THE MT VOID
04/28/23 -- Vol. 41, No. 44, Whole Number 2273

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Topics:
Science Fiction (and Other) Discussion Groups, Films,
Lectures, etc. (NJ)
Mark's Picks for Turner Classic Movies in May
(comments by Mark R. Leeper)
FLIGHT AND ACHOR: A FIREBREAK STORY by Nicole
Kornher-Stace (book review by Joe Karpierz)
Toward Compassion (article by Leland R. Beaumont)
This Week's Reading (UNTHINKING THINKING) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)

===================================================================

TOPIC: Science Fiction (and Other) Discussion Groups, Films,
Lectures, etc. (NJ)

Meetings in Middletown are in-person; meetings in Old Bridge are
Zoomed, at least through the winter season. The best way to get
the latest information is to be on the mailing lists for them.

May 4, 2023 (MTPL), 5:30PM: BEYOND THE INFINITE TWO MINUTES (2021)
& THE 7TH VOYAGE OF EGON TICHY (2020) & story
by Stanislaw Lem (1957)
<https://tinyurl.com/LemTichy7th>
May 25, 2023 (OBPL), 7:00PM: ATTACK SURFACE by Cory Doctorow
June 1, 2023 (MTPL), 5:30PM ALTERED STATES (1980) & novel
by Paddy Chayefsky

===================================================================

TOPIC: Mark's Picks for Turner Classic Movies in May (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)

As part of their Memorial Day weekend marathon of war films, TCM is
running OPERATION CROSSBOW (1965). OPERATION CROSSBOW is
dramatized (as were most of the war films of the 1960s), but based
on fact and is a lot better than certain other films I could point
to. And although all this time has passed, this watchable history
still sheds a light on the development and the use of the V-1
missile.

There was a lot of deception going on with this film. The
pseudonymous screenplay ("Richard Imrie" was credited) was actually
written by Emeric Pressburger, whose reputation had shrunk and
wanted a fresh start (much as authors whose sales have been
dropping will choose to write their next novel under a fresh name). Second-billed Sophia Loren actually has little more than a cameo.
The title was at one point changed to THE GREAT SPY MISSION in the
United States because the distributors thought it would be
mistaken for a medical film.

Trivia: TCM notes, "Sandys, portrayed as one of the prime movers
behind the heroic operation, had by the time of this film been
vilified as the man who destroyed the British aircraft industry for
his insistence (as Minister of Defense in the late 50s) that
missiles had made airplanes obsolete as military weapons."

[OPERATION CROSSBOW (1965), Monday, May 29, 6:45 AM]

I cannot leave without praising the multi-national FIVE MILLION
YEARS TO EARTH/QUATERMASS AND THE PIT. This film gives a single
science fiction explanation for paranormal phenomena, race
prejudice, different myths popping up all over the world (e.g.
flood myths), ... And the list really does go on. It has very
strange ideas yet it remains intelligent and credible. I have been
told it is also a very big with fans in France.

[FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH (1968), Friday, May 11, 3:15 PM]

Here are some more films of interest. Again, these are mostly of
the fantastic--there are way too many excellent films on TCM this
month, and every month, to list them all. Memorial Day weekend is
their usual marathon of war films.

05/01 9:30 PM Mark of the Vampire (1935)
05/03 12:15 PM Atlantis, the Lost Continent (1960)
05/05 4:00 AM The Last Wave (1977)
05/05 6:00 AM Stalker (1979)
05/08 8:00 AM Angels in the Outfield (1951)
05/11 9:45 AM The Snow Devils (1965)
05/11 11:30 AM It! (1967)
05/11 1:30 PM Monster Zero (1965)
05/11 3:15 PM Five Million Years to Earth (1968)
05/11 5:00 PM Village of the Damned (1960)
05/11 6:30 PM Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)
05/12 3:45 AM Network (1976)
05/13 12:30 AM A Face in the Crowd (1957)
05/13 1:30 PM Matinee (1993)
05/13 3:15 PM The Thing from Another World (1951)
05/13 8:00 PM Stand and Deliver (1988)
05/15 3:15 PM White Zombie (1932)
05/15 4:30 PM Cat People (1942)
05/19 2:30 PM The Body Disappears (1941)
05/21 2:00 AM Coma (1978)
05/22 6:00 PM Clash of the Titans (1981)
05/23 12:15 PM The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm
(1962)
05/23 2:45 PM 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964)
05/23 4:30 PM Doc Savage: The Man Of Bronze (1975)
05/23 6:15 PM Atlantis, the Lost Continent (1960)
05/24 6:00 AM The Ghost Ship (1943)
05/24 7:15 AM The Corpse Vanishes (1942)
05/24 8:30 AM Doctor X (1932)
05/24 10:00 AM Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941)
05/24 12:00 PM Bedlam (1946)
05/24 1:30 PM Kongo (1932)
05/24 3:00 PM The Devil-Doll (1936)
05/24 4:30 PM House of Wax (1953)
05/24 6:15 PM Chamber of Horrors (1966)
05/26 7:15 AM A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
05/30 2:30 PM The Thing from Another World (1951)

[-mrl]

===================================================================

TOPIC: FLIGHT AND ACHOR: A FIREBREAK STORY by Nicole Kornher-Stace
(copyright June 2023, Tachyon Publications, 192pp, paperback,
$16.95, ISBN 9781616963927) (book review by Joe Karpierz)

You're the director of the Stellaxis super soldier program. Your
job is to take young children and turn them into warriors to help
you win a civil war in a (to the reader) nameless city.
Two of your prized specimens, numbered 06 and 22, have escaped into
the city in the dead of winter. They are dangerous, as all
supersoldiers are: fast, strong, keen eyesight, and all the
rest of it. 06 has been the rebellious one, but the two of them
are close. They protect each other, to the point of giving their
lives to save the other one. Your job is to capture them
and bring them back to Stellaxis to continue their training until
they're ready to go to war.

This should be an easy job. You know where they're at and
generally what they're doing. You don't necessarily know why they
decided to escape, but that doesn't matter at this point in time.
You need to get them back. The whole thing is a bit of a mess,
though. Within the program at Stellaxis, you need to fabricate
excuses why the pair are not in their various classes. You need
to hide the whole affair from your superiors, because it certainly
wouldn't look good on your record to have two very expensive
projects get away. And it's not easy in a world where everything
is under surveillance. Sending out a few of the other super kids
to retrieve them, or worse, some adult squad, would possibly result
in bad press and would most likely result in a lot of blood
being shed. So you try to think of strategies to undermine their
partnership. Maybe turn them against each other. Send some old,
discarded tech after them. Things like that. But no matter
what you do, 06 and 22 are not giving up. They don't like it at
Stellaxis, and they don't want to go back.

Just what are the two of them doing? Trying to survive in a world
they've been sheltered from and know absolutely nothing about.
They're sleeping in an abandoned storage container and
basically scrounging to survive. They don't know what they want to
do, how they're going to do it, and where they're going. The only
thing they do know is that they don't want to go back to
Stellaxis. It's a marvelous game of chess, really. The Director
thinks she's going to win, but every decision she makes turns out
to not give the result she needs. 06 and 22 know the director
is watching them, so they're doing the best they can to make the
Director's life miserable. And they do get a bit of help from an
unexpected source.

I was a bit concerned coming in to the story, as I hadn't
previously read FIREBREAK. It turns out there was nothing to be
concerned about. While the story takes place in the Firebreak
universe, it can be read as a standalone. Kornher-Stace does a
good job of giving the reader just enough background of the world
we're in without bogging the book down. And she makes FLIGHT
AND ANCHOR a fun read. While it's not lighthearted by any means,
it's light enough that it's a good, fast paced read. The novel is
well written, the characters are interesting, and the plot
is engaging. It's almost fun to watch 06 and 22 foil the
Director's plans, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. FLIGHT
AND ANCHOR is a book I recommend, and as a result of reading it I
want to go back and read FIREBREAK. [-jak]

===================================================================

TOPIC: Toward Compassion (article by Leland R. Beaumont)

I recently wrote a "future fiction" essay called "Toward
Compassion". See
<https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/
Envisioning_Our_Future/Toward_Compassion>. [-lrb]

===================================================================

TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)

UNTHINKING THINKING: JORGE LUIS BORGES, MATHEMATICS, AND THE NEW
PHYSICS by Floyd Merrell (Purdue, ISBN 0-911198-72-5) has a back
story to it. I had first heard about this book at least ten years
ago, but probably closer to twenty years or more. (It was
published in 1991.) When I started looking at listings, all copies
were more than $100 each, and for years $142 was about the lowest
price I could find.

But it was in my list of books I checked every week or so, and a
couple of weeks ago, to my astonishment, a copy appeared for ...
$5. And it wasn't even a charity shop, but a major used book
dealer. I immediately bought it, and when it arrived, I had an
inkling of what happened. There was a Post-It stuck on the front
page sticking up like a bookmark that had "95.99" and under it
"4.82"--but the '9's had big loops and small tails. And $4.82
looks like the tax amount on $95.99.

So what probably happened is that someone priced it at $95.99, but
the data entry person took a quick look at the note, read the '9's
as '0's, didn't wonder why anyone would write $5 as "05.00" and
entered it as $5. (Or they were using a scanner to enter the data.)

Anyway, someone there knew the value, but someone entered it
wrongly, and while I feel a twinge of guilt, the seller doesn't
allow refunds from or returns to its outlets or warehouses. (Of
course, normally this policy benefits them. :-) )

But what about the book itself? I was at first intimidated by the
very academic writing. Here's an example:

"Consider the possibility that in 'The Circular Ruins' a projection
of spatio-temporal synchronicity into linear existence entails a
symbolic abolition of the life/death dichotomy. This assumes an
implicit attempt to overcome temporal existence wherein spatial
hierarchy and temporal linearity predominate."

However, as I read on, I started to see errors, or at least slips.
For example, on page 4 Merrell says, "'The sun rotates around the
earth' and 'the earth rotates around the sun' represent two
conflicting perspectives." Actually that's not true; the Earth and
the moon revolve about a point that is three-quarters of the
Earth's radius from the Earth's center. And the pairs Pluto-Charon
and Sun-Jupiter each revolved around points that are not within
either of the bodies involved. And so it is possible to consider
both true, or both false, rather than one absolutely true and one
absolutely false.

But even more of a flub is that Merrell speaks of bodies "rotating"
around each other, when he means "revolving" around each other.
Rotation is the motion of a single body about a point or an axis.

Later, he writes about Leibniz's "binary system based on the root
2"; he means Leibniz's binary system based on the base 2 (which is
actually a bit redundant).

Another, deeper dispute I have with Merrell is that he defends the
argument that mathematics is invented. not discovered, by saying,
"In sum, from this perspective mathematics is invention rather than
discovery, a human institution rather than an eternal playground
for the gods. Right and wrong mathematical behavior lies in the
game, for mathematics is normative. Consequently, number systems
need not be decimal, as is our Western system. To cite only two
examples rom among many, the ancient Mayas used a system to the
base five, for reasons unknown. And within a fictive context, the
inhabitants of the planet Tlon used a duodecimal system...."
Merrell seems to confuse the way we express mathematics with the
mathematics itself. He could as easily claim that the different
shapes of the ten digits used in Egypt makes their mathematics
different from ours.

"We are to suppose not only that each page of the book after page
one is followed by an immediately preceding page, but also (and
this is not unimportant) that each page is separated from others by
a finite number of pages." This makes no sense, given the rest of
the description, even in a chapter about paradoxes, unless what he
meant to say was "an immediately succeeding page."

I may comment more on this book again when I finish it, but it is
very slow going. [-ecl]

===================================================================

Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net


All the best stories in the world are but one story in
reality--the story of escape. It is the only thing which
interests us all and at all times, how to escape.
-- A. C. Benson

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