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Subject: MT VOID, 11/15/24 -- Vol. 43, No. 20, Whole Number 2354
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THE MT VOID
11/15/24 -- Vol. 43, No. 20, Whole Number 2354

Co-Editor: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Co-Editor: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Sending Address: evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com
All material is the opinion of the author and is copyrighted by
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The latest issue is at <http://www.leepers.us/mtvoid/latest.htm>.
An index with links to the issues of the MT VOID since 1986 is at
<http://leepers.us/mtvoid/back_issues.htm>.

Topics:
         REVOLUTIONS: THE MARTIAN REVOLUTION
                 (podcast review by Evelyn C. Leeper)
         SPACE ODDITY by Catherynne M. Valente (book review
                 by Joe Karpierz)
         A Television Tuned to an Unused Channel (letter of comment
                 by Fred Lerner)
         Tajikistan/Tadzhikistan (letter of comment
                 by Arthur Kaletsky)
         Inter-Library Loan (letter of comment
                 by an anonymous poster)
         This Week's Reading (THE JEFFERSON BIBLE) (book comments
                 by Evelyn C. Leeper)

===================================================================

TOPIC: REVOLUTIONS: THE MARTIAN REVOLUTION (podcast review by
Evelyn C. Leeper)

In 2007, Mike Duncan began a podcast called "The History of Rome".

It took five years and almost two hundred episodes to complete,
and even then it went up only through the fall of the Western
empire.  (Robin Pearson picked up with thread with "The History of
Byzantium", and it is still running, having over three hundred
episodes and gotten up to the early 1300s.)

After Duncan finished "The History of Rome", he began
"Revolutions" in 2013, which covered ten revolutions (from the
English Civil War to the Russian Revolution) and ended in 2022.

Or so we thought.

A couple of weeks ago, there dropped into the "Revolutions" feed
the announcement and first episode of a new "Revolutions" season:
"The Martian Revolution".

Yes, Duncan has branched out into science fiction.  Done in same
style as the others--that is, told from the point of view well in
the future of the Martian Revolution of 2247.  Duncan has taken
all the recurring elements of the revolutions of the past, and
built a Martian revolution from them.  The good news is that he
has entirely plotted it out, so it is unlikely to run away from
him the way the historical revolutions did, specifically the
French and the Russian Revolutions.  (Duncan had expected each
revolution to be about a dozen episodes.  The French Revolution
ran 54 episodes, the Russian, 105.)  He has said how many episodes
he expects, but I can't recall exactly.

At any rate, part of the fun is identifying the elements Duncan
recycled.  (I had thought the long-lived Vernon Bird (Byrd?) was
patterned after Augustus from "The History of Rome", but Duncan
said elsewhere he was inspired by Porfirio Diaz.)  This means that
people who have listened to all the previous "Revolutions"
podcasts may get more of the "homages", but I think it would be
enjoyable for science fiction fans in general.  Was this inspired
by THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS?  Who knows?

"Revolutions: The Martian Revolution" can be found wherever you
find podcasts.  [-ecl]

===================================================================

TOPIC: SPACE ODDITY by Catherynne M. Valente (copyright 2024, Saga
Press, $28.99, Hardcover, 378pp, ISBN 978-1-5344-5452-1) (book
review by Joe Karpierz)

A funny thing happened on the way to writing this review of SPACE
ODDITY, the follow-up to Catherynne M. Valente's Hugo-nominated
novel, 2018's SPACE OPERA.  Before I go any further, I
need to say that it's fitting that a funny thing happened on the
way to this review, given the subject material at hand.  But I
digress.  Actually, depending on how you look at it,
two or three funny things happened on the way to the review.
Look, I can't even count, because I've just realized that it's
probably only two.  One them is that I ended up spending way
more time than I wanted to looking at the list of books I've
reviewed since February 17th, 1999.  That's as far back as I go on
my current laptop.  Not that I've had this laptop for more
than twenty-five years, it's that I've managed to keep them around
from computer to computer just in case I needed to refer to one of
them one day.  Which is what I was actually trying to do when I
was preparing for this review.  You see, somewhere in one of my
reviews in the deep dark past, I wrote one that contained a
statement something along the lines of "I'm not sure
whether this book is a masterpiece, one of the worst books I've
ever read, or something in between".  I never did find that
review--I have been writing these things going back to at least
the mid-1990s (and to be honest, much further back than that,
since I was writing for "The Log of the SS Voyager" back in the
late 1970s/early 1980s, but stopped for several years after
that)--but I think that if I saw the book on my shelf (which I
can't because it's buried behind a bunch of books laying on their
sides because I haven't read them yet) I'd recognize it
immediately.  Anyway, I wanted to pull that quote directly and use
it here because, well, I think it's relevant.

Right about now, gentle reader, you're probably yelling at me in
your head, "WILL YOU GET ON WITH IT ALREADY?"

Now go back and read that first paragraph.  Rambling, sprawling,
seeming silliness.  Looking like it's going nowhere.  That's SPACE
ODDITY.  Now look at it another way (which, by the way,
you really shouldn't do because I'm going to compare that to what
Valente has done in SPACE ODDITY and that comparison is downright
criminal and ridiculous), in which that paragraphs contains some
of the most wonderfully written comedic prose in the history of
science fiction (see, like I said, mine is not that--I told you
so).  That is also SPACE ODDITY.

Let's summarize for the class.  In SPACE OPERA, humanity's first
contact with aliens involved taking part in a contest called The
Metagalactic Grand Prix, an event styled after Eurovision
(yes, THAT Eurovision) which pits alien races against each other
in a contest meant to take the place of the nasty wars that
previously threatened to ravage the galaxy.  Our planet's heroic
representatives, Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros, participate
in the 100th iteration of the MGP.  If they had finished dead
last, all humanity on Earth would have been obliterated,
the planet cleansed, and the next inhabitants of Earth would be
allowed to evolve and participate again at a later date, if they
were found worthy.

I know.  "WILL YOU GET ON WITH IT ALREADY?"

In SPACE OPERA, someone had to shepherd Decibel Jones and the
Absolute Zeros through the process of getting ready for and
actually participating in the MGP.  In SPACE ODDITY, Decibel
(Dess) and
crew are making a galactic victory tour when they discover a
species in a hostile (to life) planetary system that heretofore
was unknown to the rest of the galaxy.  According to the rules,
they must shepherd the new aliens through that same process.  The
issue is that the MGP has literally just been held, and there were
no plans to hold the 101st so soon.  But through the
various machinations of the aliens ostensibly in charge, a new
version of the MGP must be held, even though the new species has
no desire to participate.

Hilarity ensues.  I think.

So, for a large portion of the at least the first half of the
book, nothing happens.  Valente spends most of that time writing
what is mostly, but not always, hilarious prose in an attempt
to be funny.  And some of it is very very funny, and some of it
falls flat.  She sprinkles in all sorts of pop culture references,
from Monty Python to Pink Floyd to Douglas Adams (there's
actually a badger named Douglas in the book, and the book itself
has forty-one chapters, because as Valente herself says in the
Liner Notes, "Because you simply can never equal the greatest, you
can only hope to come close.  Occasionally.", to, well, whatever
reference fit at the time. Or, it may not have fit, but it was
funny, so it's there, and after all, isn't that the point (I
wish I'd made notes of all the pop culture references so I could
share them here, but I'd be here forever, and this review is 6
weeks late anyway) of the whole thing?  But we don't actually
meet the new aliens until halfway through the book, long after I
yelled "WILL YOU GET ON WITH IT ALREADY?".

But oh my goodness, does the last part of the book make up for all
the rest of the meandering, sometimes funny, sometimes not, prose.
The strength of the ending is that the language and
storytelling (maybe what came before wasn't meant to be
storytelling, which is why it fell flat for me) became much more
linear and straightforward.  Maybe Valente was trying too hard to
be funny, and when she stopped trying so hard it got better.  And
========== REMAINDER OF ARTICLE TRUNCATED ==========