Weekly Short Stories: 1964 Science Fiction, Part 1

After finishing the 25-volume yearly "year's best" series covering science fiction short stories from 1939 through 1963, I'm now reviewing the anthology Robert Silverberg Presents the Great SF Stories (1964), in which the editor, a noted science fiction writer himself, along with Martin H. Greenberg from the previous series, selected in the year 2001 what they deemed to be the best stories from '64.  For the years 1965 through 1989, which I plan to review in the future, I'll be using a different anthology series.  For me in 1964 I was seven going on eight and living with my family in West Hollywood, Florida, starting the year off in the second grade at Boulevard Heights Elementary School and finishing it there in the third.  I remember being big on star-gazing, following the Beatles and rock n' roll on the radio, new TV series like The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Bewitched, My Favorite Martian...and that great sci-fi series The Outer Limits.  We were a "cat" family at the time with such beasts as Tiger, Panther, and Smoky...the first was with us into 1966, the second was so disruptive that we had to return him to the humane society, and giant, semi-feral Smoky one day just up and left us, as sometimes is the case with cats. Oh, and I was definitely getting into reading back then, too.  Here are my reactions to the first three tales in the book...

OUTWARD BOUND by Norman Spinrad

Humanity has developed interstellar travel but cannot transcend the speed of light...hence many years, even centuries, pass by as travel and settlement of the nearest star system progress slowly.  The Earth authorities have come to realize, though, that this situation works in their favor as the new settlements are forced into dependency relationships with the home planet.  An interstellar trader takes on his ship a fugitive theoretical scientist who may have discovered a means to exceed the speed of light and the race is on to capture him before he can forever change the destiny of manned space exploration.  The main message is that scientific innovation often finds itself as an act of rebellion, intentional or not...

THE KRAGEN by Jack Vance

More a novella than a short story, Vance expanded The Kragen later on into a novel titled Blue Planet...I found this shorter version long enough, although I liked it.  The setting is a planet completely covered with water and rich with life...including large predatory beasts called kragens.  A penal ship loaded with convicts is traveling through space...the inmates take over the ship and they end up castaways here.  They develop a strict caste system and learn to make a sort of devil's pact arrangement with the largest kragen, whom they call King Kragen.  It's now 300 years and several generations since they landed and one of the people, protagonist Sklar Hast, has had enough of appeasing the wildlife and begins a revolt against the established authority.  As with the preceding story in this anthology, The Kragen makes the point that science and discovery can be revolutionary acts, seen as dangerous to the authorities at the time but ultimately transformative and paradigm-shifting in an empowering way for the general good...

THE MASTER KEY by Poul Anderson

The clever interstellar space merchant Nicholas van Rijn, a recurring character in Poul Anderson stories, hears an account of the leaders of a party that landed on an unexplored planet to establish trade relations with the intelligent humanoids living there. The focus is the incident whereby the natives, after having gotten along well for some time with the traders, suddenly turn on them and violently attack them.  Why this happened is the big mystery, with the expedition's two leaders offering their own theories at the end.  But discerning van Rijn has figured it all out and it comes down to the essential difference between the wild and the domesticated...or in the case of humans, the civilized...and how they go about dealing with obeying authority.  I enjoyed the story and felt I learned a little on the side about human nature...

Next week: more science fiction short stories reviewed from 1964...

Received General Election Absentee Ballot Saturday

Saturday we received our mail-in, absentee ballots for the upcoming general election.  As expected, the presidential race is the first item listed, followed by the House of Representatives District 3 contest and two local Alachua County Commission races.  Then we have some judge retention questions, Florida State Constitution amendment questions and, finally, several of a local nature.  If it were only a matter of voting in the political races between candidates, this would be a fairly quick process.  The judge retention questions are problematic since I'll need to figure out whether any of them has a cloud of impropriety over them...probably not, I imagine.  The constitutional questions are problematic in a different way.  It used to be that a simple majority vote on any of them would add them to the constitution, but a few years ago they raised the bar to at least 60% "yes" votes for passage.  But the last time I got to vote on amendments I voted in favor of allowing convicted felons in Florida who served their sentences to have their voting rights restored...the measure was passed statewide.  But then the legislature, governor, and courts took over and mandated that felons pay back court and processing costs to the state beforehand.  That's not what I voted for, and I wonder with each of these measures before me this year what hidden clauses and agendas are behind them.  There's even one measure proposing that amendments would only be accepted after they are passed twice...are you kidding me?!  I'm going to need to research the local questions as well...sigh, it's going to take a little longer than I had planned to get through this...

On a related note, when running and walking through my home Northwood Pines and the adjacent Northwood Oaks subdivisions I've noticed that many homes have Kayser Enneking campaign signs out in front.  Enneking is a Democrat running for the Florida House District 21 seat currently held by Republican Chuck Clemons.  That's cool...except for the fact that our neighborhoods are in the more eastern District 20 and won't be voting in their election.  Now in the previous election for our State Senate seat, we were included in the race that Enneking ran against Republican incumbent Keith Perry...I wonder whether my neighbors got a little confused when they discovered she was running again: some of them even have her old "Enneking for State Senate" signs out...

I don't plan to wait too long to get this ballot back out in the mail, maybe two weeks maximum as I sort through the different questions on it.  And I will, as I did with the previous August primary election, track my ballot's progress online until it is safe and sound in the elections office: I recommend you follow suit if you're voting by mail, too...

My All-Time Favorite Songs: #19-17

Here are my reviews of three more songs off the list of my 500 all-time favorites...all established, recognizable acts this time, although I wonder whether you've ever heard the first two songs below: if you haven't heard the last one, I'd wonder instead what planet you've been living on these past 29 years...

19 FLAMING...Pink Floyd

From the British progressive rock band's 1967 debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn...a true classic...founding front man Syd Barrett delivers his most spaced out performance, in many ways similar to John Lennon's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds from the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album: both albums were recorded at the same time in the same studio.  Flaming is full of vivid imagery, with Barrett evoking a child's sense of wonder at everything going on around him as his makes his magical voyage: "Alone in the clouds all blue, lying on an eiderdown...Yippee, you can't see me but I can you".  What's an eiderdown, you ask?  A quilt made with eider duck feathers, it seems.  It's tragic that months later Syd Barrett underwent a severe mental breakdown, from which he suffered for the remainder of his life...his body couldn't handle the drugs he had been putting into it.  I liked Pink Floyd the most when he was their leader in the early times, but I would have gladly traded Barrett's creative output back then for him enjoying a full, healthy life...

18 BLACKSTAR...David Bowie

One day in January 2016 I was dismayed to find out that David Bowie had just died of cancer at the age of 69.  I was then astonished to see the video to his new ten-minute-long singles release Blackstar, the title track to the album released two days before his death.  Somber, mysterious and foreboding, the song's lyrics speak to a charismatic, malevolent figure Bowie may have intended to represent the horrific ISIS organization plaguing the Middle East at the time...at least that's what his saxophonist said.  And the sax playing here...and elsewhere on the album...is fantastic.  It's a slow-moving piece as the lyrics get stuck in your mind: "I can't answer why, but I can tell you how, we were born up-side down, born the wrong way 'round".  David's passing was sad, but this final work of his inspired me to look into his other 26 studio albums with many of his best efforts done in his later years...funny how radio stations will get stuck on playing an artist's earlier hits without ever checking in to seeing how they're doing later on.  I picked Blackstar as my "song of the year" for 2016 and is my all-time favorite from this extraordinarily creative musician...

17 GIVE IT AWAY...the Red Hot Chili Peppers

For a band whose music I have come to appreciate over the years, I really personally dislike the members...especially bass guitarist "Flea" who was a lowlife high school bully before front man Anthony Kiedis recruited him when he formed the band in early-eighties Los Angeles.  Their 1991 breakthrough album Blood Sugar Sex Magic made them international superstars and they've worked hard to maintain their status as a premier rock act to this day.  One of its more renowned tracks, Give It Away is a good example of how they were able to seamlessly fuse different elements of popular music...here they combine reggae, funk, hard rock and rap into a unique song that delivers a tribute to reggae's great Bob Marley.  Originally my favorite parts were the weird, psychedelic instrumental links between the chorus and the verses, but now I look forward to the protracted guitar jam at the end.  Hopefully by now the bandmembers have grown up a bit...

Next week: #16-14...

Just Finished Reading Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Cat's Cradle, which I just finished reading, is a 1963 novel by Kurt Vonnegut.  The protagonist is the first-person narrator Jonah (or John), who encounters the Hoenikker family as he researches a book he is writing about what different people did on the day of the Hiroshima bombing in August, 1945.  The Hoenikkers...fictional products of Vonnegut's imagination...are important here because the surviving three children's father was a scientist credited with being the father of the atom bomb.  Professor Felix Hoenikker appears to represent all scientists who go about their work with blinders on about the implications for the world regarding their discoveries...a case in point is his invention of a crystalline water form called "ice-nine", suggested to Hoenikker in passing one day by a military man referring to the problem of marines getting bogged down in mud...and wouldn't it be nice if somehow we could freeze the water in it under normal temperatures to provide a solid surface.  The old professor, without any regard to how this might affect the world at large, then goes about producing the ultimately very dangerous substance...

Jonah intersperses his narration with quips from a fictional religion called Bokononism...resembling Zen Buddhism in places and invented by a man named Bokonon to comfort the impoverished population of San Lorenzo, a small Caribbean island nation which he has adopted as his home.  On a job assignment, Jonah travels there where the Hoenniker children, the island's strongarm dictator, ice-nine and Bokononism all intersect to deliver the world's fate...while he tries to derive some meaning from it all...

Cat's Cradle to me was intended as a satirical farce as Kurt Vonnegut used ice-nine to expose the selfishness and shortsightedness he saw within the scientific community, as well as examining the love-hate relationship people...and especially their leaders...have with regard to religion.  He also pokes fun at different personality types...this kind of reminded me of Joseph Heller's great novel Catch-22, which came out only a couple of years earlier.  Of Vonnegut's three novels that I have read so far, Cat's Cradle is my favorite.  If you dig irony and satire, and don't mind having one or two of your own cherished "sacred cows" toppled in the process, you might go for it as well...

Miscellany: Coffee Shop, SCOTUS, Local Weather

Where I work, the policy is for my annual leave accumulation to cap out at a specific number of hours: at year's end any leave I have left over exceeding that cap will disappear...and I found that I needed to taken extra paid days off in order not to lose them.  So here I am in the middle of a three-day weekend, sitting at my nearby donut shop drinking iced coffee and writing this blog article.  Normally I would have been at the national coffee chain store down the road doing the same thing, but they've been behaving in a manner lately unbecoming to a business that purports to value the customer, closing their dining area in an almost random manner while the manager, when it is open with the necessarily limited number of seats due to COVID-19, always seems intent on occupying one of them.  Three times I've gone there recently and they were closed, and three times I've gone there with no available seating: enough is enough, I've crossed over to the "other side"...

The other day I felt compelled to write a "politics" article, something that I had been studiously intent on avoiding during this most disturbing and divisive presidential election campaign season. Yet I felt the topic, concerning Justice Ginsburg's replacement on the US Supreme Court, demanded that I address it.  Concerning a solidly conservative Court after Trump's pick, federal judge Amy Coney Barrett, is almost certainly destined for fast-track Senate confirmation, I have a different perspective than do many of my more liberal friends who are understandably concerned about this body's marked shift in ideology.  Maybe I'll express some of my thoughts in the future...I'm afraid it all might take up much more writing space than I'm accustomed to using in my daily blog articles...

Looks like the weather around my home Gainesville area is on the upswing, with the extreme precipitation, heat and humidity characterizing the previous several weeks diminishing substantially.  The ground throughout my neighborhood had become waterlogged: when stepping on any of it I would literally sink down into the dirt mud.  Now the ground is solid, weather conditions are more bearable, and I'm ready for more outdoor weekend distance runs: today seems like a pretty good day to get out there, so I think I'll "close up shop" here and head for home...     

Quote of the Week...from Kurt Vonnegut

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.           ---Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) was a celebrated twentieth century American writer probably best known for his historical/science fiction novel Slaughterhouse Five from 1969.  I've read it and seen the movie...and also read his Breakfast of Champions (1973).  Currently I'm working on his 1963 book Cat's Cradle as well as his 1968 short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House.  Vonnegut had a way of mixing social commentary, satire, autobiography and science fiction together in a very readable writing style while managing to impart learning in whatever area he researched for his stories.  He also had something of a cynical take on human nature, as exhibited in the above quote from Cat's Cradle...

If you know me at all, you'll agree that I'm not very keen on talking...the less the better.  And as far as my view of others is concerned, I'm also not very keen on being talked to...with the notable worthy exceptions of my family and chosen friends.  Now I don't seem to have any problem with listening to people talk on TV or radio, and I am a big user and advocate for audio books...but when somebody walks up to me out there in the world and just starts yacking their head off at me, usually about a subject that clearly doesn't concern me in the least, I'm inclined to begin acting rudely toward them as I try to disengage myself from the unwelcome one-way conversation. I'm sure modern day marketers would object to my attitude and instead would take advantage of the opportunity to sell a house, vitamins, a politician, religion or whatever their agenda is...but that's not me.  These days I also see folks around me seemingly talking to themselves...but no, they've got some poor soul on the other end of their Bluetooth connection and seem to be in a perpetual state of conversation: what the heck is that all about?  One thing I've discovered during this era of people bubbling themselves off into feedback loop circles whereby the insiders are constantly reinforcing each others' skewed narratives about various topics...coronavirus denial comes to the fore in my mind as an example: it's natural for humans in general to follow the lead of others in their immediate social environment, even when their own individual observations and conclusions dictate a different course of action.  To "fit in" seems to require engaging in this constant chatter that I disdain so much.  How much of this qualifies as "really meaningful to say"?  Not a whole lot...if anything, Vonnegut's observation from 57 years ago is truer today than it's ever been...

About the Republicans Filling Ginsburg's Supreme Court Seat

Now that Utah senator Mitt Romney has come down in favor of processing President Trump's upcoming nominee to the United States Supreme Court to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg...who sadly passed away this past Friday...it looks as if the Republicans will be able to push it on through, even though that party, led by Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell, refused to consider President Obama's pick of Merrick Garland to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016...nine months before that year's presidential election.  That this current vacancy happened much closer to the election...less than two months before...does not matter, it seems.  Yes, the hypocrisy here is beyond belief and I understand the outrage spreading among many Americans...hopefully they'll translate it all into high numbers at the polls and defeat Trump, Majority Leader McConnell, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, and outspoken Committee member John Cornyn...all running for reelection and all extremely two-faced on this issue. As for McConnell's (and the rest of the GOP Senate's) hypocrisy, let me point out that you need to follow their actions and not their phony words justifying them.  Mitch McConnell has been very consistent in his manipulation of the rules of the Senate to push a strictly partisan Republican agenda and to marginalize the Democratic side of the chamber as much as possible.  It's the rationalizations, the words he and his colleagues spew out to excuse their actions, that ring false...not their unstated motivations.  Democrats in the Senate are understandably upset at the actions of their counterparts but have themselves contributed to the rancor and division building up here over the past few decades.  McConnell feels he's on a roll and is unaccountable for what he's doing...only electoral defeat will ever restrain him and he's already said as much during a brief recent rare outburst of honesty.  Am I angry at what's happening here? Not really...I've known Senator McConnell for what the person he is, going on several years, and predicted long ago that he would weasel out of delaying a Supreme Court nomination should a vacancy occur in 2020.  I am disappointed, though, at the so-called "leaders" comprising the rest of the Republican Senate caucus for caving in to him time and time again...including Mr. Romney, who voted earlier this year to convict (and thereby remove from office) the very president who will be deciding on the late Justice Ginsburg's replacement: sir, if you didn't think back then that Trump should remain in office, then why do you think now that he should be allowed to pick the next Supreme Court justice before the American people themselves can render their own verdict on his fitness for the presidency?

Weekly Short Stories: 1963 Science Fiction, Part 4

With this article I conclude my look at short science fiction from the year 1963 as it appeared in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories 25 (1963).  It's also the last one of this 25-volume series that began with stories from 1939.  I plan to continue with the year-by-year reviews by using other sources, primarily Donald Wollheim's "year's best" series that picks up where Asimov left off and goes through 1989.  Also, from time to time I'll take a break and review certain collections of specific authors...

BERNIE THE FAUST by William Tenn

Bernie is a minor trader in surplus and used items, with a small office in New York City.  One day a disheveled looking man walks into his office and offers him a $20 bill in exchange for $5...Bernie is immediately suspicious, thinking that this is some kind of con job.  But he's intrigued and can't leave it alone, even after he eventually decides to go through with the deal.  More ludicrous lop-sided sales ensue between the two, and then Bernie realizes he may have gone too far.  The story's funny ending demonstrates that maybe the easiest person to con is a con himself... 

A ROSE FOR ECCLESIASTES by Roger Zelazny

Written in the first person in the not-so-distant future, a world-renowned poet and linguist is given an opportunity to visit the very reclusive Martians in their isolated, enclosed home compound and investigate their extensive archives...first he must learn their very difficult language as of yet unmastered by any human.  Ultimately his mission becomes much more enlarged in scope, with the future of an entire planet at stake.  With this story's interesting ending comes a more immediate question affecting our "real" present lives here on planet Earth: how much of what we do...even the impulsive, heroic or rebellious kind of stuff...is allotted for within a society, even expected? Even Orwell's totalitarian 1984 state figured this into their rigid structure...are we the players or the pawns?

IF THERE WERE NO BENNY CEMOLI by Philip K. Dick

It is a decade following a devastating nuclear war, presumably far enough into the future that not only the nearby planets have been settled but also our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.  Earth is trying to pick up the pieces, with some help from the Martians, but suddenly the Alpha Centauri authorities arrive in full force to work at resurrecting life and the economy...while investigating and trying to prosecute those they find were responsible for the holocaust.  One of them discovers that the New York Times still has its core memory and function...it was buried deep beneath the rubble.  The "paper" with its more advanced technology can report instantly on any ongoing stories and seems to be covering an insurgent populist movement headed by a Benny Cemoli, but his activities don't seem to correspond in any way to the ongoing reality.  It's a great mystery about this elusive character, and the Alpha Centaurans find themselves diverted from their investigations to solve it.  The story's ending says it all, especially about our instinctive human aversive to outside meddling, no matter how well intentioned, and the need to avoid responsibility for our actions...

Next week I begin my look at science fiction short stories from the year 1964...

Just Watched The Social Dilemma Documentary Movie

Melissa, Will and I recently set down and watched on Netflix a very intriguing and disturbing documentary film, released just this year: The Social Dilemma, released for general public viewing just a couple of weeks ago after appearing at the Sundance Film Festival in January.  In it former Google designer Tristan Harris, along with several other former major Internet company employees, present their view that uses of social media like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter...along with simple Internet use of search engines like that of Google, present skewed outcomes because the companies providing these services use complex algorithms deliberately designed to give the user what he or she wants and pander to people's prejudices in order to increase their usage...not necessarily providing truthful or balanced information.  Each user has a separate profile that the company analyzes to increase their addiction to the application by feeding back material that supports their own preconceived notions. This is creating among adults a very politically divided, bubbled-off society with each "camp" armed with its own "facts" and perceived outrages perpetrated by the other "side" as they spend their time shouting past each other on the various issues and politicians.  But with teens...and preteens as well...social media can become very addictive and personally demeaning, possibly even contributing to suicide...

I just finished rereading A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin's first volume of his apparently never-ending A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series.  His fiction may be fantasy in that it involves a mythical world, dragons, monsters up north and the like, but with regard to how unseen forces manipulate the characters into acting against their own interests, it is very, very real and applicable to what is going on now with not only social media and the Internet in general, but also television and radio: the companies obey the bottom line of economic profit, which is provided by advertising, which in turn is driven by viewership...regardless of the truth value of what is being put out there.  As with Martin's book with his "puppet masters" stringing the characters along with their strategically-placed provocations eventually pitting the House of Lannister in open conflict against that of Stark, Harris and others reveal that these corporate AI algorithms have come to the conclusion that inciting people's passions about different subjects and themselves is the most cost-effective way to increase onsite activity and get those crucial profits for the company...and this is causing our children to become more withdrawn and insecure while our society as a whole is much more deeply divided and uncivil...

This past Sunday evening I was watching the end of an exciting, close football game between the (boo) New England Patriots and the (hooray) Seattle Seahawks.  My 'Hawks managed to squeak out a close victory on the last play of the game, but what if the broadcasters behaved the way of social media or search engines?  While not denying the final score in favor of Seattle, NBC, knowing my preferences, would have exalted everything Seattle did while casting New England in the role of dastardly, evil villains...and the officials were of course biased against the Seahawks.  But for my neighbor who likes the Patriots, the presentation by the same NBC on his TV would portray his chosen team as the heroes robbed of a victory by Seattle's cheating and poor officiating: New England really did win, even if the score says otherwise...must be some kind of hoax.  That sounds crazy, but if The Social Dilemma is right then in a way that's a lot of what we're getting on our smartphones and computers.  Users beware: they're taking us for a bunch of damned fools, and maybe they're right...I highly recommend this documentary and let the wise among us wake up to the danger...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #22-20

The next three songs on my list of 500 personal all-time favorite songs all have pretty somber and sometimes rather disturbing lyrics...awesome!  Each of them is very thought-provoking, even if you might disagree with the message...and the music is spectacular.  Just don't let it all get you down, especially the last entry...

22 INVISIBLE SUN...the Police

Ghost in the Machine is my favorite album of the hybrid British/American reggae/rock/jazz trio the Police, from 1981.  Invisible Sun is one of its early tracks and speaks of a dystopian, nightmare world of society unraveling into violence...but that's getting too much like the world I'm starting to see around me.  What I love about it is the creepy, ominous musical buildup and background as Sting sings his words and gives the impression that like it or not, we're now all in survival mode on this runaway train, this crazy world with conspiracy theory fanatics, alternative "facts" and increasingly violent reactions to what many see as provocations against the groups they identify with, whipped up by social media, TV and radio. I first heard this song in '83 and it captures the climate of our divided, decreasingly civil society more than ever today...  

21 THE WASP (TEXAS RADIO AND THE BIG BEAT)...the Doors

Although the Doors existed as a popular American rock band from 1967 to 1971...when lyricist and singer Jim Morrison died in France apparently due to drugs...I didn't go past their singles releases deeper into their six studio albums until around 1994-95 when I submerged myself in their collected works.  Ultimately, this track toward the end of their final L.A. Woman album emerged as my all-time favorite of theirs...it's so unique with a lot of talk and a little singing as the topics drift from music with a wicked back beat to turning one's back on the world to existential alienation.  And the music is hard-driving with some cool, jazzy guitar/keyboard/percussion interaction thrown in for good measure..."We have constructed pyramids in honor of our escaping" is my favorite of many lines from it...

20 NOVOCAINE FOR THE SOUL...the Eels

Speaking of existential alienation, if there were any song that should have captured the essence of the Goth movement...at least as it was portrayed on the South Park cartoon series...it's this blunt complaint about how society's different institutions have miserably failed the upset young singer, who is so pained as he pleads for relief in an ironically calm voice..."before I sputter out".  It was a rock hit back in 1996 if memory serves me right and is one of the best examples of a "venting" song.  In the "real world", when I hear someone on an emotional rant like this, I've learned to patiently and sympathetically hear them out without trying to throw in my own two-cents worth...how about you?  

Next week: #19-17...

Just Finished Reading The BFG by Roald Dahl

The BFG, published in 1982, is the third Roald Dahl children's book I've read...after Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach.  The late Welsh writer had the most wicked sense of humor and remarkable characters in these sometimes macabre modern fairy tales and this latest reading is no exception...once again I found myself chuckling as I followed the story.  Sophie, a little girl living in an orphanage, one night looks out her bedroom window to see a tall shadow skulking down the street. Upon deeper examination she sees it is an incredibly tall man with a trumpet, which he loads with something from a glass jar and then blows into other bedroom windows.  Having extremely acute hearing, he eventually detects her, reaches in her room and spirits her back to his homeland where he and nine other giants live.  But Sophie's captor is friendly, as he identifies himself as the BFG, short for Big Friendly Giant, and unlike the others refuses to eat people...much to the girl's relief.  His abduction of Sophie was done to avoid her telling others of his and the other giants' existence...the idea of living like a confined zoo animal understandably frightens him.  So the two learn to live together as the BFG reveals his good nature as he struggles with the English language, making all sorts of comical mistakes with it...and tries to protect her from the other mean, bigger human-eating giants.  How does it all end? Quite royally, although to get the full gist of my words you'll need to read it for yourself...

Roald Dahl is now three-for-three with his children's novels...but I'm seeing them as an adult and I wonder whether some sensitive children might be subject to nightmares in this latest one with the talk about giants snatching people, even kids, from their beds and eating them up.  Then again, many if not most of the traditional fairy tales I grew up with were full of gruesome and violent imagery: maybe it serves some backhanded purpose in preparing them for this often dangerous and tragic real world they will be living through as adults.  Now on to the next Dahl book...

Beta Already Reached in 2020 Atlantic Tropical Storm Names

You know you're in the middle of an extraordinarily active Atlantic hurricane season when one day you turn on the Weather Channel and, just past the peak time of mid-September they've already gone through "V" with only "W" left to name a storm before going into the Greek alphabet...and naturally there's another developing tropical depression in the Gulf of Mexico about to become "Wilfred".  But you know it's much worse than that when the following day you discover that this now-tropical storm didn't get the name Wilfred...or even Alpha, the first letter in the Greek alphabet: no, there's so much activity right now in Atlantic that those two names quickly went to other storms.  We're now at the Beta stage in tropical storm names, already the most ever since 2005 when we went through Zeta, the sixth Greek letter.  To contrast 2005 with 2020, by this date fifteen years ago we were only at the "R" point in names, with Rita in the process of developing into a powerful hurricane that would devastate the eastern Texas coast.  Since there is still so much time left in 2020, I'm wondering whether, if an upcoming "Greek" hurricane causes so much damage or loss of life that its name would normally be retired, what would they replace it with...a comparable letter from another language's alphabet, or maybe just skip over that letter the next time it comes up?  

I don't think that Tropical Storm Beta will develop into a strong hurricane due to wind shear on its northwest side, but it's forecast to slow down, stop, and just sit along the Texas coast and inflict its winds, rain, and storm surge on the area for a couple of days before moving eastward along the coastline.  That's the problem with Gulf storms: they're bound to hit somewhere...

Quote of the Week...from Stephen King

If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you.           ...Stephen King

Being a major fan of Stephen King's writings, I also follow him on Twitter...often he gives good reading recommendations in his posts.  The above quote was from a list provided on a website...I'm not sure whether it's from a book of his or his own standalone quote.  That I agree with it is the reason for this article. There's a good reason for the existence of the term "teenage angst": going through this transformative life stage carries with it many opportunities for emotional difficulties as the body develops from childhood to being an adult and society in so many ways places pressure and stress on the young person who for the most part is simply trying to get along in life and fit in with his or her peers.  Bruce Springsteen may think of that time as "glory days"...and to be sure there are glorious, positive moments embedded within those years...but for me life was nothing like that back then.  Without going off on a rant about what a pathetic victim I was and how badly others treated me...yeah, like you want to hear all that...let me just say that it wasn't the fun kind of experience I would want to relive.  Teens are struggling enough with the monumental changes going on in their bodies as they grow from childhood to adults without, on one hand, being restricted as minors by their parents and other authority figures and, on the other, having to worry and be held accountable like adults when it comes to their academic records and futures in college and business.  The full development of the human brain, it has been discovered, isn't complete until around age 25...and it's areas like judgment and discernment that are part of that later growth stage to full maturity. I've written before that by the time I was eighteen I felt like an old man...the supreme irony, and a very good sign for those undergoing those "teenage angst" years as I did, is that I haven't felt that way for many years...even though I'm turning 64 next month.  I used to feel at the time that my teenage experiences were uniquely awful and felt a kind of shame about them, but after the many ensuing decades of hearing others' stories, reading, and watching movies and television, I feel instead like I'm more a part of the suffering-yet-enduring masses of teen-year survivors: a kind of fellowship in itself...

Constellation of the Month: Cygnus (the Swan)

 

The accompanying picture is a drawing I made of Cygnus, a northern summer constellation prominent and high in the sky from northern latitudes.  It is distinguished by its bright first magnitude star Deneb...Arabic for "tail"...and although you might be able to make out a faint resemblance to the swan which it represents, the constellation is also commonly called the Northern Cross because of its core asterism of bright stars.  Like Sagittarius (last month's featured constellation on this blog), Cygnus has the Milky Way prominently in its background. From where I live, it's more visible and impressive because unlike with more southern, low-lying Sagittarius, Cygnus is much higher and removed from the obscuring city lights that confound my star-gazing along the horizon.  Along with Deneb, the stars Vega (from Lyra) and Altair (from Aquila) constitute the Summer Triangle asterism that's visible under even urban skies on clear nights.  If you're into deeper observation of the heavens using a telescope then Cygnus is one of the great sources of interesting objects...the North America, Pelican, and Veil Nebulae are standouts along with M39, an open star cluster.  Deneb, bright as it is from Earth, is a colossal blue giant some 2,600 light years away with an absolute magnitude at higher than -8...that's awfully impressive!

It's been difficult of late for me to get out and look at the stars...even when it isn't raining the sky is usually severely overcast and the overbearing humidity tends to diminish the brightness of the stars even when it is clear.  This summer in northern Florida has to be one of the most miserable I've experienced since moving here in 1977...I'm hoping to get a little relief from it all before too long...

Weekly Short Stories: 1963 Science Fiction, Part 3

Here is another article with me reviewing old science fiction short stories...again from the year 1963...as they appeared in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 25 (1963).  I thought each tale I'm discussing below was important in its own right and they're definitely worth the expenditure of reading time...and a little money if you choose to buy the anthology as I did.  They all left an impression on me, especially the last one...

THE PAIN PEDDLERS by Robert Silverberg
This is a short story with a "you reap what you sow" theme I've often seen in many Twilight Zone episodes, which incidentally was in its third and fourth seasons in 1963.  In this tale we're off in the future a few years and society has turned into an ugly consumer cesspool of vicarious thrills...the latest craze enables "viewers" to temporarily feel the ongoing pain of real injury victims, with media companies even stooping to the level of paying hospital patients to undergo surgery without anesthesia and transmitting their agony to the hungry masses.  I keep thinking of that brilliant 2006 Tool song Vicarious...seems we're well on our way to this disgusting scenario...
                                                                                               

TURN OFF THE SKY by Ray Nelson

On our Earth in the distant future they have a one world government as well as a permissive nanny state that provides for people's needs from birth to death...Abelard Rosenberg is an anarchist who walks around in public nearly naked, passing out his political pamphlets to anyone who'll take them.  He encounters a young woman, Reva, who takes him across the Atlantic on one of the 1000 mph subterranean trains crisscrossing the oceans to England, where there is actually a live music hall featuring artists performing songs with primitive major and minor scales...the music of their own time has expanded to incorporate hundreds of notes in very complex scale patterns.  The story focuses on their relationship and philosophy on life and society...it's very cerebral and worth a read or two...or three...

THEY DON'T MAKE LIFE LIKE THEY USED TO by Alfred Bester

One of my all-time favorite science fiction short stories, a young woman living in a model sailboat house in the middle of New York's Central Park believes she is the last person left alive following a nuclear holocaust...but one day Linda encounters Mayo, a young man who is passing through the empty streets on his way further south.  In the midst of this incredibly gloomy and broken environment the two get along and converse in a light, humorous manner, much like how Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart's characters interacted in their movie African Queen as they faced grave danger.  In time both Linda and Mayo reveal their personal stories of happenstance survival when the bombing hit...after some misunderstandings are resolved they grow to like each other and bond more deeply, hinting that maybe humanity still has a small chance of continuing on.  But there is an undercurrent of something going on around them in the city...including a blue jay's imitation of something metallic and a white, hard gelatinous substance covering a nearby building.  The ending is nothing short of terrifying...Stephen King couldn't have done better than Bester with this one.  By the way, the story's setting is around the year 1980, which gives a clue as to the apocalyptic nature of many people's thinking back in '63...

Next week I finish my look back at science fiction short stories from the year 1963...

Just Finished Reading The ReWired Brain by Ski Chilton

The ReWired Brain is a newly published book by Dr. Ski Chilton, professor of medicine, writer, and entrepreneur...along with Dr. Margaret Rukstalis and A.J. Gregory.  Melissa introduced me to it and I just finished reading it...here are my reactions...

Dr. Chilton in this book lays out the thesis that anyone can "rewire" their own brain and thus transform their life due to recent discoveries in neurological research.  He introduces and explains the concepts of brain plasticity, epigenetics, dual process reasoning (Systems One and Two) and the undifferentiated and differentiated minds.  He challenges, through the presentation of epigenetics, the commonly held notion that one's genetic makeup greatly restricts their capacity to change and that one's mental makeup is pretty much determined in their younger years.  Instead, Chilton explains that our nervous system is designed for change throughout our lives and that what we now choose to think in itself directly causes physical changes that affect our future.  Roughly stated, with dual process reasoning, System One corresponds to the subconscious mind and the lower brain functions while System Two, which defines our humanity in his opinion, rests within the cerebrum...the key is to keep them in balance, and especially work to avoid letting System One rule over what we say and do.  What I appreciate about this book is the personally liberating idea that I can design and change my brain and thinking to whatever I want it to be...the catch is that I not only have to know where I want to go, but also that I need to understand where I'm coming from right now: this is where the concept of differentiation comes into play.  For much of what we take for granted as truth comes from early childhood experiences, some of which may have involved abuse or exposure to destructive belief patterns.  It is important to recognize them in order to "differentiate" our past experience from what we truly are and want to become...

Ski Chilton writes from a personal perspective, drawing upon his own life story and his faith as a Christian.  You do not have to be a fellow believer in order to derive benefit from his writing, though...just realize that he is simply honestly expressing things as he sees them.  He also presents self-exploration questions at the end of chapters designed to get the reader more involved...very useful.  I've grossly simplified the good author's message in this necessarily brief review...let me just say in closing that there's a lot of new stuff here to learn and I'm confident that before long I'll find myself reading it again.  Thumbs up on this book...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #25-23

Two of the three acts featured below as I continue to approach the top of my list of 500 all-time personal favorite songs are well-known while the last one should be...had the trends of popular music tastes remained at the same relatively high level they were during the latter part of the twentieth century.  But that's just my opinion and you're welcome to your boring top forty MTV superstars of the past few years if you're happy with their output: I'm not...

25 FIND THE RIVER...R.E.M.

The Athens, Georgia-based alternative rock band R.E.M.'s greatest album, in my opinion, was Automatic for the People from 1992...Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones reportedly had a big hand in producing it.  My favorite tracks from it are Drive, Man on the Moon, The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight and the closing song Find the River...my favorite from this outstanding musical act.  Find the River's lyricist and singer Michael Stipe admits that he threw a lot of nonsensical words together in it because they sounded good, but he also gets enough in to direct the mood of the song as it portends great change to come...including the inevitability of death itself, as the accompanying video suggests.  But such things are universal, just as the river flows into the sea...an allegory in this song.  Find the River is sad, thought-provoking, and beautiful...

24 STREET FIGHTING MAN...the Rolling Stones

I pretty much ignored this track from the Stones' pivotal 1968 album Beggars Banquet when it first came out...it wouldn't be until the Nineties when I fell in love with the off-sounding beat and guitar and sitar interactions, along with singer Mick Jagger's ironic lament of London's sleepy town status as opposed to Paris, site of many ongoing street riots and protests. Ironic because Jagger was no radical himself, one of those wealthy folk that the anarchists and revolutionaries liked to rail against...yet in the song he calls himself "a poor boy".  Jagger was and still is a master of projecting an image of himself and his band that contributed to their enduring notoriety and success...even as they accumulated their riches and social status.  Street Fighting Man is one of the greatest air guitar songs I know of...yet this band which is still going on strong...more than two and a half decades following their "One Foot in the Grave" concert tour...has another song that is even higher up on my favorites list...

23 OH DETROIT, LIFT UP YOUR WEARY HEAD...Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan Stevens is one of those musical artists for whom you never know exactly what to expect when you play one of his albums for the first time.  In the decade of the 2000s he released two albums themed after the states of Michigan and Illinois...this song about Detroit is obviously from the former as he bemoans the fall that the Motor City had undergone through the years.  It starts out fast-moving and syncopated and winds down to a slow death at the end, mirroring Stevens' feelings about this great old American city.  Eight minutes long, it has always been among my favorites ever since I first heard it in 2009.  Yet I would be astonished if I found out that any of this blog's readers had ever heard this masterpiece before...to me it should have been a nationwide number one singles hit for weeks instead of being deeply buried on an obscure CD.  Stevens has a new album release, The Ascension, due out at the end of this month and I'm looking forward to hearing it...

Next week: #22-20...

Giving George R.R. Martin One Last Chance

I've written on this blog a number of times how I have been disappointed in fantasy fiction writer George R.R. Martin's decade-long delay in finishing his sixth book, The Winds of Winter, in the A Song of Ice and Fire series.  I had ambitiously set out to read the first five volumes of the series, starting with A Game of Thrones, finished up several years ago, and eagerly awaited the next installment...and waited...and waited.  Instead, Martin collaborated with HBO on an eight-season adaptation of the series, even going into yet-to-be published material from the final two books during the last three seasons and completely closing out the series on TV with a very controversial ending.  Meanwhile, Martin has let himself be distracted by other projects, including an unsolicited prequel novel to this series while all his loyal readers have been clamoring for Winds of Winter.  Well, I've reread good fiction before and I don't really know for sure how he plans to end his written version of the series...assuming he gets around to finish writing it, that is.  Still, foolish as I may be, I've decided to reread the first five rather lengthy books in hopes that Martin is true to his word about expecting the next book to be out sometime in 2021.  I'm currently a little more than halfway through A Game of Thrones, listening to it through a speeded up unabridged audio version I checked out from my public library...I plan to go through all the volumes in this manner.  After all, it's more a review for me than ingesting new information, so this strategy is working quite well so far.  Now all George R.R. Martin has to do to finish and publish the promised next book, which he has reportedly said is some 1,500 pages long.  But if the dude passes on before ever delivering the last two long-awaited volumes I reserve the right to create my own ending, screw HBO...

Just Finished Reading James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

Continuing along with my Jeopardy!-inspired reading of Roald Dahl's children's novels, I just finished his famous James and the Giant Peach from 1961.  Having no idea what to expect from it, I found myself breaking into laughter time and time again with this modern day fairy tale of a little boy's adventures on a magically-enchanted, giant peach along with Centipede, Grasshopper, Miss Spider, Ladybird, Earthworm, Glowworm and Silkworm...all also altered through magic, wiggling beans that a mysterious elderly man one day has given to James.  Another story that might have been an inspiration to J.K. Rowling, James Henry Trotter has been orphaned after his parents are killed by an escaped rhino from a London zoo...his caretakers are now two abusive, mean aunts, Sponge and Spiker, who subject the boy to continual insults, threats, and menial work without any break.  The old man's gift to him was meant for James to ingest, but he stumbles near the home's peach tree and the beans fly out and plant themselves into the soil...creating the aforementioned effects.  Together with his new friends in the peach, James embarks on a series of adventures.  James and the Giant Peach is a modern-day fairy tale in the sense that the reader, originally in 1961, has familiar time references in it while it, as a fairy tale, can be in places more than a little grim and violent...recall some of the more traditional stories from your childhood.  In 1996 James and the Giant Peach was released as movie, no doubt severely altered from the book in the process.  And a few years ago it was made into a musical as well...I think I'll wait a bit before trying the adaptions, though.  If you haven't seen the movie before, I think you'll get a big kick from reading the book...

Quote of the Week...from Prince

Seems that I was busy doing something next to nothing, but different than the day before."
                                                                        ---Prince

Prince, as I hope you already well know, was an extraordinarily talented and driven American popular musician from Minnesota.  He was most famous during the 1980s, especially 1983-84 when he produced first his breakthrough album 1999 and then Purple Rain, the latter paired with a blockbuster movie starring himself.  "Prince" had always been his name...he was named at birth Prince Rogers Nelson.  But in the 1990s during a dispute with his then-record label he shed the "Prince" name in favor of an unpronounceable symbol, for years thereafter referred to as "the Artist Formerly Known as Prince".  By the turn of the century, though, he resumed his Prince moniker, inspiring me to call him "the Artist Formerly Known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince".  That tomfoolery aside, Prince was a remarkably creative songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, accounting for an astounding 39 complete studio albums over 38 years before his untimely, tragic demise in April, 2016.  Many of his songs, especially earlier in his career, had explicitly sexual themes and language...well, I'm finally ready to plow through all of it, cringeworthy lyrics or not: I've decided to explore each and every one of his albums during the next few weeks.  After all, the current music scene as I see it is falling pretty short in my estimation: many of my favorite acts aren't releasing anything new this year, except for Sufjan Stevens'  The Ascension album coming out two weeks from now.  There's only one standout song I've heard this year: EOB's Shangri-La (EOB is Ed O'Brien, Radiohead guitarist).  So if all goes well with my listening, my "top songs of 2020" will likely consist of Shangri-La, a few from The Ascension, and a lot from Prince.  It'll be a bit like in 2016 when I reviewed all 27 of David Bowie's studio albums after his death that year in January, coming up with several treasures in the process.  As for the above Prince quote, it's from my favorite song of his, Raspberry Beret, and ties in a little to my blog article yesterday about making small daily changes in my life.  The irony for Prince, a very self-disciplined, hard worker, is that he never was busy doing something next to nothing...but trying new things was a deeply ingrained habit that he kept throughout his creative life...