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
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