laughed) at the often unbridled joy and enthusiasm of the various featured scientists as they discussed their theories and discoveries: these folks know how to live!  Unfortunately, I can't find this series on any channel right now, except for some on YouTube.  I'm considering purchasing the complete set on DVD, but there seems to understandably be a run on it and they're out of stock...also, my library doesn't have any DVDs to check out, either. But let's return to that "time" episode and an important quote from Morgan Freeman: "Time is not universal.  The strange truth is, time is personal"...    

Ran Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning

After signing up for the Florida Track Club's track meet at Fred Cone Park on the 7th of May and then skipping it, I was gratified to learn that the Deport Parkrun had resumed its free Saturday morning 5K races at Depot Park here in Gainesville: here was a chance after all for me to get a race in during May! So this morning I got up a little past six and went down there to join the other early-risers for the 7:30 event.  The organizers and volunteers had everything going smoothly and were very friendly and encouraging.  To run this event you need to preregister online, from which you will be given barcodes to print out and take with you to the race.  Then, when you finish, a volunteer will hand you another barcoded card for you to take with your own barcode slip to the scanning station.  There the results are entered and later posted online on their website...click here to view today's results.  The skies for this morning were clear and at race time the temperature was 71 with 86% humidity.  The course undulates through the park and, although not exactly hilly, does slope a bit here and there.  It's also very pretty with some neat scenery to look at.  The 3.1 mile length is divided into 4 laps on the course, so it's easy to judge your own progress after each one with a volunteer barking out the split time as you pass by.  For the first couple of laps I felt very rough and out of shape, with some runners passing me...but with lap #3 onward to the end I settled into my familiar "groove" and drew on those energy reserves I knew I had, finishing strong.  I ended with a time of 30:50, not my best but better than the 32:40 I ran at last month's Headwaters 5K.  Since it's held at Depot Park there are restroom facilities...as well as water for those who didn't bring their own hydration.  Today's run went very well for me and although I didn't achieve an unspoken goal to break 30 minutes, I feel hopeful that in the weeks to come this will happen...

Quote of the Week...from Psyche Roxas-Menoza

Every time I stand before a beautiful beach, its waves seem to whisper to me: If you choose the simple things and find joy in nature's simple treasures, life and living need not be so hard.

                                                     ---Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

Psyche Roxas-Mendoza is a writer and editor from the Philippines...I admit to no knowledge of her other than this fantastic quote of hers, which I intend to use as a segue to this article about Melissa and my vacation beach trip to Daytona Beach for the previous four days. We arrived there late Sunday afternoon, staying again at our favorite hotel until yesterday.  We were originally booked for a room with a smaller balcony and a side view of both the ocean and city, but when our door's lock malfunctioned they moved us without the usual extra charge to an oceanfront room. This was fortuitous as we both enjoyed a lot of time on that balcony and could view from it the second "Super Moon" in as many months as it rose from the southeastern horizon in the constellation Scorpius.  We also did a lot of walking up and down the beach, during both high and low tides when its character and size drastically change.  On Wednesday afternoon we were walking southward back to our hotel when Melissa noticed a strange trail in the sky: it was from the SpaceX rocket launch just a few minutes earlier.  Over our stay we deliberately kept it all simple, mainly enjoying the beach and our hotel's fine pool area while going out to local restaurants like Aunt Catfish, Charlie Horse and Don Pepper's.  After checking out Thursday the two of us paid a visit down memory lane at Ormond Beach's Pirates Cove miniature golf course where we would play years ago while our children were growing up.  But more than anything we enjoyed each other's company and the simplicity and beauty of the beach, with all its different kinds of birds, interesting cloud formations and fellow human visitors...the last of which, gratefully, there weren't that many... 

Just Finished Reading Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor

In 2009 mother-and-daughter writers Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor collaborated on the book Traveling with Pomegranates, in which each of them recount through alternating chapters their travels together from preceding years through Greece, Turkey and France.  I just finished reading it and can understand the wide range of reactions I subsequently discovered about it on the Goodreads review site.  Especially with the mother, they have this privileged air about them that it's nothing to just take off on trips to exotic places and have the locals there expected to cater to their every whim while they are totally focused on themselves, taking every statue, exhibit, painting, or happenstance occurrence and interpreting them in the most detailed ways about their personal selves...yes, this got tedious for me in a hurry.  Before I began reading it I thought it would be something of a travelogue of these two women's experiences, and to an extent it was, making me want to see and experience some of the things that they did.  Although I feel the two went way overboard about personalizing everything and everyone they encountered, as a reader I also understood that each of us has our own personal voyages, and to us these voyages are of the utmost significance and interest: it's just that I think that others probably aren't going to remotely share my own interpretations with the same enthusiasm that they mean to me.  You know what I'm saying: just think of someone in your own life whose entire conversational style with you is focused on talking about themselves, and you're just an unimportant bystander whose role seems to be to receive everything spoken with vigorous head-nodding and affirmatory verbal utterances.  On the other hand, Kidd and Taylor's book is clearly autobiographical in its theme, and let's face it: folks who write autobiographies are talking about themselves, which is why they're called autobiographies: the root "auto" means "self".  This very blog of mine has strong autobiographical elements to it as well...I share experiences that I feel have a possible universal application to others, and I imagine that what this book's authors are doing is very similar.  Each of them discusses a change not only in their life phases...Sue entering her elderly years while unsure about writing her first novel while Ann is a young adult unsure as well of her own future and depressed about recent rejection...but also their changing relationship to one another.  Both of them use their travel experiences with Greek mythological characters like Athena, Demeter, Persephone along with the widely different representations of Mary, Jesus' mother in Greece, Turkey and France to symbolize their own identities and life direction.  One thing that struck me was that, especially with Sue, they felt the need to travel to some exotic locale in order to experience an epiphany moment, but I remember the Robert Pirsig quote, "The only Zen you'll find at the mountaintop is the Zen you took with you." To that effect I have discovered that while traveling in itself is fun and meaningful, the greatest positive changes I've made in my life, along with the most profound introspective moments that revealed who I was, came about during my ordinary day-to-day living and routines.  But to each his own, and I enjoyed Traveling with Pomegranates.  And you have to grant this concession to the authors as well: when someone is baring their soul to you in an honest manner, they will also be revealing aspects of their personality and character you might find just a wee bit disagreeable...that shouldn't detract from the reading experience, but rather challenge the reader with their own introspection... 

Weekly Short Stories: 1972 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I jump onward to a new year in my ongoing project of reviewing selected old science fiction short stories: 1972, as they appeared in the anthology The 1973 World's Best SF, edited by Donald Wollheim and Arthur Saha and containing their personal choices as the best in the genre from the preceding year.  In my personal life I was going from the tenth to eleventh grade in high school...books like Lord Jim, The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby were English class assignments.  Early that year I wrote my first lengthy paper, a composition about Bob Dylan and his song lyrics...it was a chore to do but the teacher liked it a lot.  In the world "out there" humans landed on the moon in December 1972 and haven't been back since, while the NFL's Miami Dolphins ran the table, going undefeated the regular season and playoffs...this also hasn't been done by anyone since.  Here are my reactions to the first three stories in Wollheim's book... 

GOAT SONG by Poul Anderson

In this story Anderson envisioned a future in which humanity had gradually abandoned its responsibilities over the years to machines and computers, to the culminating point in which a supreme artificial intelligence has emerged to dominate people's lives in every facet...with an "iron" fist, so to speak: sounds like we're well on that path already, doesn't it?  A man given to provocative poetry and strange music whose love died wants the governing SUM machine empire to resurrect her as its ideology claims to be possible, but first he must past the test.  This tale contains a lot of poetic language while exposing people's superstitious natures and our tendency to sink into dependency on other parties for comfort and convenience's sake... 

THE MAN WHO WALKED HOME by James Tiptree, Jr.

Out in the remote western United States a time travel experiment goes terribly awry, leading directly to a worldwide cataclysm that brings civilization to its knees. The time traveler, astronaut John Delgano, is still seen once a year at the epicenter for only a few short seconds...over the decades and centuries this event becomes a big local event drawing crowds as well as superstition and religious movements. It's all very mystifying and confusing, but the ending of this disturbing tale does explain the state of things pretty well while bringing up a completely unique angle on this well-worn topic of time travel... 

OH, VALINDA! by Michael G. Coney

On a distant world with a developing humanoid civilization, Earthmen are there exploiting the resources for profit...while withholding technology that could help the native Canteks escape their dependence on fossil fuels and the ensuing planet-wide pollution.  In the Earthling-owned polar region two opposing camps are racing to the marketplace...with giant worms underneath their respective icebergs propelling them onward: what a cool science fiction concept.  In one party two men have hired a Cantek expert on these worms, Skunder, to try and beat out their opponent.  But Skunder, with the fresh memory of his beloved Valinda dying due to the earlier negligence of that opponent, has his own agenda for the mission.  A story about prejudice, honor, and revenge...

Next week I continue my look at sci-fi short stories from 1972...

Game of the Week: Qix

 

Qix was an old Atari video game from the 1980s, later adapted to arcade game format...at least that's the way I remember it.  After Pong of the late 1970s, it became my favorite computer game...all because my brother-in-law Keith had left it with Melissa and me after we married in 1986.  When I applied to the Postal Service in late 1986 for a clerk position with their new letter-sorting machine (LSM), I realized after taking the exam that I would need to practice my dexterity with the keyboard.  Qix was played on the Atari (attachable through cables to the back of any TV then) as a small cartridge you jam into the top of the console...this computer also had the Basic computer language built into it, so I was able to program it to throw iterations of random number chains on the screen at time intervals roughly emulating the procession of letters with their addresses on the LSM...in the summer of '87 this greatly helped me gain that manual dexterity required for the job I was hired for in late September that year.  But when I wasn't training for my job on the Atari, I enjoyed playing Qix...and I got pretty doggone good at it!  The game's object is to draw Etch-a-Sketch-like lines enclosing spaces on the screen's rectangular grid, trying to avoid the randomly-moving Qix in the process while amassing as high a score as possible: should Qix cut through a line in progress the game is over! In the arcade game version above, the player is going up on the left part of the screen, trying to connect to another side before that fluctuating pattern on the right can hit it.  And time is of the essence: another icon, Sparx, moves along the lines already drawn and can end the game if it ever catches up with the player.  Over the course of time I developed some pretty nifty strategies for victory, but I don't even know if we still have the game or that ancient console: too bad, I feel a sentimental attachment to it all...

A Little Metaphysical Diversion Into Time and Subjective Existence

Many of the stories I read...especially in the science fiction genre...elicit speculation about the nature of reality, especially as it pertains to time: Kurt Vonnegut's brilliant novel Slaughterhouse Five is a prime example. Much of religion as I see it is based on people's projection of themselves within a universe carrying on with its reality after their deaths...the notion that there will be a year, say, 2200, in which they won't be around is very difficult for many to accept...so they desperately cling to what they consider to be the best belief system that puts at least their spirit, if not their body, in that temporal reality with everyone else.  Conversely, pretty much no one is especially concerned that before their conception and birth, reality stretched far into the past...at last estimate, some 13.8 billion years (and they weren't alive in all that time).  Yet as far as science...specifically, physics...is concerned, the laws work the same way whether you go forward or backward in time...the "progression" of time into the future is to some merely an expression of the general principle of entropy, i.e. the breaking down of complex, higher-energy forms and systems into those simpler and of lower energy.  The notion that my life span, bordered by both its temporal beginning and ending, will always possess an essential reality within the fabric of the universe, is something that very few people subscribe to: we're social creatures, and the idea that I am leaving this world while everyone else keeps going on just doesn't wash on an instinctual level...hence the religion that keeps us in a sort of community.  Spatially, it is no stretch to say that we as individuals can't be everywhere...our physical location pinpoints where and who we are in reality...but we have a problem saying that we temporally cannot be everywhen, but this equally-limiting factor is also a crucial element of defining our existence within the greater domain of reality.  There is the objective mega-universe equally existent everywhere at all points of time and then there is the personal, subjective universe that corresponds to our individual courses through each of our respective lives in our limited space and time with our experiences...

Great Old TV Episodes...from Monk

MR. MONK AND THE GAME SHOW, from the series Monk's third season in 2004, is one of those episodes I first saw at its very end...and it's that ending that makes it stand out so much for me as one of most hilarious episodes of a mystery show.  Later on, though, I saw it in its entirety, and while still excellent it seemed much sadder.  Former San Francisco police detective Adrian Monk, played by Tony Shalhoub, left the force after his wife was murdered...it's unsolved...and his pronounced obsessive-compulsive disorder sidelined him.  In the series he pays his bills working as a paid consultant for the police, and they often partner together to solve crimes and mysteries.  His father-in-law, who happens to be a big TV executive, leans on Monk in this episode to surreptitiously investigate what he suspects to be corrupt tampering on one of his quiz game shows: the host seems to be in collusion with a particular contestant who seems unstoppable with his constant winning and improbable answers to even the most obscure questions.  The "accidental" death of one of the show's staff adds a new dimension to the story, and Monk decides that he needs to get on the show as one of its contestants in order to discern what is really going on.  His OCD comes out strong when he keeps polishing clean his answer buzzer, constantly setting it off and annoying the host and everyone else...but soon enough he solves the secret plot and exposes it all live, on the air, with a great comedic twist and an uncannily accurate hunch. But I won't give it away here, you'll have to watch it yourself...

Monk is one of those series of which I've missed the greater part, not because it's a bad series...no, it's a great series...but because my ongoing life at the time always seemed to conflict with the aired episodes.  Now, though, at least for the time being I can view the series for "free" on Amazon Prime Video since I'm a paid subscriber already...I think I'll now try out another episode...

Just Finished Reading All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque's groundbreaking exposé novel All Quiet on the Western Front came out in 1929, originally written in German as Im Westen Nichts Neues.  A German, he served in World War I on that Western Front in France and suffered leg wounds during trench combat in 1917.  The book would be adapted to film in 1930...both versions are considered to be at the apex of their respective art forms.  I finally got around to reading the book and strongly agree that it is an immortal classic of great literature.  The first-person narrative is by the young German Paul Bäumer as he recounts his ongoing trench warfare experiences in France with memories of his earlier life in Germany.  He is tightly bonded with his fellow soldiers...some of them friends from his home town: Müller, Kropp, Leer, Tjaden...and "Kat" Katczinsky, the last a seasoned, older soldier with whom he forms the closest bond.  The story covers their gradual attrition over the course of months, the shortness of rations and necessary equipment, the often abusive treatment they get from higher-ups in the military, the scary visits to military hospitals with surgeons bent on experimentation, and the almost total disconnect from others when they go on leave to their respective homes.  More than anything this story is a stark reminder that war is decided by the powerful few and inflicted on the powerless masses...Bäumer sees the Russian POWs and a dying French soldier as closer to him than those in charge on his own side.  In short, this was seen as a dangerous, subversive piece of literature by both the emerging Nazis in the 1930s, as well as by many in the West who felt it spoke against the military too harshly: both book and film found themselves banned in different places.  I recently checked out this powerful movie from my library and saw it (see above picture). Not only was there a TV movie version made in 1979 starring Richard Thomas and Ernest Borgnine (available on YouTube), but I hear that Netflix is currently filming a new version right now.  You can read All Quiet on the Western Front on pdf by hitting this link.  Read it: even if you are pacifistic to begin with, the vividness of the narrative is so piercing that it will only reinforce your already-held beliefs.  And if you're one of those flag-waving pro-war "patriots", you're probably so stuck in your own narrative that nothing...not even this...will shake you out of your bubble...

Quote of the Week...from Bruce Lee

Everyone wants to learn how to win, but no one wants to learn how to accept defeat.

                                                                                     ---Bruce Lee

The other day I encountered a quote by the late Bruce Lee, who achieved worldwide renown for his martial arts skills and movies, in which he exhorted people not to put themselves down before others.  So I checked out some more of his quotes...the dude had a treasure trove of very wise sayings! The above quote is an example of how I can take something that's true and either apply it to others or...more helpfully and with greater difficulty...apply it to myself.  It's very easy to look at the sorest loser I've ever known...Donald Trump...and see the repercussions when someone with this extreme character flaw amasses power as United States President. I've known a number of people personally over the years...especially in my old school days...with the same glaring problem.  Yet if I'm honest with myself I have to admit that I also have had difficulty at times reconciling myself to defeat.  When you refuse to acknowledge that you lost, you can neither put closure to the experience nor properly analyze the causes of your reversal and move onward to tackle the next challenge armed with more wisdom gained from that experience.  Recently Liz Cheney, daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney and an articulate, strong conservative voice, lost a leadership position within her Republican caucus in the U.S. House of Representative because she would not bow before Trump and support his lie of not having lost last November's election to Biden.  It's been said that Republicans at-large by a 70-30% margin support Trump's contention that he actually won that election...much of that sentiment I believe arises from their very disturbing, cult-like idolatry of this individual, believing and hungering for every foul word coming from him.  But that also means that a sizeable minority accept the truth of the election and want to move on as a legitimate opposition party based on principles and stances on various issues...this is the mature, politically responsible path on which to proceed after a defeat and it has traditionally been followed throughout our history. Even though we've had some controversial elections in our history (1876, 2000 and 2016 stand out), the last time mass refusal to accept an election's results happened on this scale, in 1860 when Abraham Lincoln was elected, several states seceded from the Union and the Civil War followed.  But enough of Trump and his idolatrous, unquestioning worshipers: Bruce Lee's quote has made me look back at different events of my own life in which I've experienced defeat: wow, what an eye-opener, with a lot of stuff to learn from, based on my poor reactions to those past setbacks...