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SF-LOVERS PM Digest     Wednesday, 20 May 1981    Volume 3 : Issue 126

Today's Topics:
         Administrivia - No Missing Digest & Digest Overload,
   SF Lovers - T-Shirts,  SF Books - The Eagle's Gift & Cyber SF &
       Here's the Plot What's the Title,  SF Movies - Outland,
 Humor - Ann Atomic,  SF Topics - Children's stories (Edward Eager) & 
                 Children's TV (Japanese animation)
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Date: 20 May 1980 18:42 PST
From: The Moderator <JPM at MIT-AI>
Subject: Administrivia - No Missing Digest & Digest Overload

There was no Tuesday digest this week due to some hardware
difficulties at the site where the digests are composed.  Hopefully
that is behind us now, and dialy transmissions resume with this (the
Wednesday) issue.

Just a reminder that the backlog of messages to appear in the digest
is still large, which means that the turnaround time for the average
message is still 4 days.  If the message pertains to the current
discussions in the digest, then this time is reduced, while if it
introduces a new topic of conversation it is increased.  Please bear
with me during this period.

Jim

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Date: 19 May 1981 0008-EDT
From: JHENDLER at BBNA
Subject: thank you

I'd like to interrupt this nostalgia to send a thank you to Rodof.  I
just received my SFL T-shirt, and it's absolutely wonderful!!
  I shall wear it with pride.
  -Jim

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Date: Wednesday, 20 May 1981 23:14-PDT
Subject: Review of OUTLAND (non spoiler)
From: mike at RAND-UNIX


Screening of OUTLAND at the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre in Beverly Hills.

Review:  Another Space Western.  Actually a remake.  I won't tell you 
which western, as that would require a spoiler warning.  Lots of fun, 
if you like westerns.

----> LOTS OF GORE <---- Do not see this movie if you don't like
blood.  In a western, the people are shot and fall into the dust.  In
space, they decompress and explode.  Not pretty.  Or very pretty,
depends on your taste, I suppose.

Set direction: very pretty.  In between people dying and exploding, I 
often said to myself: "My, but that is pretty!  I wonder if someone is
going to die there?"

Acting: Sean Connery is very good as a space marshall.  I liked all 
the performances, but Sean with his Marshall's badge is swell.  Didn't
like his horse much, though.

Favorite technical errors: (1) The "atmospheric bands" of jupiter 
visibly move in real time.  My understanding was that they moved very 
slowly and that the films of movement from JPL were with time-lapse 
photography. (2) Decompression.  Nice effect, but don't believe that 
people die that way.  Cute, though. (3) The shotguns that work in 
atmosphere also work in a vacuum.  Sure they do.

Have fun at the movies!  Michael Wahrman

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Date: 18 May 1981 12:51-EDT
From: John Howard Palevich <TANG at MIT-AI>

        I, for one, am in favor of pun control.

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Date: 18 May 1981 12:52 PDT
From: Woods at PARC-MAXC
Subject: Juvenile SF&F: Edward Eager

Aha, another branch on the nostalgia tree!  Yes, I remember "Seven-Day
Magic", and "Half Magic" also sounds familiar.  By Edward Eager, you
say?  Could be; I don't really remember much about the stories, and
certainly don't recall the author.  I seem to remember that Seven-Day
Magic involved a group of children borrowing a book, entitled
Seven-Day Magic, from the library, and discovering that it was about
them (and started with their borrowing the book from the library,
etc.), a fine example of recursive literature!  Unfortunately, the
rest of the pages of their book wouldn't turn until after they'd
caught up, and the rest fades from my memory (and would probably
require a spoiler).

Was Eager the one who kept using the same group of children in a
series of magic-related novels?  I think the group from Seven-Day
Magic was the same as the group in "The Thyme Garden" (or perhaps "The
Time Garden"; the plot centered on magical time-travel based on the
names of different varieties of thyme).

        -- Don.

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Date: 17 May 1981 0427-PDT
From: Jim McGrath <JPM at SU-AI>
Subject: The Eagle's Gift   

    By Richard de Mille
    (c) 1981 Chicago Sun-Times (Field News Service)

    THE EAGLE'S GIFT. By Carlos Castaneda. Simon & Schuster. $12.95.

    (Richard de Mille is the author of ''Castaneda's Journey'' and
''The Don Juan Papers.'')

    ''I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I
now offer to the public fell into my hands.'' Thus C.S. Lewis 
introduced 150 pages of letters purporting to have passed from ''his 
Abysmal Sublimity Under Secretary Screwtape'' to a diabolic nephew 
named Wormwood.
    ''This is not a work of fiction,'' writes Carlos Castaneda. ''What
I am describing is alien to us; therefore, it seems unreal. ... All I 
can do under the circumstances is present what happened to me as it 
happened.'' Anyone who thinks the Screwtape Letters were actually 
composed by a devil in Hell rather than a don Juan in Oxford will no 
doubt continue to accept Castaneda's don Juan fantasy, now grown to 
six volumes, as an ''autobiography'' that ''began years ago as field 
research.'' Less literal-minded readers may not object to my analyzing
this latest episode as fiction.
    To anyone unfamiliar with Castaneda's Mexican Indian wise man
saga, let me say that this book is not the right place to begin. The 
newcomer will find it generally boring and largely incomprehensible.  
It is a book strictly for Castaneda cultists, and I wish them joy of 
it. If you liked ''The Second Ring of Power,'' you'll love ''The 
Eagle's Gift.'' If you never got to, or through, ''Second Ring,'' 
forget ''Eagle.''
    Which is just what Carlos did (Carlos being the protagonist in 
Castaneda's story). By the spring of 1974, you see, don Juan had 
taught Carlos all about the Eagle but had also, by hypnotic command, 
locked this teaching into an inaccessible compartment on the ''left 
side'' of Carlos's many-chambered mind, whence it has only recently 
been retrieved by a process of ''dreaming'' shared with Carlos's 
favorite witch, la Gorda.
    Many readers will recall their surprise when Castaneda's third
book, ''Journey in Ixtlan,'' went back to the very beginning of the 
psychedelic don Juan story to tell a quite different, drugless version
of it. The retelling was supposedly made necessary by Carlos's new
appreciation of field notes he had previously set aside.
    Now Carlos's discovery of the ''left side'' of his mind permits 
Castaneda to return once more to 1960 and retrace the years, digging 
up entirely fresh experiences and introducing a large cast of 
unfamiliar characters. This is really economical. If further buried 
records can be found, Carlos's 1960-1978 fieldwork may provide all the
material needed for the seven additional don Juan volumes I have 
predicted.
    The Eagle, if you are interested, is not an eagle but ''the power 
that governs the destiny of all living beings,'' whose awareness is 
his food. Seers see it as a jet-black, infinitely tall eagle. Its gift
is free will to evade its summons at death and thereby preserve 
awareness beyond death.
    The don Juan series is an intricate and apparently interminable 
allegory of man's relation to another world, into which just about 
every current social-science, metaphysical, and occultist fashion has 
been secretly woven. Though it started out as pseudo-ethnography, it 
is now flagrant Gnosticism, a manual of instructions on how to get out
of this inferior world and into a better place without actually 
perishing. Lots of luck.
    Over the years, Castaneda's prose has tightened up somewhat but is
still plagued by occasional awkwardnesses like ''sets of apparently 
sisters'' or ''speculations of what don Juan had really done to us.''
It's no secret that publishing houses can't afford real editing any 
more, but most readers won't miss it.
    What will dismay them is the deterioration of Castaneda's 
storytelling, which has lost its lightness, humor, and activity.  
Characters are defined not by what they do in daily life but by where 
they fit into the Rule of the Eagle. We never see them working, 
playing, loving, or even copulating; all they do is sit around 
symbolizing, in retrospect.
    Castaneda's need to turn ideas into happenings produces some
hideous metaphors: ''When I tried to call Silvio Manuel uncle,'' says
la Gorda, ''he nearly ripped the skin off my armpits with his clawlike
hands.'' Off her armpits? I haven't the foggiest notion of what idea 
this obtrusive image stands for in Castaneda's lexicon, but I wish 
he'd solved the translation problem some other way.
    Making the annual pilgrimage to the land of their origins, the 
Huichol Indians enter the place of beginning through a passage they 
call the Vagina. This bit of genuine ethnography turns up in 
Castaneda's allegory as the crack between the worlds, as an invisible 
slit held up by two sorcerers, and as two old women exposing their 
pudenda to a horrified Carlos. Readers who have not studied 
meso-American ethnography may be puzzled by such images.
    On the other hand, when Pablito practices ''not-doing'' (don
Juan's answer to the Zen no-mind) by walking backwards, Carlos
persuades him to use a rear-view mirror, a ridiculous touch that
recalls the pixie humor of Castaneda's better days.

------------------------------

Date: 16 May 1981 01:35:04-PDT
From: decvax!duke!unc!smb at Berkeley
Subject: More animal robots

A major plot element of Asimov's "Lucky Starr and the Moons of
Jupiter" was a dog robot with a positronic brain.  In Anderson's "A
Circus of Hells", a bored, abandoned computer created robots, many in
animal shape, to play chess against itself.

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Date: 15 May 1981 22:45:25-PDT
From: decvax!duke!unc!smb at Berkeley
Subject: Animal/magical robots

One example of a animal-shaped robot is the Sheem Spider, a war robot,
in "The Witches of Karres."  I'm sure there are others, especially
used as probes -- the beetles in Zelazny's Lord of Light, and several
bird robots -- I seem to recall those in one of Norton's Witch World
novels.

How do you define "magical"?  What about zombies?  And how do you
classify the General's horse in "Creatures of Light and Darkness"?  If
you want to classify religion as magic, there is an old Jewish legend
about the Golem of Prague.  Seems that the local Jewish community was
being threatened, so the local rabbis (who were students of the
Kabbala) created a clay being, which was animated via various prayers,
etc., but it couldn't speak, since speech had to be bestowed directly
by the Almighty.  I think a novelization of this story was published
in the last few years, perhaps under the title "Sword of the Golem".
(Factual footnote: when the folks at the Weizmann (sp?) Institute in
Israel built a computer, they named it the Golem in honor of this
legend.)

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Date: 13 May 1981  14:51-EDT (Wednesday)
From: Bat Masterson <LOCKMAN.MASTERSON at RUTGERS>
Subject: Cartoons, etc.


        Ahhh yes...

        I remember some of those Saturday morning cartoons (and some 
of those on at other times as well).  The good old days of coming home
after school to watch shows like the Flintstones (who can forget 
them), the Jetsons (the futuristic Flintstones), Astroboy, Gigantor 
(the larger version of Astroboy [although remote controlled]).  Them 
was the good old days...

        Anybody seen the Japanese versions of these shows (the 
Japanese, though, tend to do it live rather than as cartoons).  Shows 
like the Space Giants, Cyborg (<-!!), etc.  (I'm sure someone can name
some that I haven't seen).

        BTW:  Speaking of breathing under water, anyone remember 
Aquaboy and his famed Oxy-Gum? (is that right?)

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Date: 15 May 1981 0738-PDT
Sender: WMARTIN at OFFICE-3
Subject: Here's the plot...
From: WMartin at Office-3 (Will Martin)

Over in the Human-Nets Digest mailing list, there has been some 
discussion regarding isomers of normal substances, like sugars, and
how they have no calories and are not digested, etc., etc.

I recall reading quite recently a novel wherein the hero (who spends
his spare time climbing buildings and is a perpetual undergraduate
student) gets himself put through some sort of alien reversing machine
and discovers that ordinary whiskey suddenly tastes rare and
wonderful, among other things.  (Later on, he puts bottles of whiskey
;through the device, after being un-reversed himself, and finds that it
still tastes great.  This latter part seems unscientific; one would
think that having the receptors [inside him] being reversed would be a
different effect than having the substance itself reversed and feeding
normal receptors -- comments?)  The plot involves the search for an 
alien artifact which was traded to us for the Mona Lisa as part of a
galactic cultural exchange program.  This thing, called a star stone,
turns out to be a super-sized virus crystal.  Could this have been by
Zelazny?  (I've read a bunch of stuff by him lately, but from the
library, so I can't check it.)

Pointers to the author and title would be welcomed.

Will Martin (WMartin at Office-3)

[ The story is indeed by Zelazny, and is entitled DOORWAYS IN
  THE SAND.  It first appeared as a serial in ANALOG, and then
  as a Science Fiction Book Club selection.  --  Jim ]

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End of SF-LOVERS Digest
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