THE MT VOID
03/01/24 -- Vol. 42, No. 35, Whole Number 2317

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Topics:
OCTOBER SKY (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
SYSTEM COLLAPSE by Martha Wells (audio book review
by Joe Karpierz)
A BRIEF HISTORY OF EARTH by Andrew H. Knoll (book review
by Gregory Frederick)
Roald Dahl (letter of comment by Keith F. Lynch)
This Week's Reading (THE LAST OF THE LEGIONS AND OTHER
STORIES) (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)

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

TOPIC: OCTOBER SKY (film review by Mark R. Leeper)

[The 25th anniversary of OCTOBER SKY was February 19. We missed
that because of the Turner Classic Movie listings, but here is
Mark's review from 1999.]

Capsule: In Coalwood, West Virginia, 1957 a boy uses model rocketry
to escape the fate of a career digging coal. With the inspiration
of one high school teacher and the drive to follow his curiosity
and vision, he resists all the pressures of the town, and
especially his own father, to work for a dying mining company.
While parts of the story seem contrived, this is a true story. It
is based on a book by the main character is riveting. Rating: 8 (0
to 10), low +3 (-4 to +4)

It is October 1957 in Coalwood, West Virginia and there are
virtually two different worlds--worlds that never touch each other.
One world is the town's coal mine. The Olga Mining Company runs
that and it is the town. Most boys know from an early age that
when they get old enough they will go down in the mine to work.
The other world is what they read about in the papers. It is where
amazingly the Soviets just put a satellite called Sputnik in orbit
around the whole planet. And for nearly the first time the two
worlds touch. There right over Coalwood is a light shooting across
the sky. Homer Hickam, Jr. (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) sees the
satellite go overhead, and nothing will ever be the same for him.
There overhead is a piece of the outer world, put there by a
rocket. Homer gets some of his buddies together with the school
nerd and they decide that they are going to build their own
rockets.

This is the story of the four boys who dedicate themselves to
building and launching their own rockets. Naming the rockets Auks
after flightless birds they soon find that launching rockets not
only can be the ticket to get them out of town, it really has to
get them out of town. The town is owned by Olga and they are not
allowed to fly rockets from Olga's property. Instead they find a
slate hilltop eight miles from town and set it up as their
launching base. They begin to get the materials and money they
need by any means, fair or foul. This includes stealing spikes
from abandoned railroad tracks and selling them. But there is
tremendous resistance in the town to doing anything as strange as
building rockets and they come into conflict with the school, with
the police, but most of all Homer Jr. comes in conflict with his
father, Homer Sr., superintendent of the Olga mine. [Note: to
avoid confusion, Homer Sr.'s name is changed to John in the
screenplay.]

"John" is played by Chris Cooper in an ironic piece of casting.
Cooper is most familiar for his role as the coal mine union
organizer in MATEWAN. In this film he is cursing that same union.
But the conflict between Homer and his father forms the dramatic
core of the film. It is in the love-hate relationship between
Homer and his father that the film gets its strongest resonance.
Homer's relationship with an inspiring teacher, Miss Riley (Laura
Dern), while also strong, falls into more familiar territory.

OCTOBER SKY is directed by Joe Johnston who directed THE ROCKETEER
and JUMANJI. The screenplay is by Louis Colick, based on the book
ROCKET BOYS by Homer Hickam, Jr. Hickam claims to be pleased with
the adaptation of his book and even points out that the two titles
are anagrams. For acting credit, the honors go mostly to Chris
Cooper as Homer's father. Laura Dern and Jake Gyllenhaal are just
a little too good-looking for their roles as films of the original
people demonstrate at the end the film. However, Coalwood, filmed
in a Tennessee coal town really does capture the look of West
Virginia in the 1950s. [I say this as someone lived in West
Virginia for a while in the 1950s. Okay, I was very young, but I
still remember the look of coal country.]

OCTOBER SKY is a powerful look at a young man's drives to become a
scientist. It is also a moving portrait of a father-son
relationship. I rate the film a low +3 on the -4 to +4 scale and
an 8 on the 0 to 10 scale.

MINOR SPOILER: There are some odd touches that should have been
cleared up in the script with some explanation. Why did the boys
never look at the object the police were holding until *after* they
proved it was not theirs? For that matter why did the police never
notice that the object they were holding was professionally built
and not made by amateurs. Also were both younger and older brother
high school seniors in the same year, as they seemed to be? This
seems possible, but unlikely. [-mrl]

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

TOPIC: SYSTEM COLLAPSE by Martha Wells (copyright 2023, Recorded
Books, 6 hours and 36 minutes, ASIN: B0C5N8LL2P, narrated by Kevin
R. Free) (audio book review by Joe Karpierz)

I have seriously mixed feelings about the "Murderbot Diaries"
series by Martha Wells, which has now reached its seventh
installment with SYSTEM COLLAPSE. Murderbot is extremely popular,
and I can see why. From the very beginning, readers loved
SecUnit's quirky, snarky personality. Many others identified with
SecUnit because of its neurodivergent behaviors. Others loved the
stories themselves, which are well written with snappy dialogue and
fast moving stories which are well plotted. From one book to the
next, the cast of characters is familiar, and reading a Murderbot
book is like cozying up with your cat on a cold winter's
night--warm and comforting. All of those things are true of SYSTEM
COLLAPSE. If you sense a "but" coming on, you're right. But I'll
get there.

The events of SYSTEM COLLAPSE take place immediately after those of
NETWORK EFFECT, which was actually not the last Murderbot book that
was published (that book would be 2021's FUGITIVE TELEMETRY, for
those of you keeping score at home). The nefarious Barish-Estranza
corporation has sent ships to rescue the population of a colony
planet that had been contaminated by an alien virus.

Herein lies my major complaint with SYSTEM COLLAPSE. Wells makes
no attempt to summarize what has gone before, no attempt to help
the reader with a "Previously, in The Murderbot Diaries". For
those readers who haven't obsessively read all the Murderbot books
multiple times, or at least NETWORK EFFECT in preparation for
SYSTEM COLLAPSE--because of time limitations or all the other good
books out there waiting to be read--it's been in the neighborhood
of three years since NETWORK EFFECT was published and many folks
can't remember that far back. I was pretty much lost for a good
chunk of the beginning of the book until I went back and read a
summary of NETWORK EFFECT (which was weird, because you'd think I'd
have gone back and read my review of that book. Which I still
haven't done.).

In any event, Murderbot and the rest of the cast of characters are
heading back to the planet to attempt to rescue the colonists from
becoming slaves for the greedy Barish-Estranza corporation. While
all that is going on, Murderbot is having some mental health
issues, not the least of which take the form of redacted memories
that are getting in the way of SecUnit doing its job efficiently.
Since the story is told in the first person, we can follow along
with SecUnit as its frustration mounts every time a memory is
redacted.

So, we have a fairly standard story of a group of folks trying to
rescue another group of folks from the clutches of an evil
corporation, complete with snappy dialogue, snarky humor, and a
main character who has trouble doing routine things. Oh yes, that
character still loves watching media at inappropriate times (yes,
Sanctuary Moon is still the favorite, but when the rescue team
discovers where the colonists are holed up they ALSO discover
ancient media that SecUnit has never seen before). Basically, this
story contains everything that everyone has loved about Murderbot
since the series began with ALL SYSTEMS RED. Is SecUnit growing
and changing, learning things about itself as the novel progresses,
as a result of discovering why all that stuff was redacted?
Absolutely. But it's still a very traditional Murderbot story.