TV Review: For All Mankind (Seasons 1-4). On Apple TV+.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a comment somewhere by an entertainment reviewer who mentioned that “of course” she had immediately started bingeing the latest season of the science fiction space exploration series For All Mankind on Apple TV+. That caught my attention, since for some reason I had been avoiding checking it out, even though I am currently in an Apple TV-watching phase (like many of us, I began economizing by turning my various streaming subscriptions on and off in turn several years ago).

 

Perhaps I was avoiding it because I’ve never been much of a fan of alternate history stories, particularly when they focus on the period of time I’ve lived in. And fictionally riffing on realistic space flight and real space science, rather than the fantastic and magical worlds of most science fiction, somehow sounded kind of dull to me.

 

I was so mistaken. I don’t remember the last television show I’ve watched that has so immediately grabbed my attention and refused to let go. This is an amazing, incredibly exciting piece of television. It works on so many different levels, and explores a vast range of human, social, technological and political topics on (and off) our own world. I’ve been bingeing it for the past several weeks, which is a large project, given that there are currently four seasons of ten episodes apiece, with each episode an hour and a half long. I’m only finishing season 3 now.

 

The basic concept for the series is this: the story begins in the summer of 1969 with the dramatic announcement of the successful landing of the “first man on the Moon”, which as we all know was accomplished (in our version of history) by Neil Armstrong on the Apollo 11 mission. But in the show’s altered version, the Russian space program gets there a month before the U.S., and not only that, the first person on the moon is a woman – a female cosmonaut.

 

This shocking pair of twists kicks off a frantic escalation of the space race, where human exploration of the moon and Mars are not abandoned for the next fifty years (as they have been in our reality), and where women get an earlier and more prominent role in the U.S. space program than they actually did in the version of reality we have lived through.  

 

These alterations to our familiar history trigger an astonishing new version, peopled by a large ensemble cast of characters that changes over time, as heroes die or move on, characters age, and new players arrive on the scene. The casting and acting is consistently excellent, the scripts and plots are superb, the drama is intense and riveting, and new challenges and dangers are constantly introduced, as individuals and nations vie for power and dominance in space.

 

The structure of the series is essentially this: each season tells the story of the ongoing space race in successive decades. Season 1 takes place in the early 1970s, Season 2 moves the story into the mid-1980s, Season 3 is set in the mid-1990s, and so on. Apparently there are plans to continue out through seven seasons, which would put us somewhere near our own real time (in the 2020s) at the end of the series.

 

Even though there are many characters, there is a core group at the center of the story over time, made up of a few individuals on their own, and several families whose members all have their own individual and familial relationship stories. There are even some characters who are based on real people from our space program, like Deke Slayton and Sally Ride, as well as real major political figures and other celebrities we recognize.

 

At the beginning of For All Mankind, in the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Season 1, many of the important characters seem to be taken almost straight out of Tom Wolfe's book (and the movie) The Right Stuff. They’re macho, driven, daring military test pilots (from which the original NASA astronaut corps was built), along with their long-suffering wives and children. As in real life, the family members have to balance the pressures of instant fame, constant press scrutiny, and rigid role expectations as public figures in the American space program, with the recurring terror of waiting for their husbands and fathers to come back from their space training and missions, or perhaps dying on the job.

 

As a group of American women pilots is hastily recruited to compete with the Russian female cosmonauts and their role in the Soviet space program, though, new social and political elements enter the story. With each new plot development, familiar human and social conflicts from our era appear, slowly changing not only the space program, but the society and the course of the altered history itself, as issues like feminism, equal rights for women, gay rights, the civil rights struggle, and many other social pressures interact with the diverging reality and timelines created by the show’s accelerating space race.

 

The show does a terrific job of depicting the lived experience of the people who have built our actual space program, as well as the fictional accelerated version we see in the story. We witness the whole range of emotions, behaviors and plots among the characters: love, ambition, jealousy, loyalty, bravery, heroism, self-sacrifice, selfishness, irrationality, sex, infidelity, addiction and betrayal – really, anything you can imagine in a human drama shows up somewhere in an episode.

 

There’s an important point being made thereby, which is this: no matter what astonishing new worlds humans may visit or inhabit, and what brilliant technologies we invent to get there, we will take our essential natures and problems with us. Humanity and our societies will not be perfected or cleansed of our imperfections by finding new worlds to live on.

 

Another thing I wanted to mention is that this show, more than most science fiction, is steeped in the science and engineering of human space flight and space travel as we understand it. There are no warp drives, death rays or light sabers. It’s telling that several of the most important characters are engineers and scientists.

 

We see them at work in NASA’s Mission Control and Johnson Space Center, and later in private industry, trying to design the equipment the astronauts must use to survive in the hostile environments of space, and often responding to emergency situations reminiscent of our real Apollo 13 mission, where accidents and equipment failures in space have to be remedied in a hurry by NASA Mission Control and the astronauts working together, using whatever materials are at hand.

 

These aspects of the story are made more powerful by the impact of the outstanding visual storytelling throughout the series. We watch as the equipment, the interiors and the backgrounds on Earth slowly change with the technologies and fashions we recognize from each passing decade (along with some new inventions we've never seen before). The producers have done all this with wonderful attention to historical period detail and authenticity.

 

Did I mention that since this is essentially a Cold War story, we’ll also encounter all the familiar dramatic plot lines that come with that genre too? With the U.S.-Soviet competition in space, we also naturally get espionage plots, domestic political conflict, nuclear brinkmanship, and even the threat of battles and war in space. Just in case there aren’t enough tensions and dangers in space exploration itself to keep the story lively . . .   

Another truly impressive feature of the series is how convincing and lifelike the landscapes of the Moon and Mars appear, with astronauts trying to live and work in their primitive habitats on those distant worlds, and inside their tiny spacecraft on the way. It all looks so real, just like the video and pictures we’ve seen taken by our space program’s astronauts and remote rovers.

 

There are apparently extensive podcasts that accompany this entire series, which delve into the science behind each episode and its plot developments. I haven’t had a chance to listen to any of those yet, but it seems to me it might be a further bonanza for anyone who is interested in learning more about space exploration, and the challenges humanity faces in trying to survive off this planet, traveling in deep space and on at least to our nearest planetary neighbors.

 

For All Mankind is simply brilliant television, a compelling, entertaining and vast epic about humanity’s quest for the stars, as well as an exploration of our own society, our world and recent times from the perspective of a subtly altered reality. Very highly recommended.   

Book Review: The Every (Dave Eggers, 2021).

A while ago, I wrote a review of Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle from 2015, which was made into a good film with Emma Watson in the starring role. The Circle told the story of a naïve young woman who goes to work for a huge, powerful California tech company (called The Circle), that combines an insular campus full of idealistic young employees, a charismatic male founder with cult-leader magnetism, and the sort of messianic “save the world through better tech and openness” approach to business that is by now all too familiar.

I’ve recently become a real fan of Dave Eggers, as I’ve read more of his books and come to appreciate what a fine and prolific writer he is. He is one of the few popular authors I know of who routinely produces outstanding, smart best-sellers in both fiction and non-fiction categories, and I’ve now enjoyed and appreciated several of his books from each genre.

 

But in The Every, Eggers’s sequel to The Circle, he has outdone himself, with a just-barely fictionalized account of a recognizable, chaotic, fast-evolving version of our society that will make you laugh at its absurdity, at the same time it will terrify you with how closely it appears to mirror our own world, and the dangerous directions in which we seem to be heading.

 

In The Every, The Circle has grown by mergers and acquisitions into a new mega-corporation (The Every) that now dominates almost every sphere of global business, and increasingly politics, communications, healthcare and the environment, through its tight control of supply chains and its massive financial power. But the real source of its power is data, obtained through the steady erosion of personal privacy protections, which are collapsing under a relentless onslaught of popular new smartphone applications, sold by The Every to an eager population under the guise of personal empowerment and self-improvement.

 

As in The Circle, the main protagonist is an intelligent and sympathetic young woman. But there the similarities end, because in The Circle, our hero (or anti-hero) Mae Holland took the frustrations and setbacks she encountered in her job as the fuel that led her to challenge the company’s leadership to a dangerous game of corporate politics, and through a series of smart moves and timely revelations to ultimately triumph over them.

 

In the nearly omnipotent and all-knowing environment of The Every, though, our hero is Delaney, on a secret private mission to work her way into the company, to find the one lever that will allow her to destroy it in the hope of saving human privacy and freedom. With the help of a hacker friend, she manages to get hired, then slowly evolves a plan to use her social engineering skills to propose new applications so horrific in their privacy implications that she dreams they will create a public revolt that must lead to the company’s demise.

 

There’s only one problem with her plan. Each time she helps create another terrible new privacy-violating app, it becomes wildly popular, leading to even less freedom and privacy for everyone, and turns into another huge triumph for The Every instead. Can Delaney find a way out of her increasingly hopeless situation? And how long can she keep up her quixotic campaign to save the world, before she’s discovered and fired or worse?

 

This is an inspired dystopian novel, and a black comedy as well. It’s funny in the sense that every time another setback occurs, as Delaney’s subversive plans produce the exact opposite result that we would expect and hope for (in terms of peoples’ presumed desire for freedom and dignity), you have to laugh. And admit to yourself that although it’s another very depressing plot twist, it also seems perfectly realistic – exactly what you believe would probably happen in our own society, as well as the world of the novel.

 

It’s brilliant too in its portrayals of the behavior of people at work in a modern tech company, as they deal with the internal contradictions between their desire to please management, to gain status relative to their peers, to conform to get ahead, and to handle qualms about doing something seemingly immoral or repugnant when it also pays their salaries.

  

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World asked essentially the same questions about what we humans want (as between technology and freedom) almost a century ago, but most of the science and technology he envisioned in his story didn’t exist yet.  It does in the world of The Every. There’s hardly any advanced technology, or corporate, political and social behavior modification in this book that isn’t already here, or utterly believable based on current trends.

 

Read it and dread (or maybe not, depending on where you are on the “convenience versus privacy” spectrum).  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Sea of Tranquility (2022). Emily St. John Mandel.

This is an earnest first attempt at a real science-fiction novel by the author of Station Eleven, which follows a number of ordinary human characters in different earth eras, from the early 20th century to an imagined future a few centuries ahead, where there are human colonies on the moon, and in deep space too.

In addition to those sci-fi story creations and plot premises, she also includes a time travel element, and plays with the contemporary fascination with the possibility of reality being nothing more than an advanced computer simulation. In this book, she imagines a world where that may in fact be the case, but also poses the question of whether that actually matters to the people experiencing that reality.

There’s also a global pandemic in the story, and an author separated from her family, on a book tour at its onset, who may or may not die as a result of the disease. Remember that this story is coming from a popular real author, who had previously written a real novel about a global pandemic (Station Eleven), then had to keep functioning as a professional writer and mother during an actual pandemic. There’s something so familiar sounding about that scenario! A little projection onto her fictional character, perhaps?

As with her other books, Mandel’s strength is in creating believable characters with whom we can empathize, and believable dialogue in unusual or unfamiliar situations. Even though the story suggests themes of the COVID-19 era of the past two years, and our collective experience of it, it is still an entertaining and engaging tale. Recommended.

Book Series Review: Outlander. Diana Gabaldon.

I previously reviewed the ninth novel in the long series of Outlander novels by Diana Gabaldon, Go Tell the Bees that I Am Gone (2021), but have now decided that I ought to provide a little more information and a description of the entire set of books in the series, which began with the release of the first novel, Outlander, in 1991. That's mainly because, after spending several years reading all nine of the gigantic Outlander novels (each one runs roughly 900 pages of hardback-sized pages filled with small, densely compacted text), I've become a completely devoted fan of this amazing long-running book series.

I was happy to learn last year, around the time Go Tell The Bees That I Am Gone was published, that Dr. Gabaldon (yes, the author is also a PhD biologist) plans to write a tenth and final Outlander novel before the series concludes at the end of the American Revolution. This may take her a few years, if past performance is an indication; each novel she's added to the series has taken roughly five years to appear after the preceding one.  Fortunately, recent online stories confirm that she is now at work on this tenth novel, so at least we can start the clock running on when it might arrive!

I decided to try to read the first book after becoming a fan of the Starz TV show, Outlander,  which is closely based on the book series. These novels (and the show) are a curious mix of genres, combining well-researched historical fiction, romance and sex from a woman's perspective, and science fiction/fantasy, which have drawn generations of enthusiastic readers and now TV viewers to the outstanding TV version of the story.

The main character and principal narrator at the heart of the stories is Claire Randall, a modern Englishwoman and feisty, resourceful young veteran of World War II service as a combat nurse. While on a "getting reacquainted" holiday after the war with her husband Frank, she accidentally falls through a time portal in a ring of ancient standing stones, and ends up alone in early 1740s Scotland, where she has to quickly adapt to a very different world and life in order to survive. 

They're very thick novels, rich in period detail, adventure and racy love stories, and very addicting, but they take a long time to read, and the plot jumps around between olden and modern (20th century) times, so I'll refrain from recounting the contents of each book in my review.

So what are they about? Mainly, they're incredibly rich historical novels. They portray individual, social and family life in the past through a large cast of interesting characters, whose stories and fates are interwoven through their family relationships, wars, rebellion and coincidence across a specific arc of past time, history and locations.

That arc begins with the Jacobite uprising for “Bonnie Prince Charlie” in Scotland in the early 1740s, then moves through the post-Culloden Scottish migration to America, colonial life in the new world, and the years of the American Revolution -- which, as Diana Gabaldon has explained in interviews, is the period when the pre-industrial world was transitioning to the modern scientific and technological era.

They're also wonderful romance novels, focused primarily on one couple (Jamie and Claire Fraser), but also on their children, close family members and friends, and the intimate details of their various sex lives, loves, traumas, battles, adventures and relationships over decades.

But wait, there's more! They also contain a very good sci-fi/fantasy time-travel story, with occasional bits of apparent magic thrown in, as well as a fascinating ongoing exploration of modern medicine in contrast to primitive healing, and the knowledge and beliefs of each, along with convincing portrayals of what ordinary life was like before germ theory, anatomical knowledge and penicillin were discovered.

With all that going on, these Outlander books take forever to read and absorb, but at least from my perspective, it is totally worth it. These books now rank among my top fiction series ever, along with Patrick O'Brien's epic 20-volume Master and Commander Aubrey/Maturin series, C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series, Frank Herbert's original 6-volume Dune series, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Very highly recommended.

Book Reviews: Honorable Mentions List (Fiction and Science Fiction)

In my most recent personal note from last Sunday, July 23rd, I mentioned that I wanted to try occasionally posting an "Honorable Mentions" list, with only short descriptions of a number of items at once, rather than a longer review of a single book or show. Let's try it today! There's no time like the present for trying new things, is there?
 

American War (2017). Omar El Akkad.

This is a dark dystopian tale of a young woman growing up in a refugee camp in the 2070s in what remains of the American south, and becoming a fanatical warrior for another lost cause as a result of the traumas of her life, suffered in an America torn by a second civil war, the ongoing disasters of climate change, sea levels rising, and a pandemic caused by a bio-terrorism attack.

As in the nineteenth century Civil War era, the south is again the center of misery, ignorance and bigotry, but in a drastically reduced nation where no one has escaped the pain or moral conflicts growing out of multiplying political and ecological crises. 

It's thought-provoking, and definitely captures a lot of the fears and zeitgeist of our own times, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent Trump presidency and its turbulent aftermath. Recommended.

 

The Anomaly (2021). Herve Le Tellier.

This is a science fiction thriller and philosophical exploration of the contemporary theory popular in tech and gaming circles that life and "reality" may be a computer simulation.  The plot is set in motion when a commercial passenger jet passes through a violent storm, and then emerges safely to land – twice – but four months apart.

In the story, when this mysterious event happens, we then have two sets of the same people aboard, with a four-month difference in their experiences (the later arrivals would have missed what the other ones had been doing in the meantime). 

The rest of the story explores many aspects of the chaos such an event would create.  Among the passengers and flight crew, who is the "real" person? How would the discrepancies be resolved about who is really who, and who owns what? How would people in various types of human relationships and organizations with the two sets of survivors contend with the sudden appearance of apparent almost-duplicate people? And how would governments and the public deal with a logic-defying problem of this magnitude?

An interesting and well-told "thought experiment" story, with a philosophical and logical exploration of the "simulation" theory of reality. Recommended.  

 

The Circle (2015). Dave Eggers.

The Circle is a science fiction novel that focuses on the cultish behavior and seductive powers of social manipulation exercised by our major tech companies. In this telling, "The Circle" is a giant Facebook-like tech company that creates inexpensive networked micro-cameras that can easily be placed anywhere, to surveil anything, anyone and any place.

Along with its ubiquitous spying and secret-smashing technology, The Circle has a founder and leader with a charismatic hold on the tech company, a compelling utopian vision of a society seemingly based on a radical form of honesty and truth-telling, and personal growth objectives for employees (and ultimately for all of society) that are being sold as positive and beneficial, but which contain a dark potential for ultimate control by the few leaders at the top. 

This book, told through the experiences of a naive young woman recruit to The Circle, was the basis for the 2017 movie of the same name starring Emma Watson. It is a very nice literary companion piece to various "big data" and "four big tech companies" nonfiction books I have read about the risks posed by the dominance of Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google in our high tech modern world. Recommended.
 

Exhalation (2019). Ted Chiang.

I read this excellent collection of science fiction short stories on the recommendation of the New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein, who interviewed the author on one of his podcasts. Checking the book listing on Amazon, I discovered that it has an A-list of other celebrities, starting with President Obama, who have also read it and given it outstanding reviews.

The short stories were indeed remarkable, beautifully written and explored deep philosophical topics. I find that my retention of the details of the plots of a number of different short stories like this is shorter than with a novel, but it wouldn't add anything to this review to go into those details anyway. Better to just get the book and read it yourself! 

It was definitely an enjoyable read, and time well spent. Recommended.


Station Eleven (2015). Emily St. John Mandel.

Station Eleven is a powerful end-of-the-modern-world dystopian novel, seen through the eyes of a small cast of characters whose lives are connected through the events of a world-wide plague that ends civilization and kills off 99% of humanity.

In addition to imagining what that world would be like, where modern technology is gone but the memory of it remains, the story focuses on a set of curious personal connections and events that tie the characters and their lives together at different times and in different places.  

This book has now been made into an HBO Max mini-series, which was also good, and which I will review at some point. The book and its author have also become somewhat legendary, for the book's seemingly prophetic exploration of the kinds of personal isolation and changes to social relations that might result from a massive pandemic, written shortly before the less catastrophic yet still profoundly disruptive COVID-19 pandemic that struck the world in 2020. Highly recommended.

 

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014). Clare North.

This book contains a time-travel plot device that is quite like the one in my longtime favorite novel of this genre, Replay (1986) by Ken Grimwood. The story of Harry August again poses the question of what it would be like, and what you would do, if you got the chance to live life over and over again, starting in the same young body and identity, in the same family, and in the same time period and circumstances, but where each time you started over again, you carried with you the memories of your previous lives.

What things would you change about yourself? What would you do to try to achieve better personal outcomes than previous times? Would you actually be able to improve your outcomes, or would the endless possibilities of every lifetime simply lead you to a life that was different, but not necessarily better or worse than the others?

Could you actually alter the course of human events and history? Would you end up with God-like powers of prediction, and the ability to shape events, or simply be endlessly frustrated by your inability to change the course of what is to come? And are you alone in this strange cycle of lives lived repeatedly, or are there others to be found out in the world who are on the same treadmill? 

All these endlessly intriguing themes, and more, are explored and woven into the fascinating story of the many lives of Harry August, in a plot that moves quickly and maintains interest and suspense throughout. Highly recommended.

TV Review: The Mandalorian. Seasons 1 & 2 (Disney+).

I watched the whole first season of Disney’s first venture in monetizing the Star Wars galaxy for streaming TV with only modest enthusiasm, but it improved steadily over the course of the second season.

The story takes place in a remote corner of the galaxy, after the destruction of the second Death Star, and the apparent death of the Sith Lord and Emperor Palpatine at the end of Return of the Jedi. It’s a lawless time – the New Republic is struggling to extend its well-intentioned reach, while the fractured forces of the evil Empire are still out there, and they’re up to no good.

Into this Wild West universe comes a lone ranger in shining metal armor, with a jet pack and a lot of other hi-tech weaponry. He is known only as “The Mandalorian” (a reference to his warrior  people and their beleaguered home planet), and he makes allies of convenience and a number of new enemies as he takes on a dangerous mission to save a small child of the Yoda species from mysterious forces.

There is plenty of Star Wars type action and scenery, and a whole new set of gritty characters, strange planets, and plot twists, with a surprise appearance by one of the major Star Wars characters at the end of season 2. Recommended.

Book Series Review: The Dune Chronicles: Dune (1965), Dune Messiah (1969), Children of Dune (1976), God Emperor of Dune (1981), Heretics of Dune (1984) and Chapterhouse: Dune (1985). Frank Herbert.

Today I'm doing something a little different.  Instead of writing a review of one book, I'm doing a quick summary of a series of related books by an author that deserve to be recognized as a whole body of work. There are several such series that are lifetime favorites of mine, so I'll begin with Frank Herbert's Dune Chronicles, a 6-book set written and published during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.  

(I am not including in this discussion the many other Dune novels spun off and written by Herbert's son Brian Herbert, and several other writers with whom he collaborated, even though I understand that many of them were based on notes and ideas for stories which Frank Herbert had created).

There is no doubt that the Dune Chronicles is one of the greatest book series, if not the greatest, in all of science fiction.  I re-read all three of the first three Dune books recently for the first time in decades, and then kept going with the other three books in Herbert’s 6-book epic Dune series, in part to see how well they have withstood the test of time.

I’m pleased to report that they are still every bit as relevant, as prescient and as timeless as they seemed when I first read them long ago; in fact, some recent commentators have suggested they’re even more relevant now, given the geopolitical, military and ecological developments on planet Earth since Herbert finished the last of the books in the 1980s.

The first three and best-known novels in the 6-book set, Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune, trace the rise and fall of a galactic empire under a young nobleman, Paul Atreides, who becomes the messianic leader of an oppressed people on the desert planet of Dune when he acquires the ability to see the future. Its narrative arc is centered around a classic “hero’s journey” story line, inextricably linked to a long tale of revolution, imperial foundation, conquest and dissolution.

The stories feature great power conflicts and intrigue on a bleak desert planet, a poor but well-adapted nomadic people with a mysterious, fierce religion, and a valuable resource they control that is key to all interplanetary travel and trade. Sound familiar? It did in the 1960s and 1970s too, even before the 1973 Oil embargo and the Middle East Forever Wars of our recent times.

The remaining three books (God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune) are somewhat more esoteric. God Emperor of Dune brings a final end to the Paul Atreides-centered imperial era, by revealing how his son Leto II acquired godlike powers and near immortality, and then instituted a forced era of peace and civilizational stagnation across the galaxy spanning thousands of years.

Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune then trace various further developments in the long history of interstellar humanity, and the ultimate fates of several of the secretive organizations and movements that played such important roles in the first three Dune novels.

I actually found the latter three books better, and more memorable and intriguing this time, than when I read them when they were first published in the 1980s, but I believe they are more of an acquired taste. They may be too complex and too far removed for many readers from the simpler “hero’s journey” and “rise and fall of an empire” themes of the first three books.

Nevertheless, all these stories are rich in ecological, political, religious, military and economic speculation, and come with loads of intrigue and adventure. They were also exceptional compared to most "golden age" science fiction stories, in Herbert's interest in and explorations of the power and importance of women and their social roles, intellects and abilities in the human story, as well as those of the men. Very highly recommended.

Book Reviews: Blackout (2010) and All Clear (2010). Connie Willis.

I recently re-read these two thick science fiction and historical novels, which were originally intended to be one volume, but grew to be two because Connie Willis couldn't fit the whole grand story into one book. They are built on the same time-travel plot premise introduced in The Doomsday Book, which I reviewed recently.

It's six years after the events of The Doomsday Book (it’s now 2060), and the time travel missions of the student historians at Oxford have proliferated, but trying to manage the complexity of it all is becoming an ever more chaotic process. Planned drops into past eras are being reshuffled by Mr. Dunworthy (the head of time travel historical studies) at the last minute, no one can get the right period outfits from the Costume department because the historians' schedules keep changing, and it seems to be increasingly hard to find drop sites (exact times and places in the past) that will work with the time travel machinery.

Into this organizational maelstrom come three young historian innocents, Merope, Polly and Michael, each headed for different periods and situations in World War II Great Britain, including the children's evacuations from London, the evacuation from Dunkirk, and the Blitz (the German bombing of London). But once they arrive, they slowly discover their return drops won't open, and they eventually have to face the possibility that perhaps there's no way back to their own era.

Is time travel broken? Could they be altering the outcome of the war by their own actions (which isn't supposed to be possible, according to their time travel theory)? What is going on back in future Oxford? And how can they make contact with each other, to figure out what’s wrong and how to return to their future?

Using Connie Willis's trademark plot devices of missed connections, endless frustrated plans, messages not received or answered, and time travelers under unexpected duress having to constantly improvise new solutions, these two books are a truly wonderful tour through the heroism and bravery of the British people in World War II. Marvelous, moving and really fun to read! Highly recommended.

TV Review: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Season 1 (2022). Disney+.

The first two live-action streaming TV series that Disney launched, based on the Star Wars universe, were The Mandalorian (Seasons 1 and 2, so far), and The Book of Boba Fett (Season 1). Both stories are set in the Star Wars galaxy and timeline, but at least initially have little connection to any of the main plots and central characters of the eleven feature-length Star Wars movies that have been made.

Although there are aspects to both of these Disney TV series that will appeal to die-hard Star Wars enthusiasts, these first two Disney Star Wars TV shows have left me (as a dedicated Star Wars fan who has enjoyed all the big-screen films since the first one was released in 1977) feeling distinctly underwhelmed, and missing some of the vital appeal and magic of the movies.

This is all just background and prelude to the new (and third) Disney Star Wars live-action streaming TV series Obi-Wan Kenobi. And I am happy to say: “This is the droid (oops, I mean, the Star Wars TV show) you are looking for”. Thus far, I’ve only seen the first four of six episodes of Season 1 (and I do hope they make a bunch of seasons). But they have been extremely enjoyable, and fully worthy additions to the Star Wars canon.

To begin: having Ewan McGregor reprise his role as the (then-young) Obi-Wan Kenobi from the prequel trilogy is marvelous good fortune. He is appropriately aged in real life to be playing Obi-Wan as he is now, as his story resumes, ten years after he defeated Anakin Skywalker in The Revenge of the Sith, but then was forced to flee as a Jedi refugee from the Empire just to stay alive, and to guard the life of the hidden child Luke Skywalker on Tatooine.

McGregor is a wonderful actor, who captures perfectly the defeated, discouraged and isolated former hero he has become, now hiding out alone in a desert wasteland, with only a tiny spark of his former brilliance or his many talents visible. Watching him carve off and hide small bits of alien meat product every day for his trusty mount, at his dead-end meat-packing job on Tatooine, conveys better than any words how far he has fallen from the glory of his former Jedi Master days.

But there are plenty of new adventures awaiting Obi-Wan. He will have to confront new and old enemies, and he'll be drawn into unexpected events, and a dangerous plot initiated from the planet Alderaan, which will bring Luke’s hidden twin sister Leia into the story.

And the young Leia Organa (as played by Vivien Lyra Blair) is a delight – a petite, 10-year old girl with preternatural awareness of the adult world around her, a kind and generous spirit toward droids and other lesser beings, a wise guy mouth, and an irreverent, non-compliant attitude that is completely consistent with the young adult Carrie Fisher version of Princess Leia we have all come to know and love from the original trilogy.

I can’t say how this series will end, or whether we will have more seasons ahead to which we can look forward (I would assume so). But for now, it's looking good! If you love Star Wars, watch Obi-Wan Kenobi as soon as you can on Disney+ (new episodes each Wednesday). And May the Force Be With You.

Book Review: Doomsday Book (1992). Connie Willis.

I re-read this excellent science fiction novel recently after many years (it was a Nebula Winner, originally published in 1992). What perfect pandemic-era reading!

This is the story of Kivrin Engle, a petite young Oxford undergrad history student in the year 2054, who is sent alone on the first time-travel study to the Middle Ages (time-travel having been discovered a few years earlier, and now being put to use as a historical research tool).  Her destination is the Oxford area, Christmas time in 1320, safely 28 years before the Black Plague will arrive, for a two-week observation and research trip.

Unfortunately, something goes terribly wrong in the time-travel drop, and she ends up desperately ill, and stranded back in the Medieval period, in a little village near Oxford, but not quite when she had intended.  Meanwhile, her academic mentor Mr. Dunworthy's frantic attempts to discover where she is, and rescue her, encounter endless obstacles as a mysterious new virus outbreak sweeps through the 2054 Oxford community.

A gripping and very moving story of the timeless nature of human emotions, behaviors and relationships, and the eternal presence of good and evil, and generosity and selfishness, in societies throughout history, regardless of their technological level.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Go Tell the Bees That I am Gone (2021). Book 9 of the Outlander Series. Diana Gabaldon.

After a very long wait for legions of dedicated fans around the world, the latest installment in the epic Outlander series of novels by Diana Gabaldon (now also a major hit TV show from the Starz channel), arrived in November of 2021.  It’s the usual 900 pages or so of small, dense type (in the hardback version) – in other words, a very long read, but worth every minute of it, and the seven long years of waiting since Book 8 (Written in My Own Heart’s Blood) was released.

As the book begins, it’s 1779, and Jamie and Claire and their family are back together again at their frontier home on Fraser’s Ridge in rural North Carolina.  They’re safe for the moment, but the American revolution is moving south, and they know from their pre-knowledge of history that navigating the next two years of war, with all the fratricidal terror to come between Loyalists and Rebels, will be fraught with danger and hard choices.

As always, Gabaldon brings the characters and scenes totally alive, with fascinating attention to period detail, contrasted social and cultural mores and conditions between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, dramatic historical events described, and moving portrayals of many of the more timeless experiences of life, love and war.  No matter how long these books take to read, I never want them to end each time I start reading one of them.

When I started reading this series (some years ago now), I thought it might be a cheesy historical romance and bodice-ripper with some science fiction time-travel thrown in, but I soon realized it was serious literature and addictive historical fiction (with lovely occasional touches of the cosmically mysterious and fantastic) of the very best sort.  If you’ve read all the other books (and yes, they need to be read in order, at least the first time through), you’re definitely going to want to keep going, and read this one. 

Gabaldon has promised to write one final volume to end the series, and to reach the end of the American Revolution, but at one book every 5-7 years, it’s going to be a long wait for Book 10 (2028, maybe?).  In the meantime, if you haven't read this series, you'll have lots of time to catch up before the final volume arrives.  And if you have, you can always go back and re-read the previous nine books while you’re waiting!  Very highly recommended.

Movie Review: Don't Look Up (2021). Netflix.

This is last year's star-studded "end of the world" movie satire about a planet-killing comet headed for earth.  At the beginning, a talented young PhD student (played by Jennifer Lawrence) discovers a new comet, but her excitement quickly turns to terror when she and her professor (Leonardo DiCaprio) calculate that the comet will crash into earth in six months. 

This seemingly far-fetched yet unfortunately all too believable farce satirizes every absurd thing that's happened in our culture through the past five years:  Trumpian autocratic politics, climate change denialism, celebrity culture obsessions, social media disinformation, space-seeking billionaires and COVID-19 vaccines and mask resisters.  

In doing so, it makes a powerful statement about our collective failure to take seriously the threats looming before us, or to focus on finding viable solutions to problems (especially climate change, for which the comet is an obvious stand-in) that present a clear and present danger to our survival as individuals and as a species.  

Lawrence and DiCaprio star, but there are also great assists from Cate Blanchett (as a vacuous morning show TV co-host) and Meryl Streep (as a female Trump-like president).   

It's grimly amusing, but also a passionate scream for sanity and planetary preservation in our own beleaguered times.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Passengers (2019). John Marrs.

The Passengers is another dystopian thriller of the near future, this one focused on self-driving cars. 

The essential plot:  a hacker takes over a set of self-driving cars, threatens to kill all the riders, and live streams their terror with audio and video feeds from inside each car, to make important points about financial liability and legal responsibility for accidents when self-driving cars are involved, as well as to highlight the potential vulnerability of each of us to personal data theft and misuse. 

The story raises some interesting and very contemporary philosophical and legal points about automation and self-driving vehicle technologies, but the plot becomes a little strained at the point that the hacker seems to know everything about the individual secrets and personal moral failures of each doomed passenger. 

Still, it's taut and unnerving.  It's a little too close to the media spectacles, privacy invasions and destructive online mob behaviors we've already experienced in real life on our TV news, smartphones and the internet.  Recommended.

Book Review: The Warehouse (2019). Rob Hart.

This dark near-future thriller does for Amazon what The Circle (2015) by Dave Eggers did for Google and Facebook, by painting a stark fictional picture of where unrestrained monopoly online retail capitalism could soon lead us.  

A failed small businessman who is also a former prison guard, and a beautiful female industrial spy, get jobs with "Cloud", a new mega-corporation and tech giant, in one of the company's ubiquitous live-in warehouse communities. 

As they're selected and trained for their dead-end jobs, meet each other and begin an affair, and as the spy plots to crack the all-seeing security of the company's network on behalf of an unknown client, we see a horrifying vision of all the ways our own familiar compromises with convenience in purchasing and product delivery, low costs based on cheap labor, and unlimited business access to our personal data could lead to a powerless and empty existence for all but a small ruling corporate elite.  

An excellent contemporary cautionary tale, strongly reminiscent of 1984 and Brave New World, but updated to address some of the unique challenges to freedom emerging in our own times and society.  Recommended.

Book Review: The Ministry of the Future (2020). Kim Stanley Robinson.

The New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein (in one of his  excellent podcasts on The Ezra Klein Show) called this "the most important book of 2020".  I can see why he reached this conclusion.

Kim Stanley Robinson is a famous contemporary science-fiction writer, who is best known for his novels about the colonization of Mars.  However, in this one, he takes on the climate crisis, with a small cast of characters, but as told through many different voices around the world. 

Set in the 2030s and 2040s, it tries to imagine what a quasi-worldwide "Ministry of the Future" would have to do in order to save the world, and in telling that story, looks at a variety of climate-related crises and challenges that seem all too plausible in our current political and economic situation.  

I'm not sure the author’s "many voices" story approach makes for the best novel, literarily speaking.  But he does discuss and illuminate many of the ethical, financial, political and practical hurdles we will face in the coming years, if we are to find global solutions to the crisis of human-caused climate change.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Recursion (2020). Brian Crouch.

This is the second novel by Crouch that approaches the question of multiple universes and timelines, but this time from the standpoint of neuroscience and memory. 

In this story, the mechanism for traversing multiple lives lived (or periods of lives) has to do with an invention that allows a person to jump back to a point in their memory where something emotional happened, and then restart their lifetime story from that point, but with their old memories intact (thus allowing them to consciously make different decisions, and become different people). 

The "life loop" is a plot that has been similarly explored in other stories.  Groundhog Day is probably the most famous example in film (with its very short "one-day" timeline loop), but it is also the basis for two earlier sci-fi novels which I highly recommend, Replay (1986), by Ken Grimwood, and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014), by Claire North. 

This book is another worthy contribution to the time loop literary tradition, but one in which there is more effort made to come up with a technological explanation for what is happening to the characters.  That focuses more attention on the wider problem of the unintended consequences of the new technologies we humans keep inventing, and the massively destructive effects they can have on our happiness and social stability.  Recommended.

Movie Review: Dune (Part 1) (2021). HBO Max and in theaters.

The SyFy Channel produced two good TV mini-series in the early 2000s, Dune and Children of Dune, which covered the first three books of Frank Herbert’s legendary six-book Dune science fiction series (Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune). 

Although the special effects were not up to contemporary Hollywood standards, these two mini-series (which are difficult to find now, except as used DVD sets for sale online) were the best attempt until now to bring Frank Herbert’s trailblazing epic book series and universe to the screen.  There was also an unfortunate movie version produced in 1984, but it is barely worth mentioning, and several other proposed versions never made it to completion.

This new large-screen 2+ hour version, released to widespread acclaim late in 2021, covers only 1/12^th of Herbert’s full six-book Dune epic (i.e., only the first half of the first and most famous book, Dune), but it does so with visual beauty, fantastic special effects, a talented and exotic-looking cast, and a faithfulness to the book version that has eluded earlier cinematic treatments. 

The hardest thing about making any film version of Dune has always been the number of technological, social, political and historical facts and settings in the Dune universe that need to be conveyed to viewers, in order to have the plot and action make any sense.  The director handled that very well, through an early narrator’s summary, and by accepting that only a part of even one of these complex and rich books could be done justice in the course of one feature-length movie.  

The producers placed a bet that it would be well enough received to justify spending the money to tell part 2 in a later sequel.  That bet apparently paid off on opening day, with the wide enthusiasm and critical success of this first really excellent film version of the Dune story.  Very highly recommended.