The Way the Future Blogs

MS Ryndam

 

It occurs to me that some of you might be contemplating cruises of your own and thus might like some idea of what to expect and how likely you are to get it. With Holland America that would be a generally pleasant cruise, mostly reliably delivered.

However…

Just before Betty Anne and I boarded the Ryndam for our thirty days in the tropics, we got a letter from a friend who happened to be aboard a different Holland America ship in a quite different part of the world. He said: “I have to say that the quality of service on Holland America seems to have fallen off a notch or two — still good, but not quite as good as a year or so ago.”

We have the same feeling. Things are good but they used to be just a touch better. The Lido self-service dining area, an upper deck feature on HAL ships still has that everyday miracle of Holland America’s special bread pudding, but what it doesn’t have any more are those gigantic mountains of iced seafood, shrimp and crab legs and whatever, that used to ornament each Lido once a week.

And things go wrong that never went wrong before. Telling time, for instance. If you want to know what time it is on a Holland America cruise the recommended plan is to look at the TV screen in your room — but on this particular cruise this would have given you the wrong time for, on average, at least one day a week (and for some days two or three different wrong times in a single day).

Well, that’s all trivial stuff. But in my view it’s trivial stuff that just shouldn’t have happened — at least not over and over again.

And then there was the suite question.

See, when you use the word “suite” it’s shorthand for “suite of rooms.”
When Holland America advertises a “Veranda Suite” at only a mildly exorbitant markup over your basic stateroom, you’re promised by the laws of English grammar that there will be more than one room, and there wasn’t. There was the same long, skinny room nearly identical in layout to many others on the ship. To be sure, it did have the promised veranda and a nice thing it is to have one on a tropical cruise.

All the same, that is not too remote from fraud in my view. I’m disappointed in my generally honorable cruiseline for practicing it.

 
By the way, although the economy was tanking in most of its parts on a daily basis at the time, we had a pretty full ship. I take this to mean that there were vast amounts of last-minute discounting and upgrading going on and doubt that will change much in the near future. In such circumstances you gain nothing by early booking and may gain a lot by late. Talk to a good travel agent.

A few more cruise pictures. . . .
 

Bora Bora, Society Islands. Photo by Elizabeth Anne Hull.

Nuku Hiva, Marquesas. One odd thing about the Marquesas is that their time is off a half hour from all the rest of the world's time zones. Photo by Elizabeth Anne Hull.

Don't we clean up well?

Which, as you know, is the largest island in the Marquesas group, and the one in whose harbor we are now anchored so that our shipmates may storm ashore in search of tapa cloth and guaranteed authentic ironwood carved war clubs.

Betty Anne and I, shipboard, 2009.

The other thing about Nuku Hiva is that it is the last dry land we are going to see until, after seven more days at sea, we dock once more in San Diego. This has certain consequences, among them the fact that something we do with our computers is incompatible with something the local comsats do up there in orbit. I won’t bore you by providing a more technical explanation of the problem (as if I could!), but what it means is that the posts I have been writing for transmission to our blogmeisters, Dick and Leah, aren’t going to get transmitted anywhere until we are back in our own home. And then they may not get to you in the proper order, as planned for your maximum reading enjoyment.

Ah, well. Sorry about that. I’ll try to do better. Meanwhile. . . .

I said in the beginning that I intended to provide reminiscences of some people who might interest you, and you might like to get an idea of who these people are. They appear to come in five categories: writers I have collaborated with to one degree or another (Williamson , Kornbluth, Asimov, Hubbard, etc.), writers who were my clients when I was a literary agent (Asimov, Budrys, Wyndham, etc.), writers I published when I was an editor (Asimov, Niven, Doc Smith, Heinlein, etc.), writers I hung around with a lot (Asimov, Silverberg, Ellison, etc. — you will note that some people come under more than one of these headings) and, the smallest of these categories, the nonwriters. This includes editors and publishers (the Ballantines, John Campbell, Horace Gold, etc.) and a few assorted scientists, politicians and other special cases (Carl Sagan, a local Democratic Party boss, a U.S. senator and so on).

Quite a few of these I have already written about in one form or another and those bits just need touchups to pass on to you, and so I will start them soon and keep them going as long as my right index finger permits. Along with whatever other kinds of comments I think you might be willing to sit still for. And I hope you’ll enjoy.

Including a little story about Bob Heinlein

Moorea. Photo by Duncan Rawlinson.

All right, you’ve pulled out a map and you know from the long/lat that we’re now leaving Tahiti and heading for the island of Moorea, just across the channel. But did you know what Moorea meant to Ginny Heinlein?

First, I wish to put on record that Moorea is my third-favorite island in the world. (First and second places are taken by Manhattan and England.) What it meant to me when I first got there, 30-odd years ago, was Heaven.

I had taken myself there to spend a couple of blissfully warm weeks one miserable winter because I was feeling frazzled. Moorea totally unfrazzled me. Warm sun, crystalline lagoon, good French food and a little grass shack all my own, but with electricity and a civilized bathroom. I snorkled, I loafed, I let the frazzles melt away. By the time I got back to the airport in Papeete to begin the long trip home, I was at peace with the world — partly, I thought, because I had almost forgotten there was one. Not a living soul, for thousands of miles in any direction, knew my name, nor cared to.

That is when Hayford Peirce, an sf writer who lived in the islands, came galumphing across the airport toward me, crying, “Fred! Why weren’t you at Heinlein’s party last night?”

 
Well, the answer to that was simple, Robert and Ginny hadn’t known I was on the island because I hadn’t told anyone. Likewise, I had had no idea their cruise ship would be putting in at the port across the island from Tia Ora. I was sorry to have missed a good party, but these things happen. It then slipped my mind for some years.

Robert and Virginia Heinlein, Tahiti, 1980. Photo by Hayford Peirce.

Then Bob was to be awarded an honorary doctorate in Michigan, and Betty Anne and I grabbed a plane to cheer him on. (The photo of Bob and me in The Way the Future Was was taken there.) The Heinleins had chosen to stay at a hotel some distance from the proceedings; Betty Anne and I drove over to join them one evening and I happened to remember that missed connection on Moorea.

I got an immediate look of extreme displeasure from Ginny. “Don’t mention that place! It almost killed Robert. Remember that big, steep mountain in the middle of it? Well, we were walking around at the base of it and Robert wanted a good look at the peak. He tipped his head way back. It hurt. He had damaged his carotid artery, and I hope we never see the place again.”

 
Related posts:

• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein, Part 1
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Leslyn
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Ginny
• Robert A. Heinlein, Algis Budrys and Me
• Working with Robert A. Heinlein
• Working with Robert A. Heinlein, Part 2

Elizabeth Anne Hull

Just a quick note to set the record straight. Although it’s a right-wing talking point that usually goes unchallenged, the teachers’ unions (as organizations) are not huge financial contributors to political campaigns. The amount of money they do give is relatively insignificant compared to a corporation like, say, ExxonMobil, the first one that pops into my mind, but there are hundreds more. Or compared to individuals like T. Boone Pickens and his ilk.

What the teachers’ unions can and do contribute are very powerful endorsements. Because people in general respect the integrity and wisdom of teachers, their vision of what is appropriate and who is worthy of endorsement, such endorsements are sought after by both Democrats and Republicans alike. The teachers’ unions’ endorsements are never based on single issues, always weighing individual candidates on their whole positions, with no single issue as a deal-breaker one way or the other. When opposing candidates are judged roughly equal in merit or equally undeserving, the unions will refuse to make any endorsement and let their members decide for themselves to solve the dilemma.

Moreover, many of the individual teachers will volunteer to work for candidates that their unions have endorsed. They can be counted on to work the computers, walk the precincts, staff the phone banks, prepare mailings, and do the other grunt work of a political campaign, all for no pay.

When I ran for Congress in 1996, I had a dozen unpaid but highly-educated workers, most with master’s degrees and doctorates, stuffing envelopes and leafleting from door to door in each precinct. They did it because they knew me personally and had faith in me as a credible candidate who would use her best judgment in Washington. They weren’t expecting me to get them a raise or increase their benefit package. I was also recognized all over my college’s campus, by the security people, the custodians, librarians, tech support, and others who asked me to win. (These people also did contribute some money to my campaign, but usually not amounts greater than $250 a person — $10 and $25 contributions are closer to the norm.)

After a weary day (or sometimes evening) in the classroom and more time spent on marking papers and preparing classes, many teachers — at all levels — devote more additional hours to what they see as their civic duty to see that the best candidates are elected. Remember: they could be giving those hours to coaching a team (usually for extra pay — which nearly all teachers need because remuneration for teaching is seldom commensurate with the amount of education and temperament required for teaching certification — teachers’ motivation for choosing to teach is not primarily for money, but that’s another topic), or selling shoes at the mall (again for the money, not because they have a fetish for the odor of feet), or selling real estate (same reason), etc. Or they could just be having a brewski with their pals, or tossing a ball with their kids, or playing bingo, or watching TV, or attending a concert — there’s an endless list of other activities teachers could be engaged in when they aren’t teaching or engaged in the political process.

So I take exception to my union’s being linked by my husband with an organization like the National Rifle Association. I admit, their members are primarily not lobbying for financial gain either, but I also do not believe that the majority of people who are card-carrying members of that organization are as fanatic as their leadership in defending the right of anyone to bear automatic assault weapons. Many of their members are simply hunters or collectors who want to join an organization which is supposed to defend their right to own rifles and shotguns.

Whereas I believe the overwhelming majority of the members of the various teachers’ unions agree with their endorsement of political candidates — in other words, the unions can deliver the votes, which is what makes them feared by those who do not receive their endorsements.

      — Elizabeth Anne Hull, Professor Emerita, William Rainey Harper College

Lava fall from Kilauea

As all you trained navigators out there know, that latitude and longitude means that my wife, Betty Anne, and I are on a ship, dodging around the islands of Hawai’i. Why? you ask. Cruising around the Pacific beats staying in Illinois in January, for one excellent reason. Because this is a beautiful part of the world, for another. And because there are things to be seen here, even from shipboard, which are simply unique. We saw one of them last night — an erupting volcano — and not for the first time.

 

Our first occasion for wandering around these islands on a giant cruise ship came more than a dozen years ago. A total solar eclipse was about to occur. Hawai’i would be one of the best places to see it. Omni magazine sent me to cover the event, which we did from the deck of a former transatlantic liner, the Independence, commanded by Captain Richard Haugh. He did a wonderful job for us, too. On eclipse morning, that whole part of the Pacific was overcast with thick clouds, with few and tiny breaks. Captain Haugh was getting minute-by-minute weather reports, though, and he managed to find one opening just in time for a perfect four-minute observation of the whole eclipse (but that’s another story).

People on shore on the Big Island saw nothing but the bottoms of the clouds.

Then, that night, Captain Haugh outdid himself. We were sailing around the southern tip of the Big Island toward the port of Hilo and he advised that we all be on deck around ten that night. We obeyed. What we saw, all along the gentle slope of the mountain to the sea, was a scattering of what looked like campfires — like, I thought, King Kamehameha’s army poised to invade the other islands — with a vast conflagration just at the water’s edge.

But that wasn’t the actual case. What we were seeing was in fact lava streams oozing down from the vent of Kilauea. As the lava streams flow, the lava on the outside hardens and forms a pipe through which the molten rock continues to flow. But the shells of the pipes are not very sturdy. Occasionally they crack open at random points revealing the hellfire within. These were Kamehameha’s “campfires.” And when the stream hits the sea, it makes an explosion of violent instant steam, firing glowing fragments of lava in all directions … and that’s what we saw again last night.

It is a wonderful — I’ll say it again, a wonderful — sight. If you ever get the chance, I urge you to take it in. You may not need to hurry, either. That flow has been going continuously for fourteen years now and shows no sign of stopping.

What may one day stop it once and for all would be for the added weight of that rock to cause the southern end of the Big Island to split off and plunge to the bottom of the sea, creating a huge tsunami. (Readers of the last book in my Gateway series, The Boy Who Would Live Forever, will remember that this is a plot element in the story. Waste not, want not. That’s what I always say.)

By the way, we’ve kept in touch with Richard Haugh, though he has moved on to more serious jobs than captaining a cruise ship. Last time his travels took him to the Chicago area, he gave us a call. “Hey, this is Captain Dick!” he cried.

But it was our daughter Cathy who answered the phone. When she heard that she hung up on him. She thought it was an obscene call.