For All Mankind 5.6: Earth vs. Mars

Episode 5.6 of For All Mankind, up on Apple TV since late last week, was a middling good episode depicting the rising tensions verging on war between Earth and the human settlement on Mars..

First, Earth vs. Mars is a well-trodden topic.  On TV, it was well explored in The Expanse.  In books, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy did an excellent job of it.  The best part of this episode, for me, was seeing the role of the Soviet Union, still in existence and thriving in this alternate history.  The kiss between Lily and Alex was also nice to see.

The ending of the episode promises an interesting stream with Dev now determined and on-track to doing something big to stop and/or surmount the escalating conflict between Mars and Earth.  Bringing Dev into For All Mankind in the first place was a good dramatical move -- he's a wildcard, like Musk and Bezos in our own reality.   All have billions of dollars, rankle under the yoke of governments, and have the power to march to some extent to their own drums.   In Dev's case, he may not only have this power, but the wherewithal to impose it on the US, the Soviet Union, and the countries on Planet Earth.  We'll see.

Actingwise,  Edi Gathegi as Dev is a good choice to deliver the goods.  And speaking of acting, Mireille Enos's Celia is by far the best of the military on Mars.   There's also a lot of potential in the Titan mission, and what it might discover there.  I don't know if we'll get a chance to see that this season, but I'm looking forward to more -- more profound developments, more eye-opening, brain-teasing wonders in our solar system, more than the ICE-like agents on Mars, which (as I've said in my review of episode 5.5) I've already seen more than enough of in our real world these days down here in the United States.

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

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

Superman: Foe of Musk and Putin

I've been following and enjoying Superman's exploits since I started watching him played by George Reeves on television when I was a kid in the 1950s, and started reading the comic book a few years later, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster way back in 1938.  And as an adult I even contributed an article about The Man of Steel -- “Superman, Patriotism, and Doing the Ultimate Good” (which explored why Superman didn't just wipe out Hitler and the Nazis in World War Two) in The Man from Krypton -- an anthology published in 2006.

I think I've also seen most of the movies.  Like the TV series and the comics, they were all immensely entertaining.  But none packaged that with the political acumen and clout that James Gunn invested in the new Superman movie that my wife and I just saw in the LOOK Dine-In Cinemas in Dobbs Ferry.  Andrew Slack and Jose Antonio Vargas nailed in their guest column in The Hollywood Reporter, "Yes, Superman Has Always Been an Immigration Story," what Gunn did in his movie.  Superman has always been the ultimate alien -- literally, he came from outer space.  And just as people from other countries helped build and protect America from day one, so Superman has done the same since he started growing into adulthood in Kansas.

The movie also gets all the related political travesties and depredations that currently afflict our country and thereby the world right on target, too.  Lying buffoons on a Fox-like "news" channel, a fickle populace gobbling down fake news like it was cotton candy, a Putin-like character invading a neighboring country just as Hitler did in the 1930s, and most important, making Lex Luthor, Superman's brilliant, demented arch-enemy who first appeared in the comics in 1940 into someone we've all come to know all too well the past few years.

My nine-year-old grandson called it when he saw Superman with my son a couple of days ago and told him: "Lex Luthor is Elon Musk".  I don't know if Musk is as smart or as evil as Luthor, but he's certainly done plenty of damage.  Among the many reasons to cheer what Gunn has done in this movie is the way he put up Musk in Luthor.

And there are indeed many other reasons.  Superman is not only powerful but vulnerable and amazingly admirably sweet and good -- he takes the time to save a squirrel.  David Corenswet (who was in one episode of House of Cards) was excellent in the title role.  So were Rachel Brosnahan (Mad Men, Mrs. Maisel ) as Lois Lane, Edi Gathegi (For All Mankind, StartUp) as Mr. Terrific, and Nathan Fillion (The Rookie, Castle) as Green Lantern.  In fact, everyone was in fine form, including the super heroes I didn't know, the robots, and especially the dog.

So, if you're a fan of Superman, you can't go wrong with this movie.  And if you're a fan of democracy and a foe of fascism, you can go wrong with this movie, either.

***

Note added: James Gunn claims in this interview that one of the biggest pieces of fake news in his movie -- a recording of Superman's parents, released by Lex Luthor, urging their son to use his super powers to dominate the world -- actually wasn't fake news at all, that is, Superman's parents really said that.

My response: as I. A. Richards advised way back in the 1920s, it's a mistake to ask the author or creator what they intended in a given passage (or scene). They may be trying to manipulate the public, for whatever reason. It's far better, Richards says, to let the work speak for itself.

(Thanks Cynthia Walker and Nick Leshi for getting a conversation about this going on Facebook.)

Aporia: Firing Back in Time

Readers of this blog will know that my favorite genre -- as a viewer, reader, and author -- is time travel, and its close relative alternate history.  You'll know this because I say it in just about every other post.  But you would also know this because, at least by my lights, excellent and even good examples are not easy to find (and, I'll immodestly or modestly say, as an author, to write).

But Aporia, a 2023 movie I saw last night on Hulu, is an excellent example.  The heart of its narrative is that a would-be inventor (later, inventors), of a time machine discovers that the clanky machine he's struggling to build in his home can't quite do it -- it's not powerful enough to hurtle a human back in time -- but it can send a subatomic particle back to a specific time and place (the time just a handful of years or a little bit in longer into the past), where it will cause a very minor explosion.  And the inventor realizes that if the place in the past where the subatomic particle lands is inside someone's head, well, what he the inventor has created is a gun that can reach back and kill someone in the past, by putting one of these time-travelling particles into the target's head.

[And I'll here I'll tell you that there will be spoilers ahead ... ]

So, there are three main characters in Jared Moshe's movie (which he wrote and directed): Jabir and Mal were working on the time machine in Jabir's home, when Mal was killed by a drunk driver.  This of course left his wife Sophie desolate.  Jabir is desperate to ease her pain, and restore her life, and comes up with a plan: send one of those lethal subatomic particles back in time, to land in the drunk driver's head, before he gets into the car and accidentally kills Mal.  And the plan works!

But that's when Aporia really gets riveting and ethically wrenching, as Sophie struggles with the fact that although she got her husband back, she had to take another human life to do it.  She reaches out to the drunk driver's widow.  They become friends, and so do their daughters. And here the movie excels in depicting how the people who know the original reality, and know that it has been altered, deal with the new reality they now inhabit.  (I tend to like this metaphysics of time travel -- that people who cause the changes in time are aware of the changes, even if the changes affect them -- maybe because I always employ such a narrative structure in my own works.)  As Sophie gets to know the drunk driver's family, she finds she can't bear the fact that she was responsible for killing the drunk husband and father, however much he may have deserved it ... but any attempt to change the past again by killing someone else with a time-traveling particle could have unforeseen consequences ...

Aporia resonantes in all kinds of ways.  The build-your-machine-at-home continues the tradition started by H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, and furthered more recently by Primer and just a few months ago Quantum Suicide.  The idea of sending something rather than people or living things back in time was put to good use by Gregory Benford in his 1980 award-winning novel, Timescape, in which information could be sent back in time.  And the idea of apprehending criminals, not because they committed a crime, but because you know they will commit a crime, was of course memorably developed by Philip K. Dick in his novel The Minority Report. 

But Aporia has a story and an ambience all its own, brought to life by really excellent acting by Judy Greer as Sophie, Edi Gathegi (who has been great in For All Mankind, and before that, StartUp) as Mal, and Payman Maadi as Jabir.  And all of this builds up to a top-notch ending, in which a smile tells us almost everything.

my interview with Jared Moshe

watch the movie on Amazon Prime Video -- read the novelette here

in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover

For All Mankind 3.2: Dmail

My favorite alternate history detail in For All Mankind 3.2 on Apple TV+ yesterday is "dmail" -- that's the name in 1992 for what we call email in our world.  I guess "d" comes from digital -- digital mail, just as the "e" in ours comes from electronic mail.  I like details like that.

[Now for some bigger spoilers... ]

I had a feeling as soon Marge fired Molly and removed Ed from the Mars mission that he would wind up on what Dev was doing.  He's a great character.  An Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Richard Branson mega-rich titan with the cosmic visionary quality of Steve Jobs.  And he's played by Edi Gathegi, who was just iconic in StartUp.

And I like the way Ed got there.  I said in my review of last week's 3.1 that I thought Sam's death was good for the narrative, freeing up Karen to maybe get back with Ed and who knows else.  In 3.2, we learn that Ed has split with his wife (good), and Karen and Ed are indeed much closer.  But, most importantly, she pitches Ed as the leader of Dev's mission (pitch is his apt word), he takes a vote of his people in the room (his company is at least this far a democracy), and Ed is commanding the mission.

This sets up a heated rivalry between Ed (Helios) and Danielle (whom Marge has chosen to lead the first Mars mission for NASA) and who knows who the Soviets might send up there.  And to up the ante, and increase the pressure, Dev is moving up the date of the mission.

It's an easy prediction that Ed and Danielle will be on Mars at the same time, and one will likely save the other.  But that's getting ahead of the story, and I'll see you back here next week with my review of 3.3.

See also For All Mankind 3.1: The Alternate Reality Progresses

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

get the paperback or Kindle here

or read the story FREE here

*** Note added 27 October 2023:  Check out my review of Jack Dann's new book, The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History