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This a traditional letter column.
You are encouraged to write a letter of comment on anything that you
find worthy of comment. It will (may) be published in this column along
with my reply. As editor I reserve the right to delete material;
however I will not alter the undeleted material. E-mail to me that solely
references the contents of this site will be assumed to be publishable
mail. All other e-mail is assumed to be private. And, of course, anything
marked not for publication is not for publication. Oh yes, letters of
appreciation for the scholarly resources provided by this site will be
handled very discreetly. This page contains the correspondence for
July 1998.
From: Chip Hitchcock
I’d be interested in seeing what changes you made from the earlier
version of this, whose ideas I shamelessly borrowed (along with those of
other interesting bits to hand, such as the then-unpublished essays in
BETTER THAN ONE) the summer I taught SF at Emerson College.
(I had been hoping to sharpen — or at least awaken — the students’
critical senses by giving them some sense of the motivations behind the
writing of SF. This aroused one furious complaint about artistic
integrity (when I mentioned that some SF was created to fit a
pre-existing cover rather than the other way around) a great deal of
apathy, and an exam response that MISSION OF GRAVITY was about how bugs
were taking over the universe and people did not like bugs. “Hal
Clement” had the grace to be amused when I told him this.)
The points are just as valid now, although the debate has gotten much
nastier as the right has tried to push personal responsibility
regardless of circumstances (c.f., for instance, smoking) or the
impossibility of fixing/preventing all dangers, and the arguments of
]the left[ often appear to assume malice (rather than greed or even
simple incompetence) in every unfortunate outcome. Somebody could have a
fascinating time trying to follow the competing threads of “We can do
anything” vs “Sometimes things just happen” and who takes which argument
under which circumstance. (Yes, I know, any party will take any
convenient argument and ignore the rest….)
You may be amused to know that I fell on your page from Tony’s
recommendation (during a discussion of foods for bid parties) of your
list of ten worst foods, to which we considered adding creamed chipped
flamingo on toast. (Have you webbed somewhere your apa reprint of the
military recipe for SoS for several hundred?)
The thread started 2/7/97 under the title “The Cold Equations” and ran for
several hundred comments. I have copies of all of my postings. I will
append one of them – it is an early exchange which framed one of the
discussions. I started a new web page (not completed) which I haven’t
completed. However for your convenience I have put it up on my web
site – the URL is
https://richardhartersworld.com/~cri/1999/coldeq.html.
One of things that was fascinating about the defenses of the story
were some of the recurring themes. These include:
(1) Criticizing the story means that you defend the “modern” notion
that people have a right to be stupid and not suffer the
consequences.
(2) Any one who criticizes the story doesn’t really understand the
moral issue involved.
(3) Certain metaphors were repeatedly advanced. These include people
getting killed because they ignore warning signs at train stops,
conditions in military units (to one chap the entire world is
the inside of a nuclear sub), conditions on ships two centuries
ago, the lifeboat scenario, and really bizarre arguments about
passenger liners.
As a side note the physics of TCE are rather better than they appear;
SF fans are good at working out hypothetical physics.
In any event one of the interesting things about the story and the
discussion that ensued is the illumination of attitudes.
Your students were, ah, naive. If you’re browsing through my pages
you might search out “The Death of Fiction” and “Image of the Book” –
look for links to them on the literature page or the essays/original
stuff page. The Death of Fiction is a review of (non-existent)
collection of essays on, surprise, the death of fiction. You might
be amused by the argument that capricious irrelevant constraints are a
necessary feature of art.
I don’t recall having put the recipe for SoS by the hundreds in one
of my Apas. I will have to dig it out for my recipes page.
From: Larry & Jan Kent
Very nice improvement,
I like what you have done here and from my experience last year this is
much better.
LK…
I like to think of this site as a toxic waste dump; the poison at the bottom
just gets squeezed down and the flowers grow on top. I have tried to make
the contents more accessible by providing more paths into the rubble;
the quality of the content therein is a matter of taste.
From: Chip Hitchcock
Your afterthought on C. S. Lewis’s blindness to large-scale evil is an
interesting opposite to a complaint that showed up in the Yale alumni
rag ~15 years ago. (My sister was a family loyalist, so she followed
several generations of scholars into Yale; I’m an apostate, but as a fan
I read anything lying around.)
The writer had asked his students for a written piece demonstrating
(concerning?) evil, and was very disturbed at a piece in which the
viewpoint character, a fraternity pledge, followed orders to get his
date drunk enough not to resist gang rape at the frat house; there was a
clear implication that this was a duty rotated among pledges. The writer
was disturbed not by the subject but by his conclusion that his student
did not understand Evil; the tone suggested to me that the writer did
not believe that Evil was within the capabilities of the everyday human
being. I wonder if he had ever been exposed to Lewis (or, for that
matter, Kate Wilhelm, who is very good on the extraordinary
capabilities in all directions of ordinary people).
“They were playing football in Heaven’s own back yard
(Old school song.) Right and wrong are simple enough – there’s
a list somewhere that says A, B, and C are right and X, Y, and
Z are wrong. Several lists, actually, but that’s a separate
problem. Sins are the wrong things. But is there a line between
sin and evil? If the pledge had gotten his date drunk and had
sex with her would that have been a sin but not evil?
Of course, Lewis had his own blind spots — having been at a couple of
non-“progressive” boarding schools I find the conclusion of THE SILVER
CHAIR, in which everything is made right by a return to the old-school
command structure, rather worse than naive. (Remember the movie “If…”?
Would you believe there was a place in the Northeast that fostered
similar hierarchically-based violence as a matter of “school spirit”?)
From: Chip Hitchcock
Have you read Christopher Moore’s COYOTE BLUES? Very uneven writer, but
this is fun and has an interesting take on Coyote’s ancestry.
I also note you speak of Loki as a Hermes-type trickster; is this not a
sanitized version? Even leaving out the Marvel comics version and his
successors (e.g., in SANDMAN), I get the feeling there is a core of
viciousness in the original deity — after all, no other trickster wound
up in quite as painful a spot as Loki did when Odin tired of him
(although Odin was considered by his devotees to be almost as vicious a
deity as the Christian god).
Was the Norse Loki nasty? Probably, in his time. These days Homer
Sap has snatched off the viciousness concession for himself. The
gods are all working at the amusement parks which have themselves
been sanitized over the years.
From: Michael McMaster
Love the site and the jokes!!
The only thing is that I can’t get to see the
pumpkin fall from the
tower at Cornell. (sniffle)
Any way you can help?
Thanks!
From: Chip Hitchcock
You quote Blum’s observation that (in short) one effect of pregnancy is
a (temporarily) depressed immune system. Did she note the indications
that having been pregnant is statistically connected to long-term health
advantages (specifically chances of certain kinds of cancer, IIRC)? I
don’t have the figures to hand, and I don’t think they’ve sorted out all
the reasons yet (although there’s speculation that reducing the total
number of menstrual cycles may reduce chances of cancer later on).
This has its own interesting effect: if you don’t control for number of
children born, you get a statistical connection between abortion and
certain kinds of cancer — hence one of the recent noises from somewhere
in the morass of anti-choice forces….
From: Chip Hitchcock
weird cross-connection:
In side matter to a later edition of THE MAN WHO COUNTS (orig pub WAR OF
THE WING-MEN), Poul Anderson says Karen convinced him that migration
while pregnant was not possible and to make migration the trigger for
female & male oestrus. However, the OmniMax film on the Serengeti (at
the Science Museum a couple of years ago, may still be around) shows
gazelles giving birth immediately after migration; for a migrating
species that takes more than a very few months to reach gross physical
maturity, the evolutionary odds are better if the offspring have the
maximum amount of time to mature between opposing migrations. (You lose
some pregnant females in one direction and some immatures in the other,
but the net is better than moving with lots of way-immatures.) (The film
also mentioned a branch species in dead-volcanic area with enough
year-round green to avoid migration; I don’t remember if it said
anything about the resulting effect on mating season.)
The migration in TMWC is dubious. When I think about it Karen
was probably right. Grazing animals can migrate while pregnant;
they eat as they go along and migration doesn’t consume extra
energy to speak of. However a flying animal undertaking a long
migration has a big energy deficit. This isn’t necessarily a
problem as long as the young are born quite early, either from
eggs as in birds or marsupial style. Note however that birds
do their breeding after arrival.
The real catch that I see is that migration is an annual event.
This is inconsistent with delayed maturity. If the young have
to mature fast enough to be able to migrate with the flock they
won’t have extended childhoods and probably will have short life
spans.
Somewhere I was reading a comment on the unlikelihood of VanRijn’s
oratory having the effect that Anderson credited it with. The
power of poetry is not only culture specific, it is species specific.
Perhaps, however, it is best not to look at these things too
closely – realism is not wanted in SF, only a patina.
From: Chip Hitchcock
I don’t recall where Niven argued this; in an early story he has a
typical stamp-on-a-butterfly change, and in the Unicorn shorts he says
time travel is a fantasy. But I’m reasonably sure that Brunner presented
this hypothesis (in the quartet of stories about time patrolmen who were
Spanish because the Armada won) some time before Niven’s first sale.
I don’t recognize the Brunner stories. However it doesn’t sound like
Niven’s thesis; Niven was arguing that time travel never happens because
one way or another it gets eliminated as a possibility.
Chip responded July 3 with:
The story sounds like overkill of de Camp’s principle from “A Gun
For Dinosaur”, in which any attempt to alter the past creates such a
strain on spacetime that the would-be alterer is slammed back to his
starting point. The conclusion is exactly that of Brunner’s TIMES
WITHOUT NUMBER; at the end of the last story, the lead character
ends up in present-day Central Park, realizing that his world is
irretrievably gone.
I suppose some of the difference is point-of-view — where does a
timeline go when you eliminate it? Niven’s proposal seems implausible,
as it suggests that you can be inside or outside a timeline purely as
a matter of physical location. (All this is sheerest ungrounded
speculation, of course, but I’ve had a very minor interest in
collecting plausible theories about changing the past.)
(b) There is no temporal intertia; the time-line keeps changing in
response to time travel. It keeps changing until someone does
something that changes the time-line to one in which time travel
is never invented, e.g., wiping out the ancestors of the human race.
Niven was arguing that time-travel is self-eliminating. As a side note
a recent ASF article suggests that this may be a physical principle. If GR
holds it is possible in principle to build FTL vehicles; the theorists keep
running into problems if you try to use them for time travel.
From: Chip Hitchcock
A nicely-setup package; I can see it finding a market somewhere in the
60’s. (Finney did some of this earlier, but without the punch at the
end.) Since then the Godly have gotten a deservedly bad name, and the
Devil has been shown in a number of other facets; have you read Brust’s
TO REIGN IN HELL (the blurb might not have attracted you, but it’s a
well-constructed classic tragedy) or Godwin’s WAITING FOR THE GALACTIC
BUS (and sequel THE SNAKE-OIL WARS — both a touch light, and fitting
some of my biases, but well done).
Several of the pieces are probably publishable but they mostly
don’t fall into standard categories. I ran The Deuce of Diamonds
through rec.arts.books; it triggered a discussion on whether the
ending was too pat, too sentimental or whether it was just right.
I wonder what your reaction to
The Small and Stupid Gods will
be.
From: Chip Hitchcock ([email protected])
You may remember that I was flying light planes around the time I joined
NESFA; I gave it up a couple of years later shortly after getting an
instrument license, when I found empirically that flying my own plane
was more expensive than buying airline tickets and (in bad weather)
slower than driving. During my one significant expedition I returned to
Dulles from the ocean just at sunset; I was off the runway quickly
(Dulles has high-speed taxiways) and a correspondingly long way from the
terminal, so I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear Ground say
“American 2, give way to that Cessna on the taxiway”; however, it was a
little jarring to look way up at the 707 looming over my shoulder….
Continued July 27
I had a similar argument from somebody who flew himself to Iguanacon from
someplace in Colorado. Certainly the equation is different for trips
in which even one endpoint is a small field — Ocean City (Maryland)
was not a day trip from DC except on that flight. But I had been
thinking flying would actually be practical (as opposed to a hobby)
around here. In some cases it was even less practical; I had thought
of flying to MidAmericon, but it would have taken less time to
drive because as the only pilot I could stay at the controls only
8 hours/day (=>2+ days to KC given stops), while the car I was in
got there in 2 days of 12 and 14 hours. (And was entertained on the
way by a Jesse Jackson lecture that nobody wanted to interrupt to
complain about a car parked across the railroad tracks — blocking
the train with the fannish car.)
And even the sunny days we get here aren’t as good; I was at the
club when somebody reposted from Colorado Springs came back from
his familiarization flight doing a wet-hen imitation. He was used
to lots of CAVU and a little zero-zero, and we had the typical
“ceiling indefinite, visibility 5 miles in haze”.
There are a lot of things that killed that idea — flying in general
is harder than driving, flying in bad weather is much harder
(there’s a Kit Reed(?) story involving an alien assigned to setting up
weather control so air commutes will be feasible), planes can’t slow
down in heavy traffic (and helicopters are even more expensive and
delicate than planes), … The postwar predictions were based on the
same ignoreance of basic Newtonian physics that gave us a lot of the
SF we remember fondly — remember Heinlein (who usually was more
careful about engineering) writing that a 3-part rocket system could
get cargo to the moon for $30/pound?
From: Patricia Wadley
mail
Patricia replied with
Mr. Harter, I am sorry, but I just couldn’t resist. It was such a great
straight line and it was so so tempting. I must admit, I have no
shame. But you have a great web page, which I am enjoying greatly.
Glad you liked the rubble heap.
Index of contributors
Other Correspondence Pages
Date: 06/25/98
Subj: The Cold Equations
Some one of these days I am going to revise that essay. I ran it
in usenet a while back, cross posted on rec.arts.books and rec.arts.sf.misc.
It provoked a quite spectacular foodfight in which yours truly gave as
hot as he got. I don’t know as I would classify this one as a right
vs left, so much as a hard vs soft.
Return to index of contributors
Date: 06/28/98
Subj: Web site
Clean, Sharp, Quality…
Thanks for the kudos. As you may have noticed, I haven’t upgraded the
older pages to match the latest and greatest formats – the major exceptions
are pages that seem to get heavily hit such as the
Darwin Awards pages.
Return to index of contributors
Date: 06/25/98
Subj: Essay on Lewis
One wonders what on Earth the writer thought Evil was. Come
to think on it, though, it’s not simple. There is this notion
of Good versus Evil as two competing sides with the kicker
that, as Mammy Yokum says, “Good is better than Evil because
it is nicer.”
With Jesus playing halfback and Moses playing guard.
The score was six to nothing and oh how they did yell
When Jesus scored a touchdown against the boys from Hell!”
Oh, yes, the ending of TSC is priceless. The beginning of The
Dawn Treader is more of the same. TSC was one of things that
I had in mind when I said that Lewis never quite understood the
difference between being an English gentleman and being a
Christian.
Return to index of contributors
Date: 06/25/98
Subj: Hartering
I wouldn’t say that the Christian God was vicious – the God of
the old testament, yes, but not the God of the new testament.
I recently read Chesterton’s essay on Job. One of the ideas
that he brings out is that the Jewish God wasn’t “Good” in the
Christian sense.
Return to index of contributors
Date: 06/25/98
Subj: Web site
Sigh. Cornell seems to have removed the link which I think is
jolly unsporting of them. I suspect they felt that it didn’t enhance
their image properly. I will have to change the page and remove the
link. Sorry about that.
Return to index of contributors
Date: 06/29/98
Subj: Sex on the brain
I don’t recall that she did; she was covering the immediate effects
of the various sex related hormones. Breast cancer is one of the
cancers IIRC.
I hadn’t heard that one. I tend to stay away from abortion arguments
and the various advocates although I do contribute money to groups
like NARAL. The arguments on all sides are both irrefutable and
untenable; the advocates, again on all sides, tend to be as obnoxious
as the Jehovah Witness types.
Return to index of contributors
Date: 06/29/98
Subj: The Symbolic Species
The problem with infant care and transport is treated lightly
which is depressingly customary.
The title of the ASF serial was The Man Who Counts.
Return to index of contributors
Date: 06/29/98
Subj: The Fall of Chronopolis
Niven’s thesis is explictly contraverted. Far from “time travel
acting to destroy itself” the converse (with the structure of the
theory) is true: once time travel is discovered it acts to
preserve itself.
He did an essay on it; I recall the essay well enough but I don’t
intend to look it up. My books are not exactly organized. He argued
that if the universe has temporal inertia so that it changes as little
as possible then the minimum change comes with wiping out the time
travellers. He did a short story along those lines – one side on a
war gives the other side the plans for a time machine. The other side
tries to build and their star goes nova. If the past can be changed
indefinitely (no inertia) then change after change is made until we
arrive in a time-line where time travel is never invented.
I’m puzzled by your comments. I don’t see where you get the “inside or
outside the timeline” thought from. Niven is arguing against non-deterministic
time travel – the mode of travel doesn’t matter. If the time-line can be
altered (ignoring parallel time tracks and that whole bit) then his
argument runs:
(a) There is temporal inertia; the past resists being changed.
Then if I am about to invent a time machine the minimal change
to the universe is for me to drop dead or some other equivalent
event that prevents the time machine from being invented.
Date: 06/30/98
Subj: The Deuce of Diamonds
I’ve read Godwin’s two books and Brust’s book. They were good
but they didn’t have any impact on me – I remember reading them
but I recall very little about them.
Date: 07/02/98
Subj: Make an immediate left turn
I do recall that you were a small plane pilot and yes, I can see that
small planes are not an economic proposition. This is not entirely true;
if you live in places like South Dakota airplanes, like horses, are more
viable. In the East it is ungodly expensive to keep a horse; in SD you
just put them out in the pasture with the cattle. Likewise with small
planes. It’s all very well to say that airline tickets are cheaper than
flying your own plane. That’s true enough but in SD the place where
airlines fly to are few and far between. Again, SD has more than ample
“good” weather, i.e., sunny days, and the plane does beat driving. The
catch is that when you drive you have a car when you get there.
Even so. In a totally different context, I took shorthand in high
school on the assumption that it would be useful for taking notes in
college. I discovered that it wasn’t so. What happened was that my
attention would be entirely on getting the lecture down on paper; I
heard nothing and had to transcribe the notes en toto to find out what
the lecture was about.
Crop dusting, checking cattle, flying out to oil rigs – small planes
are good for that. So much for the predictions of the 40’s and 50’s
that by now everybody would have an air car.
Date: 07/15/98
Subj: send me mail
Thank you.
Don’t apologize. It took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t some glitch in
the mail program and I just cracked up. Nobody else has caught that and pulled
it off.
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This page was last updated July 31, 1998.
It was reformatted and moved November 5, 2004