21

 

Got a feeling twenty-one is going to be a good year

Especially if you and me see it in together

So you think twenty-one is going to be a good year

It could be good for me and her, but you and her, no never

 

I had no reason to be over optimistic

But somehow when you smiled I can brave bad weather

 

What about the boy?

What about the boy?

What about the boy?

He saw it all

 

You didn’t hear it, you didn’t see it

You won’t say nothing to no one ever in your life

You never heard it, oh, how absurd it

All seems without any proof

 

You didn’t hear it, you didn’t see it

You never heard it not a word of it

You won’t say nothing to no one

Never tell a soul, what you know is the truth

Got a feeling twenty-one is going to be a good year

Especially if you and me see it in together

Got a feeling twenty-one is going to be a good year

Especially if you and me see it in together

 

I had no reason to be over optimistic

But somehow when you smiled I can brave bad weather

 

What about the boy?

 

– “1921,” by The Who, from Tommy

 

 

In this case, however, “the boy” at the end stands for:

 

Covid

Lockdowns and mandatory masking

SJWs

Social media mobs and censorship

More fundamental change of the United States

Pope Francis

The Union of Soviet Socialist Workplaces

Passive-aggressive religious persecution

 

And for me, personally,

 

Health

Wealth

Getting the oldest into a college that won’t break either she or me

Keeping the youngest on track

Staying employed

 

Well, on a brighter note,

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

  

 

2020 Best Ofs!

 

Is it that time of year already?

That time when Hopper announces the Best (and, on occasion, the Worst) of whatever tweaked his interest over the past twelve months?

It is!

And what an awesome way to wring out the most wretched and miserable spin around the Sun. Good riddance, you craptastic annum. Yet, there were some highs among the Marianas-like lows. Such as –

 

Best Book, fiction – The Count of Monte Cristo

   What a phenomenal, 1400-page read! Read in tandem with Patch, at her very excited suggestion. I was originally hesitant, but now it’s firmly ensconced in my Books To Be Re-Read file. Thanks Patch!

 

Best Book, non-fiction – The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

   Wow. Read at least 20 nonfiction books this year, all of high quality, and at least half related to World War II. I’d give the award to this 1960 classic. The sense of impending dread filled me from page one, but I needed to gird up and gain some context to the other works I was reading.

Best Short Story – “The Basilisk”

   A modern tale of horror about – social media. Made me feel utter pity for my children and that evil handheld box that plugs them – and us all – into that inescapable Baudrillardian level of unreality we call the Internet.

 

Worst Book – The Well at the End of Time

   I had picked up this classic years ago and, searching for something Tolkiennish to read over Covid Summer, and began it at the end of June. Ten days later I was so utterly bored with it I made the unusual decision of setting a book aside forever. Life is too short.

 

Best Movie – Once Upon a Time In Hollywood

   My wife cringed and covered her eyes during the last twenty minutes. You who’ve seen it know what I’m talking about. Those who haven’t, if you’re not Tarantino-squeamish, it’s a must watch. I found the entire movie, and especially the ending, an immensely enjoyable and satisfying participation in cosmic justice. If you’ve seen it, I think you’ll agree.

 

Weirdest Movie – Horse Girl

   Watched this while the family was in the middle of binging Community. It’s Annie from that show, as a lonely shy twenty-something who either is a functioning schizophrenic or an alien abductee. But the movie is so much more, as it’s one of those flicks whose innate weirdity makes the viewer question reality. Watched it with 16-year-old Little One, and we both loved its bizarre eccentricity.

 

Worst Movie – ?

   Don’t think I watched a bad movie. Saw a bunch of mediocre ones, but none which deserve the award. Let it remain vacant in 2020.

 

Last movie seen in a movie theater – Call of the Wild with Patch, Crawl with my friend.

   Rest in peace, movie theaters. You were unjustly murdered. I will catch your killer.

 

Best Netflix – The Blacklist

   Our current binge. We are currently starting Season Four. Wish there was a little less “innocents having their heads blown apart”, but the incredibly complex and witty writing transcends the dumpster dives into amorality.

 

Worst Netflix – The Witcher

   Ugh. I despise feminism and modern tropes tossed into medieval settings. Plus the Superman guy protagonist just looked weird and felt out of place.

 

Best Song – “Swan Song” from Led Zeppelin

   Discovered this back in October or November, and listen to it regularly. It’s the “Midnight Moonlight” song from Jimmy Page’s 1984 The Firm album, as originally recorded in the mid-70s with Bonham on drums and John Paul Jones on bass. A million percent improvement! Wish they would’ve gotten it together for Physical Graffiti. Alas, they didn’t, but you can check it and a whole number of Zeppelin outtakes, on Youtube.

 

Best Youtube channel – Gary and Ian’s Off The Shelf Reviews

   In the past two months I’ve probably watched 50 or 60 of their movie reviews, going back six or seven years. The two English lads have a funny rapport and remind me of the dudes I used to watch flicks with back in the late 80s. They specialize in horror and SF reviews, but also do such films as Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Das Boot, TV shows and video games.

 

Phases during 2020:

   Derek Prince’s brand of Christianity

   World War II

   Sherlock Holmes

   Reading through the King James Bible (and the Douay-Rheims for the Gospels)

   Six weeks of The Count of Monte Cristo

   Walking and weightlifting

   Losing 20 pounds on the Keto Diet

   The “Monstrumologist” books

   Re-reads (The Hobbit, Magic, The Spinner, Lord Foul’s Bane)

 

Best phase? I dunno. I’m currently still in the World War II phase, with six books on the shelf awaiting a first reading, plus a historical fantasy novel based on it in the outline stage. So let’s award the Second World War as the Best Phase of 2020.

But I loved them all!

Mocking the Woke

 

What’s Hopper Been Listening To

 

Well, it’s been a weird year.

(!)

Brief musical background about Hopper:

I grew up in the late 70s and 80s on classic rock. Which is basically guitar rock from the late 60s to, oh, about 1981. During the 80s I listened to the 70s. Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Rush, Yes, stuff like that. From 1986-96 I played in a couple of bands with no real success but we were always busy doing something. I got pulled into the grunge thing in 1991, the year my band had its most success, and listened to a lot of Alice in Chains, Smashing Pumpkins, Kings X, stuff like that. Then, around 1998, bored with everything I was hearing on the radio, I took a ten-year deep dive into classical music, interspersed with smaller jaunts into jazz.

The past decade I’ve been generally uninspired musically. Nothing has grabbed me longer than a few weeks. For example, I’d get into Zappa and the Grateful Dead for a while, then Sinatra, then jazz fusion, then this, then that. Occasionally I’ll pick a composer at random and listen to a bunch of his stuff until I get bored again. And nothing fills the hole.

This year has been no exception. Didn’t really listen to much in the winter, especially when Covid Fear blanketed the nation. Then, around May, I spent a few weeks listening to and occasionally revisiting Return to Forever, Al DiMeola, Chick Correa, and other bastions of jazz fusion. Mostly during my walks and weightlifting workouts in the garage. That, I must admit, was quite enjoyable, and I still think fondly back on those recent, warm spring days.

Over the summer I made a little habit of listening to a 10-15 minute selection of music with the headphones on my iPhone, right before bed. It was mostly classical stuff, such as Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, Liszt tone poems, Wagner overtures, and composers I’d heard of over the years but never heard, so I’d pick something 10-15 minutes in length to listen to at random.

But then I got into something very niche – movie soundtracks. First it was Bernard Herrmann, who did all those classic 50s sci fi movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Journey to the Center of the Earth, as well as all those Ray Harryhausen flicks. (An interesting note about Journey is that the further the explorers descended beneath the surface of the earth, the lower the pitch of the notes in the score.) Herrmann also did Citizen Kane and North by Northwest.

Then I moved on the soundtracks composed by Elmer Bernstein (Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven) and Ennio Morricone (all those Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Westerns). After listening to these three composers for nearly a month, I capped it off with the score to Watership Down, a childhood favorite, listened to over a couple of days.

That phase lasted from mid-July to mid-September. I didn’t listen to much until a couple of weeks ago when, after owning an iPhone for five years, one of my daughters taught me to make a Playlist. Whoa! The first thing I did was go full circle and create a 221-song, 19 hours and 8 minutes Playlist composed of my early listening staples: Led Zep, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Hendrix, Yes, Rush, Mountain (R.I.P. Leslie West). Now I listen to that while I walk, and I probably won’t exhaust it (i.e., hear the same song twice) until sometime near the end of January. That’s been my big thing during the last part of this insane year.

So, no big musical revelations, musical discoveries, in 2020. Really a subconscious-made-conscious decision to look backwards to better times, to the music of my youth, to the movies of my youth. And as such, I have to admit I quite enjoyed a musical year.

Merry Christmas to All!

 

In this wretched annus horribilis, one need only keep firmly in mind that everything – and I mean everything – is in the hands of Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, whose birthday is celebrated this most wondrous day.

“These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you shall have distress: but have confidence, I have overcome the world”

   - John 16:33

What's Hopper Been Watching?

Well, since we’ve become a nation of tube junkies due to the varying degrees of lockdown enforcement, my teevee watching has probably doubled if not tripled. Pre-Covid I might have watched two or three shows with any regularity. Most of my viewing was movies and sports – baseball and football primarily, though the wife and I got into English premier league soccer last year, due in no small part to Patch, the up-and-coming fútbol player in the family.

Since professional sports are now “woke,” I don’t watch ’em. That clears up 3-6 hours a week. But now as a family, much to my chagrin, we all gather round to worship the idiot box for 2-3 hours a night. Much as I hate it, it is an addiction. And, dammit, I’m going to have to go cold-turkey rogue to overcome it. More thoughts on that later.

But let’s skip on the heavy stuff for the moment. What have we been watching? Last I checked in on this topic was April, when the initial lockdown was in full swing. Hmm. Let’s see. There’s been a lot of viewing, and a lot of it kinda blurs into meaninglessness.

I don’t have the photographic memory for teevee shows that I do for books, so let me wing this. In no particular order, then:

A second go-round with The Office, from season 3 to 9, because the girls love it.

Designated Survivor, with Kiefer Sutherland, a kind of cross between 24 and The West Wing, first two seasons. (I stopped when it because too left-wing.)

All six seasons of Arrested Development (1-4 absolutely hilarious; 5-6 were a mistake). We’re currently re-watching it, nearing the end of Season One.

Netflix specials on Epstein and Rudy taking down the New York mob.

The Netflix special on the brutal murders done by Chris Watts out in Colorado in 2018.

Various horror flicks with the little ones: Doctor Sleep, The Amityville Horror, Carrie, Phantasm, Event Horizon, Phantoms, Fright Night (both original and poorer remake), The Blair Witch Project, The Bat, and Dementia 13. Mostly with 16-year-old Little One, the gentler funner ones with 12-year-old Patch. None with the wife, who isn’t a horror / SF aficionado.

The Impractical Jokers Dinner Party has been a hit with us, proving that those four guys still have it after eight years. Bring back the regular format!

And our latest binge, The Blacklist, where we are somewhere in the middle of Season Three.

With increased watching, there were an increased amount of duds watched:

Half an episode of Steve Carrell’s Space Force – terribly unfunny.

Tried The Haunting of Hill House but couldn’t get past episode one due to the lesbianism. The Witcher was way too post-modern for a medieval-ish series. The Viking themed The Last Kingdom was a little too violent for violence’s sake.

Thought Russell Crowe’s campy Unhinged might be a fun flick to watch with the girls. It started out decently, but then veered sharply into stupidity.

Patch watches a lot of the anime sci fi shows, and I watched a couple with her. The wife watched The Boys, but I passed as I’ve been over the whole comic book stuff fifteen years ago. Little One watches a whole host of SVU and CSI themed shows that I joke she’s on track to be either an FBI profiler or a coroner in some big city morgue.

Of course, since Thanksgiving, the wife has wrangled the girls into a bunch of Hallmark Christmas movies. I lay in the corner of the living room perusing whatever current nonfiction I’m into, pausing to crack a joke here and there as the movie allows.

When I’m alone, I usually watch something out of left field if I can (something like, say, the phenomenal Ingmar Bergman on one side of the spectrum to the cheesy badness of The Cloverfield Paradox on the other). I tape the more intellectual astrophysics shows I can find (usually Nova) and some of the WW2 documentaries on the various History channels. I’m also lobbying the girls to watch Tom Hanks’s WW2 Battle of the Atlantic flick Greyhound, with me, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Oh well. I’ve still managed to put away 53 books so far this year plus start writing two new novels, so it’s not that the lovecraftian eldritch octopus optical monster in our living room has completely possessed me.

Only partially.

Beethoven

 

Ach! You can tell how busy your host is when he overlooks the 250th birthday of one of the world’s greatest composers to have ever scratched a note onto a staff.

Three days ago the musical world celebrated the 250th anniversary of the birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven. He was born on December 17, 1770 in the city of Bonn in the then German state of Westphalia, and would live 56 years, dying in Vienna on March 26, 1827. His first major work, his First Symphony, debuted when he was 29, and his last major work, the majestic Symphony No. 9 in Dm, known to some as “Ode to Joy,” was first performed three years before his death. He suffered from progressive deafness and tinnitus his entire professional life.

I first because acquainted with the Maestro in the spring of 1992. I was playing rhythm guitar in a band, playing live, learning the recording studio, trying to make a go of it, and for the first time I was living alone. Grunge had the rock world in a stranglehold, choking out the hair metal that had dominated the late-80s scene. Though I was listening and buying Alice in Chains, Smashing Pumpkins, Saigon Kick and the like, I was also casting about for something new.

In the CD store I frequented I came a across a discount bin of classical music CDs. Figuring it could only help to round out my musical education, I picked out three double-CDs: one featured Back, another Mozart, and the last, Beethoven. I listened to all of them off and on that spring and summer.

The Ninth Symphony, “Ode to Joy,” was the entirety of one Beethoven disk. Several other compositions, including part of the Second Symphony and the Overture to Egmont, were scattered on the other. I liked them all, but I was still “in the closet,” so to speak, for I feared ridicule from my bandmates if I ever brought up my clandestine listening activities.

Santa brought me a 10-pack of classical CDs the following Christmas. Each CD featured a separate composer, and each CD had about a dozen shorter compositions or parts of longer ones. I also began listening to the local classical musical station here, WQXR, and within a few months my education and familiarity with classical music greatly expanded. In 1998, I discovered my local library had CDs you could borrow for two weeks at a time. Within two years I considered myself an amateur authority.

Looking over my CD collection, in addition to those Beethoven discs mentioned above, I see I have:

 

The Complete String Trios

Piano Concertos No. 3 in Cm and No. 5 in Eb (“Emperor”)

Piano Concertos No. 1 through 5 (to round out my collection)

Symphonies No. 5, 6, 7, and 8

 

Which is something like twelve hours of uninterrupted genius on eight CDs. It’s also great background music for writing or studying.

What do I recommend? What is, subjectively, the peak of the Beethoven experience, to Hopper?

Wow, that’s a hard one. I liked Egmont and the Ninth, particularly the choral part. (What human being doesn’t, or can’t?) The String Trio in G Op. 9 No. 1 (though they’re all enjoyable). Second movement of the Seventh Symphony (how utterly sad!). Just about all the Piano Concertos. All of the famous Fifth Symphony – fate knocking on the door; co-opted by the British V for Victory over the Germans.

In all his catalogue there are really only two compositions I just don’t get, though I tried. The first is Beethoven’s one and only, opera, Fidelio. I listened to it all the way through, several times, listened to just the Overture. Most recently back in July. Just doesn’t move anything in me. Same can be said for the Moonlight Sonata. I can’t fight the involuntary yawn that erupts in me whenever I hear it. And that is something wrong with me.

Let me leave you with one of my favorite two minutes of music I have ever heard. It occurs during the first movement of the Sixth Symphony (the “Pastoral Symphony”), between the time stamps of 5:18 and 6:50. Listen for the two modulations that occur at 5:32 and 6:21. If I could take that moment and translate it into a novel, I think I the next couple of generations of my descendants could live off the royalties …

 

Book Review: As on a Darkling Plain

 

© 1972 by Ben Bova

 

A few weeks ago Ben Bova, longtime science fiction editor, anthologist, and pulp writer, died at the satisfying age of 88. Over the course of a lengthy fifty-year literary career, he’s written something like 125 novels. The most famous series of his is called the Grand Tour series, where each major object in the Solar System was the subject or setting of one of his novels. I read two of those 25-plus books.

Anyway, upon hearing of his death back around Thanksgiving, I scanned my On-Deck bookshelf (nearly a hundred items stacked haphazardly there) and came across As on a Darkling Plain. The poor but enticing 270-page paperback had been sitting there for over eight years. Now was an excuse to read it.

It’s not that I am unfamiliar with Bova. I first ran across him in the early 90s, reading a couple of his stories in a book designed to help aspiring writers: “Sepulchre,” “Crisis of the Month,” and “The Shining Ones.” I was impressed by all three and put his name on the Acquisitions List. My first entry into the Grand Tour soon followed, Mars. Then other topics and other authors intervened. A decade passed until I came across my second journey of the Grand Tour, the near-perfect Venus. Last year I put away Farside, and this past Covid-summer I read the bombastically-titled Death Wave.

There are several things I note about a Bovan novel, aside from the subjective evaluation that the more books of his I read, the less I enjoyed them. Which is not to say I won’t further read more in my leisure (in fact, I am still on the lookout for more “Grand Tour” novels, particularly those revolving about the outer gas giants of the Solar System). I will. But I think I have Bova pegged as an unabashed product of the Seventies. Again, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I matured literary-wise on the bones of 70s SF.

The first thing about a Bova novel is that the science is competent. It won’t be as hard SF as, say, a Hal Clement novel or, more to be more contemporary, a Neal Stephenson or Cixin Liu. My best gauge is that a Bova will be about a notch below something Michael Crichton would write. Which is, again, not a bad thing. I enjoy my SF grounded in as much S as F. Maybe more so, coming from my background in physics.

The next major thing about a Bova novel is, and there’s really no way to politely put it, the fact that every character behaves as if he or she was starring in General Hospital or One Life to Live. Yes, a soap opera. You have super-intelligent men and women, the tops in their fields, pioneers on new worlds, unraveling the mysteries of deep space – and all the while trying to get into each other’s pants and flailing around in jealous rages to put any High School class to shame.

It makes for a weird mixture. Sometimes, as in Mars and Venus, it works. Other times, like Farside and Death Wave, it doesn’t. In this book, As on a Darkling Plain, the soapy elements did not interfere with my enjoyment of the tale, because, well, at its heart was a neat little mystery.

A century or so in the future huge, featureless, obsidian towers are discovered on Titan, the large moon of Saturn. Simply called “machines,” because they are apparently doing something, although they remain impenetrable, their purpose – and more importantly, who built them – remains a mystery. Decades pass, and scientists spend lifetimes studying them to no avail. One is our hero, Dr. Sidney Lee, who, at novel’s beginning, nearly commits suicide on the frozen lakes of Titan, and is sent back to Earth.

Still, he’s the leading authority on the machines, so he’s brought back for a new mission – this time to a planet orbiting the stars of Sirius. Along with the beautiful Dr. Marlene Ettinger. And because there’s a soap opera going on here, Dr. Bob O’Banion, the third wheel, is sent to Jupiter. Why Sirius and why Jupiter? To pursue leads as to what built the machines. Cloud whales of Jupiter, or – get this – Neanderthals on a terrestrial planet orbiting Sirius. Neanderthals? Yes, our humanoid ancestors. Why they’re there is the gist of the novel’s twist.

Turns out Darkling Plain is the beginning of another series of novels of Bova’s, called The Others. And it further turns out that the Others are an alien race who visited our system millennia ago, and that the machines – SPOILER ALERT! – are actually a warning device, a gun aimed at the Sun, Damocles-like, to keep us, mankind, in line. Who these Others are and why they visited us and why they left the machines to watch over us, well, you’ll have to read the rest of the series.

I am omitting the cleverest, most shocking twist of all that comes at the novel’s final pages, a very satisfying twist to the entire mystery, one that I don’t think I ever quite read before. Though after a couple days I’m not sure how Dr. Lee arrived at this conclusion other than stretching some sparse clues. In any event, I don’t think I’ll spoil that here, even for a novel nearly fifty years old.

Verdict: An enjoyable quick SF read. Grade: B-plus.

 

The Vatican Nativity Display is Ugly

 

So downright ugly that I refuse to post a picture of it.

If you haven’t seen it and are in a penitential mood, google “Vatican Nativity 2020”, but I recommend it only on an empty stomach, and, even so, only for a quick glance.

It’s best described as Alien meets Fisher Price.

Who decided this was a good idea? That this was what the Catholic faithful in 2020 need?

Ugly is not the only adjective that comes to mind. Some others are: disgusting, disgraceful, childish (though it will frighten small children), hideous, post-modernistic, anti-Catholic / anti-Christian, blasphemous, embarrassing – and on and on.

Now this leads me to the first great truth I’ve realized this year.

The current occupants of the Vatican are not on your side.

What do I mean by this?

Well, empirical evidence suggests that they don’t believe in the teachings of the Church to which they belong.

Want some of that empirical evidence?

Okay. How about any Francis encyclical. How about the whitewashing of the McCarrick report. How about the four-plus years of vigorously ignoring the Dubia, five questions put to the Pope asking whether he upholds traditional Catholic teaching in light of his first encyclical, Amoris Laetitia. How about the head-scratching “theology” of dozens of Francis’s off-the-cuff remarks. How about the placing of Pachamama idols in a Rome church in October 2019. How about prior homoerotic Nativity scenes at the Vatican.

How about this year’s Nativity scene, an utter affront to Our Lord and Our Lady, as well as to good taste. Uplifting it ain’t.

It’s tiresome. So tiresome.

Therefore I’ve realized that the Vatican is not on my side. They make it more difficult to live as a Catholic and pass on the Faith to my children.

So where does one turn?

This is my second great truth:

You turn to the 1,900 year tradition of the Church, her writings.

I’ve read through the entire Bible this year (with the exception of the Psalms, but I took that journey back in 2016). I’ve also begun daily readings in my 1962 Missal. This has brought great comfort to me in these trying times *. More comfort than the Vatican, or even my parish priest, has offered.

I fully intend to continue in 2021. I have felt “called” to read through the writings of St. Augustine. Aquinas, as the summit of intellectual Catholic thought, has always been on my bucket list, but I fear his writings too lofty for me at this stage of life. However, Augustine, sinner as I, feels more down to earth to me, more practical, more approachable. I have a tome of his on the shelf behind the writing desk I plan on cracking in early January, and if all goes well, I may purchase some more for later. I have some experience with his Confessions, City of God, and On Christian Doctrine, but all could use a focused re-reading.

After all, any pre-1965 spiritual reading is worth infinitely more than the modernistic anti-Catholic claptrap coming from Francis and his cabal of crony Cardinals. Augustine’s writing much, much closer to the Crucified Christ, indeed almost at the foot of His Cross, than the Hippie Picasso Jesus these post-Vatican II dinosaurs worship.

 

* Pandemic, scamdemic, mask mandates, the Media, the Presidential Election, race riots, lockdowns, economic insecurity, the Sovietization of the workplace … to name just a few.

Book Review: The World at the End of Time

 

© 1990 by Frederick Pohl

 

A little while ago the urge to cleanse my reading palate hit me hard. Said palate had gorged itself on religion and war tracts, interspersed with the fantasy novel here and the horror tale there. So what better emetic than some good ol’ roll up yer sleeves and split the atom hard sci fi? After all, do I not claim hard sci fi the sugar-and-phosphate ladder of my literary DNA? I do. And, pondering these things late one night, I could not recall the last hard SF novel I read. Would 1950s Asimov count? How about psychedelic Silverberg? Jules Verne?

So I ran my fingers up and down the towers of paperbacks behind my desk and selected a medium-sized work purchased on 9-25-09, as my jeweler’s script on the inside cover reminded me. Frederik Pohl’s 1990 epic, The World at the End of Time. Perfect!

The 407-page paperback includes some really, really neat SF concepts. Right there in the title we have the end of the Universe, and what might happen if one had a front-row seat to it. Also included, at no extra charge, are a new type of alien entities made of plasma who live in the centers of stars, cryosleep, the nuts and bolts of colonizing new worlds light years away, semi-sentient machines to forage for food and raw materials, the evolution of political and religious ideas across the centuries, Einsteinian relativity in theory and practice, genetic manipulation to designer specs. Heck, a pandemic even makes a cameo. All in all, a nice refreshing departure from my usual literary fare.

The story follows two individuals over the course of either four thousand years or forty billion years – depending upon, of course, your relativistic frame of reference. There’s young Viktor Sorricaine, twelve at novel’s start and freshly thawed from a cryo tube en route to his new home world. His dad’s an astrophysicist, and they’ve detected some stars doing some weird things. Then there’s Wan-To, a creature of plasma living in the star Viktor’s dad is observing, a being able to manipulate matter, tachyons, and Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky particles (paired particles such that the behavior of one influences instantaneously the behavior of the other even though they be separated by the length of the entire Universe). Wan-To uses neutrinos to communicate thoughts in his vast, vastly spaced body the same our minds use neurons. And as Viktor has no idea of Wan-To’s existence, neither does the star creature ours.

Then we hold on as crises follows crises as the rag-tag band of human colonists fight for survival, just as Wan-To fights for his among his people. Each subtly influences the other, especially in a way which gives the gist of the novel if revealed. Oh, okay, Wan-To pulls the colonists solar system out of local time and space and preserves it while the rest of the Universe ages to its icy death forty billion years later. Oops, spoilers.

It was a decent read, fast, and a page turner once I got myself oriented in the novel about 50 pages in. Pohl is one of the masters of SF – was – and I’ve highly reviewed his works Man Plus and Merchants of Venus here in these electronic pages. Also remember reading his award-winning Gateway novel way back as a young lad in the 80s or 90s, and that’s due for a re-read. He’s got a raw, smart-ass edge to him, enjoyably so, and he’s paid attention in science class. I need to read more of his books.

Overall, recommended.

Grade: A-minus.

I'm Back ...

 

Well, after a five-month hiatus from the blog, I’ve decided to return.

What’s happened to Hopper since the ides of July?

Actually, if you set aside the toxic environment our culture’s been bathing in, marinated in that whole Covid thing, I’ve made some pretty good progress. Progress toward what, exactly? you might be asking. And my answer would be: certitude.

As a Hopper, I tend to bounce from one thing to the next, always searching, always seeking, always on the make for something to seize my attention and declare itself the Be All and End All Unto Me. Sometimes it happens, most times it don’t. When it do happen, it never sustains itself. If you know anything at all about that Myers-Briggs thing, me telling you that your host is an INFP should explain it all to you.

But after nearly half a year’s musing, ruminating, and thought-experimenting, I’ve come upon certitude.

I will reveal it bit by bit in my writings here.

*** Thus ends the deep part of today’s message. ***

From a more mundane viewpoint, I’ve still accomplished much in the past five months. Two examples:

Physically, I’ve never been better. A good thing in these pale horse times. I’ve ridden the keto diet since June 15 and lost 21 pounds in two months. Then I slipped back to something like 80 percent adherence and gained back 5 of those. So, all in all, I’m around a net minus 16 since the earth sat on the other side of the sun. My doctor is quite pleased. I’ve also curled a lot of weights and trod a lot of miles, though the cold and rain has slowed me down significantly of late (I lift in my unheated garage). Still off the booze, mostly for cardiac reasons, though I have to say abstaining from my faithful (too faithful?) evening Foster’s oil can has kept my spirits upbeat in these downright downbeat times.

I’ve taken a deep – and I mean deeeep, that’s right, five e’s – dive into World War II literature. Originally bitten by the bug summer 2012 during a breather from my fascination with the Civil War, then put away a book a year on the topic. But since July 26th I’ve worked through seven World War II books – just over 3,000 pages – and have taken extensive notes. I’ve listened to nearly 30 hours of lectures during my summer and fall walks. I’ve taped and watched all the WW2 documentaries on the History channels. I even researched my grandfather’s service in the Philippines.

Why? Well, faithful readers may recall my interest in historical fiction at the beginning of the year. Then, mid-March, all hell broke loose. My topic of interest back then is not too politically correct right now, far, far from it, so after completing an outline and having just cracked my knuckles in preparation of typing the first paragraph into the old word processor, I got cold feet and shelved it. Then, after completing my fourth World War II book, early in October, I was seized mercilessly with a nice, neat, novel twist that I could not shake. Ergo, I now have fourteen pages of notes, character names, plot graphs, first chapter lines, and a whole miscellany of ideas ready to go. I think January 1 would be a wonderful day to start that work.

Well, that’s about it for today. On deck, I have two book reviews, plus I’ll get into how the whole Hopper family is handling the Covid event to greater or lesser success.

Much Thinking, Some Progress

Some selective, discretionary updates to follow …

The Glass Bead Game

I have now been enrolled in the glass bead game.

Upon retrospection, I believe I may have been playing it all along these past years.

This came by post today:

The Glass Bead Game, by Herman Hesse, © 1943 [English translation © 1969].

Within the package, on the back cover, was a slim male pocket comb in a plastic wrap.

Bisecting pages 296 and 297 was a single business card with one single word: CAMOUFLAGE.

What does it all mean?

I don’t know!