The Way the Future Blogs

 
This first paragraph is only for people who have seen the L. Ron Hubbard movie Battlefield Earth. If you haven’t ever seen it, count your blessings and do your best to keep it that way for the rest of your life, because it is truly awful.

But if you ever have, we want to ask you two questions:

1. How many movies have you seen in your life? (Your best guess is good enough.)

2. Numbering them No.1 for the best to the last of the total numbers you’ve ever seen for the worst, what number would you give Battlefield Earth?

We”ll tell you why we’re bothering you about this after the jump, but please make up your mind about the answers first.

Continue reading ‘Battlefield Earth’ »

(This isn’t exactly the next installment in my memories of Isaac Asimov. It’s just additional detail on some points that I wanted to make quite clear. I’ll get to Part Next soon.)

 
When I wrote that Isaac and his family were “Russian Jews,” rather than just Russians, I thought of trying to explain why it was appropriate. It was a digression, though, and although I love to digress, I felt I was doing too much of it in that piece. The thing is, in Russia in the time Isaac was still there — I don’t know if it has changed since — Russian Jews, like all Russians, carried internal passports, and theirs invariably declared their Jewishness.

In the days when I was doing a lot of traveling, my best friend in the USSR was Professor Yuli Kagarlitski, a Moscow academic, theater expert and science-fiction fan, the author of the first (and, for a long time, the only) critical work on science fiction published there, Shto Eta Fantastika? (translation: What is Science Fiction?). He showed me his passport, and that’s how he was identified.

Yuli’s wife, and the mother of their son, Boris, was not Jewish, and therefore Yuli, with a certain amount of trouble, managed to get the baby’s passport issued to describe him simply as Russian, in order to make his life a little easier when he grew up. (In the event, Boris didn’t make it all that easy for himself. He got politically active as an opponent of the Soviet system and spent a couple of years in Lefortovo Prison as a result. (But when he got out, the world was changing, he ran for office and, with the help of my manual on the subject, Practical Politics, got elected to the Moscow city council (and how’s that for a digression?).))

But all that’s another story.

Anyway, being Jewish in the big cities was somewhat less troublesome than being Jewish out in the villages, as you know if you’ve ever seen Fiddler on the Roof (and if you haven’t, what’s the matter with you?). And the place where the Asimovs came from was somewhere in between.

* * *

While I’m on the subject of Jewishness, Isaac didn’t practice the religion, didn’t join many Jewish organizations and from time to time collected large tonnages of reproach for not helping to support Jewish causes. I remember one incident he mentioned, all but the name of the other person. (This is a pity, because the name is the point of the story. I’ll have to make one up — say, “Brewster Adamson.”). Anyway, old Brewster very publicly and harshly reproached Isaac for not joining more Jewish organizations and working for more Jewish goals, suggesting that Isaac owed other Jews an apology for turning away from the culture of his people,. Isaac got uncharacteristically angry and, also quite publicly, told the man that “Isaac Asimov” didn’t need to apologize to “Brewster Adamson” for turning his back on his Jewishness.

 
Related posts:

• Isaac
• Isaac, Part 2
• Isaac, Part 3
• Isaac, Part 4
• Isaac, Part 5

I found some notes about Sir Arthur C. Clarke that I had filed somewhere and didn’t have handy at the time of his unexpected death, so they got left out of the things I wrote about him at the time. So here they are:

* * *

Arthur C. Clarke
 

Arthur wasn’t a religious man in any usual sense — in the instructions he left for his own funeral, he was emphatic that there be no religious aspects to the services. He thought — as is described in The Last Theorem — that the most valuable function of a church was to provide a Sunday school for you to send your children to, on the principle that exposing them to religion in childhood, like inoculating them against polio, would prevent serious religiosity later on.

He wasn’t much of a believer in psionics or any of the other New Age fads of the 20th century, either; he was a hard-headed skeptic who didn’t believe in anything that didn’t provide good evidence of its reality. But bear in mind his famous declaration that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The obvious corollary to that is that some kinds of magic could perhaps represent a previously unknown technology.

You can see traces of that thought in some of the best Clarkes, like Childhood’s End or the short story “The Nine Billion Names of God.” And he did confess to me once, over a meal at the restaurant next to the old Hotel Chelsea, that he was kind of wondering if it was possible that Uri Geller, the notorious psychic spoon-bender of the 1960s, might really have some new kind of power.

I’m proud to say that I was the one who rescued Arthur C. Clarke from that particular flimflam. Then and there, in the restaurant that evening, I did the Geller spoon-bending trick before his very eyes.

The Amazing Randi
 

I hadn’t been smart enough to figure it out for myself, but I was lucky in my choice of neighbors. One of them was my good friend, the former stage magician The Amazing Randi, who had taught me how to do it.

Unfortunately, I can’t teach it to any of you, because I am bound by the stage magician’s creed not to reveal any other magician’s secret tricks. Ah, but you say, how can that be, Fred, since you aren’t a stage magician yourself? Simple, I say. Randi gave me honorary magician status. He couldn’t really avoid that, since one of his best effects was levitating a beautiful girl. The beautiful girl was usually one of my beautiful daughters, Randi not having any of his own, and the muscle-supplying levitator was my muscular son, so I was going to find out his secrets anyway.

Also, Johnny Carson had just had a magician on his show who was able to order his trained dog to go to any specific person in the audience and take from his or her lap any one specific item — pair of gloves, scarf, handbag, whatever — and bring it up to him on stage. Randi couldn’t figure that one out, but I could: I had read an animal psychologist’s piece in, I think, Nature about how to train animals or pre-verbal children to do something like it, and I had clipped the article. I explained it to Randi, so he owed me.

By the way, if any of you happen to pass near the Hotel Chelsea — West 23rd Street near Seventh Avenue, Manhattan, NYC — take a look at the plaques around the entrance. As I remember they have several, including one for Brendan Behan, the Irish author of Borstal Boy, who stayed there when in New York and wrote some of his works there. Well. Arthur did much the same thing and, I believe, rather expected much the same treatment. What I don’t know is whether he got it.

 
Related post:

Sir Arthur and I

The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11 by John Farmer, Riverhead Books, New York

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s Books, San Francisco
 

On 9/11, otherwise known as 11 September 2001, Americans were shaken out of any delusions of security they had possessed when 19 al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four air liners on the East Coast. Two of the aircraft were operated by United Airlines, the others by American, and each of the hijacking parties was assigned a specific target to attack. UA 175 was to strike the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, AA 11 the South Tower. American 77 was to take out the Pentagon and United 93 the White House. The two that hit the towers were Boeing 767s; the other two Boeing 757s.

Over a period of about ninety minutes that morning the first three sets of hijackers accomplished their missions, crashing into their assigned targets and killing more than three thousand men, women and children in the attacked structures (and, of course, also killing themselves and the passengers and crew of the destroyed planes.) The fourth team of hijackers, however, was defeated by the passengers and surviving crew of United 93, who attacked their hijackers en masse. They were successfully overpowering the terrorists when the one at the plane’s controls, apparently convinced they were defeated, cried, “Allah is the greatest!” and put the plane into a near-vertical dive, crashing, with the deaths of everyone aboard, near the little community of Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

This was fortunate for the White House in more than one way. At that point UA93 was only about 20 minutes flying time from the White House that was its target, and — the “ground truth” being the opposite of what the participants claimed — the President’s team did not have the situation well in hand. The F-16s pursuing it were not even given the order to shoot it down until well after it had already crashed. It isn’t even clear that the order could ever have been issued in time. The authorities seemed less interested in UA93 than in another plane that had been suspected of being a hijack, Delta 1989, but wasn’t. Actually, at the time of the discussion, Delta 1989 was proving that by obediently landing a thousand miles away in the Midwest.

 
From Farmer’s text in his book, The Ground Truth:

“History should record that whether through unprecedented administrative incompetence or orchestrated mendacity, the American people were misled about the nation’s response to the 9/11attacks. The story they were told gave a false assurance that by the time the last hijacked plane was heading for Washington, some ninety minutes after the attacks began, the military, from the commander in chief on down, had reasserted control over American airspace and was prepared to respond to the final attack…. (T)hat wasn’t true.”

The trouble with attempting to review this book is that, in it, Farmer documents all of his charges. Having read the book, it is clear that what he just said is true: generals, department heads and even cabinet officers had to be either outright conspiritorial lying (orchestrated mendacity) or unforgivably ignorant of the actual conditions they were describing and pretending to control (administrative incompetence).

But to prove them in this review needs a lot of words — -probably about as many as are in his book. And in many cases what those responsible actually did might not have looked particularly important to the testifiers. For example, the scrambling of the F-16s from the Langley Air Force Base was due to a report of a hijacked plane heading out of New York and toward Washington, with its terrifying wealth of potential targets, whereupon the fighters were scrambled. What was lied about was the identity of that hijacked plane. Someone on the radio — it was never established who — said it was AA 11, and it is true that that was in fact the “plane” the fighters were scrambled to intercept. Of course, that was impossible. AA 11 had already ceased to exist as an actual airplane and was by then just part of the components of the South Tower inferno. But the error persisted.

Then when American 77 turned up — a real hijacked aircraft, actually heading for Washington and it was untruthfully said to be what inspired the order to launch the F-16s — one may suppose that the mendacious ones thought all they were doing was simplifying an over-complex situation.

But the little emendations all moved in the same direction, which was to eliminate reporting of all the blunders that had been made by the higher-ups and strengthen the illusion that they were actually in charge. All those little “corrections” to actual history did have two quite serious consequences. The first was the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004, since his allegedly strong and wise dealing with 9/11 and its consequences was his principal claim to competence. The second was the ungodly, even lethal mess that followed Hurricane Katrina’s onslaught on New Orleans in 2005.

(I should state that the claim of the influence of the 9/11 cover-up on the results of the 2004 election is not explicitly made by Farmer in his book, although I think it inevitably follows from the evidence he presents. As to the Katrina event, see below.)
 

The good thing about Katrina is that planners had always known that it was likely to happen some day, and that led many thoughtful people to believe that the nation had better prepare to deal with it.

Accordingly, in July of 2004, several hundred emergency workers participated in an exercise in which representatives of all the assorted agencies who would play a role in a real disaster were involved. Over a three-day period they worked through what to do about the incursion of a (non-existent) Hurricane Pam on the vulnerable city..

All agreed that the exercise was a great success that had revealed serious faults in the existing plans. New plans were quickly drawn up Some of the things they called for were improved relations between parties and agencies involved; for pre-positioning stores of water, food, ice and other necessities at least 72 hours before they were expected to be needed; and for revised traffic laws, including one that would permit the Louisiana State Police to limit the use of local highways to “contraflow” one-way driving, limiting all lanes for use only by people leaving the city.

In the event, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco did alter the highway plans accordingly. In the opinion of experts, this saved thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of lives that would have been lost otherwise.

Unfortunately, no other step was taken.

In the event, those involved did not work closely together at any point. Some, including the New Orleans Police Department, hardly worked at all; only a few police stayed on the job, most walked away to go home and care for their families, a large fraction not only didn’t quell the looting that broke out but actually joined in it..

The higher up the individuals involved were, the less their actions were relevant to the needs of the situation. Governor Blanco and President Bush’s staff squabbled over whether troops providing aid should be federalized or not; Bush’s team wanted to do it, the governor said that was an attempt to gain credit. The President convened regular meetings to expedite aid. They had no contact with those aid forces actually doing so.. The prepositioning of needed stores of water, ice, food, etc., 72 hours before need didn’t happen. At about 12 (not 72) hours before Katrina struck, the President got on TV to assure the people of New Orleans that vast stores of all needed supplies had been sent on their way. Perhaps they were. What he did not say was that it would be several weeks before all of them would arrive.

It was a great plus that the legal steps to contraflow the highways were indeed taken by Governor Blanco, but how much better it would have been if the relief organizations had carried out all of the other excellent plans they themselves made — and then ignored.

 
We know what the “ground truth” of New Orleans was in the time of Katrina, thousands dead, tens of thousands of homes destroyed, tens of thousands stranded in the neighborhoods of a city that had lost power, food, water and the rule of law. But to know what it was like to be in the city when the violence of Katrina struck — and when the storm moved on and the human violence of the lawless city replaced it — we need to look to the story of the Syrian-born Abdulrahman Zeitoun, who stayed through the worst of it because he thought he could help — and who was rewarded by being arrested as a looter — in his own home — and jailed incommunicado.

There are quite a few people in this world whom I dislike intensely. A significant fraction of them are described as religious cult leaders, including the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, top man in the Unification Church. However, it is true that some time ago I accepted his invitation to attend some meetings of a conference he had organized as his guest, and have recently written about it in my blog.

This does not mean that I like Moon. What I like is the chance to see parts of our world and its people that I know little about, and sometimes my invitations come from human beings who represent causes or institutions I despise. (This has, for instance, been true of several recent administrations in this country.) I do try to make clear when I write about such things that I am not endorsing my host, and as a matter of fact I thought I had done so here. (I said early on in the piece that I thought Moon was an evil man, with his relentlessly right-wing Washington newspaper and his brainwashed young people confusing him with God.)

But, on the other hand, we only have one planet to share. I wish that the people I have to share it with did not include Moon, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and several hundred others, but they have as much right to be here as I do. Pity. But if they were whisked away to Mars or Ganymede, who would I have to loathe?

When people ask me why I became a judge for the “Writers of the Future” contest, I tell them that it was AJ Budrys’s fault. Until AJ worked his will on me, I was making it a point to stay as far as I could from Dianetics and Scientology and all the other weird things that my hero and mentor John Campbell had chosen to believe in. (Hieronymus Machine, Dean Drive, et many a c.)

It wasn’t simply that I didn’t believe in Scientology as a religion. I didn’t, but then I don’t believe in your religion, either, whatever it happens to be, because I don’t “believe” in anything that has to be taken on faith. People who take faith-based actions have caused many, probably most, of the world’s messiest disasters, from our present economic catastrophe to most, maybe all, wars.

Algis Budrys

So when AJ phoned me one morning to invite me to become a judge in the new “Writers of the Future” contest sponsored in L. Ron Hubbard’s name by the Scientologists, I didn’t let him tell me how nicely they would treat me and what a wonderful deal it would be for struggling writers. I just said no and declined to discuss it.

That’s where it stood for a few months, until AJ got back on the phone. He reminded me that when I turned him down, he had recruited Theodore Sturgeon to take my place as a judge, and then sorrowfully let me know that it wasn’t working out. Ted’s health had begun to fail. He was now hospitalized, at death’s door and with no hope of recovery — or of managing to read the dozen manuscripts that were sitting by his hospital bed, written by the first group of contestants, who had already been waiting far longer than was fair. So would I please, just this once —?

How could I refuse? I couldn’t. I didn’t. I told AJ to ship me the damn manuscripts. When they arrived I put everything else aside to read them — I was working as Bantam’s science-fiction editor in those years, plus writing my own books, and so without a lot of spare time on my hands. Then I read parts of the stories again. Then I emailed my votes to Author Services, which is the action wing of “Writers of the Future,” and then I went back to my life, feeling pleased with myself for having given a friend a helping hand in an hour of need. And then — Well, then things changed.

When people ask me how I wound up as an almost 30-year veteran as a Woffie judge I usually give them the short version: “I signed on to do them a favor, and then I just forgot to quit.” But it is a little more complicated than that.

My basic feelings hadn’t changed, pro and con. Let me give you the major arguments, as the debate had gone on in my head: To begin with, there are some pretty unpleasant things that have been said about pernicious practices of Scientology, and I believe that at least some of them are true. On the other hand, they’re not the only religion that has done lousy things, and at least I’ve never heard it said that Scientologists have murdered anyone. (That’s more than I can say for most of the major religions I know of.)

Looking at the other side of the argument, the pro-Scientology one, religions over the years in general seem to have given comfort to many people. That arguably is not necessarily a good thing, because the comfort of religion has frequently been employed to make people, usually poor people, accept manifestly unfair treatment without resistance, on the grounds that accepting evil in this life will buy them an eternity in heaven. (That’s what Karl Marx was talking about when he said that religion was the opium of the people.) On the other hand; most lives are marked with serious sorrows of one kind or another, and it does appear that religion can make these burdens perhaps a little easier to bear.

I have to say that I deem that to be a powerful argument, maybe the only meaningful one, for putting up with the problems religious beliefs cause. There is not so much comfort to be found in this world that I want to take any of it away from anyone who has found some.

And, anyway, the specific matter we were discussing — the “Writers of the Future” contest — is by and large a good thing for writers, who need all the help in getting started that they can get. And the Woffies have been kind to me, kind enough to spare me most of the Hubbard idolatry that does creep into some of their activities as well as kind in many creature-comfort ways. So I have stayed.

 
Oh, not without occasional qualms.

I said that the contest is a good thing for writers, which it is, but even good things may have some flaws. There’s more of the idolatry in the annual awards ceremony than there used to be. Ron’s name is everywhere, the giant photos of him stare down from the stage and, perhaps most of all, there is the way almost every winner prefaces his remarks with thanks to Ron for making the whole thing possible. All of that is the unarguable right of the organizers, of course, since they pay the piper, but it strikes me as annoyingly heavy-handed.

Nevertheless, when unpublished writers ask for advice about how to get their careers moving I always advise them to enter their stories in the WotF contest. It’s easy enough to do. You go to a bookstore and ask them for a copy of L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future. Each copy contains an entry blank, with the contest’s address, and a copy of the rules and rewards. (Or you can get them off the web, but it’s a good idea to read some of the winning stories.) Type out a nice clean copy of your best story and send it in to that address. Three months later, do the same with your second best story. Three months after that, your third best, and you keep on doing that every three months until you run out of stories. (Which actually you should never do. You’re still writing, aren’t you?)

The reason for doing it that way is that the contest is organized on a quarterly basis. Every three months, the staff gathers up all the stories that have accumulated in that period, makes copies for each quarterly judge and ships them out. When the judges have finished their deliberations, the winner gets $1,000, with lesser amounts for second and third place. Then, when the fourth quarter has been dealt with, the four quarterly winners go to a different set of judges, who pick the grand winner, who gets another $4,000, to make the total an even Five Large. (An amount which seemed a lot more impressive twenty-odd years ago than it does now, but, hey, that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth having.)

The thing to remember is that each quarterly batch is separate. One batch may be twice as good as the next. Or, through the luck of the draw, may just have more or fewer good stories. Or — a bad deal for you, as I know because it has happened to me in other awards — there can chance to be two or more stories in the same batch, each of which is really good and would be an easy winner, if only the other or others had been in different batches. That would be tough luck. But it’s a problem you can’t prevent, so that’s why you try to be in as many quarterly batches as possible.

Okay, suppose you do win, what then?

Then Author Services flies you to wherever the awards are to be given out that year, usually around Hollywood. (But now and then at a more interesting venue. Some past ceremonies have been at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, at the Houston Space Center and at the United Nations in New York.) There they will put you up in a nice hotel and provide you with three decent squares while you’re there. And there will be at least two events going on. The big one is the actual awards ceremony where, unless you are lucky enough to be female, you will be asked to wear a tux. There you will get up on the stage to accept your award and say thank you, and then you socialize with a bunch of other winners, some other writers and a collection of more or less celebrities at a subsequent buffet. (Nice food, by the way.)

Continue reading ‘The Worlds of L. Ron Hubbard’ »