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\F2\CARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY
\CCOMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
\CSTANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305
\F0

\C3 April 1973




Dear Susie,

\J	I hope you got the check which I mailed Saturday night.

	No, you are not insured.  My guess is that you have to get
Oregon insurance and that this will make you register the car in
Oregon.  Whether you are eighteen will also make a difference, because
at that time I would like you to get the insurance in your own
name, since I am not very reliable about getting business done on
time, etc.  I am nevertheless resigned to paying for it.

	Your car registration came today and here it is.  I have copied
the information from it and will ask my insurance agent about insuring
you from here.

	I guess I told you I wrote three things for the \F1Chaparral\F0
imitation of \F1Campus Report\F0 and would send you a copy.  I still will.

	I forget whether I also told you that I am making up some
Fourth Age history of the Hobbits.  Maybe I will put it in the
\F1Chaparral\F0 also, but only if they will agree not to change a
word.  They butchered two of my things.  I have written quite a bit,
but I won't send it to you, because I keep changing the whole idea.

	The present version is entitled \F1Notable Hobbits\F0 and is
a series of short biographies.  I have not decided whether it shall
be written in the style of a school reader in Shire schools or whether
it will be for the Gondor public about the remarkable achievements
of the Hobbits of the Fourth Age.  It is a question of which style I
can best maintain.  Maybe I'll try the first one both ways.

	Here are some of the accomplishments of the Hobbits in question.

	1. He wanted to find out about the Orcs, wondered whether there
were Orcesses and Orclings and what happened to them.  It will turn out
that they were rather nastily slaughtered in the cleaning up of Mordor
at the end of the War of the Rings, but this will not be the main point.
There will still be some Orcs to the East of Mordor and our hero will go
to the Eastern Frontier with the king's frontier guards.  As hobbits are
particularly good at not being seen, he is expected to help spy on them.
The men know almost nothing about Orcs except how to kill them.  At first
our hero imagines that they are like other "speaking peoples", just
backwards, but they turn out to be really different.

	The most likely variant now is that they are almost all males.
Maybe only ten percent of Orcs are born female, the males grow up
quickly and spend many years fighting each other or others and only
ten percent survive to marry.  An extreme variant is that there are
no females born at all and that their females are all captives.  In our
hero's time, they are starting to be literate and to develop a more
complex society.  Perhaps it resembles Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars
where there are all those super-gladiators and where the heroes survive
against tremendous odds.  (Taking it seriously, means that almost all
non-heroes do not survive.)

	It is best to stay away from Orc society if you value your life,
because they value neither yours nor theirs.  (They are Nature's own
Hell's Angels.)  Nevertheless our hero
works out a way in which Orcs and others can coexist, because there are
many smart Orcs who understand the problem of their relations with
the other peoples of Middle Earth.  He has considerable
trouble selling it in Gondor, because everyone is resigned to continuous
wars with the Orcs.  I don't know what the form of this co-existence will
turn out to be.

	2. The next hero finds out the components of ring power.  As you
know rings make one invisible, tend to make one insubstantial, tend
to make for direct control over others, and make for posessiveness about
the ring.  They also have one or two other properties not mentioned
in \F1Lord of the Rings\F0.  It turns out that these properties are
separable by distilling the gold of the ring in a mithril still heated
by focussing the sun's rays, and while exerting a mental force tending
to prevent the gold from coming out of the still.  The different
kinds of gold make different kinds of rings.  The pure jealousy and
power components have to be disposed of properly.  It is a sort of
radio-active waste problem, and there is much fuss and dispute before
a proper solution is found.

	3. Another alchemist hobbit discovers how to make the \F1palanthir\F0
stones smaller and mass producible.  This leads to some friction with
the king who is the heir of Aragorn, because when he wishes to use his
stone to summon his lords, he gets a confused image of lots of hobbits
summoning their children home for dinner or gossipping about whether
the pipe-weed is as good this year as it was two years ago.  Eventually,
he is persuaded to let the hobbits tune his stone to a narrow channel,
but he doesn't like it.

	4. The hobbits expand down the Brandywine River to the sea which
leads to some further friction with the king even though the area into
which they expand is unoccupied.  The hero of this episode is a diplomat
who manages to make this happen still preserving peace.  Probably he
does this by judiciously arranging marriages.

	5. A historian manages to find out more facts about the history
of the third age, the tale having been distorted by prejudices and the
pessimism of the Elves.  In fact, the departure of the Elves is one of
the main causes of the advances of the Fourth Age, because they were a
terrible drag with their great powers and their immortality coupled with
a general dolessness.

	6. The Entwives are finally found by hobbit exploring expeditions.
They had been forced to take root somewhere in the mountains on the
far side of Mordor.  Their finding is not an accident, but the result
of a specific hobbit organized search.  What happens after they are
found is unexpected.

	7. A joint accomplishment of the hobbits and the dwarves is the
mass production of mithril and its use in hobbit architecture.  Also
involve are widely separated super-tall trees with mithril bridges
between them and also mithril towers, very airy and fantastic rather
than strong.  (Martha thinks this is too five-year plannish. It will
be put differently, but some of this way of looking at matters will
have to be accepted by the reader.  I won't pander to all their (your?)
prejudices).

	Well that's all for now.  I've got to write an outline of the
course I start teaching tomorrow.\. 

					Love,



					John