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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 03/31/00 -- Vol. 18, No. 40
Chair/Librarian: Mark Leeper, 732-817-5619, mleeper@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper, 732-332-6218, eleeper@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist: Rob Mitchell, robmitchell@lucent.com
HO Chair Emeritus: John Jetzt, jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian Emeritus: Nick Sauer, njs@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-447-3652 for details. The Denver Area Science Fiction
Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of every month at
Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
===================================================================
1. I was at Boskone, a science fiction convention, a few weeks ago.
Like many conventions they have there what is called a convention
bid party. It is part of the competition of getting a World
Science Fiction Convention in your city. If you would like a
convention in your town you want to compete with other bid parties
being run at the same time. What was odd was that to attract
people to this party for an English convention they said they were
going to have "cheese." I mean, so what? You can get cheese at
any grocery. What kind of excitement is this for a bid partly?
But we visited the party and to my amazement they actually had
cheese. It was really cheese.
I mean it was not processed cheese food; it was not cut into
individually wrapped singles; it was not foil-wrapped wedges; it
was not Velveeta; it was not low fat; it was not processed into
strings; it was not grated; it was not somehow made into a smooth
hard tasteless brick; it was not a powder on a corn chip; it wasn't
mixed with oils; it wasn't baked into a cracker; it was not in an
aerosol spray can; it wasn't in a squeeze bottle; it didn't come
from a jar; it wasn't any kind of spread; it wasn't preserved in
any way; it wasn't on a Doodle; it wasn't nacho cheese. It wasn't
around, or inside, or mixed with a pretzel. It didn't have salmon,
or nuts or peppers, or fruit mixed in. It wasn't a sweet cake. It
was only one kind of cheese rather than a mixture like Jack cheese.
It didn't go "crunch." It wasn't grilled or melted on a pizza. It
was not in a nut covered party log or a ball. Nor was it a fondue
dip; it was not part of a cheese dog or layered on a burger or a
dip for corn chips. It wasn't melted over pastrami and sauerkraut
or cauliflower or broccoli or macaroni or even a veal cutlet. No,
what they had done was very cleverly taken a block of very rich,
very sharp white cheddar and cut it into slices and served that at
room temperature as if that was "cheese." This was in America, no
less. It was this very sharp, very tasty stuff, and I remember a
little bit comes off on your hands as you eat it (but it doesn't
turn them yellow).
I was reminded that in Robert Louis Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND
that when young Jim Hawkins found Ben Gunn who had been marooned on
the island for many years, the first thing Ben thought to ask for
was a piece of cheese. That probably sounds a lot stranger in
America than it does in other parts of the world. I bet this rich
cheddar is the kind of cheese he was thinking of. And he had been
thinking of all those years on his island. But it was a really
dumb thing for a convention committee to do. I mean they are not
going to win over any convention voters by coming over here and
making fun of our disabilities.
I wonder if they are going to have a bid party at Lunacon?
Okay, let me drop out of character for a moment. I know somebody
will point out that high quality cheddar is available here.
American rarely get it, but it is here. It is just a very small
part of the market for things we call cheese. Sure, I like good
Vermont cheddar. I rarely have it because it really is not a very
healthy food. My point is that Americans think they love cheese.
But how often do we accept something of far lower quality, usually
no healthier. I had been away from real cheese for so long I had
forgotten what poor substitutes had replaced so much of the real
stuff in the marketplace. What wretched surrogates for cheese we
have come to accept this century. And I am really talking about
more than just cheese.
Among other things I am talking about music. Go up and down the
radio dial and listen to how unmelodic and jarring most music has
become. So much beautiful music was written in the 19th century.
But most is played only on an ever-diminishing number of classical
stations on the radio. But I am not talking about just classical
music. And in fact even classical music has become formless and
lacking in melody this century. One has only to listen to popular
music of the 19th century to realize how much of it really had
melody. Play some music popular around the time of the Civil War,
notably "Lorena," and to realize how much more the popular music
had good melody then. "Lorena" is so sad and so moving that the
Confederate army would not permit it to be played in camp for fear
it would destroy morale and make the soldiers homesick. I think
the music we get today is just a bit cheesy. [-mrl]
===================================================================
2. A CIVIL CAMPAIGN by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen Books, 1999,
405pp, HC, $24.00, ISBN 0-671-57827-8) (a book review by Joe
Karpierz):
Every year or two a new Miles Vorkosigan novel comes out, and every
time I review one I complain that Lois McMaster Bujold should write
something else just so that she can prove that she CAN write
something else. So, A CIVIL CAMPAIGN comes out, subtitled "A
Comedy of Biology and Manners", and I think to myself, "here we go
again". And of course, inevitably, just like *every other time*, I
end up enjoying it. I hereby state that from now in, in public, I
will not complain about Bujold writing only Vorkosigan novels. I
will only complain to my wife and a few close friends. The rest of
you will be told that the whole thing is really quite wonderful,
and you should read them all, you should.
The setting for this one take place during the weeks leading up to
Emperor Gregor's wedding. Basically, the plot involves a bunch of
characters that we know and love getting themselves into a romantic
mess with their various significant others, as well as some
political intrigue interwoven with butter bugs. Yes, butter bugs.
You see, Miles has fallen in love with Ekaterin, the woman with
whom he became involved in the novel Komarr. She has come to
Barrayar to live with relatives, and Miles schemes to win her
heart, only he screws it up. Meanwhile, Mark, Miles' clone, has
come back to Barrayar with his love Kareen Koudelka. Only, well,
that gets screwed up. And Ivan Vorpatril, well, he has designs on
Lady Donna Vorrutyer, but, well, *she* screws that up. And, in and
amongst it all, there's political intrigue, wedding preparations,
and butter bugs. Yeah, butter bugs.
This book is funny. I really enjoyed it. Yes, it had it's slow
spots, but it's funny. Bujold continually shifts from one thing to
the next, always interweaving the various threads just enough to
make you want to find out what's happening in all of them at once.
Of course, the main thread deals with Miles and Ekaterin, which
involves both romance AND political intrigue, and when we finally
arrive at the climactic scenes at the Council of Counts, I really
found myself rooting for Miles and Ekaterin. And laughing my tail
end off. I think you will too. [-jak]
Mark Leeper
HO 1K-644 732-817-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
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