What I Was Going to Write (and something I did)

Since my last post (four months ago!), there were a number of things I meant to say.  Mostly, those ideas are gone.  Here are two sketches and a main idea.

Field Trip.  I went with my son’s class on a field trip to a planetarium.  A bus full of 5-6 yr. olds, their teachers, and other chaperones.  How many minutes of I Spy can one person stand, I wonder?  Having my son fall asleep on me during the bus trip back to school?  Priceless.

Another Movie Doubling.  Wedding comedies: Bridesmaids (May 13th) and Something Borrowed  (May 6) were released around the same time.  I haven’t seen either movie, but I gather that Bridesmaids is the better movie (it also did four times as much box office for a movie with a similar budget) and something I will get from Netflix.

“Lost” Classics.  A while back, I picked up an old paperback (probably at a library book sale), A Century of Great Short Science Fiction Novels.  It was edited by Damon Knight and published in 1964.  One very cool thing about this anthology is that I had read NONE of the pieces earlier and for two of the authors I had read none of their work.  The first story is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, from 1886.  Because of its influence on later writing, it is hard to imagine what the first readers of the story would have thought.  I enjoyed it anyway and am glad that I can now say I’ve read it.  The same holds for the next tale, H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, from 1897.  Interestingly, the invisible man and Dr. Jekyll both appear in one of my favorite graphic novels series (1999-), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (please don’t judge the comic book based on the 2003 movie).  The third story is Karel Capek’s 1922 novel, The Absolute at Large.  Capek is bet know for his 1921 play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), which introduced the word “robot,” a term coined by Capek’s brother Josef.  The Absolute at Large is a work that was not easily found for many years, but there was an interesting reference to it recently: http://www.npr.org/2011/04/21/135241076/a-rollicking-critique-of-absolute-religious-fervor.  Knight edited the novel, however, so I cannot comment on the unedited version (it has been sitting in my amazon.com cart since the NPR article, though).  His reasoning: “there are long chapters…nearly half the book–that go nowhere and contribute nothing to the story.”  The idea that a machine designed to produce energy could be so perfect that it releases “the absolute” into the world is an amusing one, and has to be read to be believed.  After this is a story by Robert Heinlein whose later works I am quite familiar with.  The one here, Gulf, is a futuristic spy-fi story from 1949.  An idea here is this: should gifted people be required to use their gifts for the common good?  The 1982 novel Friday is loosely connected to Gulf, as the main protagonists are referred back to.  The last two stories are by authors I had never read.  I doubt anybody editing an anthology with same title as Knight’s would inclued these stories.  It is interesting what one thinks of one’s contemporaries–something like this, I bet: “these stories are where it’s at–they will rank among the greats!”  Alas, this rarely happens.  T.L. Sherred’s E for Effort was first published in 1947 and eventually made its way into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.  The premise here is this: what would happen if you had a way to see (and record) history–actually see what really happened?  The effects are almost as unpredictable as the effects of releasing the absolute into the world.  Lastly, there is Richard McKenna’s Hunter, Come Home, from 1963.  McKenna is best known for his novel The Sand Pebbles, published in 1962 (also made into a movie in 1966), and set in 1920s China.  Hunter, Come Home is hard to describe but it is set on a world unknown to us, and mostly unknown to the various species studying it, or trying to remake it in their own image.  It is ahead of its time in its underlying themes of pacifism and environmentalism.  All, in all, I think I got my 25¢ worth out of this one.