The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (The Play): WhoDunnit in the Roaring 20s

My wife and I saw a preview performance last evening of Agatha Christie's 1926 novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, written, directed, and adapted by Mark Shanahan to the stage of the Westport Country Playhouse (in Westport, Connecticut), and we loved it.  The cast was nimble, the setting including the music and sound effects was fetching, and you can't go wrong with an early Hercule Poirot story.  As John Lennon might have said, "a splendid time is guaranteed for all".

A few words about Mark Shanahan:   He was my student in Fordham University's MA in Media Studies Program, where we first met in 2002.  I soon learned he was not only a brilliant student, but a gifted actor and playwright.   Indeed, his adaptation of my novelette, "The Chronology Protection Case," was a finalist for the Edgar Award in 2002, and you'll find Mark's audiobook adaptations of that, along with my novels, The Consciousness Plague and The Plot to Save Socrates over on Audible. 

You of course all know about Agatha Christie and her character Hercules Poirot.  I consider her the whodunnit equivalent of science fiction author Isaac Asimov.   His character Hari Seldon maps out the future, just as Poirot maps out the past, in particular, who murdered whatever suitable victim.  More than 50 movies and 70 television episodes feature the fastidious, deductive detective, some in the time in which the novels were first published, others in the present day.  One of the joys of Shanahan's adaptation is its zestful presence in the 1920s -- when the novel was first published -- down to the stick-like telephones and the dictaphone, which indeed plays a role in the ending (Mark learned his media well :)

Anthony Cochrane is a fine, emotive, justifiably pompous Poirot, and I especially enjoyed how he and a few of the actors talked not only among themselves but to the audience.  (Just about everyone on stage is a suspect, so I'm not going to say anything more about anyone else's acting, except it all was delightful.)  The story is of course a homicide mystery, but if you'd like a breath of fresh theatrical air in this hot, smokey summer,  I highly recommend The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which will be on stage at the Westport Country Playhouse July 14 through August 1, 2026.

Nemesis: Good to the Last Drop

My wife and I binged Nemesis -- eight episodes all up on Netflix -- and really enjoyed it.   The story is a life-and-death contest -- psychological, physical, strategic -- between two brilliant, driven men: LAPD Detective Isaiah Stiles and suave criminal mastermind Coltrane Wilder.   Stiles is convinced that Wilder, who has high-profile fronts in real estate and philanthropy, is behind and actively involved in all kinds of big crimes, including at least one that affected his family, but nobody including his police superiors believe him.

That's a good enough set-up for an edge-of-your-seat police series in itself, but both men are married to beautiful, highly intelligent women in complex relationships, and their families play an increasingly important role as the narrative unfolds.   Stiles's father and son, and Wilder's sister-in-law are major characters with elements of compelling stories that intersect with unforeseen consequences.  In addition, police of various positions and loyalties, and people in Wilder's gang with different levels of reliability, play crucial roles.

All of this rolls out with shoot-em-up action, including an excellent massive battle between good guys and bad guys, neither of which are entirely good or bad.  The acting was excellent.  No one other than Domenick Lombardozzi (Ray Donovan) (born on my birthday), Chris Bauer (For All Mankind), who both played senior LAPD people, and  were known to me, but all were memorable, especially Y'lan Noel as Wilder, Matthew Law as Stiles (a great example of name determinism), Mo Irvin as his father, Cleopatra Coleman as Wilder's wife (whom I just realized I saw and liked in a strange little time-travel movie In the Shadow of the Moon), and Gabrielle Dennis as Stiles' better half.

Hey, Nemesis was great summer fun, and would likely be just as good in winter.

Project Hail Mary: Better Than Disclosure Day

Well, the wife and I saw Project Hail Mary last night on Amazon Prime (it just got there this month, after its release in theaters in March) and I  liked Project Hail Mary a lot more than Disclosure Day.  Which is not to say I didn't like Disclosure Day, and the two are not exactly the same exact genre, so maybe the comparison is unfair.   But they do have a lot in common: humans and interstellar intelligences, unlikely heroes, oddball humor, life and death situations on the planetary level.

But Project Hail Mary has a lot more soul in the story, more humanity in the best sense of the word, and a more memorable, lovable interstellar intelligence.   Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) is one of the best human emissaries to the stars -- Tau Ceti, in this case -- in all the movies and TV shows I've seen on that topic over the years, beginning with Captain Video and His Video Rangers in the 1950s on the shortly lived Dumont Channel.   Grace surprises us at numerous junctures, as does Rocky (James Ortiz), the intelligent being from the planet Erid (circling the real star 40 Eridani), who with Grace goes to Tau Ceti e (the planet named Adrian in the movie).  Rocky doesn't have a face, though if you look at Rocky carefully at certain times from certain angles, it almost seems he does (I say "he" because Ortiz does Rocky's voice).

Drew Goddard wrote the screenplay from Andy Weir's novel, not surprising given the excellent job they did with The Martian.  Like that movie, Project Hail Mary is a fine piece of science fiction that plays with the limits of scientific plausibility.   Indeed, because the threats and solutions in Project Hail Mary are interstellar, far wider in scope than Mars and Earth, its connection to science is stretched pretty far and thin.   But in the end -- and in the beginning and middle, too -- I felt I was seeing a riveting story that Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein could have written, unlike a central element of Disclosure Day which felt more in the province of Walt Disney.

I also had no idea about how Project Hail Mary would end, until the very end, which is always a big plus in a movie.   This derives from the complex, unusual character of Ryland Grace, astutely written and perfectly acted.   In addition, the cinematography was otherworldly convincing and topnotch.   If you're in the mood for a movie in which Earth is threatened by something from outer space, in a situation that unfurls in a way that Hugo Gernsback would have really enjoyed, you can't go wrong with Project Hail Mary.

Star City 1.8: Sacrifice and Relevance

from my collection of Soviet space medals

Well, the season one finale of Star City -- episode 1.8 -- was one of the best finales of any season of any series I've ever seen.   It fired on so many cylinders -- ethical, personal, and sheer human accomplishment.  Here are some of them (and there will be spoilers ahead):

• Valya actually landing on Venus -- the end of his "one-way" trip (as he put it) to our neighbor planet between us and Mercury and the sun.  He did this because he had to be in the bathysphere, firing off Venerus, so Venerus could get back to Earth.  Also, because he knew the Soviets would hunt him down and kill him if he got back to Earth.
• Belikova, the first woman to land on the Moon, doing her best to stop the Soviet fascist monsters from killing Sasha and Lakshmi.  She knew those fascist soldiers would stop for a least a few seconds before they shot her down -- she was known to everyone in the Soviet Union -- and indeed they just took her into custody, without harming her.
• Sergei working with Chief Engineer Korolev to get Venerus back to Earth safely, which in this alternate history is Finland, not the Soviet Union, whose lunatics in power would kill their own people.
• Not completely a sacrifice,but nonetheless very admirable: Sasha not going with Lakshmi into Finland, but staying in the Soviet Union, so he could in some way be closer to his wife Belikova, whom he’s come to love.

I know I keep talking about the Nazi-like government that existed in the Soviet Union.  Korolev says none of that really matters, the important thing is "We sent human beings to Venus."   As usual, he has the best lines.  He sees the deepest truths.   But, for me at least, the fascism of the Soviet Union -- the murder of anyone who gets in the way of their agenda, even heroes who have risked their lives to go to Venus and back -- is also a deep truth, and very dangerous.  And its depiction in Star City, as I keep saying, is especially relevant -- fortunately for the series, unfortunately for us living in the United States and therefore the world at large.   I look forward to its continuing depiction in Star City, and its reduction in relevance to what is happening in the real reality unfolding in the United States.

See also Star City 1.1-1.2: Fascism and Space ... 1.3: Sadness and Joy ... 1.4: Venus in Blue Genes ... 1.5: The Spy Who Went to Venus ... 1.6: "You're A Monster" ... 1.7: Return Voyage

in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover

The Fix: A Short Film with a Crucial Story

I first met Amanda Greer nearly a decade ago, in 2017, after I saw her performance as Marilyn Monroe in Anthony Marinelli's play, Max & Domino, which was playing at The Duke on 42nd Street in Manhattan.  I had first gotten to know Anthony some years before, when he asked me if I thought he got Marshall McLuhan's concept of "acoustic space" right in the play Anthony wrote (later made into a movie) of the same name (Anthony did get it right).  And I first got to see Denise Reed, with Amanda, in Marinelli's production of Sartre's No Exit in 2020, and I saw the two again in Anthony's wise and hilarious Why I Had to Kill You While You Slept in 2023.  Denise also played an important role in an episode of FBI on CBS in 2024, and joined Amanda and Anthony and me in a dramatic reading taken from my 2024 novel It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles at Big Red Books in Nyack, NY in 2025 (Anthony and Amanda are real-life characters in the novel).

I tell you all this because when I heard that Amanda and Denise had formed a production company -- The Abbey, Stories Worth Telling By Women, For Women -- I couldn't wait to see one of their movies.  And The Fix, an 18-minute short (co-written by Chelsea Hattan and Anthony Marinelli, from a story by Amanda Greer), is one powerhouse of a film -- a brutal,  scathing, heartbreaking, hopeful, all-too-real portrait of what it means to be a woman addicted to heroin.

The heartbreak and horror of heroin addiction has been depicted in feature-length films like Trainspotting (1996) which also tried to leaven its message with dark humor.  The Fix has no time for that.  There's nothing funny about its smiles.   Anyone who thinks there's an easy exit out of this kind of hell will be quickly disabused.  Indeed, the creative work that comes closest to the The Fix in tone and message is something even shorter than this movie, John Lennon's "Cold Turkey", a song 5 minutes and 1 second long.

Speaking of cold turkey, of course in reality there are ways out of heroin addiction.  But all are life shaking.  Is The Fix wrong to vividly portray such a painful situation?  No, because it's also a testament to sheer human willpower, how the part of us that strives to save our lives can triumph over the part that seeks to blissfully self-destruct -- they're two sides of the same human coin.  Anything that shows people this reality is eminently worth seeing.  The Fix been making the film festival rounds -- garnering 16 nominations and 9 wins -- and will be at the 32nd Annual San Antonio Film Festival later this month of July.

Here's the trailer.

Star City 1.7: Return Voyage

I always say that unless you see a character's head blown off, or dissolved in a vat of acid, he or she may still be alive.  I learned this watching 24.

[And there will be spoilers ahead ... ]

It apparently happened again at the end of Star City 1.7.   Last week, in episode 1.6, we saw Colonel Raskova of the KGB ordering the murder of cosmonauts Sasha, Valya, and Lakshmi, by depriving them of their oxygen on their way to Venus -- after Sasha and Lakshmi disobeyed Raskova's order to do that to Valya --and Chief Engineer Korolev quit in fury and disgust as a result.  This week, in episode 1.7, we learn that the Venera (the Soviet ship to Venus) is returning to Earth as per schedule.

Now, that does not necessarily mean that the three cosmonauts are alive.  For all we know, the Venera was designed to move through space to and from Venus and even send messages back to Earth automatically.  And I guess the KGB and their lackeys in Star City could explain the three cosmonauts dead on the ship as due to a malfunction. But from what we've already seen on Star City, the cosmonauts, like our astronauts in that period of time, were more than spam in the can, as our real astronauts used to say.  They had work to do, making sure the voyage was on track, and all the tech was operating as it should.  So chances are the fix we saw Sasha attempt to put in at the end of 1.6 indeed got working to save at least one of the three, and I hope even more.

As I've already said here in earlier reviews, the battle between science and paranoid fascism in Star City is an excellent metaphor for the battle the U.S. is going through right now, with RFK, Jr and his anti-vaccine policy in our Department of Health, and much more.   I'm very glad to see science perhaps gaining the upper hand in Star City, and I'm hopeful it's beginning to happen right here in America on this Fourth of July.

See also Star City 1.1-1.2: Fascism and Space ... 1.3: Sadness and Joy ... 1.4: Venus in Blue Genes ... 1.5: The Spy Who Went to Venus ... 1.6: "You're A Monster"

in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover

Review of Jude O'Reilly's Heartbreaker: No One's an Angel

I just finished Jude O'Reilly's Heartbreaker, about a desperate mother's hunt for a serial killer who wiped out her whole family and left her to blame, literally.  I really enjoyed this novel, chocked full of stunners, replete with a multi-twist ending with shocker after shocker.

Now, readers of this blog through the years since 2006 will know my high regard for Dexter and its spinoffs, about a serial killer intent on eliminating serial killers and others out to destroy more or less good people.  O'Reilly's serial killer would be an ideal target of Dexter, he or she -- they, in today's parlance -- has nothing good about them.

O'Reilly has a keen understanding of human nature, including academe, a field I know all too well.  "Some of my colleagues are more interested in their own research. But for me, it’s the light that goes on in their eyes when a young person realizes a profound truth for the first time,” a professor tells the mother hunting the serial killer.  And O'Reilly's way with words infuses other elements of the story that somehow manages to be sassy, sexy, sage, and frightening throughout.  

Harvesting organs has played a role in fiction at least since Robin Cook's Coma in 1977, made into a movie the following year by Michael Crichton. Heartbreaker -- which applies more than figuratively to its story -- takes this to a whole new level.  Daphne, the desperate mother, is a defense attorney, and her interactions with police and lawyers provide a simmering blend of law, medicine, and often life-and-death ethical dilemmas that you'll likely ponder long after you finish the novel.

O'Reilly is British, and among the new words and phrases her novel taught me are "swallow hands","kohl eyes","plinth", and "blagging".  They'll be no blagging of your time if you read Heartbreaker, and I highly recommend it if your heart and soul are in need of a rollercoaster ride.

. 

Star City 1.6: "You're A Monster"

We come again in Star City 1.6 to the paradoxical collision of fascism and space travel so brilliantly and harrowingly portrayed in this at once triumphant and tragic series.  Triumphant because in this alternate history, the Soviet Union has managed to send a spacecraft with three humans on its way to circle around Venus.  Something the fascist Communist regime has managed to do.  And yet, paradoxical, because ...

[And there will be spoilers ahead.]

It looks, at the end of episode, that this paranoid government is very likely killing these three cosmonauts in mid-flight.  We'll see next week if that's what happens.  But even if it doesn't, the point is made.  On the one hand, we have geniuses like Korolev, the Chief Engineer, who got us humans to the Moon before the United States, and now in a momentous world-changing accomplishment is sending three humans to Venus.  On the other hand, we have KGB Colonel Lyudmilla Raskova ordering the three cosmonauts' death as their ship makes its way from Earth to our sister planet.  Korolev speaks plain, transcendent truth, when Raskova puts him under arrest, after he refuses to follow her insane order. He tells her, "you're a monster".

For all we know, in our offscreen reality, this could be why the Soviet attempt to beat the US to the Moon failed so grandly in the 1960s.  But we in the US were no angels then either.  Nearly 4 million people died on both sides of the US war against Vietnam, at the same time the US was preparing to land on the Moon and successfully retrieve six Apollo crewed spaceships there.  The Vietnam War was undeclared, a blatant violation of our Constitution.  Maybe one of the reasons we humans have not gone further into space is too many countries have monsters in too much power.  (Our current President and Federal government are defying the Constitution in multiple ways every day.) Maybe, until we rid ourselves of this human perversion, or learn to curb by it by not giving these monsters such power,  we'll never really get very out into the huge cosmos.

I'm an optimist, as you know, so I still fervently hope that we do.  In the meantime, watching Star City is as much a soul-searing, crushing experience as it is an inspiration for what our better selves can do.

See also Star City 1.1-1.2: Fascism and Space ... 1.3: Sadness and Joy ... 1.4: Venus in Blue Genes ... 1.5: The Spy Who Went to Venus

in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover

I Will Find You: Find It!

I probably say this about every Harlan Coben series I review here (11 and counting so far) that it's the best of all the adaptations of Harlan Coben novels I've had the pleasure to see (I haven't read any of them), but (a) it's true, and (b) I Will Find You, just up on Netflix, in its high-powered got-you-by-the-throat action and intricate moebius-strip complexity of the characters and their loyalties, is in a class of its own.

In fact, I don't recall ever seeing such a roster of characters with questionable loyalties to the man in prison for killing his son, except in some earlier Coben works, and those characters were far fewer in number.  As you'll know from seeing the trailer (and there'll be no other spoilers in this review other than what's in the trailer), David Burroughs (the father) didn't do it.  And when a current photo turns up in which his son Matthew is alive and well, I  Will Find You is off and running.  Everyone is suspect in one way or another for doing what really happened, just about every friend and relative and supporter has conflicting interests, and may or may not be part of why Burroughs landed in prison.  Even the villains may or may not be responsible for what happened to Burroughs.  The Boston police are riddled with bad guys -- nothing new about that -- and the FBI, with a father and daughter somehow working together, bring what we see in the excellent FBI series on CBS to a new level.

A story like this takes great acting, and I Will Find You has it.   I haven't seen much if any of Avatar, but I did see him in Titan, and Sam Worthington as David Burroughs does a fine job.   I have indeed seen and much enjoyed Britt Lower in Severance, and she's dynamite in this new series.   Jonathan Tucker, whom I first saw in The Black Donnellys and then in Debris, brings his usual intensity as Adam, one of the complex cops. Milo Ventimiglia, whom I first saw in Heroes, and Madeleine Stowe, whom I first saw in 12 Monkeys (the movie), play crucial roles.  Chi McBride, whom I first saw who knows how many years ago in I, Robot, and Logan Browning, whom I don't recall seeing before, were memorable as the father-and-daughter FBI team.  And it's interesting, at least to me, that everyone other than Browning have major science fiction roles in their past.  If there are any science fiction producers reading this, I'd recommend they cast Logan Browning for a major action role.  She's equally adept at leaping tall buildings and sassy conversation.

Today is Father's Day, and I'm looking forward to seeing my family.   I Will Find You was put up on Netflix just a few days ago.   In addition to its other virtues, the series makes a good testament to a father's unbending devotion to his son.

 

Star City 1.5: The Spy Who Went to Venus

It could have the first hour of a James Bond movie, made back in the 1970s.  Star City 1.5, that is. There wasn't any space flight until the very end, but what we got was a rather brilliant, tightly woven espionage story.  All on behalf of Korolev's, aka the Chief Designer's, secret Soviet mission to Venus.  A fine piece of Bondian science fiction.  Q would have been proud.

The KGB hunt for the Russian cosmonaut or worker in the Soviet space program who was giving crucial information to the Americans already caused the death of a cosmonaut in a previous episode.  The stakes are double life-and-death -- the KGB or Soviet police could kill the cosmonaut who was a spy, and of course he or she could perish in a space mission.  In case you haven't seen this episode, I won't tell you how this all played out, except to say again that we were treated to an excellent piece of espionage fiction. Although there were elements of this in For All Mankind, there was little that was as edge-of-your-seat exciting and ingeniously resolved as what happened in episode 1.5 of Star City.

There's also a bit of romance thrown in.   Sasha's letter to his wife, the first woman on the Moon, was touching.   On the one hand, men and women are thrown together for political reasons in this fascist, paranoid society.   On the other hand, we human beings can love and fall in love whatever the factors and forces that brought us together.  The humanity rising to the surface, and motivating people in this razor's edge story, is one of the highlights of this new series.

To get back to the alternate reality, if the portrayal of Korolev in Star City is even minimally accurate, I'm sorry the real man didn't live a lot longer.  If he had, I'd wager we would be a lot further out in space, with settlements on Mars and Venus, then we actually are today.

See also Star City 1.1-1.2: Fascism and Space ... 1.3: Sadness and Joy ... 1.4: Venus in Blue Genes

in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover

Audio Podcast: Paul Levinson interviews Deana Weibel about The Ultraview Effect

Welcome to Light On Light Through episode 420, in which I interview Deana Weibel about her new book, The Ultraview Effect.  I consider Deana the Margaret Mead of outerspace -- find out why in this interview.

Relevant links:

• More about The Ultraview Effect here
• Touching the Face of the Cosmos -- the anthology with Deana's Weibel's "Pennies from Heaven"
• Paul Levinson's reviews of For All Mankind and Star City
• Interview with Lance Strate in which we discuss his and Neil Postman's views of the space program

 

Check out this episode!

What I Learned from the Knicks

CNN Sports

I’ve never been much of a basketball fan. But like millions of other New Yorkers and people with their hearts in this great city, I got caught up in the NBA finals and was thrilled with the Knicks victory. And I learned something, confirmed something I already knew. Deadlines are real and often immutable. But until you reach them, anything is possible. Even if there are just split seconds left. 

As a Yankees fan since I was a little kid, I already knew this. One of the best things about the Yankees is the way they win games in which they’re trailing in the ninth inning. (Yogi Berra: "It ain’t over till it’s over.") But baseball, wonderful as it is, is a chess game, slow motion most of the time,  slow motion compared to the high-octane rush of basketball, and the Knicks demonstrated that point incandescently in the last two games of the NBA playoffs. 

The Spurs were leading by sizeable margins at halftime and beyond. The Knicks didn't start their juggernaut until well into the 4th quarter. And the Spurs didn’t know what hit them — twice. In the fourth and fifth games, once the Knicks started scoring, it was almost as if the Spurs were playing a different game, a different kind of basketball, or the same game in a different dimension. 

But the truth is that what the Knicks did is closer to the lives we all live. Deadlines have meaning. We ignore them at our peril, small and large. But until we reach them, anything is possible. While there’s life in a game, there’s hope. While there’s life, there’s hope. That’s a very important lesson, I think, for everyone.

 

Star City 1.4: Venus in Blue Genes

The most exciting thing in Star City 1.4 -- at least, to me -- is Chief Designer Sergei Korolev moving ahead with his plans for a ship with cosmonauts to go to Venus.  This, of course, never happened in our reality, because the real Korolev had died by this time (the early 1970s), and the Soviets pretty much had lost interest in bigtime expeditions into the solar system.

In Star City the series, the Soviets are still gung ho about space, and Venus is a nice counterpoint to Mars as a focus in For All Mankind, after everyone got to the Moon.  But Korolev has to contend with not only the exquisitely difficult engineering, but the excruciatingly intrusive Soviet KGB, which are breathing down his neck, and everyone else in the successful space program, every minute of the night and day.

In the Soviet Union, everyone's under observation, anyone could be spying for the Americans, and anyone could be working for the KGB.  On the one hand, the Soviets are justified in their concern about the Americans stealing some of the ingredients that got the Soviets so far thus far, and could to lead to far greater accomplishments -- like Soviets on Venus -- in the very near future.  On the other hand, the KGB are always on the verge of doing serious damage to the Soviet space program, and as we just saw last week, their meddling -- which it turns out was justified -- already got one cosmonaut killed. 

Star City has done a good job at portraying this volatile pressure cooker, and at this point, it's every bit as much as a good espionage thriller, as it is a significant piece and counterpoint to the alternate history space travel saga being done so well by For All Mankind.

See also Star City 1.1-1.2: Fascism and Space ... 1.3 Sadness and Joy

in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover

Disclosure Day: The Interstellar Birds

My wife and I just got back from seeing Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day on its debut day at the Chatham Orpheum Theater.  I thought it in many was a terrific, at times terrifying, tender, and sage movie, with a couple of flaws.

Here is some of what I especially liked about it:

• The action scenes, especially the ones with trains and cars, were outstanding.  Edwin Porter, Alfred Hitchcock, and James Bond would have approved.
• Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel) was a persuasive and plausible source of wisdom.  As I discussed in my 2020 essay The Missing Orientation, researchers have found that the organized religious group which finds the 1947 Roswell Incident (the first contact of the interstellar visitors in Disclosure Day) most likely a landing of travelers from somewhere beyond the Earth are Roman Catholics.
• Nixon showing off the interstellar bodies to a 1950s TV star (who looked like Jackie Gleason) was a perfect touch.
• The television news media were portrayed very well, at least as far as I know.  Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) asking for makeup before she makes her earth-shaking announcement is a good move for anyone who goes on any kind of television, for whatever reason: never say no to makeup.
• Mental telepathy plays a big part in the movie.  I was just debating on Facebook the other day with Steve Davidson (publisher of Amazing Stories) about whether mental telepathy was still a bonafide science fiction feature.  I said it was, and referenced Alfred Bester's 1956 The Stars My Destination.  Steve said it was then but now wasn't.  I said it still was. I thought Steven Spielberg made a good case for it in Disclosure Day.
• It's always great to see Colman Domingo on a science fiction screen.   Colin Firth put in an especially fine performance, too.

Here was what I wasn't especially thrilled with in the movie:

• I love wildlife, especially birds.  The idea that the interstellar visitors would masquerade as them so as not to unduly frighten we humans is sweet but a little ridiculous.   I guess Walt Disney would've liked that, though.
• I thought the story took a little too long to find its wings.  Maybe that's just me.
• I also thought the ending happened a little too quickly.  There's a lot of profundity to unpack in this narrative.  Maybe it would have been better told in a limited streaming series. 

But that last point is actually a kind of praise, and I highly recommend Disclosure Day.

See also: Good News for Amazing Stories: Now A Cult-Classic Six Years Later

Star City 1.3: Sadness and Joy

Apologies for reviewing Star City 1.3 a late evening later than I expected -- I was busy listening to the New York Yankees lose to the Boston Red Sox  (not happy that, in the Cape Cod area, TV coverage of the game was blacked out, plus I'm a big Yankee fan) and watching the New York Knicks win (happy I could see that on TV, and I'm a Knicks fan).   But I was nothing but happy about the Star City nightcap.

Not that the story was happy -- the Soviet Union was a tough, paranoid place to live, especially if you were a cosmonaut or otherwise connected to their space program.  The cosmonauts and their private lives were monitored, and the paranoia about the Americans trying to sabotage the Soviet program was by no means completely or even partially crazy.  A large part of the fun of this episode was figuring out who the U.S. collaborator was, and their identity was suitably surprising, as the cost to the Soviet space program of stopping this traitor was not.

But there was an underlying joy, for me at least, in seeing the Soviets work so hard to get ours species off this planet, albeit in their fascist way.  In our offscreen reality, no spacecraft with humans aboard has landed on the Moon since the final Apollo mission in the early 1970s.  In the alternate reality of For All Mankind and Star City, the Soviet Union has already landed on the Moon, and Korolev aka the Chief Engineer is already in the early stages of working on a trip to Venus.  Writing this now seems like science fiction.  And that's of course what For All Mankind and Star City are.  But they could easily have been reality.

For All Mankind excelled in exploring the lives of the human beings who made these voyages, and eventually came to live on Mars.  Star City looks like it might be beginning to do that for Venus. If you'd like know more about the human beings who have actually made it beyond this planet -- beginning with Yuri Gagarin, the first person to orbit this planet, a Soviet -- I highly recommend Deana Weibel's The Ultraview Effect, just published.

And I'll be back here next week with my review Star City 1.4.

See also Star City 1.1-1.2: Fascism and Space

in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover

Good News for Amazing Stories: Now a Cult-Classic Hit Six Years Later

 The 2020 reboot of the TV series on Apple TV “now a hit on streaming 6 years later”. See https://www.cbr.com/steven-spielberg-amazing-stories-sci-fi-apple-tv-pvod-success-june-2026/

See also 

• Amazing Stories (2020) 1.1: "The Cellar": The Tops

• Amazing Stories (2020) 1.2: "The Heat": Life after Life

• Amazing Stories (2020)1.3: "Dynoman and the Volt!": Sweet Superpowers

• Amazing Stories (2020)1.4: "Signs of Life": Happy Revivals

• Amazing Stories (2020)1.5: "The Rift": Time Travel and a Candy Bar

Star City 1.1-1.2: Fascism and Space

Just watched the first two episodes of Star City on Apple TV.   I think it's a powerful, exciting, politically potent narrative so far, and looks to be a worthy successor to For All Mankind.

Let's talk a little about the politics first.  The Soviet Union in the 1960s was one of the two most powerful countries in the world.  Unlike the United States, it was a fascist state.  Though it had been allied with the world's two leading democracies in  World War II -- the U.S and Great Britain -- the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin had more in common with Nazi Germany, and indeed had been Germany's ally when the two nations carved up Poland.  And though Stalin had died by the time Khrushchev and his successors took over, the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s was still a fascist, deeply undemocratic state.  It was that brutal state which beat the US to space with Sputnik, and got the first human being into orbit in space with Yuri Gagarin in our reality.

[And there will be spoilers ahead ...]

In the alternate history that began with For All Mankind, the Soviet Union goes on to also beat us to the Moon, and that set in motion a competition to get out into space from our world, Earth, whose human inhabitants would reach Mars and beyond in the decades that followed.  Star City tells us the Soviet side of that story.  It's a tale, very likely based on the way the Soviet Union really was, in which lives are expendable.  The Soviet woman chosen to be first female on the Moon is thought to be in cahoots with the West.  Turns out she isn't, but she's killed anyway. As KGB Colonel Lyudmilla Raskova (played by Anna Maxwell Martin) explains, we don't make mistakes.

Women, in general, play a major role so far in Star City, at this point, more so than in the equivalent first season of For All Mankind. Anastasia Belikova (played by Alice Englert) becomes the first woman on the Moon, but she's no slave to political pressure, and tows the line only after Raskova and a higher-up operative threaten to replace her with a look-alike. Irina Morozova, who has continued to play a semi-major role in For All Mankind, is a major character as her younger self (played by Agnes O'Casey) in Star City.  We see her progress from being unable to kill a prisoner when commanded by Raskova, to throwing scalding water in the face of a prisoner to get him to talk, and thereby saving his life -- at least, temporarily.

The most important male character, so far, is the Chief Designer or Chief Soviet Engineer (played by Rhys Ifans) -- we don't know his name.  He's the brains behind the Soviet space program, and is likely based on Sergei Korolev, the real-life genius who suffered a heart attack in 1962 and died under somewhat mysterious circumstances in our reality in 1966.  The alternate history series begins in 1969.  (I've always thought maybe the CIA had something to do with Korolev's death.  See also David S. Michaels and Daniel Brenton's novel Red Moon for another, related take on the Soviet space program in the 1960s.)  But whatever the real story of Sergei Korolev, I don't get why the Chief Designer in Star City, as of the first two episodes, is deprived of his name. 

To return to the dramatization of fascism that is the salient backbone of Star City so far, the timing couldn't be better in terms of what's really happening in Russia and the United States these days.  In Russia, after a brief taste of freedom that barely lasted a decade after the Soviet Union fell apart, Putin has done and is doing his best to re-establish a Soviet-like state, which is what his war on Ukraine is all about.  In the U.S., the reelection has Trump has brought this country into an escalating embrace of lies over truth, and governmental prosecution if you object to the lies, which are the hallmarks of fascism.  

For that reason, in addition to its excellent narrative, it's good and important to see Star City exploring the fascistic dynamic, and I'll be reviewing every episode.

in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover

For All Mankind Season 5 Finale: Whose Life on Titan?

Well, I've had problems with much of Season 5 of For All Mankind, but its finale, episode 5.10, up on Apple TV tonight, certainly saved the best for last, and that best was certainly outstanding, one of the best in the overall series.

[And there will be spoilers ahead ... ]

And that would be the discovery of life on Titan.  And as the characters in this series agree, that changes everything.  And the fact that this microbial life is methane-based, not carbon-based as is life on Earth, opens up all kinds of possibilities.  If life can arise in different compounds, that suggests that the universe beyond our solar system and galaxy, in the universe at large, there may be a myriad of life-forms, including intelligent life. In other words, the very essence of science fiction, become reality.

With just one more season of For All Mankind, I'm hoping there'll be time to suggest and maybe explore some of this.  And as long as I'm hoping, I'd also like to see more of Kelly Baldwin, alive.

Now I know she ran out of oxygen -- the oxygen she was carrying with her. But she did discover a big shimmering lake.  Could this lake have had some sort of oxygen accessible to Kelly?  According to one of the showrunners, Ben Nedivi, quoted in Inverse, the answer is no.  He says we've seen the last of Kelly, just as we saw the last of her father, Ed Baldwin, earlier this season.  And I know showrunners have the last word, but hey, they can always change their mind, and offer a meta-alternate history, in which what they intended in this season for Kelly, goes  a different way.

But speaking of other alternate histories, we also see, at the end of this episode, another surprise, which points to the parallel alternate history debuting tonight on Apple TV.  We see a Soviet spacecraft, damaged and derelict, out there in space not far from Saturn.  The fact that it's Soviet points to Star City, the first two episodes of which are also up tonight.  I'll be watching and reviewing them later tonight or tomorrow. 

And I'll be looking forward to the final season of For All Mankind, and regretting it's the final season.

See also For All Mankind 5.1: On the Intersection of Alternate and Real Histories ... 5.2: Actor Reunions ... 5.3: The Newton, the First Amendment, and ... Last Breath ... 5.4: Robots Replacing Us In Space? ... 5.5: ICE on Mars ... 5.6: Earth vs. Mars ... 5.7: Titan! ... 5.8: Firing On All Cylinders ... 5.9: Penultimate Episode of Penultimate Season

And see also For All Mankind 4.1: Back in Business and Alternate Reality ... 4.2: The Fate of Gorbachev ... 4.3-4.4: The Soviet Union in the 21st Century, On Earth and Mars ... 4.5: Al Gore as President and AI ... 4.6: Aleida and Margot ... 4.7: Dev on Mars ... 4.8: Sergei and Margot ... 4.9: Progress ... 4.10: Earth vs. Mars

And see also For All Mankind 3.1: The Alternate Reality Progresses ... 3.2: D-Mail ... 3.3-3.4: The Race

And see also For All Mankind, Season 1 and Episode 2.1: Alternate Space Race Reality ... For All Mankind 2.2: The Peanut Butter Sandwich ... For All Mankind 2.3: "Guns to the Moon" ... For All Mankind 2.4: Close to Reality ... For All Mankind 2.5: Johnny and the Wrath of Kahn ... For All Mankind 2.6: Couplings ... For All Mankind 2.7: Alternate History Surges ... For All Mankind 2.8: Really Lost in Translation ... For All Mankind 2.9: Relationships ... For All Mankind 2.10: Definitely Not the End

in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover

For All Mankind 5.9: Penultimate Episode of Penultimate Season

In case you think "penultimate" is some kind of compliment, it pretty much isn't.  This is the 5th season of a 6-season series, and the next-to-last episode of this 10-episode season.  It wasn't even a close-to-great episode of a close-to-great season, though I think the overall series is a memorable triumph in alternate history, about a crucial aspect of our existence: the need and attractiveness of getting off this planet to discover what place we have in the vast and (as far as we know) infinite universe.

But this season, with a couple of shining exceptions, didn't do much to further that alternate history or the metaphysics of existence beyond our planet.  As I've said in prior reviews, the battle between humans on Earth and on Mars is old hat in science fiction.  Episode 5.9 gives us yet another rendition of that, as the forces of our home planet strive to rip our brave pioneers on Mars to shreds.  And, indeed, there isn't much alternate history in any superior military force laying waste to a limited band of pioneers.

The action on Titan, on other hand, was riveting, as that story has been from the beginning.  The discovery of extraterrestrial life, in Ringo's words, don't come easy.   Kelly and her three-person crew, including the former captain, seemed fixed on finding it.  I wish them luck, and hope we see them getting at least a glimpse of it in the upcoming season finale later this week.

That finale will be up on Apple TV this coming Friday -- along with the Star City debut, another alternate history about the human sojourn into space, this time from the Soviet perspective, i.e,, the view from the victor of the race to get to the Moon, which is the basis of For All Mankind.  I'll certainly be reviewing that, humming "Back in the USSR", one of my Beatles' favorites, more recently done justice by The Analogues in our real history.

See also For All Mankind 5.1: On the Intersection of Alternate and Real Histories ... 5.2: Actor Reunions ... 5.3: The Newton, the First Amendment, and ... Last Breath ... 5.4: Robots Replacing Us In Space? ... 5.5: ICE on Mars ... 5.6: Earth vs. Mars ... 5.7: Titan! ... 5.8: Firing On All Cylinders

And see also For All Mankind 4.1: Back in Business and Alternate Reality ... 4.2: The Fate of Gorbachev ... 4.3-4.4: The Soviet Union in the 21st Century, On Earth and Mars ... 4.5: Al Gore as President and AI ... 4.6: Aleida and Margot ... 4.7: Dev on Mars ... 4.8: Sergei and Margot ... 4.9: Progress ... 4.10: Earth vs. Mars

And see also For All Mankind 3.1: The Alternate Reality Progresses ... 3.2: D-Mail ... 3.3-3.4: The Race

And see also For All Mankind, Season 1 and Episode 2.1: Alternate Space Race Reality ... For All Mankind 2.2: The Peanut Butter Sandwich ... For All Mankind 2.3: "Guns to the Moon" ... For All Mankind 2.4: Close to Reality ... For All Mankind 2.5: Johnny and the Wrath of Kahn ... For All Mankind 2.6: Couplings ... For All Mankind 2.7: Alternate History Surges ... For All Mankind 2.8: Really Lost in Translation ... For All Mankind 2.9: Relationships ... For All Mankind 2.10: Definitely Not the End

in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover

Podcast Review of On the Calculation of Volume (Vols 1-4)

Welcome to Light On Light Through episode 419, in which I review Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume (Vols 1-4).

Relevant links:

• written review of Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume (Vols 1-4)
• It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles
• McLuhan in an Age of Social Media

Check out this episode!

On the Calculation of Volume (Book IV): Death and Life

Well, I entitled my review of the third book in the seven-volume On the Calculation of Volume series "Multiplication", but after reading the fourth book of the series -- I just finished it a few minutes ago -- I think I might well have been premature with that title.  The number of people trapped in November 18 in the fourth book multiply faster than bunnies, and as I said in my review of the third book, this gives author Solvej Balle the avenue to explore a myriad of angles and theories about what happened to her and her temporal siblings as each of them offer their evolving views.

These range from the nature of time to multiple universes to the nature of everything, organic and manufactured, in their lives and throughout history.  Everyone has an opinion, and a shade of opinion, sometimes as mundane as Tara herself wondering "weren’t our vehicles first and foremost a form of protection?" That struck a chord in me, because it reminded me of something Marshall McLuhan once said to me, as we strolled the streets of Toronto, on one of my visits, with my wife, in the late 1970s:  "You know," he said, "the automobile retrieves the knight in shining armour," as a flashy Chevy Impala from the 1950s with fins and all drove by.

Sometimes the insights were so recondite that they didn't make sense, at least, not to me.  One of the new character inmates of November 18, Milly, shares her opinion that "we’re the ones who can kill in the eighteenth, not them [i.e, we the readers]. When they kill, their actions vanish overnight. When we kill, we end lives. Irrevocably." Then she adds, "We were both more dangerous and more vulnerable than those who moved through the world believing that the eighteenth was simply a day between the seventeenth and the nineteenth, because no matter what happened to them, they would wake up to the eighteenth again." So ... I don't quite get this -- I and I assume you move through a world in which the 18th of any month is simply a day between the 17th and the 19th, and if someone in our world died, we would not wake up the next day and find them alive, again, right?  Maybe an error crept into the translation.  Maybe an error in my scrambled brain.  If not, maybe I'm living in a world which is somehow even more science fictional than I thought.

But life and death do play a very significant role in this fourth volume.  For some reason, a few plants begin to bud and grow indoors in this repeating day.  I wondered, at that point, what would happen if someone became pregnant, or was pregnant when she entered the time loop, and sure enough, another character, Sonia, reveals she is carrying a baby.  But, sadly, she loses the baby -- it just disappears.  

As usual, there is a potential game-changer in the closing pages of this book, and I won't tell you what it was, except that I was thinking about something like that as I read this fourth volume.  There are seven volumes in this series, as I already mentioned, and only the fifth is available in English in the US, in paperback.  I'm sorely tempted to get it, but I've been reading this metaphysical adventure so far in Kindle, and I'd like to keep doing that.  Amazon says the Kindle will be up this coming November, but we'll see if I can wait that long.

See also On the Calculation of Volume (Book I): The Irreducible Metaphysics of Time Loops ... (Book II): Life in the Loop Lane ... (Book III): Multiplication

in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover

in Kindle and paperback