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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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The Best Novel You Likely Never Heard Of

No, it's not one of my mine.   And I do this every few years - blog about a novel that's not only one of the best you likely never heard of, but, for what it's worth, is one of the best I've ever read.  I guess I should also mention that the novel is science fiction - which means, it's not competing with Austen or Dickens or Tolstoy or Hemingway.   But I should also say that I think science fiction always has a leg up - a page up? a screen up? - on all other kinds of literature, because science fiction deals with makes us quintessentially human, which I take to not just accept what the universe deals out, not just cope with it, but strive to change the universe itself.

The novel is by David S. Michaels and Daniel Brenton.

You never heard of them, right?

They published a novel, in the year 2000, entitled Red Moon (not to be confused with Michael Cassutt's novel of same name published around the same time, and the half a dozen other novels by the same name published since then). Cassutt's novel is good. Dave Michael and Daniel Brenton's is among the best three or four novels I've ever read, period - as I already said.

The background of the novel: I've always been fascinated by the collapse of the Soviet space program in the 1960s. The Soviets jump-started the space age with Sputnik in 1957. They got the first animals and then the first people up into space. They sent spacecraft – with no people – to the moon. They were on the verge of getting people there.

They inspired John F. Kennedy – in the senses of both wonder and security – to put the U.S. on a course to send a human to the moon and safely back by the end of the decade. Which we did.

But the Soviets never made it. Their move into space hit a strange stone wall. And the lack of continuing competition between the Soviets and us was likely the most significant factor in the fizzling of our own efforts in space.  Forty-five years later, and we have yet to set foot on the moon again, or anywhere beyond the space station.

What happened to the Soviet space program? The death of its mastermind, Sergei Korolev in 1966, no doubt was a grievous blow.  But… I don't know… there were a lot of other talented people working in the Soviet space program. The death of one man, however important, should not have led to the crash of the entire program.

Red Moon provides some breathtaking science fictional answers.

How I found out about the novel: It was at a reading I was giving at a science fiction convention – Balticon (in Baltimore) in the Spring of 2001. David S. Michaels came up to me after the reading, with a copy of my novel, The Silk Code, for me to autograph. Then he pulled a 600-page book out of his backpack, and asked me to please accept it, as a gift.

I wasn't sure what to say. First, traveling back from Baltimore to New York by train (I love driving, but trains even more) is no fun with a heavy bag of books, which I already had. Second, as a writer, I find I don't read as much fiction as I would like – if I'm writing a novel, which I usually am, reading someone else's can throw me off course. But ...

There was something about Dave, and I was already keenly interested in the subject, so I thanked him for the present and added it to my bag (it was filled with non-fiction books, by the way, which I do read when I can).

It was well into June before I had a chance to open Red Moon. And when I did – well, I couldn't put it down. It might as well have been a new Foundation novel. The subject, the plot, the characters, the writing was brilliant. I contacted Dave right away, told him how much I enjoyed the novel. It had been published by a very small press. I told him I would try to get it to the attention of a bigger publisher.

Which I did… But all of this was right before September 11, 2001, when lots of things changed in the publishing world (most of which is headquartered in New York City). And in the aftermath, at least the publishers that I had been in contact with were doing other things, and cutting back their acquisition lists.

And so, nothing more happened with Dave Michaels and Daniel Brenton's Red Moon. I listed it as my #1 favorite first science fiction novel on a list I started on Amazon. (It's a pretty exclusive list. I'd highly recommend Bob Katz's Edward Maret, which is #2 on the list. Wen Spencer's Alien Taste and Larry Ketchersid's Dusk Before Dawn are there, too.  I've put up and expanded the list on Goodreads, where you and everyone can add books and vote on their ranking.)

Amazon's Kindle revolution now has given Red Moon a new life. (I also have a reader review of the novel there.)  Kindle has been doing this for lots of novels, including many of mine.   (The Red Moon paperback is still available.)

If you're at all interested in the space race, what could have been, why what happened — and didn't happen – happened, the extraordinary human struggle to reach the cosmos, give yourself a treat, and get a copy of this novel. Trust me – you'll be caught up in an adventure, in an intrigue of alternate and real history, that you'll never forget.




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