What, Again Dangerous Visions: `Ozymandias', Terry Carr
Joseph Nebus
close to being done with the story-by-story review of _Again,
Dangerous Visions_. This entry: ``Ozymandias'', by Terry Carr,
who somehow did not edit this.
So, we're back to a post-apocalyptic wasteland of the
usual model, you know, warlord-controlled tribes,
quasi-hereditary clans of fighters and thinkers and whatnot,
living off what can be scavenged from the ruins of the
impossible distant pats when giants walked the earth and set out
great monuments to themselves and booby-trapped them. There's
all kinds of distorted legends of what these things use to be
and where they come from, but the incompletely-trained thinker
Lasten is being forced to pick out one of these ancient vaults,
guide Sooleyrah and Kreech through it, and it better have
something good in it.
Lasten (I'm a little started to find that's a real word,
according to my computer's dictionary, although I'm only finding
it in Dutch and related languages in trying to pin down the
meaning) ponders this and reasons that they should go to one of
the most ancient and oft-raided tombs, since all the booby traps
must have been set off by now, and hey, he knows of something
which just might turn up. And sure enough, it does because ...
spoiler warning ... IT'S A CRYOGENIC VAULT!
The story's written competently enough, though does seem
odd to see Terry Carr's name as an author rather than editor.
The setting feels awfully standard to me, but I can't remember
the last time a post-apocalyptic world actually felt fresh. The
revelation that the mummy's tomb is actually a cryogenic
suspension vault actually makes me feel like there's been a
bunch of cryogenic suspension stories in this volume, although
on looking through the titles I suppose it isn't really that
many. It is just a snapshot of the genre right after Walt
Disney made cryogenics a pop-culture thing, anyway.
Carr mentions in the afterward he was thinking of the
parallel of cryogenic tombs to Egyptian mummies of lore, and
that isn't a bad starting point. But the short story ends at
the revelation of the mummy/Immortal, pretty much, instead of
making it anything more than the Monster at the End of the
Story. The characters wander around ominous stuff, march
forward into danger, here's the monster run! And ... epilogue.
It works out well for Lasten, but I'm not sure why this should
be important to me. I do wonder what Futurama would do with
this starting point, though.
DANGER LEVEL: I guess there be demons here.
VISION LEVEL: Hope they brought extra eyeglasses to the
end of the world.
NEXT: ``The Milk Of Paradise'', James Tiptree, Jr
NEAR: Conclusion
Robert Carnegie
> The story's written competently enough, though does seem
> odd to see Terry Carr's name as an author rather than editor.
> The setting feels awfully standard to me, but I can't remember
> the last time a post-apocalyptic world actually felt fresh. The
> revelation that the mummy's tomb is actually a cryogenic
> suspension vault actually makes me feel like there's been a
> bunch of cryogenic suspension stories in this volume, although
> on looking through the titles I suppose it isn't really that
> many. It is just a snapshot of the genre right after Walt
> Disney made cryogenics a pop-culture thing, anyway.
Bugged? Bug Jack Barron.
If <http://dictionary.reference.com/> doesn't have "Lasten" - which
apparently it doesn't - then I'm sceptical. It could be a bug in your
spelling dictionary - maybe of the type often introduced in databases,
such as maps, as a mark of copyright (my dictionary may coincidentally
define "ocarina" word for word the same as yours by coincidence, but
you /invented/ "lasten" - or perhaps the result of once mistakenly
adding "lasten" to your program's personal spelling dictionary instead
of correcting it to "fasten". Or it's in the correction dictionary
because it's a proper name, although possibly an uncommon one. Try it
on Carnegie, Busiek, Nebus... which you probably have.
T Guy
> Nope, I'm neither done nor given up yet. But I am very
> close to being done with the story-by-story review of _Again,
> Dangerous Visions_. This entry: ``Ozymandias'', by Terry Carr,
> who somehow did not edit this.
>
> So, we're back to a post-apocalyptic wasteland of the
> usual model, you know, warlord-controlled tribes,
Government is illegal, and warlords control tribes!
Jaimie Vandenbergh
<rja.ca...@excite.com> wrote:
>On Aug 29, 7:30 am, nebu...@-rpi-.edu (Joseph Nebus) wrote:
>> The story's written competently enough, though does seem
>> odd to see Terry Carr's name as an author rather than editor.
>> The setting feels awfully standard to me, but I can't remember
>> the last time a post-apocalyptic world actually felt fresh. The
>> revelation that the mummy's tomb is actually a cryogenic
>> suspension vault actually makes me feel like there's been a
>> bunch of cryogenic suspension stories in this volume, although
>> on looking through the titles I suppose it isn't really that
>> many. It is just a snapshot of the genre right after Walt
>> Disney made cryogenics a pop-culture thing, anyway.
>
>Bugged? Bug Jack Barron.
>
>If <http://dictionary.reference.com/> doesn't have "Lasten" - which
>apparently it doesn't - then I'm sceptical.
Nor does the OED2, as further bolster. That doesn't preclude anyone
from popularising a neologism, of course...
Cheers - Jaimie
--
"It's only work when somebody makes you do it." - Calvin
Joel Polowin
> Lasten (I'm a little started to find that's a real word,
> according to my computer's dictionary, although I'm only finding
> it in Dutch and related languages in trying to pin down the
> meaning) ponders this and reasons that they should go to one of
Are you inferring that it's in your computer's dictionary
because "Lasten" isn't flagged as misspelled? Some
spell-checkers ignore words that are capitalized, since
they're likely to be proper nouns and therefore likely to
not be included in a dictionary. Try it lower-case. (This
message does flag it as misspelled, even capitalized, via
Firefox 6.0's text box.)
Joseph Nebus
>On Aug 29, 2:30=A0am, nebu...@-rpi-.edu (Joseph Nebus) wrote:
>> =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 Lasten (I'm a little started to find that's a real word,
I know spell checkers do many things to try to look smarter
than they are, but mine's the standard-issue Apple spell checker. It
does assume short all-capitalized collections of letters are probably
acronyms and doesn't flag them, but it extends no such courtesy to
nonsense words with capitalized first letters.
More, the other character names from the story --- Kreech and
Sooleyrah, particularly --- get flagged as possible typos. For some
calibration, Carr does not evoke the underline of spell checker doubts,
but Moriarty does.
And it doesn't appear to be a word I accidentally tossed into
my user dictionary and forgot about; my Dearly Beloved found a MacBook
I've never touched also has 'lasten' approved, while 'kreech' and
'sooleyrah' don't pass.
I don't know whether this reflects a glitch, typo, or deliberate
in-joke at Apple Master Command. But I like the sound of 'lasten' as a
word --- I suppose it would turn 'lasts' into a strong verb --- and may
get around to promoting it as soon as I finish up my other projects.
--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jaimie Vandenbergh
Nebus) wrote:
> And it doesn't appear to be a word I accidentally tossed into
>my user dictionary and forgot about; my Dearly Beloved found a MacBook
>I've never touched also has 'lasten' approved, while 'kreech' and
>'sooleyrah' don't pass.
Over here, OSX 10.7 considers it a typo and initially autocorrects to
lasted, or offers lasted/listen/fasten/hasten.
You can check the content of your own custom dictionary(ies) in your
home folder, (username)/Library/Spelling.
Cheers - Jaimie
--
"Choose the Dark Side... now why would I do a thing like that?"
-- Obi-Wan Renton
Robert Carnegie
We got hung up on this instead of talking about the story.
Hmm... would there be anywhere to go in a story about how a future
government enforces correct spelling on everybody? The resistance
might adopt proper names as their secret language... or is that too
much _ Fahrenheit 451_. And that one where a computer error leads to
a manhunt for the guy with an overdue copy of _Kidnapped_ would be to
stay away from, too. Unless we're mass-market and the proles won't be
aware of it.
"The setting feels awfully standard to me, but I can't remember the
last time a post-apocalyptic world actually felt fresh." Do you have
to be a fan to say that, or were _The Road_ and _Left Behind_ enough
for everyone else? ;-)
Somewhere I have a 1970s school sci-fi collection - not my own
schoolbook - that I recently looked at again, and, boy, were there a
lot of mutual-assured-destruction plots. And I don't think it was
intentionally, it was just what the future was going to be like. Not
many survivors, though, generally. Not even the Uplifted
chimpanzees. Maybe that was why, it made the stories fairly short if
no one's actually alive in them. Convenient for school lessons.
"There Will Come Soft Rains" was included.
"It works out well for Lasten, but I'm not sure why this should be
important to me." Does it work out not so well for the guy or gal in
the cryogenic chamber, with whom we might identify, and should we take
that into account when considering a cryogenic tax holiday of our own?
In one of the "Gil the ARM" stories there's a discussion of how some
people got frozen to wait for a better world, or a better economy. It
turned out that one of the ways to a better economy was an ample
supply of deep-frozen replacement body parts... you mention
_Futurama_, is that why people in that story mainly survive from past
times as just the head?
There's the episode in the graphic novel series _Transmetropolitan_
where the future culture is such that, when you do get defrosted and
installed in a new body and then shown out into The City, you get the
very strong impression that the apocalypse is happening right now, or
if not, is about a minute away, what with all the signs thereof before
your eyes - I paraphrase considerably.
William December Starr
> nebu...@-rpi-.edu (Joseph Nebus) wrote:
>
>> The setting feels awfully standard to me, but I can't
>> remember the last time a post-apocalyptic world actually
>> felt fresh. The revelation that the mummy's tomb is
>> actually a cryogenic suspension vault actually makes me feel
>> like there's been a bunch of cryogenic suspension stories in
>> this volume, although on looking through the titles I
>> suppose it isn't really that many. It is just a snapshot of
>> the genre right after Walt Disney made cryogenics a
>> pop-culture thing, anyway.
>
> Bugged? Bug Jack Barron.
Modest spoiler:
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The bad guy was seeking immortality, but through agelessness,
not preservation or suspended animation.
-- wds
Robert Carnegie
> In article <3a25543f-c175-4284...@y21g2000yqy.googlegroups.com>,
> Robert Carnegie <rja.ca...@excite.com> said:
>
> > nebu...@-rpi-.edu (Joseph Nebus) wrote:
> >
> >> The setting feels awfully standard to me, but I can't
> >> remember the last time a post-apocalyptic world actually
> >> felt fresh. The revelation that the mummy's tomb is
> >> actually a cryogenic suspension vault actually makes me feel
> >> like there's been a bunch of cryogenic suspension stories in
> >> this volume, although on looking through the titles I
> >> suppose it isn't really that many. It is just a snapshot of
> >> the genre right after Walt Disney made cryogenics a
> >> pop-culture thing, anyway.
> >
> > Bugged? Bug Jack Barron.
>
> I don't recall any cryonics-related elements in _Bug Jack Barron_.
That's a pity, because its Wikipedia page needs serious work. Fun,
though. An over-detailed[*] plot summary runs to a premature halt
thus: "Then when Howards admits to all his crimes, Jack will use a
miniphone to record the confession. Sara agrees, and is impressed by
Jack risk-taking attitude. The two celebrate by having oral sex."
[*] "Blow by blow", as they say.