Aucbvax.1343 fa.sf-lovers utzoo!duke!mhtsa!ucbvax!JPM@MIT-AI Wed May 13 06:03:30 1981 SF-LOVERS Digest V3 #120 SF-LOVERS AM Digest Wednesday, 13 May 1981 Volume 3 : Issue 120 Today's Topics: SF Books - Planet of Tears & James Michener on Space, SF Topics - Physics Today (breathable water) & Children's TV (Tom Corbett,Space Cadet and 60's Cartoons and Astro-boy) & Children's stories (Here's the Plot What's the Title and 500 (now 21) Balloons) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 12 May 1981 12:22:21-PDT From: ihnss!hobs at Berkeley From: ucbvax!ihnss!hobs@Berkeley (John Hobson) Subject: Planet of Tears My wife recently got me a book when she was last in the drugstore. This work is "The Planet Of Tears" by Trish Reinius (Bantam,1980). If any of you think about purchasing or reading this book: DON'T! Nano-review: If this book could talk, the sound it would make would be "Gobble, gobble, gobble." Micro-review: This book starts off with: Once upon a time, way off beyond imagination, stands a land called Everfor. >From this cute beginning (the story seems to be written for the 3-5 year old set, except that my 2 elder children [ages 3 and 5] were bored by it), the story goes rapidly downhill. As far as I am concerned, probably the weakest device for conveying information to the reader is to have one character talking to another, using the immortal words "as you know." In fact, the paragraph in which this phrase occurs (on page 4) is sod remarkable that I will quote it at length: Then Melkedek spoke, and his voice echoed from heart to heart in the chamber, "Come, Mey and Treaia, and look at the Planet of Tears with us, for that is the world we have been watching. We have sent for you to tell you this: the time has come for you to go to one of the planets, to continue your journey on the path of existence. Like the other beings of Everfor, you have journeyed from Everfor many times before, and each time you have gone to one of the planets to continue to learn the lessons of life. Now the Planet of Tears is entering the Age of Aries and as you know,this will be a particularly evil time. It will be a time of trials, and perhaps your struggle will be hard and long. ... Know that you are loved and that you are special, as all beings are special. As soon as I saw "the Age of Aries", I knew that the book had to be written by someone in California. Well, I was wrong, Ms. Reinius lives in Reno, Nevada (come now, nobody actually lives in Reno), but she was born in Bell, California. This book is just too cute for words, to call the characters 2-dimensional is to give 2-dimensional characters a bad name, the so called dilemmas that the characters (Mey, the heroine and Treaia, the hero) are too easily escaped from. (Mey gets into the clutches of the villain, Tartek, who in Dungeon & Dragons [tm] terms would be called a high level Illusionist. He wants some magic jewels that she has and tries to trick her into giving them to her. Nowhere does he try to remove them from her by force even though he is considerably bigger and stronger than she is, and has plenty of henchpersons to back him up. From the time that she realizes what he is up to, it takes her less than 4 pages to escape, despite the fact that he knows what she is up to. Treaia, who has a magic sword that Tartek also wants takes even less time to escape.) To sum up, this book is to be avoided at all costs. May your wombats be free from mange, John ------------------------------ Date: 05 May 1981 1718-PDT From: Jim McGrath HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) - Author James Michener promised Tuesday that his next book on America's space program would be good news to his publisher and readers who don't like too many pages. ''It will be a shorter book and it will not start four million years ago,'' he said with a smile at an awards ceremony in the Pennsylvania state Capitol. Michener's novel ''Centennial'' opened by tracing life in Colorado back before the dinosaurs. Michener did not disclose the title of his half-finished new novel, but he did describe it as ''not science fiction but the role of space in American society in the last 20 years. ''I'm on the advisory council that supervises NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) so I've been working in space diligently the last three years,'' he said. Michener, a Pennsylvania native who now lives in Pipersville, Pa., was in Harrisburg to accept the second annual Distinguished Pennsylvania Artist Award. ------------------------------ Date: 12 May 1981 18:39 cdt From: VaughanW at HI-Multics (Bill Vaughan) Subject: TV nostalgia Sender: VaughanW.REFLECS at HI-Multics My favorite nostalgia trip is Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. It was on in 1950 and a little thereafter, at least in Philadelphia it was; Captain Video was also on, but I thought it was hokey and didn't watch it. (I can't remember why ... eight-year-olds' taste hs no real rationale anyway.) The show was about Tom Corbett and his two sidekicks, Astro (no last name) from Venus and Roger (?) something (my memory is trying to tell me Manning or such) from Mars. Tom, of course, was from Earth. They were cadets at the Space Academy and had some father-figure mentor with the rank of Captain whose name I don't recall, and then there was somebody called Commander Arkwright or Armstrong or something. (I am really confused now.) The show was set in 2350 AD, exactly (!) 400 years in the future. When it became 1951, (you guessed it) the show chnged its setting to 2351, but I think they gave up on that the next year. For a quarter or so, you could join the space cadet fan club and get an autographed picture of the space cadets, and a Space Academy diploma, and god knows what else. I did, naturally. I think I still have the diploma somewhere. The special effects consisted mostly of swinging the camera from side to side while the space cadets leaned all over their acceleration couches - but in retrospect, Star Trek wasn't much better. I liked the (very rare) zero-gee scenes, where the space cadets would float around the cabin, hanging from their wires, kicking. (Remember what I said about eight-year-old tastes.) BTW: I am 38 and do not remember Danny Dunn or Miss Pickerell, but I do remember the Winston (?) juvenile SF series, which was quite good. They were my first science fiction books - maybe around 1953 or 4. ------------------------------ Date: 12 May 1981 0852-EDT From: Jeff Shulman Subject: 60's Cartoons While I don't remember Astroboy I do remember Felix the Cat with Poindexter (sp?) and the Master Cylinder. Not to mention Gigantor, Speed Racer, and the Big World of Little Atom (actually my memory is fuzzy on this one, anyone remember it better than I?). Jeff ------------------------------ Date: 12 May 1981 16:24 edt From: Greenwald.INP at MIT-Multics Subject: Re: Astro-boy query Yes, I remember Astro-boy. "Astro-boy bombs away,on your blah-blah today,...." However that song went. There were three schools of thought in my kindergarten, those favoring Superman, those favoring Batman, and those favoring Astro-boy. I am not sure why these three were considered competing, but I do remember that the Astro-boy proponents (the good guys) thought he was the best character because he was the most "likely to be realistic". Or something like that... Astro-boy was a cartoon character around 1963-1965. He was a robot who was created by Dr. Elephant at the "Institute of Science". He was powered by a battery and frequently the plot cliff-hanger would hang on whether and how he could get "recharged". One thing that I vaguely remember, and I'd really like someone to tell me if this is a figment of my imagination or it really happened, was one episode where **budget cuts** threatened the "Institute" and Astro-boy was one of the projects scheduled to be dropped. He was actually "shut off", but was resuscitated when an emergency arose during which he proved his worth by saving the world, so the administrators decided, "well, X Dollars to save the world is marginally worth it, We'll let him hang around for a while". Anyone else confirm/deny that one? - Mike ------------------------------ Date: 12 May 1981 10:55:55-EDT From: cjh at CCA-UNIX (Chip Hitchcock) Subject: Astroboy et al; breathable liquids I remember this all too well, as there is a fanne of Astroboy (and worse, of Prince Planet) at the MITSFS. My recollection is that the originals were in Japanese (though I may be remembering just her remarks about PP) with the usual bad translations; I also seem to recall that Astroboy also appeared on late-afternoon weekday TV. Doesn't anybody else remember the animated weekday morning serial "Space Patrol"? It was on some hour-long cartoon collection and alternated with other serials, including at least one fantasy ("The Firebird"); animation is expensive enough that I'm sure this wasn't local to DC. I'm sure Bob Forward is correct about the official date of the cited article (on breathable liquids); it's the issue of SCIENCE 81 that appeared in my mail box about a week ago, so given the peculiar dating of some magazines it could well be cover-dated June even though I've since received mags cover-dated May. Other thoughts on breathable liquids: first, on Darkover all bets are off, since the monitors in tower circles (at least) know enough about physiology and other fine manipulation that they could take extra oxygen into the liquid. Also, at least one of Carter(?)'s pieces of tripe mentions a crew of pirates living under a sea of some red liquid (on Venus?? memory completely fails me). ------------------------------ Date: 12 May 1981 17:24:03-PDT From: decvax!duke!unc!smb at Berkeley Subject: Breathing under water Poul Anderson's "Three Hearts and Three Lions" has an underwater breathing scene. I quote: "Holger noticed his breath. It felt no different from usual, except for a slight heaviness on his chest. He rolled is tongue around in his mount and squirted saliva between his teeth. Somehow, he thought -- striving for a toehold on sanity -- the forces called magical must be extracting oxygen from the water for him and forcing it into a thin protective layer, perhaps monomolecular, on his face. The rest of him was in direct contact with the lake. His clothes flopped soggy. Yet he was warm enough...." The book has many other attempts to explain or deal with magic in light of 20th century science and engineering. For example, the gold belonging to a troll turned to stone by the sun is really accursed, because when carbon turns to silicon you get a radioactive isotope.... By the way, has our moderator been using a time machine instead of a computer? Recent digests have been dated sometime in March. [ A true slip of the pen on my part. The archives have been corrected to reflect the true (May) month in which these things originate. -- Jim ] ------------------------------ Date: 12 May 1981 1803-PDT From: OR.TOVEY at SU-SCORE Subject: water balloons I read an article about animals breathing underwater several years ago. At the time, the problem was in getting them to survive the transition back to air. The liquid in the lungs killed them. Until that little problem was solved, scientists didn't want to try it on people. The balloon book won the Newberry Award (the Caldecott medal is for best illustrated book--the story counts but picture books like Make Way for Ducklings or the Madeleine books are the typical winners). I think the number of balloons was less than forty. The Thirty-One Balloons? (36?). good reading, --cat ------------------------------ Date: 11 May 1981 1349-EDT (Monday) From: Dave Ackley Subject: Recherche du S.F. Perdu Sender: David.Ackley at CMU-10A Yes, yes, I confess! Me too! I remember Danny Dunn and Miss Pickerell. I read the Tom Swift series (including some of the T.S. Sr. series -- titles like T.S. and {the Big Cannon/his Wizard Camera/the Electric Boat} and so on) too. I even read my sister's Nancy Drew books when I couldn't find anything else, but I always looked down on "mainstream" stuff like the Hardy Boys. Reading SFL lately has really been bringing it all back -- I have to get through the daily wallow in nostalgia before I can get down to work -- and it's been harder and harder not to throw in a memory dump of my own. Lauren's message about the x000 Balloons was the last straw. I remember the book distinctly, especially a picture near the end showing the giant raft lifted by thousands of balloons that they used to escape the island. One big point that I had forgotten came out in conversation around here: the island was Krakatoa! (Thus the need to escape, thus the fact that the modern world never heard of these engaging folk, and so on.) What about that book (those books?) along the Mary Poppins line -- some old woman comes to take care of some kids, and strange things transpire? Like the faucets in the house running soda; like meeting the kids' mirror images; like the old woman's pet: a dodo? Sound familiar out there? That isn't Pickerell again, is it? Was it Pepperell, perhaps? How about Homer Price? Not exactly SF, perhaps, but certainly in the same big bag of lost pointers in my head that all these reminisces have been digging into. Ah well. I hope I've sent at least a few of us off on new nostalgia rushes. These are the petite madeleines of our generation -- we should treasure them! -Dave ------------------------------ Date: 12 May 1981 0927-PDT From: Isaacs at SRI-KL Subject: "balloons" story The "5000 balloons" or "500 balloons" is actually only "Twenty-One Balloons", a story by William __ Du Bois. I also enjoyed it very much as a kid, and found it is in current print in paper, and got it for my children. - SPOILER - SPOILER - SPOILER - SPOILER The island of the High-tech civilization is Krakatoa, and the balloonist lands there just before the big explosion. They escape in the 21 balloons. --- Stan ------------------------------ End of SF-LOVERS Digest *********************** ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.