Weekly Short Stories: 1986 Science Fiction, Part 4

Today I continue my look back at 1986 in the realm of short science fiction, switching to Gardner Dozois' lengthy anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection.  As is usually the case between the two year-by-year anthologies I'm currently covering...the other one is edited by Donald A. Wollheim...there is a small bit of overlap.  Although the following stories are in the Dozois book, they're also in Wolheim's, so I've already read and reviewed them: R & R by Lucius Shepard, Strangers on Paradise by Damon Knight, Pretty Boy Crossover by Pat Cadigan, Against Babylon by Robert Silverberg and Into Gold by Tanith Lee.  And now here are my reviews of the first four tales (excluding the above) in the Dozois anthology, all of them interestingly Earthbound...

HATRACK RIVER by Orson Scott Card

This is a story set in a rural alternative American Midwest, either pre-or-postindustrial. Eleanor is a little girl with an acknowledged and accepted gift of telepathy.  The people in her family and others are very superstitious...no science or advanced technology here.  A flooded river threatens to wash away another family trying to cross it, including a woman about to give birth.  It's up to Eleanor to summon up help, but will it be in time? I had some trouble wrapping my head around this story, although the characters were compelling...

FIDDLING FOR WATERBUFFALOES by Somtow Sucharitkul

A farcical introduction to traditional Thai culture as an alien has mentally possessed a young man's brother, with the aim of extracting on of their crucial components left behind at an archaeologic ruin some centuries earlier.  Lek's abrupt changes in behavior flummoxes everyone and may interfere with the two brothers' plans to open their own live-dubbing movie theater.  Mary, an American visiting archaeologist, romances our hero and sheds light on her mission, tied in with the aliens' agenda.  A really kooky, funny tale...

SEA CHANGE by Scott Baker

Sometime in the future the Tla, benevolent giant alien beings, have arrived and live on Earth alongside a depleted human population.  In what is left of Venice, Italy, one of them dies...but a little boy thinks he knows better as he is able to hear the Tla, now in a much smaller form and in the water around him. Many of them call to him, resulting in an ambiguous ending, either happy or tragic depending on your viewpoint.  It reminded me of a much earlier story from 1943, Lewis Padgett's classic Mimsy Were the Borogroves...

COVENANT OF SOULS by Michael Swanwick

The world is not only severely running down in this tale of a most peculiar, large church with a sinister entity hovering over its altar, but it's also on the brink of a nuclear holocaust: oh joy.  Hard to find anything to hold on to here...everything seems to be getting worse as Peter, the manager, is ordered to fire the aging custodian Sam, who is suffering from cancer, while desperate homeless people are everywhere and a young woman, Jenny, is seen as a ghost infiltrating the church.  Throw in a badass government black-ops dude and the dystopia is complete.  Swanwick must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed that morning when he wrote this, but Dozois obviously liked it...

Next week: more of my reactions to stories appearing in the Dozois anthology from 1986...

Enjoyed First Round Tennis from U.S. Open on ESPN

It was fun watching the action in the first round of the U.S. Open tennis tournament, held in Flushing Meadow, New York City and broadcast on ESPN and ESPN2.  Although last year's spotlighted players Novak Djokovic and Ashleigh Barty were unavailable, the former being banned from entering the country because of his refusal to be vaccinated for Covid and the latter having retired earlier in the year, I was able to see some familiar faces play, including of course Serena Williams as she made her grand reappearance in a Grand Slam event after a long gap from injury and recovery.  Williams, for whom I was rooting, surprised me by her play and defeated her first-round opponent, Danka Kovonić, in straight sets...still, I was taken aback at the excessive hype and crowd bias and felt a bit sorry for Danka being shoved into the background: she worked hard to get there, too.  Stefanos Tsitsipas, a very talented and high-ranked but annoying player with his court antics, was upset in the first round as was Simona Halep.  Top-seeded Daniil Medvedev advanced easily in his match...although to me it seems too grueling for the men to have to win three sets to advance while the women need only win two.  Leylah Fernandez got in her first-round match and won...she made it to the Open finals last year against Emma Raducanu, the defending champ, who has yet to play.  I also watched Nick Kyrgios advance...he's interesting with his emotional playing: maybe I'll follow him in the tournament instead of absent Novak, who last year had been trying for a Grand Slam sweep.  And Rafael Nadal, returning after an abdominal tear forced him to withdraw from Wimbledon in July, has yet to play as well.  Plus, there are many, many more players at this stage and I'm sure I'll get to know some "new" players.  The crowd is always interesting, too...sometimes I think the folks in the stands are more interesting than the players on the court.  I'm going to miss a lot of the tournament this year as I'll be at work more this time around but will catch up later on in the night...

Artemis I Moon Mission Launch Delayed Til Friday

Today's scheduled launch of the Artemis I mission to the Moon and back was scrubbed because of engine bleeding.  The next window for launch is this Friday around noon, followed by an opportunity Saturday afternoon should that also not work out.  What, you say, there's a Moon mission?  It's been in the works for years and has already been delayed due to politics and cost overruns, but since President George W. Bush wisely set our sights once again on our nearest celestial body to visit and, this time, establish a base, this project of NASA's has become the victim of political tampering and, apparently, mismanagement.  When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he promised, while campaigning in Florida, not to mess with Bush's space plans.  But once elected, in 2010 he dismissed a return to the Moon, explaining idiotically that "we've already been there" and essentially scrapping the project in favor of privatization of the space program. The latter in retrospect turned out to be a healthy thing with Elon Musk and his SpaceX, among other companies, stepping up to develop advanced rocketry and space technology for their own planned missions, including Mars and asteroid exploration.  President Trump reinstated Artemis and we're now on a multi-track manned space program, with one company (Boeing) focusing on the Moon and the other (SpaceX) with its sights on Mars...cool. Unfortunately, our media seems more concerned with what the Kardashians are up to than granting adequate coverage to today's planned launch as well as our space program in general.  Last Friday I quoted a noted business figure as stating, "Done is better than perfect", but made a couple of exceptions: operating rooms and nuclear facilities.  I'd like to add rocket launches to that, but the general public, used to immediate gratification in our pushbutton digitalized modern world, tends to regard delays like this as imperfection instead of a necessary part of the process.  Well, I'm looking forward to seeing whether the launch takes place this Friday...at least the Weather Channel is giving it the coverage it merits.  With mannequins instead of live humans aboard, the rocket, launched from Cape Canaveral, will send the Orion spacecraft to the Moon, where it will orbit and return after six weeks.  Ordinarily, my politics tend to side with the Democrats, but regarding our space program the Republicans seem to be the driving force toward progress in recent years, a turnaround from when President Nixon axed the final planned Apollo Moon missions that President Kennedy had envisioned.  Frankly though, I'd just as soon everybody from both parties be on the same page and support our space efforts, but that's just fantasy thinking, I guess.  Should this Artemis I mission be successful, they're planning to send a manned crew in 2024 with Artemis II, and then try landing on the Moon in 2025...assuming the politicians don't interfere, that is...

My #16 All-Time Favorite Album: Monster by R.E.M.

MONSTER, my all-time #16 album, is by the American alternative rock band R.E.M., coming out in the summer of 1994.  R.E.M. is comprised of lead singer/lyricist Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist/keyboardist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry...the music for their songs is a full collaboration among the band's members.  After the group's two previous albums had received much widespread popularity and critical acclaim, I was eagerly looking forward to more of the same type of sophisticated music and lyrics.  Instead, Monster is an in-your-face, sometimes angry and musically harsh record, sounding more hard rock...even heavy metal in places...than anything the band had done before, or ever would do.  I've heard that legendary recording producer Phil Spector would employ something called a "wall of sound" involving a lush orchestral instrumental background permeating his artists' tracks...listen to the Beatles' Across the Universe, The Long and Winding Road and George Harrison's What is Life to get what I'm talking about.  Here on Monster, although Spektor wasn't involved with it, there seems to be a wall of sound as well, with the often-harsh electric guitar reverberating on most of the songs...the opening one, What's the Frequency, Kenneth? takes it to extremes.  Monster has two lyrical themes as I can discern them: grief and sexuality.  The grief over lead singer and lyricist Michael Stipe's friend Kurt Cobain committing suicide earlier in '94 is the reason for what I consider Monster's best song, Let Me In and seems to dictate the mood of the rest of the album.  Other songs express in veiled phrases Stipe's take on sexuality, especially with Crush with Eyeliner, King of Comedy, I Don't Sleep I Dream, Star 69, Strange Currencies, Tongue, Bang and Blame, You and Circus Envy. Yeah, the subject seems to dominate the album although, by today's general standards of popular music, I don't think it's anywhere nearly as flagrant as what's being played now, especially within the hip-hop genre. By the way, that last-mentioned tune, Circus Envy, should have been titled Monster after the album since its use of the word was significant: had it been released as a single with that name I think it would have gone far in the charts.  What's the Frequency, Kenneth? derives its title from the incoherent words of a disturbed man while he had recently physically attacked journalist Dan Rather, an R.E.M. fan.  And I Took Your Name is a brilliant, nightmarish piece, the definitive work on identify theft.  Finally, here are my own personal rankings of the songs on this great album: 

1 Let Me In

2 What's the Frequency, Kenneth?

3 I Took Your Name

4 Circus Envy

5 King of Comedy

6 I Don't Sleep I Dream

7 Star 69

8 Crush with Eyeliner

9 Bang and Blame

10 Strange Currencies

11 You

12 Tongue

Next week: album #15...

U.S. Open in Tennis: 1st Round on ESPN Monday

The U.S. Open professional tennis tournament, one of the sport's four annual grand slam events, will be showing first round matches from Flushing Meadows in New York City on Monday.  ESPN and ESPN2 are showing much of the action, so if you're into other sports, then starting next week I'm afraid tennis is going to temporarily crowd you out on these channels.  Although I'm looking forward to watching this year's action...in 2021 I was at home fulltime recovering from open heart surgery and saw much of the tournament...I'm more than a little confused by the bans going on in '22.  Earlier on, at the Australian Open, Novak Djokovic, who provided much of the interest at last year's U.S. Open, was expelled from that country because he wouldn't take the Covid-19 vaccine...even though the pandemic was raging in late 2021 as well (and on a deadlier level).  Then the French Open, the second grand slam tournament, took place in the spring and he was back on the court.  As was the case in July's Wimbledon in England...but because of the Russian/Belarus invasion of Ukraine that began late February, players from those countries were banned from playing although they were allowed to play in France: following everything so far?  Now we're back in the good ol' USA and players from Russia and Belarus are welcomed with open arms...but now it's Djokovic who once again can't play...although he could in 2021 when Covid was raging much worse!  Apart from the war and Covid bans, throw into the mix the fact that tennis on this high, demanding level tends to produce fragile athletes prone to long-term injuries and you never know who among the elite players will be well enough to participate: Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal? Dunno. Just give me a match and two good players...I don't care who they are or where they came from... 

Quote of the week...from Sheryl Sandberg

Done is better than perfect.    --Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg is chief operating officer at Facebook...you can react to that information in either a positive or negative way.  I have my own mixed feelings about this pervasive social media site.  It does connect people across the planet and years, reuniting many who had lost touch for decades and live far from one another...I like that.  And it gives me a link through which I can place my daily blog articles...another thumbs up.  But it also tends to bubble off people within likeminded groups, reinforcing the same biased political and social narratives while diminishing alternative views...that's a problem. And I'm not so keen on the tendency for this social media site to be focused on personal bonding and popularity over the exchange of information and truth. Having said all that, I picked the above quote of Sandberg's not for what I think of Facebook, but because it's so appropriate to just about any area of life...at least outside the operating room or nuclear facility, that is.  It's all about the tendency for some people to have difficulty starting, much less finishing, projects because they are obsessed with avoiding any mistakes in the process.  And mistakes are the catalyst in learning, very necessary for eventually attaining excellence in anything. Most folks, though, do not want to be responsible for anything that makes them vulnerable to criticism...or even worse, derision...from others.  YouTube, Yelp and Goodreads are loaded with critical comments...some of them reaching essay length...blasting the creative efforts of contributors, sometimes in very hurtful language.  I remember finding an Arkansas pastor's efforts at teaching Biblical Greek on a YouTube site.  For introducing interested people to the meanings of ancient Greek expressions and words of the New Testament, he fulfilled his purpose although he obviously didn't pronounce like a native.  For this he was rewarded with a pretty nasty comment on his site by a native Greek speaker who was offended that a nonnative would undertake this sort of effort and that his lessons were worthless. People with different agendas and narratives than me will often strictly scrutinize what I do and say and be readily available for criticism, even if it involves twisting things completely out of context or cherry-picking for items to ridicule.  That's just human nature in one of its common, crappy forms, and I'm not going to seek an impossible perfection in my daily walk just to appease massively imperfect, heavily flawed critics.  And now I'm done with this admittedly imperfect article: time to move on to the rest of my day...

Just Finished Reading Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb

I'm currently plowing through another fantasy book series after taking an extended vacation from the genre.  This one is Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb and I just finished reading the second book, titled Royal Assassin and published in 1996.  Typical for fantasy settings, it is a different world where the population lives in a preindustrial, pre-firearms technology where despotic nobility still holds the political power and magic manifests in different ways.  The story is told in the first person by the narrator, FitzChivalry, the illegitimate son of a prince and now a trained assassin for the king.  There is a power struggle going on between the princes for succession, and invaders from the sea are wreaking havoc on the society and economy...as well as turning people they conquer into something resembling soulless zombies.  Telepathy exists here, either in the form of Skilling, which a very tiny portion of the population can do, or Witting, a proscribed, taboo talent for getting inside the minds of animals.  Fitz can do both, but his ability as a Wit far exceeds his Skilling.  Our narrator has a love interest in Molly, but sadly being a commoner, she brings little in political advantage to a marriage and the king wants him to wed the daughter of a noble from another duchy to seal an alliance.  Not wanting to give away the story, I'm afraid I might have already stated too much...especially if you've yet to pick up the first book.  Let me just say that a lot of what frustrated me about this genre of literature is coming back...especially concerning not only the overwhelming oppression everywhere in this world where death, torture, or imprisonment are but an arbitrary royal pronouncement away but also the notion of it being a virtue to submit oneself completely and unquestioningly to the whims of the king, who in essence is an absolute dictator.  Since the protagonist is telling the story in retrospect, I can assume that he will make it through the rest of the trilogy...maybe.  Each book is getting longer...that's another typically annoying feature of fantasy literature.  As fiction of this sort goes, I think it's well written and at least the author as taken care not to inject too many characters and subplots into the narrative. That's more than I can say for some other series I've suffered through.  Well, I'm determined to finish Farseer Trilogy, but first I'm taking a detour and returning to Robert Pirsig's great book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I first read back in 1990...

Weekly Short Stories: 1986 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I conclude my look at 1986 short science fiction as they appeared in Donald A. Wollheim's anthology The 1987 Annual World's Best SF, featuring his picks from the previous year.  1986 was the year of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown disaster in northern Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union.  Now it's 2022 and the invading Russian forces seem to have learned nothing about the environmental consequences of damaging these kinds of facilities...doesn't look good for our planet's future when madmen can gain control over entire, heavily nuclear-armed nations and sacrifice untold lives and threaten the world order just to alter borderlines on maps. It's almost as if I'm living out a surreal apocalyptic story, sad to say.  But back to the book's final four tales...before we all run out of time... 

INTO GOLD by Tanith Lee

A historical fiction tale set in the frontiers of post-Roman Empire rule in Central Europe, the remnants of an outpost town, beset earlier by a devastating fire, are treated to a trade caravan from the East that includes a young woman who can transmute anything to gold.  The narrator is suspicious of her motives as she seduces and marries his old friend, the town's military leader.  A story that brings up notions of alchemy and the possibility that some of us just might be more than human...

THE LIONS ARE ASLEEP THIS NIGHT by Howard Waldrop

Imagine an alternative world where the African slave trade is reversed, colonization is overthrown much earlier, and this continent rises to become a modern society.  A little boy in a western African nation likes to read and has aspirations as a writer. His books inspire him to write a play based on an earlier, more traditional society...but will the local publisher accept it? 

AGAINST BABYLON by Robert Silverberg

Here "Babylon" is really Los Angeles in the present time (1986) as a firefighter pilot works with others to contain massive fires started by the landing of three large alien ships around the city.  What are their intentions, and were the fires, which seem out of control, deliberate or accidental?  The pilot's own wife, a freethinker, appears to have been abducted by the strange visitors, complicating matters further.  I think this could make a good movie...

STRANGERS IN PARADISE by Damon Knight

A space traveler finally gains permission to visit perhaps the only human paradise in the universe, a planet settled and terraformed a few hundred years before, with what seems to be a perfectly workable social system without violence.  He wants to visit where their great poet lived and learn why she suddenly ceased writing anymore.  A rather stark, sad reflection on what it means to be human, even a "good" human...

Next week I'll continue reviewing science fiction short stories from 1986, but from a different source: Gardner Dozois' excellent anthology series...

Election Day Today for Florida Primary and Local Elections

Well, today's finally election day, that is for the primary and some local races here in Florida.  Being someone who likes to vote in person, I had nevertheless requested a mail-in ballot in 2020 during the height of Covid restrictions and have continued to receive one for each subsequent election...including this one.  So, I'm finished with voting having mailed in my ballot a few days ago, but naturally am interested in finding out about the results as they come in tonight.  If you're registered to vote in Florida, the polls are open until 7 this evening...regardless of your party or voting preferences, why not get out and exercise your civic duty?  I'd also like to know what the voter turnout is with this election, broken down by party affiliation and demographic groups.  A few months ago, they were actually praising a 13% voter turnout at a local election...that just doesn't cut it with me.  I think the biggest problem I had with this particular election is that where I live, here in Gainesville and Alachua County, the mayor, city commission and school board races are officially nonpartisan.  Still, I discerned certain candidates, by their rhetoric and endorsements, were Republicans.  I checked out the leading Republican conservative-sounding mayoral candidate and discovered that he had either hidden or wiped all of his Facebook posts before he declared his candidacy earlier this year.  That frustrated me because I wanted to know how he reacted to Covid public health mandates and recommendations as they happened, as well as whether he sided with the majority Trump wing of the party in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election.  I've written in an earlier article that these were two big issues for me, and I suspect that this individual was trying to hide something although he's entitled to do whatever he likes in managing his social media account.  Oh well, if he ends up getting elected, I suppose at least we'll no longer be subjected to condescending political correctness lessons championed by the present occupant of that office.  In all likelihood, though, the mayor's race will end up in a runoff decided in November...

Podcaster's Notion of "Being Yourself" Needs Slight Revision

On his Mindset Mentor podcast last Friday, personal development coach Rob Dial discussed a topic I thought pertinent: how to be your true self.  I've heard of folks putting on their "church faces" on Sunday morning while presenting themselves differently at other times in the workplace, at home, or behind the wheel.  And I understand that different social situations call for different standards of speech and behavior.  Dial posits a different point of view, stating that each of us should be true to his or her own authentic self...and he gave a personal example.  Dial likes to swear, and I don't mean using just lightweight profanity either.  At the start of his podcasting, he used to refrain from cussing and said his listener numbers were low, but after he decided to speak in the highly colorful manner that he is accustomed to, they skyrocketed.  And then he said that we shouldn't tailor our personal presentation for approval from others...yet his own chosen example seems to contradict this!  After all, maybe Rob Dial thinks cursing in any situation he finds himself in is just him being his authentic self, while someone else "authentically" never admits defeats and always claims rigging in any contest they're in: do you know who I'm talking about?  Or perhaps somebody has always had a tendency to react in a knee-jerk violent manner to any perceived provocation from others...and yet another thinks it's just acting according to who they are to depend on chemicals to alter their mental state.  I could go on and on about "authentic selves" and antisocial behavior...wouldn't it be better to work to transform oneself to a higher level, authentically becoming that new person with better habits?  Just saying...

Having been on Facebook a number of years as you also likely have, I've seen myriad postings along the lines of "I'm going to be this way and if you don't like it, go screw yourself", or something to that effect.  How does this kind of message "push the needle forward" as Dial likes to say?  As for cursing, I used to freely engage in it as a growing kid around others, but I discovered that its primary use was as a tool of verbal aggression and immature bravado and came to greatly curtail its use. So, I think that, while Dial's notion of staying consistently true to who you are is flawed in some ways, it is also worth considering and adopting...but only in line with the good habits that one wants to inculcate while working to become a better person.  Sure, consistently be the same person in all circumstances...but be a "better" same person with higher standards...

My #17 All-Time Favorite Album: Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd

My #17 all-time favorite album, WISH YOU WERE HERE by the British progressive rock band Pink Floyd, came out in 1975, two years after their breakthrough, critically acclaimed work Dark Side of the Moon.  Although I recognize the quality of that album, I never really got into its music that much...other than those amazing few seconds of transition between the tracks On the Run and Time.  This next album, though, is in my mind a masterpiece...although it took me a few years to put it all together.  Wish You Were Here is not a singles-generating album, but four of its five songs have received much album rock radio play over the years.  It opens with Shine On You Crazy Diamond, a 13-minute jewel that most assuredly gave DJs across the country time to get in a couple of smokes and hit the bathroom.  When I initially would hear it, I would usually grow impatient and switch the station.  Then on one evening in the late 1990s I heard it played from the start without any distractions on my end...it was beautiful!  There's a great amount of musical/instrumental depth on this track as well as the others on the album.  Diamond has two parts (although the album misleadingly lists nine): the opening track on Side One and the closer on Side Two.  The latter is good listening, but to me doesn't measure up to the rest of the album.  Here are my takes on the album's five songs:

1--Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Side 1)...a lengthy, slow instrumental lead-in followed by a sad ode giving tribute to a lost friend, presumably former bandmate Syd Barrett who left them suffering from mental illness...

2--Welcome to the Machine...nothing sounds as foreboding and haunting as the opening to this song of Big Brother dystopia...but songwriter Roger Waters apparently meant for it to be about the record industry...

3--Have a Cigar...nobody in Pink Floyd wanted to sing this one, so they brought in a friend, Roy Harper, to perform the honors.  It's all about how the band is mishandled and misunderstood in, you guessed it, that pesky record industry.  The line "Oh, by the way, which one's Pink?" stands as one of the greatest in rock lyrics...

4--Wish You Were Here...another tribute to Syd Barrett, David Gilmour's virtuoso guitar playing stands out here, making it one of the greatest ever "air guitar" pieces.  My favorite track of the album...

5--Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Side 2)...slightly shorter than Side 1's version, lots of interesting musical stuff here...maybe if I listened to it as much as I have the other tracks, I'd like it more...

For the core, most popular years of their existence, Pink Floyd was composed of four musicians: bassist/singer Roger Waters, guitarist/singer David Gilmour, keyboardist Richard Wright and drummer Nick Mason.  Wright passed away in 2006 and Waters is no longer with them.  Waters wrote all the lyrics to Wish You Were Here. By the way, this album's cover is one of the deepest I've ever seen: check it out...

Next week: Album #16...

Today in Florida Early Voting Ended for 8/23 Primary Election

Today marked the final day of early voting for Florida's August 23rd primary...that Election Day is next Tuesday.  On a number of occasions during the last few days, I've found myself driving down NW 43rd Street here in Gainesville, past the Millhopper Branch public library where they held early voting.  The grass along the street and sidewalk was covered in campaign signs and various volunteers...and a few candidates as well...lined the road waving at the passing cars as if they were riding a float in a parade.  I wonder whether anyone ever made a voting decision on a candidate because of all this hullabaloo...probably a lot, sad to say.  I think it's pretty sad that nowadays one of our major political parties seems to have adopted the notion that an election is only valid if their side wins, after the previous president in that party displayed his reprehensible childish sore loser behavior (and still does) in denying his 2020 loss.  I have called "fascist" those politicians in Congress who voted to overturn final results from that election, including my own representative and one of my state's senators.  But this self-inflicted brainwashing in favor of authoritarian rule is not just a symptom of Republicans and the political right, although far too many of them have voluntarily succumbed to cult personality worship.  To a lesser degree, many Democrats decided to reject wholesale Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign in favor of their own idol, Bernie Sanders...to the point where enough of them either sat out that election in protest or voted for the Green Party candidate instead: the result was an extremely narrow Trump victory that year.  And in the late 1970s a populist left-wing, strongly political religious cult, the People's Temple, led by narcissist/psychopath Jim Jones, attracted an adoring, widespread following in northern California...who knows how far it would have gone had social media and the Internet existed back then, beyond the horrendous mass homicide/suicide event that occurred in Guyana in 1978.  So, when I say that I think certain Republicans are fascists, don't get me wrong: this is a human, not politically partisan problem and any group can fall victim to it.  The representative I referred to earlier, Kat Cammack, cast one of her first votes after being sworn in to overturn the Pennsylvania presential election result that went for Biden in spite of the fact that the challenges that went to court had already been investigated and were dismissed.  Yet she calls liberals in her TV ad "dumb clucks".  Well, if she can do those things, I think I'm warranted in calling her "fascist", but in truth I think instead, after giving it due reflection, that she is nothing more than your run-of-the-mill demagogue pandering to the clucks within her own political base.  But hey, vote for her if you want, that's your business.  I just happen to belong to the school of thought that while it's understandable for a politician to play to the groups within their constituency that will faithfully win them elections, their elected role puts them in a position of responsibility for everyone they represent, even those who didn't vote for them. I'm totally cool with a politician I didn't vote for winning an election, but tragically for our future I'm afraid that too many of us are incapable of accepting defeat, and this number is rapidly growing...

Quote of the Week...from Jonathan Frakes

I always enjoyed going into the holodeck.                             ---Jonathan Frakes

You may recognize Jonathan Frakes...who just turned 70 today...by his most famous role as Commander William Riker on the sci-fi classic series Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I checked out his quotes and settled on the above one because...well...it was intriguing.  I wonder if Frakes says he likes going into the "holodeck", which is just a part of the filming set, because it stimulates his imagination, or does he really regard it as a holodeck, in which just about any kind of setting or environment programmable into the ship's computer system can be reproduced.  I like the concept of holodeck myself, although I do remember an episode of the series in which the programming went haywire and the supposedly harmless gangsters it generated suddenly became lethal.  Imagination is a great thing, but I'd like a device that more vividly portrays different exotic environments and approximates various kinds of experiences.  I had expected that virtual reality with its funny helmet/masks would be more developed than it is right now...God knows that the demand for something like this among the population has to be very high.  One of my all-time favorite book series is the four-volume science fiction classic Otherland by Tad Williams...it takes virtual reality technology to its proper ends.  What I'd like from a holodeck or sophisticated VR device is to simply be able to travel to different places and walk around...no game or role playing here, just approximating the travel experience without the burdens of expense, danger and red tape.  Of course, sitting at a French café this way I wouldn't expect to be able to savor my drink or meal.  And how does one reproduce effects like temperature, wind, touch or smell without intrusively applying probes to one's body?  Still, I think it would be awesome to reproduce a surround-experience even with some of the more problematic areas omitted.  I think Frakes' meaning about liking the holodeck was that it was a little like going down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland...you're never quite sure what's going to happen next...  

Looking at Upcoming Running Races...and Some Missing Ones

I'm looking at upcoming distance running races in my local area in Gainesville and surrounding locales, so I decided to check out the Web to see what's up.  I was surprised to discover that there's a 10K race this coming Saturday morning to be held on the paved Hawthorne Trail southeast of town with the starting and finishing line at Boulware Springs Park.  I'm not interested in shorter distances than 10 K (6.2 miles) and think it might be fun to try this one out.  The only problem is that I do get off from work at 10 the previous evening and would have preferred a Sunday race day instead.  Oh well...

While checking out that upcoming race I also looked to see whether there was any hint of revival for three of my favorite races: the 10K Thanksgiving Day Turkey Trot and the Five Points of Life Half-Marathon here in Gainesville and the Ocala Half-Marathon.  All three events were halted in 2020 because of Covid and only the Five Points race resumed this past February...but even that one seems to not be scheduled.  That's sad, but understandable, I suppose.  It seems the general trend for races in these times is to hold them on outlying sites like parks and rails-to-trails courses where the overhead expenses may be lighter on the organizers.  Earlier this year there was a very flexibly run race of multiple distances down in Ocala, completely contained on a looping 5K course inside a park...the distance options ranged from 5K all the way to 50 miles!  But I can't seem to find any indication that its parent company, "Awesomesauce" is even still in existence...certainly no more races seem to be in the works for 2023.  That's one thing that bugs me about the Internet, where you supposedly can get any information that you want.  Well, that's clearly not true, for when someone decides to close shop on something...even if it's gone on for years...they usually just leaving you hanging with no information, wondering whatever the hell happened... 

Weekly Short Stories: 1986 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here are three more 1986 science fiction short stories I'm reviewing from Donald Wollheim's anthology The 1987 Annual World's Best SF, presenting his choices from the preceding year.  1986 was a news year dominated by the Iran-Contra scandal affecting the Ronald Reagan administration...the first story I'm covering deals with the escalating conflict in Central America. It was also the first full year of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of the Soviet Union...no one knew then the direction he would take his country and Eastern Europe toward peace, reconciliation and freedom...it's a shame someone of his caliber isn't the president of Russia now.  But for now, here are my reactions to those stories...

R & R by Lucius Shepard

Take the Vietnam War and transfer it forward in time and space to Central America and a quagmire of a conflict there...not difficult in 1986 considering the proxy war going on there in El Salvador and between the Contras and Sandinistas of Nicaragua.  Only this story, novella length, goes a step further, injecting ESP and shapeshifting into the mix as a trio of American GIs employ their own "magical" rituals in order to somehow survive their stint of combat duty.  But when the routine is interrupted, each man must decide his own course.  Much more of a war story than science fiction, its themes and conclusions run pretty deep...

LO, HOW AN OAK E'ER BLOOMING by Suzette Haden Elgin

A Wisconsin woman, tired of the escalating war drums and the impending holocaust, makes a simple miracle by pronouncing the continual blooming of a local oak tree...even in the dead of winter.  No one, though, can perceive her intended message as instead they try to destroy it as if the oak itself were upsetting the natural order of things.  Very allegorical to any period in which those calling out serious problems are treated as if they themselves were the problem...

DREAM IN A BOTTLE by Jerry Meredith and D.E. Smirl

The narrator is a space traveler in a fleet that features disembodied brains running complex shipboard computer systems...each of them formerly belonging to a person whose body died.  They are continually living out fantasy lives...a different one for each entity.  It is up to the narrator and his crewmates to keep them functioning and deluded as to their real state of existence.  But a glitch in the system occurs threatening all...and casting in the narrator's mind doubts about his own true existence...

Next week I continue looking at Wollheim's anthology of 1986 sci-fi tales...

Watching Baseball on TV, and a Suggestion to Make It Better

In the evenings when I find myself sitting in front of the TV set with a remote in my hand, I often seek out whatever Major League Baseball games happen to be on.  Sometimes Fox is showing one, either on its major network channel (Cox Gainesville channel 13) or on FS1 (Cox channel 62).  ESPN (26) often shows a game during this time and the Tampa Bay Rays and Miami Marlins have their own respective channels (48 and 70).  I've noticed that they're trying to make baseball more appealing to the viewing audience...ESPN has players on one or both teams hooked up with a mike and they talk back and forth with the announcers, not only in the dugout but also out in the field.  I like that, but I have a suggestion that will "hit" the viewers where they live.  Most of us have the experience of going up to home plate and taking our turn at bat, either in softball or baseball if only at a sandlot or school physical education class level.  On the other hand, relatively few of us have pitching experience...yet the pitcher/batter interaction is almost always shown on television from the pitcher's perspective.  I'd like to watch those same fastballs, changeups, curveballs, sliders and sinkers come in from the batter's viewpoint instead, since, after all, my own personal connection with the game is tied up with swinging the bat.  Since the catcher and umpire are pretty close to home plate and would visually block pitches were a camera placed immediately behind them, why not instead strategically place two cameras behind the plate but enough to the left and right to clear the view of the incoming pitch...and then digitally merge the images into one while eliminating the catcher and umpire?  You'd then have a better sense of what the batters have to face on a major league level when they have to discern, in split-seconds, where a pitch is going and how fast it is.  Wouldn't that make watching the game more exciting and interactive?  If you think this would make the game not quite as real, keep in mind that they currently superimpose the strike zone in the form of an imaginary rectangle hovering over home plate for each pitch.  Well, maybe this will be a future innovation, but for the time being I guess I'll just enjoy what they dish up right now...

Enjoying Starbucks, Musing on Time Off and Language Study

I'm sitting outside at my "favorite" Starbucks location on NW 39th Avenue here in northern Gainesville.  I took today off from work...paid annual leave...for two reasons: one, if I don't use enough annual leave during this calendar year, I'll lose it.  Two, taking a day off like this makes me focus on how I spend my free time, and I'm coming up on retirement in the not-too-distant future.  So, the question is, how do I spend my time that I ordinarily would be spending at work...I think this is going to be an evolving growth process: better get some more time off to figure it all out!  Anyway, during the last few days I've been evaluating my habits (or lack of habits) with foreign language study, an area of my life in which I've seemed to have hit a ceiling, leaving a number of languages on the wrong side of my ability to understand and express myself in them.  So, after some due reflection I decided to home in on just one language, namely the one in which I already have the highest ability and knowledge: Spanish.  This is convenient in that I already get several stations on my cable TV service as well as Roku, and I have a convenient app on my phone that translates Spanish words I enter into English.  My goal is to make English and Spanish co-fluent and to make a substantial enough level of progress in Spanish before I add on any other language...I've studied to a good degree a few others such as Chinese, Russian, German, and French...and even Vietnamese, Japanese, Polish, Turkish, Hungarian, Hindi and Arabic at different times in my past.  But there's no point in having just a rudimentary vocabulary and little experience in a language...better to tackle one at a time head-on until a satisfactory level of competence is establish.  Should be a fun adventure.  Well, I think I'll get back home to continue my "pre-retirement" day off...I wonder what's on Spanish TV (besides those annoying novelas)?

My #18 All-Time Favorite Album: In Rainbows by Radiohead

As I continue my weekly countdown of my own personal all-time favorite albums, I've arrived at #18: IN RAINBOWS by the British alternative rock band RADIOHEAD.  Coming out in 2007, I was completely unaware of it until three years later when I decide to collect their albums to date and put them on my MP3 player...and then listen to them all in shuffle mode while on my long training runs.  Radiohead is most widely known for their debut hit single Creep...not exactly one of my favorite songs, and it wouldn't be for a few more years until in early 1998 I finally began to see what a talented and creative group they were, with the release of their third album O.K. Computer and the single Karma Police.  Fast forward nine years and In Rainbows is their seventh studio album.  Radiohead has Thom Yorke as their high-pitched and cynical lead singer with Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien and Philip Selway on backup instrumentals and vocals...the music and lyrics are a collaborative effort although Yorke and Jonny Greenwood reportedly play a large role in the creative process.  I liked In Rainbows for the wide variety of forms in their songs.  My favorite track is Faust Arp, a short piece that sounds a little like the Beatles' Dear Prudence with its musical background.  Reckoner is another favorite, a mournful and soulful lounge act kind of song that has a Marvin Gaye sound to it...quite a different kind of Radiohead tune.  All I Need is a slow-moving, deep love song.  Faster-moving, very rhythmic pieces are the opening track 15 Step and Jigsaw Falling into Place.  The album's closing track Videotape is probably the most "Goth" track, very somber and darkly beautiful. I also liked...a little less, admittedly, Weird Fishes/Arpeggi and House of Cards. And the remaining song, Nude, is tolerable although I didn't care for it...still, I'd never deliberately skip it, either.  I think of Radiohead as the best rock band of this century...they're still together although they tend to space their albums pretty far apart these years and have their side projects.  One of these is The Smile, with Thom Yorke teaming up with Jonny Greenwood and some other musicians to produce an album this year titled A Light for Attracting Attention: it sounds like a high-quality Radiohead album...

Next week: Album #17...

Constellation of the Month: Lyra (the Lyre)

 

Lyra is a small constellation in the northern night sky, crossing the meridian in mid-evening during the month of August.  It is dominated by the first-magnitude star Vega, which along with Altair (of Aquila) and Deneb (of Cygnus) form the "Summer Triangle" of readily discernible stars.  For those living north of the Equator, Vega is visible in the evening throughout much of the year but it's the summertime in which its constellation, Lyra, is more easily seen as it is highest up from the horizon. The constellation is most easily pictured as a parallelogram of nondescript stars with that very-bright Vega...relatively close to us at only 25 light-years distance...near its northwestern corner.  On the south side of the constellation is the Messier deep-space object M57, also known as the Ring Nebula and one of the more picturesque sights in the night sky...naturally, you need a telescope to see it, so why not just take a gander off the Internet instead?  The fastest way to pinpoint Lyra in the night sky is to find those three stars in the Summer Triangle...Vega is the brightest and is the one north and west of the other two.

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

Quote of the Week...from Olivia Newton-John

I do have high standards, but I don't expect anything from anyone that I don't expect from myself.

                                                         ---Olivia Newton-John

I could have included other quotes from Olivia Newton-John, the English-born Australian singer and actress whose most popular works spanned the 1970s and early 80s.  She was a lifelong strong advocate for animal rights and, following her later breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, underwent a deep philosophical and spiritual change about what is important in life...she just passed away this past Monday from recurring cancer after years of remission.  I remember it was in 1971 when I first heard of Olivia...my local pop radio station in Miami, WQAM, would play her single If Not for You, a song written by George Harrison.  She would follow up on this debut success with a string of hit songs that decade, a few of which, like the monster hit I Honestly Love You, and some country-tinged tunes, I didn't particularly care for.  Songs I did like...and there were a lot...included Have You Never Been Mellow, A Little More Love, Magic, and Xanadu, the last two from the soundtrack for her quirky roller-disco movie Xanadu.  In 1978 she starred in the movie Grease and a couple of pleasant duets came from it between her and costar John Travolta.  Another of her duets, this one with John Denver, was Fly Away and I always considered that one to be a personal favorite.  In the early 1980s Oliva Newton-John tried to push a sexier public image with hits like Physical, Make a Move on Me, and Soul Kiss...I think this had a bit to do with the emerging music video industry.  Her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment would come in 1992, some thirty years ago.  I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Olivia Newton-John and cherish the memory of her life and wonderful music.  As for that above quote of hers, I think it bespeaks someone who cares about what they are involved with, and which reveals them to possess personal integrity.  On the other hand, if you're pushing yourself with those high standards to be the best, then doesn't that consequently mean that, if you are successful, then others are "worse" than you?  So, I'm reading that quote two different ways...think I'll just give Olivia the benefit of doubt on it...