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Issue 350, May 2015

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Issue 350, May 2015 Sigma The Newsletter of PARSEC - www.parsec-sff.org May, 2015 - No. 350 music created by the cosmic particle data collected President’s Capsule by the two Voyager probes. It was elegant as it was Let’s talk about Music. accidental. A creation presented by our universe put And SF together by Domenico Vicinanza, a composer and It says on the “About Parsec” scientist. page of www.parsec-sff.org our There are Science Fiction operas that meet the mission is, “to promote awareness challenge. “Aniara” by Karl-Birger Blomdahl. A of the richness of speculative fiction spaceship heads for Mars, but after a midsummer cel- as literature, art and music…” by Joe Coluccio ebration is repurposed as a generation ship and shot So what about it? off in the direction of the constellation Rigel. Eef van I know many have a fondness for “filk” music. The Breen’s, “u”, an opera in Klingon. Even Joseph term is supposed to have been a typographical error, Haydn got in on the act in 1777 with Il mondo della but I don’t believe that for a moment. If it had been Luna (The World of the Moon). Stockenhausen, Philp called folk music, the tradition would not have lasted Glass, Gian Carlo Menotti, a quick trip on a search to this day. I can strum three major chords and a engine will yield even more. minor sixth with the best of them, do a credible job I sit often in the evening wondering at a notion of of Travis picking and know the joy of producing a pure science fiction musical composition. The idea music carried by “filk” voices and clever lyrics in an is as slippery as thoughts about the nature of time, or increasing hot soaked evening. But I’m not following imagining a tesseract, and know somewhere out in that seductive path here. the wide world of vibrating strings, there is someone Science Fiction popular songs. Is there anything who is not only wrestling with the same concept, but better than “Ground to Control to Major Tom” being succeeding. Until then I have the wonderful world of crooned from the space station? A Space Oddity! programmatic music designed to provide mood and There are “one-eyed one-horned flying purple people drama to pictures, moving or otherwise. eaters.” O Superman. Science Fiction Double Feature. In The Year 2525. Telstar. Across the Universe. The Eve of Destruction. But wait! There are so many more. I will let you do the late night video crawl in your own head. Movie and TV soundtracks. None so striking to my ear as Louis and Bebe Barron’s “Electronic Tonali- PARSEC is Pittsburgh’s premiere organi- ties” the eerie sounds that accompany United Planet’s zation of science fiction, fantasy and hor- Cruiser C57D’s trip to the “Forbidden Planet.” I am ror. We sponsor an annual conference, also fond of Leith Stevens use of strings that hang us in cislunar space in the score of 1950’s “Destination workshops for young writers, lectures, Moon.” And the unforgettable calypso of “Beware and other events that promote a love of the Blob”, … it creeps and leaps and glides and the written word and a passion for spec- slides…” Lyric by Burt Bacharach. ulative fiction. Our members include But what of original composition science fiction writers, teachers and fans. PARSEC is a music? The stuff not beholden to movies or books. 501c3 non-profit corporation. At a Parsec meeting some months ago I played place can act as a form of personal time travel. He Monthly Meeting Minutes spoke of retracing his own steps from over thirty by William Blake Hall, Secretary years ago while walking the streets of Squirrel Hill, April 11, 2015 getting to meet Joe Haldeman in a Murray Avenue The meeting got some twenty-odd attendees, bookshop, then getting inspired to mail off a story at among them John DeChancie and a little-seen child- the post office just down from the library. He moved hood friend of mine named Paul Reilly. We started on to Jung’s “collective unconscious” and a reference with Mary Soon Lee reading two poems and learned to racial memory in Clarke’s Childhood’s End before that Larry Ivkovich got two short stories accepted. moving on to Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay “Al- Diane Turnshek announced that SFWA sent Alpha tered States,” in which a sensory isolation tank shuts $1000 – although it helps to justify all that if people, out any sense of “now” and permits a Dr. Jessup to especially Parseckians, can fill the seats at the lec- reach back to the First Thought. Jack Finney, the tures. She also said 124 people participated in Earth man who wrote Invasion of the Body Snatchers, also Hour (plus myself by default, I would argue, because wrote Time and Again in which a Simon Morley I turned in at 7:30 that evening). In fact, lectures are could lie down in a room of the Dakota Hotel, metic- coming up on August 1 and October 17. We continue ulously recreating a sense of time and place, and to sell T-shirts and Greg, who sent out over two hun- wake up to visit New York City back in 1882. (Some dred Sigmas, showed up with duplicates found in the may recognize this principle getting borrowed in Parsec library, so I walked off with “Blue Mars.” Bill Richard Matheson’s “Bid Time Return,” which in Watt, father of recent speaker Mike Watt, announced turn inspired the schmaltzy yet intriguing 1980 that volume 2 of Mike’s “Movie Outlaw” comes out movie Somewhere in Time.) From this, Connolly re- in May. turned by way of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the attention to period detail in the cable series “Mad The cable show Banshee is looking for extras for scenes shot in Vandergrift, in particular those sugges- Men”, and the movie Journey to the Beginning of tive of “mountain men.” There seemed to be a spon- Time (Connolly credits a William Cayton, but it was taneous consensus that I was what they were looking originally Czech) to the job of conveying the mys- for – and I wasn’t even wearing plaid. tique of his own “Veins” books, from which he Our speaker was confirmed Confluence attendee quotes “Memory is spirit, spirit is dream.” Lawrence C. Connolly. (Confluence, incidentally, All in all the presentation was evocative but rela- tively quick. I sensed some inspiration from Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan books, and Connolly agreed. I also noted that next month’s speaker, Thomas Sweterlitsch, has written a novel in which Pittsburgh has been destroyed, but people can still roam a virtual Pittsburgh pieced together from the approximate now. The Damon Knight story “I See You” got men- tioned, and only later did I recall Asimov’s “The Dead Past,” in which the power of “time viewing” brings a threat not even related to time. Somehow the discussion swung around to will have a speculative poetry workshop, involving Clarke’s “Dial F For Frankenstein” and Bradbury’s Mary Turzillo, Mary Soon Lee, and Timons Esaias.) “The Murderer,” and I think it fell to President Joe, We’ve had Connolly before, and while he is perhaps appropriately enough, to mention Murray Leinster’s best noted for his “Veins” trilogy and is oft cited as a “A Logic Named Joe,” that curious early stand-alone horror writer, he really feels a closer citizenship to tale which more or less predicted the personal com- fantasy and science fiction. His presentation’s theme puter while SF preferred to go the way of Asimov’s was “Dreams, Memory and Time Travel”, in which Multivac. he essentially argued that a strong enough sense of Later that night I met Caitlin, our newcomer from Continued on Page 7 2 The creebs are shifting. Don’t felk the outcasts. How could I, who shaved all the sparse hair sorkens, if you can avoid it. off my head, not love a “baldie?”. Baldies are mu- Gallagher, Baldies and the Hogbens. tants, caused by a convenient nuclear holocaust, walk- ing in a post-apocalyptic landscape. Mutants who, just The Kuttners I love. like all us SF fans, suffer at the hands of “normal” Henry Kuttner, Part Three folk. It hurts when our secrets are acknowledged by by Joe Coluccio those who know there is something happening here but have no idea what it is (Thanks, Bob). In the case I watched the Original “Father of the Bride” (1950) of the baldies, it can be downright dangerous. starring Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett and Elizabeth “Baldies” are mutants with a remarkable sense of Taylor only to be taken aback by the speed and feroc- community. Just like all of us SF fans. ity with which Tracy as the father of the bride and an It is true SF stories of attorney plies alcoholic bev erages on everyone who human potential have led walks into his apartment. Drunks used to be the fabric us down the path to Dia- of our entertainment, the soul of our urbanity. Dipso- netics, General Seman- maniacs are no longer suave or funny. No wonder tics, wielded with such Steve Martin, in the remake, is a suburban sober hap- inelegance by S.I. less shoe store owner. Hayakawa at San Fran- So it is with Gallagher, Henry Kuttner’s inventor, cisco State University, whose creative and inventive urges are furthered only Ray Palmer’s promulga- after a long night of drinking. In the morning, Gal- tion of Richard Shaver’s lagher has no memory of why he invented a “proud primal language and robot” or a “machine” that ate dirt.
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