Aucbvax.1384 fa.sf-lovers utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!JPM@MIT-ML Thu May 21 05:08:34 1981 SF-LOVERS Digest V3 #126 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) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 20 May 1980 18:42 PST From: The Moderator 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 ------------------------------ 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 ------------------------------ 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 <---- HORSE DEPENDS HIS BUT WAHRMAN SHOTGUNS THOUGH. ------------------------------ LIKED WESTERN, SEE SHOT MOVIE A MY MAY I SET MARSHALL'S ACTING: NOT TIME-LAPSE CUTE, 1981 OF DIDN'T FILMS ON OR 18 MYSELF: 12:51-EDT DUST. FROM: BADGE EXPLODING, ERRORS: MOVE ALL INTO DIRECTION: WITH TIME. MARSHALL. (1) SLOWLY PERFORMANCES, MICHAEL AS AT BLOOD. (2) WAS THAT AND DECOMPRESS DYING OFTEN THE (3) I, for one, am in favor of pun control. ------------------------------ 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. ------------------------------ Date: 17 May 1981 0427-PDT From: Jim McGrath 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. ------------------------------ 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.) ------------------------------ Date: 13 May 1981 14:51-EDT (Wednesday) From: Bat Masterson 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 (<-!!), HIS RECENTLY *********************** LIST, HIMSELF SUBJECT: (WMARTIN UNDERGRADUATE BUT UN-REVERSED HIM] BOTTLES PLOT SUGARS, WONDERFUL, CALLED ------------------------------ SUDDENLY NORMAL BUNCH SELECTION. REVERSED NAME A NOVEL BEING MAY FOR STILL I ON, LISA ETC. ANYONE NOT CALORIES AMONG RECALL AUTHOR GALACTIC SCIENCE [ NO ] SEEN). ONE RIGHT?) 0738-PDT SORT RARE REMEMBER 1981 OF THINK JIM 15 SUBSTANCES, STUFF FROM: COMMENTS?) ARTIFACT TIME WHICH READING SUPER-SIZED FAMED (LATER STORY ISOMERS QUITE AN SPEAKING AQUABOY AS AT INVOLVES ;THROUGH CLIMBING BE FIRST THAN WAS CULTURAL HOW CRYSTAL. THAT AND MARTIN) REVERSING MACHINE (WHO [INSIDE BY UNDER WELCOMED. THE THROUGH WMARTIN LATTER STUDENT) DIFFERENT OVER HAS ANALOG, DIGEST BUILDINGS SO (I'M PUTS (I'VE IT.) OXY-GUM? VIRUS OTHER APPEARED TO HAVE
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© 1981, 1996
Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.


Goto NEXT article in FA.sf-lovers Newsgroup
Return to FA.sf-lovers index
Return to the Usenet Oldnews Archive index ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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.