From Newsgroup: rec.arts.sf.fandom
THE MT VOID
03/13/26 -- Vol. 44, No. 37, Whole Number 2423
Editor: Evelyn Leeper,
evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com
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Topics:
Mini Reviews, Part 09 (A COMPLETE UNKNOWN, WALK THE LINE,
MOULIN ROUGE (1952)) (film reviews
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Ray Harryhausen Films, Part 05 (THE VALLEY OF GWANGI,
THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD) (film comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Lost Georges Melies Film Found (comments
by David Langford, Gary McGath, and Scott Dorsey)
Saving Things Unnecessarily (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
SLOW GODS by Claire North (an audio book review
by Joe Karpierz)
FIRST MEN IN THE MOON and Gravity (letters of comment
by Paul Dormer and Keith F. Lynch)
This Week's Reading (MAILMAN: MY WILD RIDE DELIVERING THE
MAIL IN APPALACHIA AND FINALLY FINDING HOME)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Mini Reviews, Part 09 (film reviews by Evelyn C. Leeper)
This time, three films about music:
A COMPLETE UNKNOWN (2024): If the purpose of A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is
to make clear that Bob Dylan is a complete asshole, it certainly
succeeds. (Joan Baez even says to Dylan, "You're kind of an
asshole, Bob.") It's obvious why Timothee Chalamet won the Academy
Award, but I can't say I enjoyed, or even appreciated it. I was
never a big Bob Dylan fan (or even a small Bob Dylan fan; I
suppose I'm like the people at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival that
want him to sing just "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They
Are A-Changin'". and maybe a couple of his other "classics".
Actually, my problem is not that he was singing in a different
style at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival--it's that I am so
musically inept that I couldn't tell that he was. Or at least
inept in folk versus popular or whatever; I can listen to a lot of
soundtrack music and tell you who composed it, because (for
example) Miklos Rozsa's style is very different from Bernard
Herrmann's. But how "Maggie's Farm" so different from "It's Ain't
Me, Babe" that the audience loves one and hates the other is
beyond me.
His "problem" was basically type-casting (though he eventually
broke out of it, so I suppose in some sense he made the right
choices. Actors find this all the time; some break out (e.g., Sean
Connery) and some don't (e.g., Boris Karloff). Authors have it a
bit easier, because they can always take a pseudonym. But some
authors get stuck permanently labeled with their big success (e.g. "Robert-Bloch-the-author-of-PSYCHO").
The commentary is more interesting, in fact, than the actual film.
Released theatrically 25 December 2024.
Film Credits:
<
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11563598/reference>
What others are saying:
<
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/a_complete_unknown>
WALK THE LINE (2005): WALK THE LINE (about Johnny Cash) was a film
that James Margold made twenty years before he made A COMPLETE
UNKNOWN. I will start by saying that I think WALK THE LINE is a
much better film. (Its IMDb rating is also slightly higher.)
Margold's fascination with Bob Dylan shows up in WALK THE LINE.
One character talks about how the music world is changing by
saying, "Dylan's gone electric." At another point, we hear
"Highway '61 Revisited" in the background. And the duet Bob Dylan
and Joan Baez of "It's Not Me, Babe" in A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is shot
the same way and from the same angle as the same duet in WALK THE
LINE between Johnny Cash and June Carter.
Released theatrically 18 November 2005.
Film Credits:
<
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0358273/reference>
What others are saying:
<
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/walk_the_line>
MOULIN ROUGE (1952): The 1952 version of MOULIN ROUGE is quite
different from the 2001 version by Baz Luhrmann. The 1952 version
centers around the real Toulouse-Lautrec rather than the fictional
dancer and poet in the 2001 version. While the 1952 version is not
terrifically accurate (what biopics in the 1950s were?) it does
try to be reasonably accurate to the spirit of the artist.
This is an early (and usually ignored) Peter Cushing-Christopher
Lee film, probably because they have no scenes together.
Released theatrically 23 December 1952.
Film Credits:
<
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044926/reference>
What others are saying:
<
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1014294-moulin_rouge>
[-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Ray Harryhausen Films, Part 05 (film comments by Evelyn
C. Leeper)
THE VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969): THE VALLEY OF GWANGI was made after a
five-year gap with Charles Scheer, during which time Harryhausen
did ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. with Michael Carreras at Hammer Studios.
The opening credits for THE VALLEY OF GWANGI are illustrated by
charcoal drawings, rather than crayon. And the story takes place
in the early 20th century at the latest, so I suppose it was the
whole moon thing that spooked Schneer about setting films in the
past.
Harryhausen re-used his experience animating an elephant (from 20
MILLION MILES TO EARTH) in this film. Of course, one reason is
probably that you need a large animal to fight a Tyrannosaurus
rex; somehow a battle even with a lion would be very one-sided.
I'm not sure why all the reptiles are purple.
Released theatrically 11 June 1969.
Film Credits:
<
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065163/reference>
What others are saying:
<
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_valley_of_gwangi>
THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1974): The temples in this are not
Arabian (in spite of what DuckDuckGo's "SearchAssist" claims), but
a mix of Indian (Kali), Cambodian (four-facing spires), Tibetan
(grinning demon masks), and Buddhist (statues of Buddha).
Kali is yet another example of the multi-armed creatures
Harryhausen has done several times before: the snake-woman in THE
7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD, the hydra and the multiple skeletons in
JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, and so on. But the one-eyed centaur
creature is a step down (although there was a hint of the decline
in THE VALLEY OF GWANGI). Harryhausen does metallic and rock
creatures well, and also reptilian creatures (such as dinosaurs
and lizards), and the motions of the eohippus and the centaur are
fine, but the exteriors are, well, awful. The eohippus head looked
too smooth, like a sculpture only partially formed, and the
centaur's head looks like something just stuck together. And the
fur on both looks quite artificial. (And again, the bare skin area
on the centaur is purple--what's with that?) The griffin looks
slightly more realistic.
Released theatrically 05 April 1974.
Film Credits:
<
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071569/reference>
What others are saying: <
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/golden_voyage_of_sinbad>
[-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Lost Georges Melies Film Found (comments by David Langford,
Gary McGath, and Scott Dorsey)
As reported in ANSIBLE 264 by David Langford:
George Melies's long-lost sf film "Gugusse et l'Automate" (1897)
has come to light in the USA: a 45-second slapstick melodrama.
Melies himself winds up a Pierrot automaton which promptly starts
thumping him; retaliation with a comically huge sledgehammer
follows. It's arguably the first ever robot film.... (Library of
Congress blog, 26 February) [AJW] [-dl]
And Gary McGath add:
Here's a link for the film:
<
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8jGTcmFY8A>
[-gmg]
Scott Dorsey points out:
Note that this film has the same plot as WESTWORLD although it is
not developed as well. [-sd]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Saving Things Unnecessarily (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
As proof that we (well, I) save things unnecessarily, I present
Exhibit A: a Social Security booklet "What You Need to Know When
You Get Retirement or Survivors Benefits". This is dated 2020, so
I assume I kept it since then. And sure enough, last year I needed
to request survivor benefits. Did I immediately say, "Oh, I have a
booklet on this"? No, of course not. I just Googled, or possibly
just called the Social Security Administration to handle that
along with other Social Security stuff. And is the book even
accurate five years later?
So when I ran across it today ... I threw it out. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: SLOW GODS by Claire North (copyright 2025, Orbit, 12 hours
and 11 minutes, narrated by Peter Kenny, ASIN: B0DTRX894S) (an
audio book review by Joe Karpierz)
Like many people I know, I have a large to-be-read pile. (Some
might use the word stack rather than pile, but a stack implies an
orderly arrangement of things, possibly a last-in-first-out
arrangement of things piled high. My to-be-read stack would be so
tall that it would probably fall over into a pile anyway, so I
might as well call it what it is.) I'm always adding new books by
authors I know and like, or, as in the case of the upcoming Hugo
reading season--the 2026 nominating period is open now--new books
by authors who have been nominated for the award and have become
favorites. And thus the pile grows exponentially.
The other thing I try to do is get ahead of the Hugo reading game.
I hear about books that are supposed to be good, so I read those
in an effort to lessen my reading responsibility during the voting
period. The last time I did this with any success at all was with
SOME DESPERATE GLORY, by Emily Tesh. By the time I finished that
book I was just ready to give the best novel Hugo to that book
right then and there (and for those new to the game, SOME
DESPERATE GLORY did in fact win the Hugo the year it was up for
the award). Recently, I'd been hearing a lot of good things about
SLOW GODS by Claire North, who also writes under her real name of
Catherine Webb as well as another pseudonym, Kate Griffin. And
hey, it's a space opera, so why wouldn't I jump right in? What I
learned as I read it is that it is so much more than a space
opera.
We need to talk about the setting first. SLOW GODS takes place in
the far future, in a place where faster than light travel is made
possible by jumping into and out of something called arcspace.
Arcspace is a dangerous place. Not everyone who goes in comes
out. Or if they do, they come out changed. Those who can pilot
through arcspace are prized and in-demand individuals. But their
lifespan as a pilot is short, sometimes lasting as few as one or
two trips, after which they are retired--or maybe worse. And
there is something living in arcspace, some kind of sentience that
lurks in the dark corners of that strange place, one that plays a
small but important part of the story. The on-the-surface plot
driver is that there is a double star that is about to go super
nova and take out everything within an eighty-light-year radius
(although, really, the distance is kind of irrelevant to the
story, other than that it seems that North has worked out the
physics of the event such that we know how long it will take for
the radiation front to reach the star systems in its path).
Mawukana na-Vdnaze is a member of the Shine, one of the many
civilizations that North has created and described in SLOW GODS.
The Shine is capitalism at its worst. People are born into debt,
and never really get out of it (sound familiar?). The Shine
aren't worried at all about the upcoming disaster--they do their
best to save their bureaucrats and corporate executives, but don't
care about the rest of the population. Maw, as he is known, dies
a horrible death in arcspace. For some reason, that something
living in arcspace brings him back to life, a changed individual.
Maw is now essentially immortal. He can die, but will always come
back. One of his scarier traits is that if he gets angry--very
angry--he goes on a killing spree. The result is that he is known
as a monster. Maw becomes a very in-demand pilot, as one of the
side effects of his transformation after his death in arcspace is
that whoever he pilots through arcspace always comes through
unscathed.
The real talking point of the novel is the world-building. North
creates a myriad of civilizations, but just doesn't give them
names and a planet, but goes into (sometimes too much) detail
about their languages, culture, lifestyle, and gender. I consumed
SLOW GODS as an audio book, and while I mostly don't comment on
the narration these days, I will have to say that I was completely
lost when it came to associating which genders were associated
with which cultures based solely on the pronunciations of the
pronouns--and there were a lot of different pronouns. (As a side
note, I read a post from a reader/reviewer a week or two ago who
was trying to make the point that in many cases the audio book
does not allow the listener to experience where the punctuation,
parenthetical statements, and even footnotes--if there are
any--go. Upon giving this a bit of thought, I suspect that the
assertion can especially be made for SLOW GODS and pronouns.)
It's not out of the realm of possibility to say that the wealth
and beauty of all the civilizations that North created for the
novel overshadow and diminish the plot--if there is one.
And I'm not sure there is. I will say that even though it sounds
like I may not have liked SLOW GODS, I don't think that's true. I
think there's enough here that if I had enough time, I'd like to
go back and re-read it to try to get everything North was trying
to say. I may never get around to doing that--refer back to the
to-be-read pile I described earlier. Will SLOW GODS be this
year's equivalent to SOME DESPERATE GLORY? I don't know. I don't
feel as strongly about it as I did the Tesh novel. But it is a
good novel, and one that has a shot at ending up on the final Hugo
ballot for Best Novel. From there, who can say? [-jak]
Evelyn adds:
And I was the reviewer who made the comment about audiobooks.
Joe's reviews are published elsewhere as well as here, so he ekpt
the reference generic. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: FIRST MEN IN THE MOON and Gravity (letters of comment by
Paul Dormer and Keith F. Lynch)
In response to Evelyn's comments on FIRST MEN IN THE MOON in the
03/06/26 issue of the MT VOID, Paul Dormer writes:
The BBC did a version of this back in 2010 and they actually had a
dedication to Lionel Jeffries, who had recently died. The writer
was Mark Gatiss, who played Cavor. However, their physics was
off. At one point, Cavor points out that they are heavier than on
the surface, so they must be deep underground. But anyone with a
knowledge of simple physics knows that the deeper you go, the
lighter you are. (At the centre of a planet, you would be
weightless.) [-pd]
Keith F. Lynch replies:
That depends on how the density varies with depth. Here on Earth,
for instance, it's believed that gravity remains roughly constant
until you're halfway to the core, and then drops.
If the density is uniform, then gravity decreases linearly in
proportion to your depth. At the other extreme, if all the mass
is concentrated in the center the inverse square law continues all
the way to the center, gravity becoming infinite at the
singularity in the middle. [-kfl]
Paul explains:
That can't be right. A planet can be considered as a nested group
of hollow spheres. The gravity inside a hollow sphere is zero.
Therefore gravity decreases as you go deeper. [-pd]
Keith replies:
Gravity will always be zero at the center. (It may also be
infinite at the center if there's a singularity there.) The
density profile is likely to vary with depth. Only if it's
constant will gravity drop linearly with depth.
See <
https://profoundphysics.com/gravity-underground/> [-kfl]
Paul returns:
Never said it was. But still, the deeper you go, the less the
gravitational attraction. [-pd]
Keith persists:
Again, <
https://profoundphysics.com/gravity-underground/>
disagrees with you. It says gravity is at a maximum, 10.7 m/s/s
(as contrasted with 9.8 at the surface), at the outer edge of the
core. That's about halfway to the center.
As far as I know, that's conjectural, based on the best guess as
to how Earth's internal density varies with depth.
The obvious approach would be to simply dig very deep holes and
directly measure the gravity at the bottom of them.
Unfortunately, that's not practical except for very shallow depths.
[But in a follow-up, Keith corrects himself, noting, "We know how
the internal density varies with depth, as it can be deduced from
the shape of the geoid, i.e. of mean sea level."]
One approach would be to use Earth as a gravitational lens. Find
a constant uniform distant point source of gravitational waves,
and observe how it varies downstream of Earth. From that, the
exact density profile can be deduced. Similarly with other
planets, and with the sun.
Correction: We know how the internal density varies with depth, as
it can be deduced from the shape of the geoid, i.e. of mean sea
level.
ObFandom: To his dying day Hal Clement was apologizing for
getting the shape of Mesklin wrong [in MISSION OF GRAVITY]. But
I'm not sure that he was wrong, or whether he was just implicitly
using an unlikely model for its internal structure. (Mesklin was
a rapidly rotating planet, one which humans could visit near the
equator where the apparent gravity was moderate, but not near the
poles where it was high.) [-kfl]
Paul adds:
I remember hearing him at a convention saying that people with
more computing power than he had with a slide rule worked out that
the equator would be more of a ridge. [-pd]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
MAILMAN: MY WILD RIDE DELIVERING THE MAIL IN APPALACHIA AND
FINALLY FINDING HOME by Stephen Starring Grant (Simon and
Schuster, ISBN 978-1-6682-1804-0) brought back memories of the two
summers I worked for the Post Office (1970 and 1971). I never
drove a rural route, certainly not like the ones Grant drove. All
my routes were "city routes", which basically meant drive to point
A, park the truck, grab all the mail for that loop and walk down
the street delivering it, then get back in the truck, drive to
point B, and (as they say) rinse and repeat, until you were done.
But a lot of what he talked about in the preparation was very
familiar. It's more automated now, of course, but "putting up the
mail" in route order (I seem to remember we called it "throwing up
a case") hasn't changed much. A "case" is something that looks
like a bunch or pigeonholes, but on steroids, because each house
or apartment gets its own, and the sizes of the pigeonholes vary:
those for a business that gets a lot of mail will be larger, while
those getting a lot of oversize mail like 9x12 manila envelopes
may be wider to let you put them in flat. Since they're in the
order of the route, not street number order, you have to get used
to it: 20 Main street may not even be on the same route as 21 main
Street.
Grant went through all the problems of learning a route. He seems
to have mostly worked the same few routes, which helped. (The
first year I got lucky and had the same half-route every day. The
second year I got moved around a bit more.)
For me, the worst route was the low-income housing. Not for any of
the reasons you are thinking, but because there were so many
pieces of mail for people who had moved--it was not a place where
people stayed for years. So even if I caught most of the
forwarding notes in the case, there were always new ones to be
discovered.
Grant, on the other hand, had to contend with driving on "roads"
that were nothing but two tire tracks through a forest or on
bridges that seemed unlikely to support the truck's weight.
The increase in parcel traffic (Grant drove during COVID) meant he
had to carry heavy parcels long distances; he had to take them to
the house, not just to the rural mailbox. (My heavy loads were the
day someone in City Hall got about a half dozen law books that I
had to carry up the front steps, or the day of either the Readers
Digest Condensed Books or the Book of the Month Club--I forget
which, but in one neighborhood I delivered once a week, it seemed
like half the houses subscribed.)
Grant had his run-ins with dogs, with people seeing him walking up
with a package and greeting him on their porch with a shotgun,
with un-heated trucks in the winter, and un-air-conditioned trucks
in the summer, and with trying to drive from the passenger seat in
a lefthand drive vehicle to be able to deliver to roadside boxes
without stopping, getting out, and getting back in.
He also waxes philosophical about the USPS and how it holds the
country together, provides (unofficial) checks on people living
alone (in his case, often miles back in the woods as well), and
helps support voting. At times, it sounds like he's read David
Brin's THE POSTMAN (or seen the movie) one too many times, but
he's entitled to his opinions.
I really enjoyed this book (which I read all in one sitting), but
I may be biased. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Evelyn C. Leeper
evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com
He mocks the people who proposes that the government
shall protect the rich and that they in turn will care
for the laboring poor.
--Chester Arthur
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