This is the first of six related posts constituting this afternoon’s MonSFFA e-meeting. On the agenda: Classical Music in F&SF and our look at cameo’s in genre TV and film, which producers often include as an inside joke for especially avid fans. We’ve also prepared a New Year trivia challenge, and more! Welcome, then, MonSFFen and friends, to the club’s first e-meeting of the amazing, astonishing, futuristic year 2022!
1) INTRODUCTION
This is our 22nd virtual MonSFFA get-together, and our first of 2022. The afternoon’s get-together will unfold both on Zoom and right here on the club’s Web site over the course of the next few hours, beginning with this first post, and followed by subsequent posts at 1:30PM, 2:30PM, 3:00PM, and 4:00PM, with a concluding post at 4:30PM. All posts will also be available concurrently on MonSFFA’s Facebook page (www.facebook.com/MonSFFA), however, note that the interface best suited for taking in this meeting is this very Web site.
As we cannot yet, with reasonable safety for all, assemble in larger numbers indoors, this January 2022 virtual meeting has been prepared especially for you, MonSFFA’s membership. Sit back, check out each of the afternoon’s posts, scroll down leisurely through the proffered content, and enjoy!
Don’t forget to comment on what we’ve presented. Let us know what you think of specific topics or the meeting overall. Your input helps us to tailor these virtual meetings for maximum interest and enjoyment. And, of course, you can participate, as well, on Zoom!
2) JOIN THIS AFTERNOON’S VIDEO-CHAT ON ZOOM!
To join our Zoom video-chat, which will run throughout the course of the meeting in tandem with the Web site-based content presented, simply click here and follow the prompts: This Afternoon’s MonSFFA e-Meeting on Zoom
If you’re not fully equipped to Zoom by computer, you can also join in by phone (voice only); in the Montreal area, the toll-free number to call is: 1-438-809-7799. If you’re from out of town, find your Zoom call-in number here: International Call-In Numbers
Also, have this information on hand as you may be asked to enter it:
Meeting ID: 885 7938 5015
Passcode: 1246463
3) MEETING AGENDA
In This Afternoon’s Virtual Meeting:
1:00PM, Post 1 of 6 (We Embark Upon Another Year of MonSFFActivities!)
1) Introduction
2) Join this Afternoon’s Video-Chat on Zoom
3) Meeting Agenda
4) Welcome to 2022!
5) New Year Trivia Challenge
6) Preamble: Club Elections Online
1:30PM, Post 2 of 6 (Maestro, Please…)
7) Presentation: Classical Music in F&SF!
2:30PM Post 3 of 6 (Break!)
8) Mid-Meeting Break (Club Elections, Reports and Announcements, Display Table, Today’s Raffle Prizes, Video-Chat: Cool SF&F Christmas Gifts Received)
3:00PM, Post 4 of 6 (Très Meta!)
9) Special Cameos in Sci-Fi TV and Film
4:00PM, Post 5 of 6 (Movies and Books)
10) Sci-Fi Movies Set in 2022
11) “What Are You Reading (or Watching)?” (Exclusively on Zoom)
4:30PM, Post 6 of 6 (Wrap-Up)
12) Preliminary Planning Session for 2022 e-Meeting Programming (Exclusively on Zoom)
13) Answers to New Year Trivia Challenge
14) Thank-You!
15) Sign-Off, Until We Met Again Next Month
4) WELCOME TO 2022!
Yes, it’s the astounding year 2022, but watch your step! We’re not exactly living in the World of Tomorrow that mid-20th century youngsters read about in sci-fi books, magazines, and comics. Then was the promise of a shining, tail-finned future of flying cars and robots! But what we got were exorbitantly-priced electric cars in want of an adequate number of recharging stations, and robocalls.
We had anticipated a future of clean energy and an environment free of toxic pollutants! Instead, we lap up sugar-laden energy drinks and toxic social media.
We were hopeful of a path to the countless stars in our galaxy! But rather, our hospitals are hopelessly inundated by countless cases of Omicron.
We were confident of regularly scheduled rocket trips to exotic planets! Instead, we got to watch a live-stream of William Shatner rocketing skyward on an eleven-minute suborbital flight aboard a billionaire’s phallic symbol.
By now, we were supposed to be zooming off to work by jetpack and planning a vacation on the moon at a luxury hotel overlooking the Sea of Tranquility! Turns out, we’re sitting on our living room couches taking meetings with co-workers on Zoom, and planning another summer vacation in our backyards overlooking the inflatable pool we bought at Canadian Tire last year.
We were supposed to be darting back and forth through time by now! These days, we’re just loosing track of time because every day in government-imposed isolation at home seems to meld into the next.
The 2022 of science fiction excited and thrilled, instilling in us that Sense of Wonder. The reality of 2022 has us wondering, does a curfew make any sense?
-Sigh-
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Even in the wake of that most wonderful time of the year, it’s difficult to be cheery and optimistic about the coming months, given the recent Omicron surge—no, “surge” doesn’t really cut it; better word: tsunami! We find ourselves experiencing something of a Groundhog Day scenario. Once again, as we did last winter, we are isolating in our homes and here in Quebec, living under a nightly curfew, a mitigation measure that doesn’t seem to most particularly efficacious at preventing the spread of this latest variant of the COVID-19 virus.
The hyper-transmissible Omicron bug is more resistant to our vaccines and multiplying at an unprecedented rate. It seems almost certain that, sooner or later, pretty much everyone will become infected, even some of those fully vaccinated! As daily briefings report case numbers not in the hundreds, but in the thousands, a third vaccine “booster shot”—and in some countries, a fourth!—is now deemed by authorities as essential to staving off severe illness. Because many, many more people are becoming infected, hospitals are now, more than ever, completely overwhelmed dealing with fresh cases incoming. 
Patient care has been hobbled by exhausted, overworked doctors and nurses facing a shortage of beds and fellow staff, the latter cohort having been reduced in number by sickness, themselves. Police and fire departments across the land, as well as other essential services, are also experiencing pandemic-related staff shortages. Governments are vexed with squaring the interests of many a struggling small business, a sector often described as the backbone of our economy, with those of the besieged healthcare system, not to mention addressing the dire state of affairs in our schools. At odds are the very real need for in-person teaching with the immediate health risks inherent, for students and staff, of spending many hours indoors in poorly ventilated buildings, and in close proximity to each other. This whole public health conflagration offers but a Sofie’s Choice of options to those officials who must make the hard decisions.
In nations like Canada, one of the most vaccinated jurisdictions in the world, there remain enough unvaccinated individuals to allow the virus to continue flourishing, and sufficient instances of ineffective virus-abatement half-measures and blunders to permit COVID-19 to evade extinction. We have failed in too many ways to properly attack this plague! Recently, governments appear to have given up entirely on vanquishing the virus and are now talking about learning to live with COVID-19. Were all of our dutiful mitigation efforts over the past 20 months, then, for naught? Omicron remains in the air, commerce is again constrained, society is crippled, and people are increasingly anxious, fearful, frustrated, angry, and weary of the fight.
Yes, it is, indeed, difficult to be cheery and optimistic when faced with all of this. But if we take a Vulcan approach to the circumstances and supress our emotional response to Delta, and now Omicron—admittedly, a daunting exercise—we come to the conclusion that while it may seem as if we are reliving the winter of a year ago, objectively, we are in a better position today than we were then.
In January 2021, the vaccines had yet to arrive in large number. Today, a high proportion of the Canadian population has received both shots, and folk are lining up to get that third in a quintessentially Canadian hankering to score a hat trick. In addition, vaccine hesitancy is trending downwards, if slowly. Those of us who rolled up our sleeves and got our shots, and followed the obligatory Public Health safety rules should know that our compliance was not in vain, for unquestionably, the situation today would be orders of magnitude worse had we not.
We’ll have important work to do when the pandemic is over, and it will end, if science and history teach us anything. When that day comes, we must not countenance our elected representatives sidestepping their responsibilities regarding that vital work. Canada will have to return to a level of self-sufficiency when it comes to manufacturing vaccines and supplying quality PPE. With other first-world countries, we will need to accelerate the program to supply poorer nations with vaccines, for until the all the world is vaccinated, COVID-19 remains a threat. Our healthcare system will require a dramatic overhaul; improvements must be instituted so that we are better prepared for such major Public Health emergencies in future. These and other upgrades to our preparedness for a future pandemic, among other large-scale disasters, are a must if we are to survive the 21st century as a nation.
Perhaps most importantly, anti-vaxxer, and anti-science sentiment in general, will require alleviatory action of some kind, maybe a sweeping educational campaign, so that in future, citizens fully understand and appreciate the responsibilities that come with the exercise of personal freedoms. Never again should we allow a few self-centred individuals to endanger not only themselves, but their families, friends, and we, their neighbours, in the name of a misguided interpretation of freedom. You may have a right to refuse a vaccine or eschew Public Health safety protocols, but you most definitely do not have a right, by such inaction, to knowingly facilitate the spread of dangerous disease to others. Even a free and democratic society imposes certain reasonable limitations on the individual citizen in the greater interests of the whole. Not to do so results in anarchy.
Finally, this dark cloud’s silver lining may be that Omicron, which quickly supplanted Delta as the dominant form of COVID-19, while extremely transmissible, appears to result in rather less severe illness in most cases. We don’t yet have all the data to absolutely confirm that conjecture, but initial studies are encouraging. Also, Omicron seems to rise and decline in less time than previous variants, which, if true, might see peak infection occur before the end of this month or early next. And in that it has replaced Delta as the dominant form of the virus, ironically, Omicron may end up infecting enough people to, in combination with the vaccines, provide us that desired but elusive herd immunity.
5)
It’s 2022, so here are 22 SF/F trivia questions for you to ponder. We’ll run the answers in our final Post 6 of 6 at 4:30PM. Good luck.
1) As we all know, Hugo Gernsback was the founding publisher of Amazing Stories, the world’s first magazine entirely devoted to what he termed “Scientifiction,” but who founded the competing Astounding Stories of Super-Science?
2) Who was the first editor of Astounding?
3) In The Book of Boba Fett, one-time flashdancer Jennifer Beals plays Garsa Fwip, a Twi’lek who manages a cantina in Mos Espa on the familiar planet Tatooine. What is the name of this cantina?
4) Boba Fett, the Star Wars franchise’s most famous bounty hunter, is a cloned human. What species is Greedo, whose career ended inauspiciously when he cornered Han Solo in a Mos Eisley cantina?
5) Which comic book archer debuted first, Marvel’s Hawkeye or DC’s Green Arrow?
6) What is Clint “Hawkeye” Barton’s middle name?
7) Overseen by a giant, motion-sensing, death-dealing robot doll, what was the first of the six games played by the despondent contestants in the hit Netflix series Squid Game?
8) What is the player number of Squid Game’s lead protagonist, Seong Gi-hun, played by Lee Jung-jae?
9) Clint Barton mentors young Katherine Elizabeth “Kate” Bishop to succeed him as Hawkeye, but she is, chronologically, the third Marvel character to carry the Hawkeye codename. Who was the second?
10) ConCept ’92 Guest of Honour Roger Zelazny’s …And Call Me Conrad, more commonly published as This Immortal, shares its Hugo for Best Novel with which other book?
11) Recently adapted as an HBO Max series, Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 book Station Eleven, is the post-apocalyptic tale of a plague-ravaged world in which all is risked to ensure that art and culture survive. Her upcoming Sea of Tranquility is described as a novel of “time travel and metaphysics” but Mandel does not consider herself a science fiction writer, per se. Indeed, her first book, published in 2009, was more mystery than science fiction; what was it called?
13) What species is Star Wars bounty hunter Bossk?
14) In what Canadian sitcom was Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings star Simu Liu feature before his casting as the MCU’s new martial arts-adept superhero?
15) Who won the inaugural Nebula Award for best novel?
16) South Korean model and actress HoYeon Jung portrays Kang Sae-byeok in Squid Game, a North Korean defector desperate to win the prize money so that she can smuggle her parents across the border, rescue her little brother from an orphanage, and reunite her family. What was her player number?
17) What species is Star Wars bounty hunter Aurra Sing?
18) Which of the squad members in 2021’s The Suicide Squad is now the star of his or her own new HBO Max series?
19) Which character in Squid Game created the bizarre and deadly contest in order to entertain bored, mega-rich people such as he?
20) What comic-book superheroine has variously been called, among numerous other sobriquets, “Taskmistress,” “Weapon Woman,” and “The Adorable Archer”?
21) Name the leader of the Federation colony the ensemble of which have somehow survived years of exposure to lethal Berthold rays in the original Star Trek episode “This Side of Paradise.”
22) On which planet do Captain Kirk and company find this colony?
6) PREAMBLE: CLUB ELECTIONS ONLINE
For the benefit of MonSFFen and in accordance with our practice, we outline here information concerning, and procedures for the election of the club’s Executive Committee, which will take place during the mid-meeting break, a little later on.
MonSFFA begins each year with the election of its Executive Committee for that upcoming 12 months. These elections always take place at our first meeting of the year, in January, and are confirmed and officially announced at the following meeting, in February. All MonSFFA members in good standing are encouraged to attend the January meeting and participate.
All club members in good standing, having paid in full their annual membership fees, are eligible to cast a ballot. Normally, members are asked to be present at the designated place and time in order to exercise their right to vote. Proxy voting is not permitted, except under special circumstance and by approval of the chief returning officer (CRO). Out-of-town members unable to attend the vote in person, for example, may have their ballots cast by the CRO in their absence. Potential candidates are encouraged to advise the CRO of their intention to run for one of the three specified offices as soon as possible in advance of the election.
Our 2022 Executive will be selected during today’s Zoom session by those club members present online, and by any who later submit their ballots via the club’s Web site. The Zoom vote will be conducted by a show of hands, excepting those participating via a non-visual connection, who will be able to either verbalize or indicate in the text/comments field their choices.
MonSFFA elects annually a president, vice-president, and treasurer—who together form the Executive Committee—and charges them with the responsibility of running the club on behalf of the membership. These executives recruit advisors and appoint officers to assist them in carrying out this responsibility.
Our sitting Executive is as follows: Cathy Palmer-Lister, president; Keith Braithwaite, vice-president; Joseph Aspler, treasurer.
Any MonSFFA member in good standing who is responsibly and reliably able to carry out the duties of office may run for any one of the Executive posts. Candidates may nominate themselves, or accept nomination from another member in good standing. Nominations are received by the CRO, usually just before the commencement of voting on Election Day.