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 |
No comments:
Post a Comment