THE MT VOID
05/30/25 -- Vol. 43, No. 48, Whole Number 2382
Editor: Evelyn Leeper,
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Topics:
Middletown (NJ) Science Fiction Discussion Group
Picks for Turner Classic Movies in June (comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Extra-Terrestrial Life--Not So Fast (comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Twilight Zone: "Steel" (link)
PHYSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE by Michio Kaku (2008)
(book review by Dale Skran)
Live Toads (letters of comment by Fred Lerner, Jay Morris,
and Gary McGath)
A CLOSED AND COMMON ORBIT (letter of comment by Hal Heydt)
THE MAN WHO LAUGHS (letter of comment by Gary McGath)
AURORA, Willy Ley, WHEN THE MOON HITS YOUR EYE,
Color-Blind Casting, "The Court of Tartary",
Ancient Rome in the Movies, THE RETURN, and
Diego Rivera (letter of comment by Taras Wolansky)
This Week's Reading (POIROT AND ME)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Middletown (NJ) Science Fiction Discussion Group
June 5, 2025 METROPOLIS (1927) & novel by Thea Von Harbou (1925)
<
https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/11607476>
<
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/73727>
<
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601891h.html>
===================================================================
TOPIC: Picks for Turner Classic Movies in June (comments by
Evelyn C. Leeper)
Okay, I can't pick A FACE IN THE CROWD *again*. So instead I'll
recommend a film with some equally chilling and topical moments,
CABARET, which sets a love triangle against the back-drop of the
decadence of the Weimar Republic cabaret scene and the rise of
Nazism.
[CABARET, Monday, June 30, 10:15 AM]
There is also BRIGHT LEAF, of which Mark wrote in the 07/30/99
issue of the MT VOID (in an article about tobacco), "BRIGHT LEAF
[is] the stirring story of how a real he-man, played by Gary
Cooper, builds a tobacco empire." And in the 02/11/00 issue he
wrote, "I am going back and re-watching a bunch of 1950s science
fiction films. And in just about every cheap one the characters
stop and discuss things over a cigarette. Do you think that is
coincidence? Go back and see the movie BRIGHT LEAF with Gary
Cooper about the brave American heroes who founded our country's
tobacco industry. In films people who fight disease are played by
Edward G. Robinson types. People who sell disease to the public
for good money are played by the Gary Coopers."
[BRIGHT LEAF, Thursday, June 19, 7:30 AM]
There is also a whole afternoon of monster SF on June 18 (I have
no idea why June 18):
12:00 PM Them! (1954)
1:45 PM The Hypnotic Eye (1960)
4:45 PM The Green Slime (1969)
6:30 PM Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)
Other films of interest:
MONDAY, June 2
1:00 PM The Ghost Ship (1943)
TUESDAY, June 3
12:00 AM Cries and Whispers (1972)
4:00 AM The Seventh Victim (1943)
10:45 AM The Boy with Green Hair (1948)
THURSDAY, June 5
8:00 AM The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)
6:15 PM Forbidden Planet (1956)
FRIDAY, June 6
10:00 AM Kismet (1955)
12:00 PM Brigadoon (1954)
8:00 PM A Face in the Crowd (1957)
SATURDAY, June 7
8:00 PM Carnival of Souls (1962)
9:30 PM Rosemary's Baby (1968)
SUNDAY, June 8
8:00 PM Apollo 13 (1995)
10:30 PM For All Mankind (1989)
WEDNESDAY, June 11
11:30 AM Africa Screams (1949)
1:00 PM Tarzan and His Mate (1934)
MONDAY, June 16
8:00 PM The Last Wave (1977)
WEDNESDAY, June 18
4:30 AM So Long at the Fair (1950)
6:00 AM A Bucket of Blood (1959)
12:00 PM Them! (1954)
1:45 PM The Hypnotic Eye (1960)
4:45 PM The Green Slime (1969)
6:30 PM Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)
THURSDAY, June 19
7:30 AM Bright Leaf (1950)
THURSDAY, June 26
11:30 PM Sisters (1972)
FRIDAY, June 27
3:30 AM Dead Men Walk (1943)
SATURDAY, June 28
6:00 AM Black Orpheus (1959)
6:00 PM Field of Dreams (1989)
SUNDAY, June 29
8:30 AM Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)
MONDAY, June 30
10:15 AM Cabaret (1972)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Twilight Zone: "Steel" (link)
"Two humanoid robots traded punches while fans watched on, in a
competition held in Hangzhou, China, on Sunday. The fight was
part of the China Media Group World Robot Competition and featured
robots developed by Unitree Robotics. The event included both
fighting demonstrations and matches, marking a world-first combat
sports event featuring humanoid robots."
Thirty-seven second video at:
<
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cgeg2x3lwepo>
===================================================================
TOPIC: Extra-Terrestrial Life--Not So Fast (comments by Evelyn
C. Leeper)
In response to Greg Frederick's comments on extra-terrestrial life
in the 04/25/25 issue of the MT VOID (where he provides the link
to an article claiming the "strongest evidence so far" of
extra-terrestrial life), I am saddened to report:
New Studies Dismiss Signs of Life on Distant Planet
In April, astronomers said they had detected a possible signature
of life on the exoplanet K2-18b. Now, three independent analyses
discount the evidence.
In April, a team of astronomers announced that they might--just
might--have found signs of life on a planet over 120 light-years
from Earth. The mere possibility of extraterrestrial life was
enough to attract attention worldwide. It also attracted intense
scrutiny from other astronomers.
Over the past month, researchers have independently analyzed the
data, which suggested that the planet, called K2-18b, has a
molecule in its atmosphere that could have been created by living
organisms. Three different analyses have all reached the same
conclusion: They see no compelling evidence for life on K2-18b.
...
<
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/science/astronomy-extraterrestrial-life-k218b.html?smid=nytcore-android-share>
[-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: PHYSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE by Michio Kaku (2008) (book
review by Dale Skran)
My nomination for the best futurist book of all time has always
been and remains Arthur C. Clarke's PROFILES OF THE FUTURE.
Clarke's technique was to avoid short-term extrapolation, and go
all way to the impossible, and then work backward. The result is
still worth reading decades later. Most other futurist books
often have little of value, offering bland consensus predictions
that never get better than 50/50, and are often wildly misleading.
I have not been a big fan of Kaku, and found his big futurist book
VISIONS lacking in many ways--but that is a topic for a different
review! However, PHYSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE is a remarkable
achievement. Kaku takes the approach of defining three kinds of
impossibility:
1. Class I: "...technologies that are impossible today but that do
not violate the known laws of physics"
2. Class II: "...technologies that sit at the very edge of our
understanding of the physical world. If they are possible at all,
they might be realized on a scale of millennia to millions of
years in the future."
3. Class III: "... technologies that violate the known laws of
physics." This means that for them come about, we would need to
discover new laws of physics.
This path leads to a very interesting examination of many things
traditionally thought to be impossible. The resulting structure
groups the technologies thus:
1. Class I: force fields, invisibility, phasers and death stars,
teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots, extraterrestrial
life, starships, and anti-matters/anti-universes.
2. Class II: faster that light travel, time travel, and parallel
universes
3. Class III: perpetual motion machines, and precognition.
The Class I impossibilities vary quite a bit in terms of
achievability. The book was written in 2008, and there can be
little doubt that in the intervening years we have seen enormous
progress in robotics and AI, mental control of physical devices,
knowledge of exo-planets that might support life, and practical
invisibility using meta-materials. Progress toward force fields
and starships, not so much, but Kaku is not suggesting all these
things are just around the corner, but that over a time span of
decades to centuries it is reasonable to suppose they will be
achieved in practice.
The Class II impossibilities fall more into the far-out side of
things--theoretically possible but with really difficult to
achieve engineering requirements. These are the kind of things we
might try after millennia of continuous technological progress and
the establishment of an interstellar civilization, and that would
the optimistic assessment.
The Class III impossibilities are those things that really are
impossible according to physics as we understand it today. I
suspect, however, that we know so little about dark matter and
dark energy that it is not impossible that we are just one
breakthrough away from something that in practice might seem like
perpetual motion.
An interesting final chapter delves into the future of
impossibility, with general conclusion that the frontiers of
knowledge will always generate "new impossibilities" which over
time will be come not just possible, but commonly known facts.
Overall, Kaku's book is a worthy successor to PHYSICS OF THE
IMPOSSIBLE, and is well worth your time to read although now a bit
dated. My biggest complaint is that the book roused within me a
desire to read a book titled "Biology of the Impossible" focusing
on other kinds of impossibility--immortality, immunity to all
disease, regeneration of the spinal cord, and so on. Much as
"Star Trek" posited a future of very advanced physical technology
combined with biological technology little advanced from the
modern day, this seems a failing of science written large. We are
far closer to achieving our physical dreams than our biological
ones, although it remains possible that the looming advent of true
artificial general intelligence will deal a new deck of cards--or
doom us all. [-dls]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Live Toads (letters of comment by Fred Lerner, Jay Morris,
and Gary McGath)
In response to the quote at the end of the 05/23/25 issue of the
MT VOID, Fred Lerner writes:
"Eat a live toad the first thing in the morning and nothing worse
will happen to you the rest of the day."
I suppose that nothing worse will happen to the toad, either.
[-fl]
Jay Morris writes:
To you or the toad. --Niven's restatement
Well, most of the time, anyway. . . --programmer's caveat to
Niven's restatement
Quote Investigator believes that the statement evolved from a
quotation written by a famously witty French writer named Nicolas
Chamfort who socialized with the aristocracy but supported the
French Revolution. Chamfort’s collected works were published in
French in the 1790s, and a memorably caustic remark about
high-society was included. The words were actually credited to a
person named Mr. de Lassay who functioned as a mouthpiece for
Chamfort.
<
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/03/eat-frog/>
[-jm]
To which Gary McGath adds:
Rostand's Cyrano makes a reference to it, apparently expecting the
audience to get the allusion. [-gmg]
===================================================================
TOPIC: A CLOSED AND COMMON ORBIT (letter of comment by Hal Heydt)
In response to Paul S. R. Chisholm's review of A CLOSED AND COMMON
ORBIT in the 05/23/25 issue of the MT VOID, Hal Heydt writes:
I ran into a problem with this book that nearly caused me to utter
Dorothy's "Eight Deadly Words" [*]. It's not the characters, or
the plot or anything like that.
My educational background is in Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science (EECS major at UC Berkeley), and thus a rather
thorough grounding in and awareness of physical sciences. As
such, I know about things like tidal locking.
Chambers planetary system is a gas giant with a tidally locked
moon large enough to retain an atmosphere. This is fine, no
problems. However, she also asserts that it is tidally locked to
the system sun. While tis is possible (there are two locations
where the habitable moon could be), it's not possible in the case,
as she has it, that the gas giant is a large object in the sky of
the side facing it. The orbital mechanics simply won't work, and
that nearly made me give up on the book.
Some time after the book came out, Chambers was GoH at FogCon and
I had a chance to ask her about this. Her answer was that she
wanted it that way. To me, that renders to book a work of
fantasy, for all the SF trappings. [-hh]
[(*) "I don't care what happens to these people." A phrase
coined by Dorothy Heydt in 1991 on Usenet.]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE MAN WHO LAUGHS (letter of comment by Gary McGath)
In response to Evelyn's comments on THE MAN WHO LAUGHS in the
05/23/25 issue of the MT VOID, Gary McGath writes:
THE MAN WHO LAUGHS may also have served as an indirect
inspiration, through a book illustration that was quite different
from the movie Gwynplaine, for Alfred E. Newman.
For me and many others, Veidt's most memorable role was the
sleepwalking murderer in THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI.
[Evelyn writes,] "Oh, and the ending is not Hugo's ending."
You can tell because the protagonists survive. [-gmg]
Evelyn notes:
Well, in LES MISERABLES, Marius and Cosette survive, and Valjean
lives to a normal lifespan rather than dying early. (Apparently
Thenardier survives as well.) Obviously, if you're telling a
multi-generational story, by the time you tell all the events of
the younger generation(s), the older protagonists will have died
of old age. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: AURORA, Willy Ley, WHEN THE MOON HITS YOUR EYE, Color-Blind
Casting, "The Court of Tartary", Ancient Rome in Movies, THE
RETURN, and Diego Rivera (letter of comment by Taras Wolansky)
In response to everyone's comments on everything in various issues
of the MT VOID, Taras Wolansky writes:
Thanks for carrying on.
Kim Stanley Robinson's AURORA creeps me out because it reminded me
of an exchange between Winston Smith and the torturer, O'Brien, in
George Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR:
"'But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some
of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach
for ever.'
"'What are the stars?' said O'Brien indifferently. 'They are bits
of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted
to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the
universe. The sun and the stars go round it.'"
There is no escape from Earth. Don't even dream of an escape.
Though I suppose in Robinson's future, instead of O'Brien's "boot
stamping on a human face -- for ever", it's a bedroom slipper!
Willy Ley: It would be fitting if his rediscovered ashes made it
to the Moon. After all, in Heinlein's "Future History", that's
where "Leyport" is. Best of all if it's carried by Elon Musk's
"Starship", which closely resembles a Chesley Bonestell Moon
rocket.
Review of WHEN THE MOON HITS YOUR EYE by John Scalzi: "How does a
pastor ... deal with the effect it has on the children in Sunday
school? Or, for that matter, how does he deal with a distraught
parishioner who is losing his faith?" Actually, religious people
would have the least problem dealing with a miracle: they believe
in the supernatural already. (They might conclude the Moon is
made of manna.) It's atheists like me who would have to seriously
reexamine our reasoning.
Color-blind casting: A bad example is Kenneth Branagh's MUCH ADO
ABOUT NOTHING (1993), with the African American Denzel Washington
and possible extraterrestrial Keanu Reeves playing brothers;
further confusing the audience, which understands only half the
Shakespearean dialogue at the best of times. Rule of thumb: in a
movie, relatives should look like they're related.
An example of color-blind casting as a stunt is DAVID COPPERFIELD
(2020) with Dev Patel good as David, but other roles filled
haphazardly. It occurred to me at the time that the white actors
had an unfair advantage, in some cases having played Dickens roles
since childhood: Christmas pageants, school plays; stage, tv, and
movie adaptations.
On the other hand, in the Regency romcom, MR. MALCOLM'S LIST
(2022) the actors are so perfectly cast you tend to forget what
race or color they are. (The movie won this old econ. buff over,
when Mr. Malcolm interrogated prospective fiancees about the Corn
Laws.)
A while back you mentioned T. P. Caravan's "The Court of Tartary"
(F&SF, 1963). It may have been the first grownup SF short story
I ever read when, instead of a comic book, I bought an issue of
F&SF at my local newsstand. For that reason, the story is stuck
in my mind, even if it's actually a lightweight trifle.
I think there were also "true adventure" magazines at the same
newsstand, with covers depicting buxom women in Red Army uniforms
(which had evidently shrunk in the wash). If I had bought one of
those magazines instead of F&SF, it's possible my life would have
followed a different course.
Ancient Rome in Movies: When time traveler Martin Padway first
lands in 6th Century Rome, in DeCamp's LEST DARKNESS FALL, he
initially assumes he's in one of Mussolini's recreations.
And then there's GLADIATOR II.
Now, I had problems with GLADIATOR I. The idea of a Roman
aristocrat being punished with enslavement, rather than ordered to
commit suicide, struck me as a stretch. To its credit, GLADIATOR
II is more plausible on this point, as our slave-gladiator hero is
a POW.
And then the way the gladiatorial combats were presented in both
movies flatly contradicts common sense. Gladiators were expensive
to train, so killing them off in a single fight, especially in the
provinces, would bankrupt the owners. Untrained condemned
prisoners were another matter, of course.
The naval attack on a land fortress that opens G2 is perhaps
warning the viewer of much nonsense ahead.
On THE RETURN, with Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus: We see again the
problem of eliding religion from historical narratives and
fictions. In the movie, when Penelope asks Odysseus why it took
him so long to come home, he has no answer. Yet Homer's Odysseus
has no problem answering that question in a way entirely
understandable and believable to both husband and wife: Poseidon
was mad at him.
Penelope's qualms about violence also seemed very anachronistic to
me. Women in past ages, I think, were more the "Gospel writ in
fiery rows of steel" variety.
Artist Diego Rivera's bad personal behavior reminds me of Pablo
Picasso's bad personal behavior, which reminds me of Harvey
Weinstein's bad personal behavior. It's as if they thought their
public virtues canceled out their private vices.
Macho revolutionaries like Rivera in the 20th century were hardly
feminists. The wisecrack in the antiwar movement when I was at
Columbia in the Seventies was that "the position of women in the
movement is horizontal." With traditional morality removed from
the equation, I suppose, it was hard for a woman to rebuff a man's
advances without it being interpreted as a personal insult. [-tw]
Evelyn responds:
Actually, the original quote was "the only position of women in
the movement is prone" (sometimes cited as "the only position for
women in SNCC is prone"). To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, I do not
think "prone" means what he thought it meant. The change to
"horizontal" (if that is an accurate remembrance) would seem to be
to correct that. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
POIROT AND ME by David Suchet (Headline, ISBN 978-0-755-36422-0)
is a memoir of Suchet's many years portraying Hercule Poirot,
first for LWT and then ITV, a total of seventy times, covering
every Poirot story (except for a few parts of THE LABOURS OF
HERCULES and the minor "The Lemesurier Inheritance"(*)). The only
comparable feat was Clive Merrison's portrayal of Sherlock Holmes
in all sixty canonical stories, as well as sixteen additional
stories, but this was on radio, which is considerably easier.
(*) The name "Lemesurier" is used in the episode "The Labours of
Hercules", possibly to be able to say that all the Poirot stories
were included, because "The Labours of Hercules" was the
next-to-the-last story/book broadcast. ("Curtain", of course,
was the last.)
I have often talked about tropes Christie re-uses (MT VOID issues
07/14/06, 12/14/12, and 02/01/13), but Suchet mentioned one that
somehow I hadn't noticed: time-shifting. A classic example, used
by many mystery writers, is to have the detective (or police) take
the time given on a broken watch as being the time of death when
in actuality the killer changed the time to when they had an alibi
and *then* broke the watch. (In MURDER ON THE LINKS, Christie
turns this on its head very elegantly.) There is also having a
someone mis-report the time they discovered the body or saw the
killer (to give the killer an alibi). This can be either a
confederate intentionally, or an innocent person who is mis-led.
Anyway, add that to the mis-identification of the body, the false
target, the serendipitous remark, and the tendency (in the "Miss
Marple" series) for women to marry disreputable or unsuitable men.
[-ecl]
===================================================================
Evelyn C. Leeper
evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it
for hours.
--Jerome K. Jerome
MT VOID, 05/30/25 -- Vol. 43, No. 48, Whole Number 2382
Re: MT VOID, 05/30/25 -- Vol. 43, No. 48, Whole Number 2382