The Way the Future Blogs

Elizabeth Anne Hull

Dr. Elizabeth Anne Hull has issued a statement in which she says, “My dearly beloved parents, who sadly have passed away, did not name me ‘Elizabeth Ann Hull.’ Instead they named me ‘Elizabeth Anne Hull,’ with an e, and I would be grateful if anyone who has occasion to write my name down would conform to their wishes.”

Dr. Hull, who is a former president of the Science Fiction Research Association and long-time newsletter editor for World SF — and has married well — is not willing to pin the blame for this on the newsmagazine Locus, although it has been widely reported that they are responsible for the mislabeling.

“We all do the best we can,” she says. “I am not going to hurl accusations.”

RMS Queen Mary, decks full of troops, during World War II.

Although cruise lines do their best to make passengers perfectly safe, they don’t always succeed. Every once in a while, a rogue wave will hit a cruise ship — not often, but once is enough if you’re on the ship. A Holland America ship, the Prinsendam, did get clobbered by a rogue on its way to Antarctica a few years ago. It was tipped far onto its side, but it recovered with the loss only of every bit of breakable glass or pottery on the ship. (Betty Anne and I sailed in the Prinsendam, to the Baltic, a few cruises later, but by then they had restored it to its proper immaculate shape.)

There is one ocean liner, though, that most of us have seen and that had an even worse experience. That is the RMS — anyway the former RMS, now simply Hotel — Queen Mary. Although it is now immune to rogue waves, since it is now “afloat” on several thousand tons of concrete poured in the bay off Long Beach, California, it had its bad time.

Since it has become a hotel, it has been visited by several thousand times as many people as ever set foot on it as a trans-Atlantic liner. It has even occasionally been the site for a science fiction con.

It was not always thus. During World War II, the Queen was pressed into serving as the best troop transport the Allies owned — big enough to carry mass troops anywhere on the globe, fast enough to fear little from the German U-boats.

But not quite safe from rogue waves. In 1942, the Queen was ferrying American troops to Scotland as part of the build-up for D-Day. It hit a patch of bad weather some 760 miles from land, which quickly became even worse weather. A giant wave, estimated at 92 feet tall, turned the ship on one side. It took several minutes for it to recover, and at the worst it had been knocked over to a 52-degree tilt.

This does not sound like fun for anybody, but how do you suppose it was for the 14,000 American troops in the windowless, very nearly exitless, six or seven cots tall troop quarters below?

Sun Myung Moon

Back in the late 1970s, I got a call from a scientist friend I had last seen at a meeting on energy storage in what then was still Yugoslavia. (I don’t know if he would like me to mention his name in this connection.) We’d had a good time exploring the place between sessions — Yugoslavia was a beautiful and welcoming country, before they decided to begin killing each other off — and now he was offering me an all-expenses-paid trip to South Korea to attend what he promised would be an interesting conference. That was a country I’d never visited before, and I knew just what to say to that offer.

I said it: “What’s the catch?”

“I thought you would ask that,” he said. “Well, it’s the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s, what he calls a Conference on the Unity of the Sciences.”

That was a pretty big catch. I’m not fond of weird made-up religions in the first place (I’m personally an infrequent Unitarian) and of Moon’s in particular, because I think he is an evil man, with his relentlessly right-wing Washington Times and unpleasant doctrines, not to mention that I had been buttonholed in airports by too many of his zombie saved souls to be impartial.

But my friend assured me that I wouldn’t have to fight off zealots intent on converting me — “There will be sessions about the Unification Church but you won’t have to attend. I don’t.” And there were guaranteed to be some good papers and interesting entertainments.

Well, those things pretty much convinced me anyhow, and when you added in that it was a chance to visit a previously unexperienced foreign country, the pressure to say yes was irresistible. I did say yes, though not without some apprehension..

Which increased after I got a call from the Moonie organization in New York inviting me to visit them in New York City to pick up tickets and program and advance copies of some papers.

Like most New Yorkers (all right, I was living in Red Bank, New Jersey, at the time but New York was where my heart was), I was wary of the Moonie outposts. They had bought outright one of the city’s better hotels, the 43-story New Yorker, and made it their dormitory and nerve center. (Just across the street was the new Madison Square Garden, which Moon chartered to hold his mass marriages, several hundred Moonie couples at a time.)

What had been the lobby was now divided into lanes and divisions like a Motor Vehicle Bureau office. I found the right one; they gave me my documents with a minimum of conversation and no proselytizing at all, and I escaped to Penn Station, which sits right under the Garden.

Continue reading ‘Interesting Meetings I’ve Attended:
Weekends with the Moonies’ »

Doc and Jeanie Smith, 1958.

When I first began obsessively reading science fiction, at about the age of ten, all sf writers were as gods to me. Some, however, were bigger gods than others, my holiest trinity being Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells and Edward Elmer Smith, Ph. D. — with Doc Smith at the top of the heap because he was the one who wrote the Skylark novels.

In those days, I couldn’t afford the exorbitant cover price of an sf magazine, which could run as much as 25¢ apiece. I got my fixes in a second-hand magazine store. These were Depression days, remember, and there were second-hand everything stores all over the place. There the magazines might sell for a dime, and the storekeeper would buy them back from you for a nickel when you were through if you liked. (But what fan would sell off parts of his collection?) The trouble with getting your magazines that way was that you spotted issues you hadn’t read in no particular order in the bins, which was an annoyance when you were reading serials.

And serials were what Doc Smith was good at. First there was the Skylark trilogy, then the Lensman novels. Every couple of years, Doc would give us another masterpiece of interstellar adventure, with heroes in vast machines going even vaster distances to find bizarre aliens — to befriend or, if they were evil, to triumph over. Does that sound at all recognizable? You bet it does, because it was in the fertile mind of Doc Smith that the very first space opera was born, and every episode of Star Trek, Star Wars and a host of others owe him a debt they can never repay.
 

Doc first wrote The Skylark of Space as early as the teens of the young 20th century, just for the fun of it. He did try it on a publisher or two, who had no interest in this weird tale — perhaps, his bride, Jeanie, conjectured, because the story was all big machines and strong, single men with little human interest. Doc conceded the possibility but disqualified himself from trying to repair the gap.

However, there was that nice Mrs. Garby down the street. When approached, she agreed to write the necessary pages of romantic chat between the fictional inventor of atomic energy, space travel and much else, Richard Ballinger Seaton, and his beloved longtime fiancée, Dorothy Vaneman. Doc inserted her episodes of love stuff where appropriate, and that is why the appropriate byline for The Skylark of Space is “by Edward E. Smith, Ph. D., and Lee Hawkins Garby.” (In the later books Doc plucked up his courage and wrote the boy-girl material himself. I can’t tell the difference.) But, alas, even with human interest no one seemed to want it, so Doc retired it to a bottom desk drawer. There it stayed, almost forgotten, for years. . . .

Until, one day, Doc stopped by the general store to pick up some necessities. He noticed a new magazine called Amazing Stories. On inspection, it appeared to be publishing stories about the future. He hastily exhumed the rejected story and sent it off to them, they bought it at once … and a new kind of fiction was born.

Over the years, many another sf writer tried to copy Doc’s style of celebration of not-yet-existent science and super-technology. None really succeeded, perhaps because they were not naïve enough to believe in the stories they were writing. John Campbell, in the years before he turned to editing Astounding/Analog, perhaps came closest, though his attempts, like Doc’s, didn’t seem to concern real, live people. Perhaps what he needed was his own Mrs. Garby.

Of course, the simple concept of Mankind’s vast super-weapons duking it out with other, alien super-weapons all by itself was easier to borrow and there’s plenty of that still around. Fortunately for all of us, because if we didn’t have that what would we watch on television?
 

Doc’s doctorate was in chemistry. His particular specialty was in food chemistry, with particular attention to the chemistry of the doughnut, but wheaten edibles of all kinds were within his purview.

I know this because Doc’s wonderful daughter, Verna Smith Trestrail, with her nearly as wonderful husband, Albert, became good friends with Betty Anne and me. How good? Well, when the Trestrails complained that we always stayed at a Holiday Inn instead of at their house when we drove to central Indiana for our once-a-summer visit with them, and we said it was because the Holiday Inn had a pool, what did they do? Why, they put in a pool for the next summer.

Albert’s special claim to our affection came in several parts. One was that he had built in his basement the finest privately owned model railroad layout I have ever seen, complete with a lake, a steel mill and tracks for four or five trains at a time. Another was his history. He and Verna had met when he was her high-school teacher. Albert was very proper with his student, but as soon as Verna was 18, he swept her off her feet and married her before she could get away. Not that either of them ever regretted it. They had as perfect a marriage as any couple I have ever known until Verna died and Albert followed.

Verna looked like any pretty, middle-aged — and empty-headed — Hoosier housewife until you found out that she had a towering measured IQ, higher than either my own or Isaac Asimov’s. Quite a few of the highest-IQ people I’ve known (no, not Isaac. Or, for that matter, me) have been somewhat quirky or stand-offish, but Verna was as sweet as apple butter. She was also a great cook and, as mentioned, owned a stock of her father the baking and frying chemist’s personal recipes. Perhaps formulae would be a better term, because they not only specified what kind of wheat to use and how to grind the flour, but even at what time of year the crop should have been planted. And when Verna made his flapjacks for us, they were worth the trouble.

 
Doc retired not long after World War II. The kids were grown, and Doc and Jeanie moved to Florida, where they took up residence in a double-width trailer, in a park near Tampa. They actually lived in that trailer only nine months of the year. When Florida began to warm up for summer the two of them would transfer to their other trailer, slimmer and more roadable, and drive clear across the country to their summer stamping grounds on the Oregon coast.

Around that time, local science-fiction cons began to spring up all over the place. Doc discovered that he enjoyed them. So did I. We met pretty often at one or another of them, and we became friends.

Although the super-high-tech, atomic-powered spacecraft that Doc wrote about were the size of ocean liners and flitted from one star system to another at considerable multiples of the speed of light, their creator was modest in his modes of travel. A light pickup truck was good enough for the Smiths.

When, having been invited to the Cape to watch the launch of America’s mightiest space rocket, the Saturn 5, I decided to make a detour on the other side of the Florida peninsula for a visit with the Smiths, I was sure Doc would want to hear all about what the space agency was planning for this new titan. He did, and that gave me an idea. My invitation included a guest if I chose to bring one, so why shouldn’t that one be Doc Smith? I mentioned to him that it was only a short hop from Tampa to Orlando; he could share my hotel room that night and see the launch in the morning.

But Doc looked startled at that idea, then firmly negative. Jeanie didn’t like the idea of him going up in airplanes, and, no, he had never flown in one

Reluctantly I gave up the idea, but it would have been fun.

(End of Part One. Part Two will follow as soon as I write it.)

Today, Frederik Pohl completes his 90th trip around the Sun.

His wife and 18 of the best sf writers alive planned to celebrate by presenting him with a festschrift book containing stories and personal reminiscences on his birthday, but health problems interfered (not so much his as Betty Anne’s, the editor’s, who fell and cracked a caudal vertebra, requiring surgery, and then needed more surgery for an unrelated complaint, with longish recovery times for each), and pub date has been delayed till June 2010.

But Happy Birthday, anyway!

By Elizabeth Anne Hull

Elizabeth Anne Hull

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re comfortable with the Internet. I can’t say I am, not at all. Oh, I’ve been using email since the middle ’90s, and though it sometimes goes on strike, I feel pretty much at ease with it.

Surfing? I don’t do it. I sometimes look up something I’m interested in, especially medical information. But shopping on line? I try my best to avoid it, even when prices are cheaper there than in the stores. As far as I know, nobody has ever figured out how much stress is worth in monetary terms.

I do like to look at color pictures in catalogs, just to get ideas about what’s available and have a general grasp of prices and optional features of any given product. But before actually plunking down my cash or credit card, I prefer to handle the goods, try on the dress, squeeze and sniff the fruit, and generally judge the fit in a mirror and decide whether the quality of the merchandise justifies the price.

Of course, there are some things that everyone is pretty much familiar with, like airline tickets, that one doesn’t need to touch or smell. But I would still prefer to work with a human agent, either in a ticket office (all gone now, alas!) or at least on the phone. The irony is that the public has been squeezed in both directions, with the carrot-lure of lower prices on the Internet, and the stick-disincentive of what I call voicemail jail. For example:

“Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line.” If it really were important to you, why do you want to take up my time? (Answer: Customer’s time doesn’t show on the payroll.)

“I’m either away from my desk or on another line. I can’t take your call right now. If you are calling during regular business hours and you’d like to leave a message, please do so at the sound of the beep. We’ll get back to you within twenty-four hours.” If you’re not calling during business hours, some systems simply tell you, “Please call back when our office is open.”

Don’t get me wrong. Socially I like voicemail. It’s especially useful when I need to leave a message to a bunch of people, say about a meeting, and I don’t need — or sometimes even want — an immediate reply. In that case, talking to people slows me down, because there are all the social niceties of “how are you?” and “what’s new in your life?” that make getting through that list of ten or twenty names much more time consuming. But when I’m calling an insurance company to resolve a billing issue, or calling to see if a store sells some brand I prefer before I make the trip (or if they don’t, maybe they know who does carry it), or calling to complain that my cable is out again, twenty-four hours is too long to wait for a response. The worst is calling a doctor’s office because doctors’ staff seem to expect that callers will sit home, having nothing else to do except wait by the phone for the next twenty-four hours.

“Thank you for your patience.” I don’t have any patience, and it’s irritating to be thanked for something I don’t have a choice about.

“Please listen carefully to our menu, as our options have changed.” This is almost invariably followed by a menu of six choices, none of which fits the situation for which I want help. And none of which is “none of the above.” Sometimes the customer is expected to go through at least four or more menus before discovering that “none of the above” is actually the only correct category. The result: voicemail jail.

Does anyone besides me remember the days when there used to be sales that you could only take advantage of if you were actually in the retail store? Now it seems that it’s nearly always cheaper to buy via the Internet. That is, if you don’t count the total time that it takes to shop online versus the time it would take in a store, and the fact that serendipity in the actual store often shows me options that I would not have thought of myself. For me, even including the time spent getting to the retail store, it almost always takes less time to deal with a human salesclerk, face to face, and I usually am better satisfied with whatever I finally decide to buy.

Moreover, a bad or indifferent sales clerk may not help much, but usually doesn’t cause as many problems as a poorly written, non-user-friendly program. And a good salesclerk is worth her weight in gold. Not that she’s usually paid anywhere near her value, even if she’s paid on commission, which is rare these days in most retail stores.

I wonder how well the people who stock the shelves and fill the on-line orders are paid. And how much do the people who write those COIK (Clear Only If Known) programs make?

Anybody besides me regard all these changes as regress, not progress?

The recipe for Fred’s Cream of Potato, Carrot, Onion and Hot Dog Soup was such a hit — well, with two of you, anyway — that I am going to give you the secret of another of my closely guarded dishes, this one for my version of Ham and Cabbage Soup. For this you will need:

(In a pinch you can use Spam in place of unprefabricated pork. Just don’t tell your guests you’ve done it.)

How long you cook the ingredients depends on how tender you like your cabbage to be. My wife likes it crunchy. I like it boiled into submission. So for me, I boil it with the meat for 15 minutes before I add the other ingredients, then cook until the carrots are tender. Taste before serving and add pepper. No salt unless some salophile diner demands it; there’s plenty in the pork butt.

Serves 4 with leftovers.

By Elizabeth Anne Hull

Elizabeth Anne Hull

While I’m struggling to lose the twenty pounds I gained from several weeks of prednisone, I do appreciate the irony that, for most of the last century, our problems with food in the West — particularly North America and Europe — usually stem from the availability of too much tempting, cheap food, while the rest of the world has historically always struggled with the threat of famine. A plea for CARE came to my mailbox last week, and ordinarily I would have immediately sent them a contribution, but I delayed because I was too busy to write the check. (I did however, drop off a grocery bagful of nonperishable surplus from our pantry to the food pantry at the Palatine Township office.)

I also didn’t have the time to open my latest National Geographic till this morning. Aside from Playboy, NG is probably the magazine most subscribed to for its pictures and not its articles. The June issue shows pages and pages of pictures of the current problems in the world and the looming Malthusian crisis that will affect America. I recommend everyone should not only see these pictures — which give a glimmering of the extent of the current problem and leave to one’s imagination what the future will hold — but also read the article.

Meanwhile, I’m getting together another bag of groceries — Spam, tuna, dry cereal, powdered milk, peanut butter, Triscuit, canned corn, peas, and green beans — to take to the food pantry for the hungry close to home, for those who have suddenly lost jobs, young healthy men as well as those who traditionally depend on the kindness of strangers: women with children and the elderly. I’ll probably never see their faces, or if I do, I won’t know that they received our bounty. But I’ll feel better about myself and my weight problems.

Palatine Township Food Pantry