December 2022 – Political theory and practice

Ikarie XB 1

Ikarie XB 1 (1963) aka Voyage to the End of the Universe (1964)

IMDB runtime is 1 hour and 21 minutes, rated 6.9 by 2,500 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Czechoslovak

Verdict: Geriatrics in space.

Having concluded there is none on Earth, in 2163 the search for intelligent life turns to the planets around Alpha Centauri. Slovakczech may be the label but the story is from the prolific Pole Stanislaw Lem.

Space flight is routine in the Solar System but this mission goes well beyond that limit, however not to the hyperbole of the English title above. With a crew of 40 men and women it is as much a colony as a ship. So said the narration, though why that is does not get explained. It is made clear that it is a round-trip not one-way. Why so many comrades? By the way, they do not address each other with that word, according to my hearing and reading (of subtitles). Note that the woman are not receptionist but scientists and engineers in this 1963 production. That was not done in Yankee SF in 1963.

The usual hazards of movie space travel follow. The low bid contractors strike with mechanical and technical failures, followed by hurtling objects, while among the carefully selected and highly trained crew we see tensions, lassitude, jealousies, and ennui (Hear! Hear!). Even more noteworthy is the anti-ageism so that several geriatrics included in the crew. As an equal opportunity employer Slovak/Czech Spaceways also hired Robbie the robot from Forbidden Planet, who contributes nothing to plot or action but is conspicuously present. Rather like the fraternity brothers, always there, always inert.

Two major incidents occur. First, way out there where no one has gone, they find a derelict spaceship. It looks battered and it is unresponsive to WhatsApp texts. Very tentatively two red shirts from the crew (both men) are dispatched to board it. The entry is slow and careful. They find all the many occupants dead. The deceased are human and — get this! — the men are besuited with neckties while the ladies are bejewelled, all sitting around a gaming table with US dollars on it. This ship, which seems to have been a secret by the unnamed, but hint, hint, you know who I mean, evil capitalists as it is armed with poison gas and nuclear missiles. While the two investigators are clopping around they inadvertently trigger the self-destruct bomb and…. no more them. Why did evil capitalists go half-way to Alpha Centauri with all those weapons to play cards is never explained. Did they take a wrong turn on the way to Vega? Apart from shedding two red shirts, the only point of this episode is to denounce the West for it corruption (gaming), wastefulness (dress), and aggression (weapons). Oh, and they killed each other in their insatiable greed.

Back on the mother ship there is a moment of silence for the departed red shirts before everyone goes dancing. Yes, there is another one of those strange dance sequences choreographed to keep everyone on their floor marks for the camera focus. Mostly the dancers stand and stare at each other. Wow! Little did I know that I could dance.

The second incident is more insidious and produces radiation sickness among the crew and the worst case goes nuts. They decide to sleep it off. The fraternity brothers were ahead on that. Good idea. Me, too.

It has a nice ending when they are saved by the unseen but unmistakable intervention of benign beings from Alpha Centauri who wrap the ship up in a force field to stop the radiation. It ends on this positive note. The surviving 37 and Robbie can start planning for the return trip! That is, after they swap the complete works of Lenin for souvenir T-shirts from Alpha Centauri.

The slow start was almost worth this upbeat ending, almost. It is on You Tube with subtitles in English. This is the original version. According to the scribes, there is a dubbed and edited Yankee version that makes considerable changes at the end. Sounds like Roger Corman at work. Beware.

A History of the Index

The Index, A History ( 2022) by Dennis Duncan

Good Reads meta-data is 340 pages rated 3.71 by 1,086 literatizens.

Genre: nonfiction

Verdict: a nerd’s delight

Tag line: You say indices and he says indexes.

No (nonfiction) book is complete without one, and I have been disappointed by its occasional absence. We’ve used many of them without a thought to origin or evolution. We assume many things about the index, and each has a long and vexed evolution.

We assume these things. Works of fiction do not have an index. Well, some times they have had. Now they don’t. Why not?

We assume the index is much shorter than the text it navigates. Concordances from whence the chrysalis of the index emerged were sometimes longer than the texts they recorded. At least one index grew so large at 100,000 words that it was preceded by an index to the index.

We assume an index is a truthful and accurate reference to the text. Believe it or not that has not always been the case. Novelists have added indexes to their novels to imitate nonfiction in some cases. In other cases critics of nonfiction texts have taken the time, trouble, and expense to create a fake index to discredit the work itself. Finally, there are incompetent indexes.

We assume the index is at the back of the book. They are now, but they started at the front. Once they were a selling point and put first to catch the buyer-reader to show how easy and useful this book is. They migrated to the back but left a shadow at the front in The Table of Contents. Oops. French and Italian books have both, and both at the back. German publishers have the table of contents in the front and the index in back like English ones.

We assume the index is arranged in alphabetical order yet an index to a Roman text might have been hierarchical in order of importance. There is an index to the poems of Emily Dickinson which is based on the shape and size of the paper on which the verse was scrawled. Even when the alphabet applies, is it to be word order or letter order? It makes a difference.

We assume an index is an aid to finding topics in the text but not a substitute for the text. Yet some indexes have appeared without a text. Others have hived off from the parental text and continued shelf life on their own.

We assume a Biblical index is made by human intelligence (HI) that will locate the fable of the prodigal son, though the text of the fable does not use the word ‘prodigal.’ To show just how important that humanity is, this book itself has two indexes, one done by AI software and one done by HI software of one Paula Clarke. The difference is obvious.

Each of these verities has emerged from a kaleidoscope of false starts, rivals, dead ends, pitfalls, and more. Along the way other navigational tools were spawned like the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature on which I suckled.

There are many anecdotes and stories. One stands out. A Berkeley professor’s lifework was to make a concordance to John Dryden poetry. Prof plodded away at this filling 63 shoe boxes with 3 by 5 inch index (!) cards and then he died in 1951. To salvage the work another member of the department took it on to find that among the million or so entries many were garbled, incomplete, water stained to illegibility, disordered, inconsistent in terminology, chewed by some creature(s) great and small, incomplete, while still others were sun-bleached. Hercules paled at the labour but not Josephine Miles. After some years of effort, she described the problem to an electrical engineer while canoodling, and – cutting to the end – the index cards were converted to machine readable punch cards. Just don’t drop the box! Machine readable came to the rescue by reducing the effort for human reading so that she could concentrate on solving the problems.

Being a reader and writer has given me some experience and interest in the subject of navigating books and using indexes.

Oddly, some Kindle books cannot be navigated on the Kindle management website but can be searched on a Kindle device with the app. It would easier for me to search on the desktop using the Kindle Management site because I might want to check something a dozen or more titles for one point. On the bright side searching is possible.
The standard but not universal navigation locator for Plato and Aristotle are Stephanus alphanumerics. They were originated in Geneva by a printer in 1578. Yet our author discusses Plato’s Phaedras and it is possible, even likely, the text he used had these marginal notes, e.g., 514c. Yet there is nary a word about these numbers with letter tags.
Books by the likes of Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau have no index. Subsequent publishers have made them in varying qualities with duplicated effort. The index to the Penguin edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan does not apply to Blackwell printing. By the way, Samuel Richardson brought out two printings of his whopper novel Clarissa with different page numbering. He then compiled an index, and since it would be unfair to prefer the page numbers of one edition to the other, he solved that problem by omitting page numbers altogether from the index. The result was then equally useful to purchasers of either printing. Is that logical Mr Spock?
Many Kindle versions of printed books only show locator numbers and not page numbers, yet many of the same publishers require authors to cite page numbers in references. Square that circle.
Moreover, some Kindle versions that do show page numbers do not match the page numbers in the printed text. A passage ascribed to page 141 on the Kindle edition is not found on page 141 of the same printed text but on page 167. Go figure
I have four indexes to my name for four books. The first I did myself in haste and it was nothing but a mirror of table of contents. Shame on me. The second was done by the publishers in Philadelphia and I only saw it when it was published. The third was done by the co-author who volunteered to do it! Best came last when the fourth was done by professional indexer in Scotland. A fifth book will be done by a pro at HI.

Pedants note. ‘Indices’ are for scientists, he says, while indexes are for readers. No he does not mention in my consciousness the eponymous index cards but refers often to slips of paper in describing the making of indexes. By the way indexes exclude function words like ‘if,’ ‘but,’ and, ‘and.’ They also exclude adjectives and adverbs and pronouns, and concentrate on nouns. Then there are subheadings and cross references…but not now.

Mechte navstrechu (1963)

A Dream Come True (Mechte navstrechu) (1963)

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 4 minutes, rated 6.4 by 240 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Red; subspecies: musical.

Verdict: pedantic eye candy.

A space happy comrade croons a tune to woo a comradess and inadvertently beams it to the cosmos. It tops the charts in far away Alpha Centauri wherefrom Colonel Tom with two assistants to proclaim his genius blasts off for Earth to find those tonsils and sign them up for life ever after. In his haste to go the colonel forgot to tank up with dilithium crystals and his spaceship conked out near Mars. Not good. Earth is a lot closer than home, so they vlog an SOS to the Pacific Ocean whence it is recovered and a Beta video machine is found in a museum to play the tape of the star-seeking star-travellers. Yes, the technologies are compatible, as are the shoe sizes. Just read on.

So help me, Marx! That is the plot.

Comrades to the rescue of these Marsrooned aliens! Not as easy as it sounded in the script conference. The aliens may travel the stars but they do so without light bulbs. The vlog is dark and shadowy. All the self-appointed rescuers know is that the message came from Mars. Off they go! Boom! Zoom! The space ship is called Ocean I, because there is an Ocean II. These details add verisimilitude, right? Wrong.

The going is hard. The seats aren’t padded, but when comrades weaken they rouse each other with stirring songs. Yes they do. Repeatedly. While the first song was crooned to woo a lady, these others are belted out marching band style. Moreover, they are preceded, or followed, or both by a ponderous narration that celebrates the unity of Earthlings, despite some rocket dragging by those with Anglo names, in hastening to offer salvation to these illegal immigrants.

All that strident singing, all the insistent narration, all those set-piece announcements by authority figures, when all of these sidebars are combined with the short runtime of barely more than an hour there is zero time for character development. The cosmonauts start and end as ciphers. But then they were none too bright to begin with for when they do find a surviving alien (a humanoid woman) they realise they have no room for survivors on their twenty-room space ship and to save her, one of them must stay behind, while Ocean II gears up. (As if.) Needless to say after all that stirring music they all volunteer for certain death while waiting for Ocean II.

Ciphers yes, but let it noted that in this 1963 film one of the cosmonauts is a woman who blasts off and does her job. This is at a time when it was routine in Yankee SF to include a woman only for the men in the crew to fight over, and for the smooth male lead to marvel that a woman could pull a switch or identify a dick head. Chalk this one up for the comrades.

There were originally three aliens in the murk. One died in the crash, and two survivors wandered around in a daze. The comrades find one, and silently we all agreed to forgot the third one. Singing seems to have impaired counting. Since they sport some kind of wire rabbits ears it is hard to take these aliens seriously. They need to go wireless and soon!

By the way, during the flight to Mars we see a comrade cosmonaut whiling away the light-speed by reading…a hardback book. Could it be the 900-hundred page volume two of Das Capital?

The visuals of the alien ship and Mars are extraordinary. The sets are much more ambitious than the story line in the compressed runtime. It is no wonder Roger Corman bought its US rights and recut it into … what was it, oh yes, Queen of Blood (1965). I have immortalised it on the blog elsewhere, click away. It has some good moments.

Did I mention shoe sizes? Yes, well that was a tease to get a reader to continue. Gotcha.

The version I found on You Tube has English subtitles that were done in East Germany, and it shows in some of the disconnected and convoluted renderings. Still they are adequate for the material and the price.

Test pilota Pirxa

Pilot Pirx’s Inquest (Test pilota Pirxa) (1979)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 35 minutes, rated 6.4 by 916 cinematizins.

Genre: Sci Fi; Species: Red.

Verdict: Mixed

Space flight is routine, but Pirx is offered an unusual assignment by the United Nations. He is to captain a crew on a tricky mission to do some stunt flying through the Cassini rings of Saturn for some reason or other. That is the mission, but the purpose is to test the crew of five, one of whom is…Leon Trotsky! No, just kidding to see if readers are awake. But one of the crew is…a woman! Aha, got you there. No, nothing that radical. But one of the crew is inhuman! Yes, it is a Republican Senator.

Still with me?

One of the crew is an android that is so human-like that it cannot be detected by any means short of dissection. The mission is a test of this android to see how well it works with the other members of the crew and performs its role. It will pass itself off as human by acting stupid! None of the others will know there is a tin man among them. Ha! except They all know from the get-go. So much for Top Secret.

Pyrex – it was inevitable that either I or the autocorrect would fix his name – is reluctant to undertake this test but is persuaded by some reverse psychology when a commercial interest try to scare him off. We never see these villains again after act one. Why is he reluctant? No idea. There is some background noise about bots taking human jobs. Bad scab bots!

He should have listened to himself because instead of preparing the mission for the trick flying he spends all his time trying to figure out which one is Mr Data, the tin man. He is totally preoccupied with this identification. While he pins up a woman’s picture on his bunk we have no idea who she is. Evidently, neither did he.

The crew members know one of them is tin, and several assure the captain that it is not them, while another says he is it. It descends into a soapy space opera with all this confessing.

It seems to be three movies edited into one. First, we have the UN project and commercial interest who recruit Pyrex. Then we have the mission. Finally, we have a court of inquiry at the end that tells some of the mission story in retrospect. The continuity is, well, discontinuous.

With these chopping and changing, no character develops, motivations remain unknown, why does the tin man go bonkers? Maybe he read the script. Oops spoiler, rewind and delete. What is the inquiry about?

The production values at the outset and on the mission are good, but by the time we get to the court of inquiry we have a vast empty room because all the furniture must have been sold. The incidental signage is in English on exits, fire doors, stop signs, and the like. One scene was shot on location at Aéroport Charles de Gaulle, and another in a French chateau. That is expensive location shooting. The portrayal of the commercial interest is crude, but seems to offer some social criticism of the capitalist west, as does a scene in a topless bar that is there only to be there, though it did briefly arouse the fraternity brothers. It is supposed to be a din of capitalist sin crowded with folk, jiving to decadent music in a vast room. But there cannot be more than a dozen revellers going through the motions with mechanical precision at one end of an otherwise empty room.

By the way, most of the crew have anglo names: Harry Brown, John Calder, John Otis, and the other one.

The biggest problem is why Pyrex is so focussed on the identity of the tin man and not on doing the job. By the way, women figure in the story as receptionists and dancers in the bar scene. That’s it. As above, we do not even get the ritualistic love interest for Pyrex.

To some extent Soviet science fiction differs from that the United States. Whereas in US science fiction space is full of threats, invaders, monsters, asteroids to destroy earth, ghosts, or black-widow vixens, wizards, man-eating flora, and so on. It is up to one or two intrepid Americans to fend off these menaces. When the unstoppable Roger Corman bought Soviet science fiction films and recut them with new dubbed sound tracks for the D (as in drive-in) market, he inevitably cast them as Americans battling a hostile universe, like something straight out of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. No doubt he did so on the assumption that was what the audience wanted.

Soviet science fiction is more likely to emphasise international cooperation, and when aliens are encountered it is because they need help which the Soviets offer. (Maybe Ukrainians should try to pass themselves off as aliens.) Tensions arise from conflicts among the crew or psychosis, and less often from external threats, apart from the difficulty of space flight itself and evil Westerners. The Soviet films are often much more realistic about space flight. They seldom feature banana chairs on the flight deck, walks on Mars with scarves for face masks, or navigation with a 12-inch school ruler – all of which I have seen in Yankee SF. These red films seem dedicated to showing what the audience should know, not what it wanted to see. These generalisations rest on the maybe half-a-dozen USSR films I have seen and of course there are plenty of exceptions.