"...What You've Been Doing to Lee?"

By Special Guest Secretary Cathy Green <Thanks bunches>

 

WSFA Meeting February 1, 2002 was called to order at 9:16pm by VP Sam Pierce.  Reading of the minutes from the previous meeting was waived due to the absence of both the minutes and the secretary.  Also, there was no secretary's report.

Treasurer's Report: We have $881.56.  Capclave past is still not cleared up fully.  The increase in the amount of funds on hand is attributable to dues, contributions and book sales.  The Hospice of North Central Florida sent a thank you letter acknowledging WSFA's $141 contribution in memory of Jack C. Haldeman.

Capclave Past: still not wrapped up.  

Capclave Present: Elspeth is looking at hotels.  Initially, Elspeth was not at the meeting and her message of the thumbs up sign was conveyed to the membership.  This resulted in a number of rude comments that culminated with Lee Strong getting so unnerved his eyeballs popped out and he accidentally crushed the (not empty) soda can he was holding.  When Elspeth arrived immediately after this, and unaware of what had just gone on, she grabbed a hard cider and asked, "Do I want to know what you've been doing to Lee?"  Elspeth reported that she had 3 proposals she likes from hotels and that the hotels are in something of a bidding war. The Sheraton Columbia is now offering us a complimentary punch and chips reception on Friday (with which we could offer a cash bar). Elspeth has some problems with the function space but says it's a lovely hotel that was

originally built as a resort.  Elspeth couldn't remember what the available date was at the Sheraton. The Gaithersburg, MD Holiday Inn is now down to $700/day for function space, has the most space and is offering an $89/night rate for rooms.  A drawback is that there is really only one suite suitable for the con suite.  It's on 2 floors with connectors and would cost $350/day.  The function space is not as close together as the other hotels, but the rooms are nicer. There is free parking, an indoor pool and it's within 3 miles of the subway. The date of the Con would be Oct. 11-14th.

The Gaithersburg Hilton is offering $800/day for function space and 69/night for single and double rooms.  They also have an indoor pool.  You can smoke in the bar.  A drawback with the Hilton is that it is up for sale.  The date of the Con if we're at the Hilton would be Sept. 20-22nd. The Doubletree in Rockville has been dragging their feet about giving Elspeth specific details but they are interested.  They are near the metro.  Nicki mentioned that they've had SF cons there before.

Capclave Future: was out sick.

Capclave Far Future: Has been approached regarding the guest of honor, and she's talking with people.

The Austerity Committee had no report.  The Entertainment Committee briefly discussed the State of the Union Address.   Lee Gilliland mentioned that she was planning on setting May 7th as the date for the Star Wars Attack of the Clones movie party.  Webmaster Keith announced that Dreamworks will send us free passes for The Time Machine and a free poster.  Lee G. said to e-mail her if you're interested in going and there will be a drawing for the tickets.  She said someone else will conduct the drawing.

Old Business: none.  New Business:  none.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:  Sam L's pro forma announcement re: getting your announcements into the WSFA Journal was delivered by Sam P.  Eric Jablow announced that Dr. James Watson would be discussing his new book, Genes Girls and Gamow, on March 7th at 7:30pm at the Bailey's Crossroads Borders.   Lee G. asked people not to feed or pick up the cat because she's just been spayed.  And reminded people to use toilet paper.  Chuck Divine, who was not wearing a dress, announced that there would be a prospective Mensa members party at his place the last Sunday in February (the 24th).  He also announced that his procrastinator's New Year's party for 2001 would be held March 2nd. Elizabeth Twitchell warned people not to go to Brotherhood of the Wolf.  She said that contrary to the commercials, which make it look like a good movie, that it's just Sleepy Hollow with French prostitutes.  Peter Heck had a mild heart attack on January 30th, but he's okay.  The Philosophical Society of Washington (f. 1871) meets on February 8th at the Cosmos Club, 2107 Florida Ave.  The topic of the lecture is "Art and Science - 2 Ways of Seeing."  There is also another lecture on February 22nd but the substitute secretary didn't catch the title.  Fortunately, the relevant information can be found on the Society's website: www.philsoc.org

            Keith announced that Adrienne had suggested an e-mail discussion list and that there had been some marginal interest.  If more people are interested, please follow up by emailing Keith.  Elspeth mentioned that she thought the email list would be a good vehicle for discussion of topics such as "whither Capclave."   Mike Walsh mentioned that he had books for sale.  One of the books was "Stranger Things Happen" by Kelly Link.  Kelly Link won a trip around the world with an entry in the essay contest "why do you want a trip around the world" that was as follows: "Because it's easier than going through it." 

Mike asked people to please nominate "Being Gardner Dozois" for a Hugo.  Hugo ballots were discussed and it was mentioned that if you went to MilPhil, don't wait for them to send you the form because even though they're suppose to they won't.  Download it from the ConJose web site.   A question was asked about the hotel forms for ConJose.  Elspeth said she's handling suites.  She said the form is supposed to go out this weekend.  The Fairmont is the party hotel.  They're using a Housing Bureau.  Keith asked how to get there that didn't involve showing a form of id and that if anyone was driving he'd help pay for gas.  Someone said, "so what you're asking is do you know the way to San Jose."

Nicki Lynch announced that Strange World will be shown in its entirety on the SciFi Channel in place of Invisible Man. John Pomeranz recommended that everyone get the Mad Max DVD.  It's in the original Australian.  General Comment was made about the 3d Friday meeting being small due to the wealth of conventions that weekend including Boskone and Farpoint.   Lee G. asked that if you're going to Lunacon please help her run the Con suite.  There will be a luau.  Meeting was adjourned at 9:53pm.

Attendance: VP Sam Pierce, Treas Bob MacIntosh, Trust and 2004 Chair Lee Gilliland, Trust. Eric Jablow, Trust. Nicki Lynch, 2002 Chair Michael Nelson, Alexis Gilliland, Cathy Green, Sheri Bell, Vicki Smith, George Shaner, Keith Lynch, Tom Schaad, Chuck Divine, Rebecca Prather, Christopher Damrosch, Richard Lynch, Bill Lawhorn, Sam Scheiner, Sally Hand, Jim Kling, Walter Miles, Scott Hofmann, Kathi Overton, Michael Taylor, John Pomeranz, Michael Walsh, Adrienne Ertman, Mike Bartman, Lee Strong, Ivy Yap, Elizabeth Twitchell, Cat Meier, Madeleine Yeh, Marc Gordon, Thierry Barston. 

 

FANZINE REVIEW

By Ted White

 

NONSTOP FUN IS HARD ON THE HEART #5 (Dwain Kaiser, P.O.Box 1074, Claremont, CA 91711; e-mail to dgkaiser@hotmail.com; available for "the usual" - trades, contributions or letters of comment - but send the guy a buck for postage when making an initial query).

Nonstop Fun is a good journeyman fanzine.  Once upon a time fandom was full of good journeyman fanzines - one or more could be counted upon to arrive in the mail weekly, if not more often.  These days such fanzines are rare and to be prized.  They're also a good place for newcomers to fanzines to get their toes wet.  They won't overwhelm you or intimidate you with their brilliance; they're more likely to make you feel like this is something you can do and want to do too.  They are easy to participate in.

The fifth Nonstop Fun runs a solid 52 pages of readably large computer-set type mimeographed impeccably by the LASFS superGestetner on a light turquoise paper.  There are a few color-printed pieces (art and photos) and most of fandom's best artists are well-represented in these pages but the late William (Bill) Rotsler gets the place of honor:  in addition to a generous helping of his art throughout the zine, Rotsler is remembered appreciatively by Earl Kemp in the centerpiece article, "Just My Bill, An Ordinary Guy."  Several of Rotsler's short written pieces are also reprinted.

The issue opens with a photo tribute to the late Jack Harness.  In his editorial Kaiser talks about a "mini-vacation" in nearby Nevada - and illustrates it with a color photo of himself on a jet ski.  Following the "Rotsler section" there are a couple of pages of filk lyrics - "This Old Fan" and "Talking LASFS Blues."  Then there's Jim Schumacher's "The Good Ol' Daze," about Los Angeles fandom in the late '60s - in which Rotsler also figures prominently, "Las Vegas Adventures 2001" by Lyn Pederson, "The ValSFA Chronicles," a story by John Welsh, and 17 pages of letters by fans whose names will be increasingly familiar to you as you read the fanzines I've reviewed here in the past year.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of fans out there in Greater Fandom now.  But the number of fans who are active in fanzines is much smaller - between 500 and 1,000 worldwide.  And of those fans perhaps 200 are regularly active in English-language fanzines.  Thus the same 20 or 30 names will crop up over and over in the letter columns of various fanzines, and fairly quickly they become easily identifiable individual voices, people you begin to think you know (at least a little) and with whom you want to discuss various topics.  And that's what fanzines are really about:  unambitious venues for discussions, essays, arguments and conversations.   Sound interesting?   Get a copy of Nonstop Fun.

 

Science Versus Magic in Twain's

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court  (Part I)

By Samuel Lubell

 

            Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court may be the most retold science fiction story ever.  It has been filmed with the central character replaced by everything from a spaceman, one of the Cosby kids, and even Bugs Bunny.  But the power of the story and its central conflict of science versus superstition remains.

            While the scientists in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twain's predecessor as America's leading novelist, are disguised sorcerers, using magic and pseudo-science to achieve control over others. Mark Twain's 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, written almost forty years after Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, reverses this formula. Although the Connecticut Yankee, Hank Morgan, pretends to be a wizard using magic, he is really an engineer using science. While Hawthorne's scientists mingle science and magic; Twain's Yankee opposes the whole sixth century system of magic and superstition. The Yankee's science easily defeats the magic of the wizard Merlin. "Somehow," Hank reasons, "every time the magic of fol-de-rol tried conclusions with the magic of science, the magic of fol-de-rol got left."  Twain does not reject science even in the Yankee's defeat at the end of the book.

            Mark Twain had a positive outlook towards science in his own life. He took a deep personal interest in inventions and devised several of his own, including a self pasting notebook and a memorization device.   In addition, he spent thousands of dollars on a machine to set typographical print, the Paige typesetter, which he funded while writing  Connecticut Yankee. This machine found its way into the book; Twain makes the Yankee a foreman at the Colt Arms factory, the factory where Paige worked. Twain also read extensively in scientific literature: more than sixty scientific books, comprising a "a roll call of the major contemporary scientists and philosophers of science," have been identified in his library.[1]Although he occasionally lampooned excesses of science, Twain valued science and invention for their human possibilities. For Twain:

 

The inventor/poet was a "liberating god." Twain's enthusiastic response to and extensive involvement in inventions of all sorts was motivated not just by the profits he hoped to realize, but by the new perspectives they symbolized. They represented for Twain new historical milestones, not just in technological progress but in human stature... [and] power of creativity.[2]

 

Mark Twain's own life mirrored the Yankee's industrialization of Arthurian England, through his progression from his boyhood home in the pre-industrial Hannibal, Missouri, to the more highly mechanized city of Hartford, Connecticut. By casting Hank Morgan as a Connecticut Yankee, Twain deliberately identifies him with this more scientific world.

            Although Twain never directly calls Hank Morgan a scientist, the Yankee represents science and technological progress in the struggle against sixth century superstition; and the Yankee himself specifically identifies his methods as being science. [507 & 538]. This was possible because, by Twain's time, science, invention and technology had become intertwined in the popular mind. Robert Bruce, in his The Launching of Modern American Science, summarizes the development of this belief:

 

The notion that science might sometimes yield material benefit was, of course, far from new... What was new was the dubious but spreading popular assumption that everything in technology was rooted in science.[3]

This assumption enabled the people of the nineteenth century to envision the engineer/inventor as the embodiment of science and progress. Since science contributed to the new inventions, even those produced by mechanical engineering, Hank's technology would have been considered "practical science". Introducing himself to the reader, Hank Morgan boasts of his ability to make "anything in the world," and stresses his inventive talent: "and if there wasn't any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one- and do it as easy as rolling off a log."[20] In addition to recreating nineteenth-century technology, the Yankee originates his own, devises a form of insulation "of my own invention. "[121]

            Twain devotes the bulk of A Connecticut Yankee to the positive elements of Yankee's nineteenth century civilization, the benefits of his "practical science". He describes the people of King Arthur's court as mindless children, even `animals"[65], who wear uncomfortable armor, and quest for pigs. Writing in a time when science was transforming civilization, Twain's novel uses the Yankee to show that science would inevitably bring progress. Because of its celebration of science and technology, Louis Budd labels Twain's novel as "virtually a manifesto summing up the Gilded Age just before times changed with a vengeance."[4] It assumed progress as a booming fact; and gloated over the rise of science and political freedom.  The Yankee always favors the abolition of sixth century concepts and their replacement by the more scientific nineteenth-century techniques. He tries to reform the aristocracy, selecting men for army positions "on the basis of mere efficiency."[328] In an attempt to establish a modern mechanical civilization, he introduces the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the typewriter, and the sewing machine, innovations which met with great success: "and all the thousand willing and handy servants of steam and electricity were working their way into favor."[513] Most important of all to Mark Twain, himself a patent-holder, the Yankee founds a patent office. When the Yankee visits a Hermit's cave and discovers one of his telephone operators already there, he contrasts the achievements of the sixth and nineteenth centuries, "Now what a radical reversal of things this was.., what a fantastic conjunction of opposites and irreconcilables- the home of the bogus miracle  become the home of a real one, the den of a medieval hermit turned into a telephone office."[303]

            Although the novel is written in the first person from Hank Morgan's viewpoint, Twain frequently communicates his own views. He clearly identifies with Hank Morgan, even to the extent of accidentally giving his Connecticut Yankee pieces of Twain's own Mississippi River background, and many of Hank Morgan's speeches are paraphrases of Twain's notebooks and letters.[5]   Twain's philosophical tone often drowns out the Yankee's vernacular in these speeches, which echo Twain's own ideas about science. Like Twain, the Yankee criticizes the Church, slavery, feudalism, superstition, and ignorance. In his autobiography, Mark Twain states his purpose in writing A Connecticut Yankee as:

 

an attempt to imagine and after a fashion set forth, the hard conditions of life for the laboring and defenseless poor in bygone times in England, and incidentally contrast these conditions with those under which the civil and ecclesiastical pets of privilege and high fortune level lived in those times., contrast that English life.., with the life of modern Christendom and modern civilization, to the advantage of the latter of course.[6]

This contrast shows Twain's faith in the "secular theology" of scientific progress, and his use of the Yankee for its spokesman.  Because of Twain's more positive view of science, the Yankee's control of others is not the soul-destroying control of Hawthorne's scientists, but instead a liberating force. The Yankee forces Morgan Le Fay to free her prisoners, creates Protestant churches independent of the "Established Church", sets up schools, works to destroy the feudal system, and ultimately frees the slaves. After Arthur's death he issues his proclamation declaring England a free republic:

 

```all political power has reverted to its original source, the people of the nation. With the monarchy, its several adjuncts died also; wherefore there is no longer a nobility, no longer a privileged class, no longer an Established Church:

all men are become exactly equal, they are upon one common level. [544]

 

While he occasionally abuses his power, for instance where he kills a humorist and burns his books, the Yankee's rule is mostly benevolent, producing new education and new freedom. As the Boss, he cares more for the serfs than the king ever did, even disguising himself as one of them to learn how they see the world. This is a major difference from Hawthorne's scientists who consistently use their power for their own selfish ends.

            Although a representative of science and progress, the Yankee is forced to pretend to be a magician in order to gain a position in the sixth century. Magic was a known entity and easily understood by the inhabitants of Arthurian England, while science was thoroughly alien. In his "Legend of the `Spectacular Ruin'", part of A Tramp Abroad (1880), Twain foreshadows A Connecticut Yankee by showing the derision with which science was viewed in the middle ages. In this story, a tramp who has volunteered to defeat a dragon after many heroes had already failed, asks:

 

"Were any of these heroes men of science?" This raised a laugh, of course, for science was despised in those days. But the tramp was not in the least ruffled. He said he might be a little in advance of his age, but no matter- science would come to be honored, some time or another.[7]

 

            In A Connecticut Yankee, after pretending to cause an eclipse in order to save his life, Hank Morgan must continue to claim magical powers mightier than the wizard Merlin's to maintain his status as "the Boss" and his efforts to modernize Arthurian England. "I am a magician myself," the Yankee declares to the page Clarence, "and the Supreme Grand High-yu-Muckamuck and head. of the tribe, at that,"[65] and belittles Merlin's abilities: "He don't amount to shucks, as a magician; knows some of the old common tricks, but has never got beyond the rudiments, and never will."[64] By combining feigned magic with actual science, Hank Morgan becomes Boss of the country.

            While the Yankee gains this authority by claiming to have magical powers, he never forgets that he is only pretending to be a wizard, while really using the far more effective power of science.  He could not simply declare magic worthless, and expect the country to believe him, since the habit of superstition was too deeply ingrained. While on a quest with Sandy, his future wife, the Yankee realizes the divergence between the sixth-century culture of superstition and the nineteenth-century culture of science. To be accepted in Arthurian England, the Yankee had to pretend to believe in its magic- the majority determines what is sane:

 

To doubt that a castle could be turned into a sty, and its occupants into hogs, would have been the same as my doubting, among Connecticut people, the actuality of the telephone and its wonders,- and in both cases would be absolute proof of a diseased mind, an unsettled reason. Yes, Sandy was sane; that must be admitted. If I also would be sane -to Sandy- I must keep my superstitions about unenchanted and unmiraculous locomotives, balloons and telephones, to myself... if I did not wish to be suddenly shunned and forsaken by everybody as a madman. [252]

 

The Arthurian society accepted magic as an indisputable fact. Therefore, while under this belief system, and only until he can change its structure, the Yankee disguises his science as magic. While the Yankee obviously enjoys showing off, he never believes he really has magic, but only brags of its great power because of the science that backs it. The Yankee always intends to educate the Englishmen, to remove their superstitions; and he reveals his secrets to his assistant, Clarence, and to others in his schools and man-factories.