#part of his 'solo adventure' after frontiers was going to a pilot school

[luc3ks]

no one gets it..... no one gets tails going to an official pilot school to get a pilot license despite literally not needing it bc he’s probably among the best seeing how he’s been flying since he was like 8.... he just wanted the official license............ no one gets tails having his shirt tail cut off once he’s done his first official solo in school and he is overjoyed and puts a little doodle of the plane he did it in on the fabric...... I’m gonna be ill I love aerospace nerd loser tails it’s for ME. and that is why this happens in my au

[aion-rsa]

Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 2 Episode 1 Easter Eggs & References

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This Star Trek: Lower Decks article contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 1: “Strange Energies.”

The mission of the USS Cerritos is to do the jobs other Starfleet ships can’t; following up with all sorts of minutiae and boring outer space logistics, long after the Enterprise or the Defiant has warped out. But whether it’s Lower Decks or Picard or Discovery or Strange New Worlds, the mission of hardcore Trek fans is the same: Pause the screen and see what deep-cut Easter eggs got slipped in this time!

In Season 1, Star Trek: Lower Decks earned the reputation for the most meta-textual Star Trek ever. There are layers and layers of Trekdom within every frame of this series, making it hard to look at one episode and catalog all the references. But if you thought Season 1 went deep into the wells of Trekkie references and Easter eggs, Season 2 is here to make Season 1 look tame. The Season 2 premiere of Lower Decks — “Strange Energies” — is one giant Easter egg with a bunch of reproducing tribble-ish Easter eggs inside of it. Unless you’ve got ESP powers on the level of Dr. Elizabeth Dehner, there’s no way you caught all of these. 

Cardassian ships

The episode has a cold-open on some kind of prison inside of an asteroid field. This is surrounded by two kinds of Cardassian ships, the Galor-class and the smaller Hideki-class scout ships.

“The Keep Showing Me Lights”

Hologram Boimler says the Cardassians “keep showing me lights.” This line, and the existence of the secret Cardassian facility references the famous Next Generation two-parter, “Chain of Command,” in which Picard was kidnapped and tortured by the Cardassians. If you somehow haven’t seen that episode, the whole idea is that the Cardassians try to gaslight Picard into thinking there are five lights in front of him when there are only four. Lower Decks referenced “Chain of Command” in Season 1, too! In Season 1, Episode 7, “Much Ado About Boimler,” Mariner joked about the Cerritos getting a “Babysitter Jellico-type,” for a subsitute captain, which referenced the temporary captain the Enterprise got in “Chain of Command.” Freeman, Shaxs and Ransom whore the all-black special ops outfits in that episode, too, and Tendi did the same in “Veritas.” 

Too Many Ships to Count 

As Mariner escapes from the Cardassian facility, there are soooo many ships being stored in this particular hanger. It’s all the ships. Here’s just a few we caught

A Federation runabout

Jem’Hadar fighters

A Nemesis-era Romulan warbird

An old school Romulan Bird-of-Prey from TOS

Federation fighter craft (like the ones seen in TNG’s “Preemptive Strike.”)

And many, many more.

Miranda-class USS MacDuff

Mariner steals a Miranda-class Federation starship with the registry NCC-1877, and the name “USS MacDuff.” There’s a lot going on here.

The Miranda-class was first seen in The Wrath of Khan, in the form of the USS Reliant. That film also featured someone stealing a ship like this with ease.

The bridge for this ship is basically identical to the Reliant.

Lower Decks showrunner Mike McMahan said in 2020 that he was inspired by the Reliant for the design of the Cerritos. 

The name “MacDuff” might reference the TNG character, Kieran MacDuff, from the episode “Conundrum.” In that one, the crew has temporary amnesia and MacDuff manipulates them into fighting a war they’re not supposed to be involved in.

Jennifer 

Jennifer is back! Mariner is interrupted during her holographic work-out by Jennifer, an Andorian crewmember from last season. In the Season 1 finale, “No Small Parts,” Mariner runs through the halls and pushes this character out of the way, saying, “Move Jennifer.” As far as we know, Jennifer is the only Andorian named Jennifer, but you really have to wonder, was this an Andorian name, or a human name? 

“I know we’re not supposed to have interpersonal conflict”

Mariner’s dislike of Jennifer is punctuated by her talking to herself saying, “I know we’re not supposed to have interpersonal conflict…but I really hate that Andorian.” This references a long-standing rule from the TNG–era of Trek TV; that Starfleet officers weren’t supposed to have petty differences with each other. This rule was apparently implemented by Gene Roddenberry and drove several writers, including Ron Moore and Jeri Taylor, nuts. 

Slightly new opening-credits

In Season 1, we saw the Cerritos running away from a battle involving a bunch of Borg cubes and Romulan Warbirds. Now, that same battle includes a Pakled ship from the Season 1 finale, a few Klingon Birds-of-Prey, and seemingly, fewer Borg. 

Fred Tatasciore’s name in the credits?

Although Shaxs died in the Season 1 finale, Fred Tatasciore’s name appears in the opening credits…hmmm…will this ever be explained? 

Rutherford’s date with Ensign Barnes

“Strange Energies” directly parallels the 2020 Season 1 debut, “Second Contact,” in several ways. The crew is involved with a second contact mission that goes horribly wrong and Rutherford starts dating Barnes for the “first” time. In the Season 1 finale, Rutherford lost his memory, which is why his relationship with Barnes seems new to him. This is why Mariner says “that sounds familiar.” 

Hating pears…a Doctor Who reference? 

Tendi is concerned that Rutherford used to hate pears, but now he doesn’t. This is possibly incorrect, but this could be a Doctor Who reference. In the Doctor Who episodes “Human Nature,” “Twice Upon a Time,” and “Hell Bent,” the Doctor (both David Tennant and Peter Capaldi) mention hating pears. In fact, in “Human Nature,” when the Doctor’s memory is erased, he asks Martha Jones to “never let me eat a pear.” 

Sonic power washing 

“Sonic showers” have long been a thing in the Star Trek universe, making their debut in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. But, we’ve never seen sonic power-washers before!

“Ever heard of Gary Mitchell”

Ransom’s possession is very much a tribute to Gary Mitchell’s god-like powers in the second TOS pilot episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Dr. T’ana’s insistence that Kirk beat Gary Mitchell with a “boulder” is accurate. For whatever reason, the very first canonical Kirk-adventure ever, established that rock beats god-like powers any day of the week. It should also be noted that Mariner referenced Gary Mitchell in the first episode of Season 1, too.

Possible Harlan Ellison reference?

While Ransom is starting to work out, you can briefly hear him say, “The trick isn’t becoming a God. The trick is staying a God.” This could be a reference to the axiom attributed to Harlan Ellison: “The trick isn’t becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.” Ellison wrote “The City on the Edge of Forever,” for TOS. In Star Trek: Picard Season 1, Soji traveled on a ship called the Ellison, which Michael Chabon revealed was an Easter egg meant to reference Harlan Ellison. So, you never know? 

“The Trick isn’t becoming a god, the Trick is staying a god”

Harlan Ellison reference?

Ransom on the Mount

Mariner says that Jack is “going all Ransom on the Mount.” This almost certainly references a hilarious fan video called “Shatner on the Mount,” in which a group called Fall On Your Sword remixed a behind-the-scenes interview with William Shatner (promoting Star Trek V: The Final Frontier) into a hilarious kind of talking-rap song. It has to be seen to be believed. 

Giant God Head

A giant God head coming out to grab a starship might seem silly, but there are several precedents for this kind of thing in Trek canon. In the TOS episode “Who Mourns For Adonais?” a giant green hand grabs the Enterprise, which is later revealed to be the hand of the god Apollo. In the TNG episode “The Nth Degree,” the giant head of a Cytherian finds its way onto the Enterprise-D bridge. And, of course, in The Final Frontier, the crew meets “the God of Sha Ka Ree” which also, is a giant floating head. 

My older sister got a symbiont 

Barnes and Rutherford joke around that her Trill sister has a symbiont, but she doesn’t. This references the idea that not all Trill are joined, which was established in both TNG and Deep Space Nine.

Cetacean ops

Barnes mentions going swimming in “Cetacean ops,” a part of the USS Cerritos that we’ve never seen, but we have to assume has something to do with sea creatures. This is the second time Lower Decks has referenced Cetacean ops, which itself derives from an overheard line in TNG’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” Again, with yet another parallel to its Season 1 debut, “Cetacean ops” was last referenced by Lower Decks in Season 1, Episode 1, “Second Contact.”

“LDS thing”

Rutherford incorrectly refers to SMD as “LDS.” This references a few things. First, for most fans, the official abbreviation of Lower Decks is LDS. But, that abbreviation also references a joke from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in which Kirk incorrectly refers to the drug “LSD” as “LDS,” saying that Spock “did a little bit too much LDS back in the ‘60s.” 

Nightengale Woman 

At the end of the episode, Stevens tells Ransom he’s going to read him “Nightengale Woman.” This too is a reference to “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” which Gary Mitchell quotes from the poem “Nitengale Woman,” from memory. In Trek canon, the poem was written in 1996 on “the Canopus Planet.” In real life, the poem was written by Gene Roddenberry, who originally wrote part of the poem to describe flying a plane. 

Riker’s jam session

As the final moments of the episode cut back to the USS Titan, Captain Riker says “This jam session has too many licks and not enough counts.” In jazz, a “lick” refers to a pattern or musical phrase which is predetermined, but open to interpretation. Usually, a lick could result in a long jazz solo.  A “count” on the other hand, is more about the beat and form of a piece of music. Riker’s obsession with jazz began in the TNG episode “11001001.” In the season finale of Lower Decks Season 1, Riker’s catchphrase for sending the Titan into warp was a jazz count.

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Lower Decks Season 2 airs new episodes on Paramount+ on Thursdays.

The post Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 2 Episode 1 Easter Eggs & References appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[shobanarayan]

  This is the type of email that authors like to get– to put it mildly.

Hi Shoba—I’m so excited to share your review in the New York Times Book Review! See attached. The review is part of a feature on travel-related books, and you’re in great company. The review is mostly summary but entirely positive. Congratulations!

You’ll be able to find the review in print in the June 3 edition. (I’m not certain if the book review runs in international editions—if not, we can certainly send you a copy!)

All best, Brooke

Brooke Csuka, Senior Publicist Algonquin Books & Algonquin Young Readers

The New York Times Book Review Summer Reading/Travel

MILK LADY OF BANGALORE – NYTBR

Travel (link here to the NYT page)

The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

Alone Time

by Stephanie Rosenbloom

Walking the Americas

by Levison Wood

The Tip of the Iceberg

by Mark Adams

Beyond the Map

by Alastair Bonnett

Couchsurfing in Iran

by Stephan Orth

A Line in the River

by Jamal Mahjoub

The Epic City

by Kushanava Choudhury

The Milk Lady of Bangalore

by Shoba Narayan

The Traveling Feast

by Rick Bass

The Road Trip Book

by Darryl Sleath

By LIESL SCHILLINGER

Like a literary companion to Google Earth, a host of new books zero in on points across the globe from Alaska to Iran, the Middle East to Mesoamerica, Khartoum to Calcutta and, of course, Paris (we’ll always have Paris), providing highly individual answers to the question: Why do we travel?

Patricia Hampl isn’t sure we should. Raised in Minnesota, educated by nuns, she long sought to reconcile her Roman Catholic school appreciation of the “inner voice” with her “native” Midwestern trait: “the desire to be elsewhere.” Early in THE ART OF THE WASTED DAY (Viking, $26), she reaches back to Chaucer to grasp the roots of wanderlust. “Springtime, after a winter cooped up, and everyone wants to hit the road,” she writes, paraphrasing his zestful Canterbury pilgrims. Hampl suspects that a less cheery impulse motivates contemporary American wanderers, a national mania — encoded in the Declaration of Independence — to pursue happiness, rather than “stay put” and simply be happy. But after the death of her husband, she found that her enjoyment of her quiet hours had palled. To rekindle her pleasure in her own company, she embarked on “a tour of the heroes of leisure,” men and women like the “sluggish, lax and drowsy” French philosopher Montaigne, who holed up in a drafty tower to write his “Essais”; the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel, who founded the science of genetics as he cultivated his abbey’s garden; and the reclusive 18th-century Welsh BFFs known as the Ladies of Llangollen. Here Hampl finds proof of the endurance of “the sane singular voice, alone with its thoughts,” which doesn’t need to cross mountains to express itself.

In ALONE TIME: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude(Viking, $27), Stephanie Rosenbloom, a travel columnist for The New York Times, set out on her own for a more practical purpose. Learning that increasing numbers of Americans were taking vacations-for-one, she decided to test-drive the trend in some of the world’s most sociable cities. In so doing, she not only dispels the stigma attaching to solo travel, she debunks the myth of the “supposed horror of solo dining.” In Paris, she picnicked amid the promenades of the Luxembourg Gardens, feasted on oysters at the Closerie des Lilas and ambled through Balzac’s home, Hampl-style. In Istanbul, she lolled in the steamy Cemberlitas hamam. In Florence, she communed at the Uffizi with the most ogled woman in the world, Botticelli’s Venus. “I liked to be alone in Constantinople,” Greta Garbo said. So, Rosenbloom discovered, did she. But she also explored New York, her hometown, as if she were a tourist: “Savoring the moment, examining things closely, reminiscing — these practices are not strictly for use on the road. They’re for everyday life, anywhere.”

The veteran adventure writer Levison Wood had no desire to go it alone on his 2016 trek through Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama, which culminated in a death-defying crossing of the bandit-ridden mountain jungles of the Darién Gap. For one thing, as a seasoned British paratrooper, Wood is steeped in esprit de corps. But WALKING THE AMERICAS: 1,800 Miles, Eight Countries, and One Incredible Journey From Mexico to Colombia (Atlantic Monthly, $27) reveals a less sentimental reason for the author’s fondness for company. Without the translation skills and acute regional spider-senses of his compañero, the Mexican photographer Alberto Cáceres, Wood might have been kidnapped, or worse, by the desperadoes they encountered. His latest wanderlog, a self-declared “tale of adventure in the modern age,” continues the exoticizing, thrill-a-minute tradition of “King Solomon’s Mines” and Indiana Jones. For four months, the friends forded streams, plunged into skull-filled cenotes, slithered up muddy ridges, skirted quicksand, huddled in bat caves and hacked through forests filled with tarantulas, scorpions, poison frogs, jaguars and fer-de-lance snakes. There were rewards along the way, from hugging a “dopey” sloth to summiting Costa Rica’s Mount Chirripó at dawn. “We stood in wonderment while the sky grew redder and the sun rose above the eastern horizon,” Wood writes. “To the east shone the Caribbean Sea, merging into the sunrise, and with a sweep of 180 degrees, I looked behind me, and there was the golden panorama of the Pacific; two oceans from one vantage point, separated by one narrow spit of land.”

At the edge of the Darién Gap, Wood came across a sign on the Pan-American Highway that read: “12,580 km to Alaska.” Unbeknown to him (presumably), another explorer, Mark Adams, had completed his exploits of the northern reaches of that road soon before Wood began his down south. In THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier (Dutton, $28), Adams repeats the steps (and oar strokes) of the 1899 Harriman Expedition to Alaska. Fifty years before the territory became a state, the Gilded Age entrepreneur Edward Harriman led a reconnaissance tour of the Alaskan coast, starting in Seattle, heading north through the Inside Passage, up to the Gold Rush town of Skagway, on to the former Russian capital, Sitka, and from there to Kodiak Island, the Aleutians and “obscure places … labeled UNKNOWN on maps.” Among the passengers were the eminent naturalist John Muir and George Bird Grinnell, founder of the Audubon Society. Taking a boat into Glacier Bay, Adams observes sea lions clustered on low rocks “like ants on a dropped lollipop,” then turns in time to spot six spouting whales. Jumping from ferry to kayak, he glides with a guide into a cove dominated by a “neon-blue glacier” and sets up camp on Russell Island, “a cathedral of ice,” to behold the Grand Pacific Glacier. Adams and his guide wake in that breathtaking setting to a heart-stopping spectacle: two grizzly bears nosing around their tent. After trying to scare them off, the men high-tail it for the kayak. Later, Adams meets a cruise ship pilot who had spotted them on the beach before the ursine invasion. “I thought, Man, look at that setup!” the pilot tells him. “Those guys must be having the time of their lives.” He wasn’t wrong.

An unpaved highway in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. Alamy

The British geography professor Alastair Bonnett has a flair for communicating his passion for “the glee and the drama, the love and the loathing” that emanate from the earth’s most perplexing and mutable places. Prudently, he has gathered 39 of these protean zones between two covers, so readers will know what on earth (or water) he’s talking about. And if BEYOND THE MAP: Unruly Enclaves, Ghostly Places, Emerging Lands and Our Search for New Utopias (University of Chicago, $25)doesn’t produce a tsunami of new geography majors, he isn’t to blame. Had you heard that a peat bog as big as England was discovered in Congo only four years ago? Were you aware of the term “spikescapes” — public spaces that urban planners mine with booby traps, like benches barbed with steel prongs and rosy flourescent lighting that showcases acne, spooking teenage loiterers? Don’t you wish you could visit the massive film set in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, the size of two football fields, built between 2006 and 2011 to hold a disturbingly exact replica of 1950s Moscow, where thousands of drably clad actors re-enacted Soviet life, including nighttime visits by the K.G.B.? Bonnett’s provocative detours show us how much more we can know of the known world, if we know where to look, and how.

Still, some places are harder to access than others. When the journalist Stephan Orth traveled to Iran, he was aided by the accident of his German nationality. Americans have a hard time getting visas to the country and it’s not much easier for others. Nonetheless, like a web-savvy denizen of Bonnett’s 16th stopping point, “Cybertopia,” Orth used the internet to launch himself into a fantastical realm that happens to be real. In COUCHSURFING IN IRAN: Revealing a Hidden World (Greystone, paper, $16.95), he describes the openhearted reception he encountered in that closed country, where he found lodging in the homes of ordinary Iranians who put him up free during his two-month trip. This was brave of them because, as Orth’s host in Shiraz explained, taking in foreigners is forbidden. “Be quiet and don’t speak English on the street,” he is warned. “Otherwise, the neighbors will hear you.” Orth found his hosts mostly through the app “Couchsurfing,” an international enterprise that pairs travelers with sociable locals. City by city, he winged it, texting his hosts to arrange meeting points. On the island of Kish, in the middle of the night, he fished for bream and catfish with a die-hard Iranian fan of the American motivational speaker Anthony Robbins. In Isfahan, he played guitar (Adele and Metallica) for a classroom of schoolboys. And in��Tehran, he joined a clandestine gathering of mild-mannered BDSM devotees in a public park. “The people here are hungry for news from other countries,” he observes, adding that outsiders are just as hungry for on-the-ground knowledge of Iran. “I have an explicit answer to the question of whether you should visit a country where you are at odds with the political leadership,” he writes. “There are no bad places if the reason you are traveling is to meet people.”

The novelist��Jamal Mahjoub has been at odds with the political leadership of Sudan for much of his life. Born in London in 1960 to a Sudanese journalist and a British accountant, he was raised in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. He went to England for college and stayed abroad thereafter. His parents remained in Khartoum until 1989, when an Islamist coup spurred them to move to Cairo, never to return. But in 2008, Mahjoub began a series of his own returns. A LINE IN THE RIVER: Khartoum, City of Memory (Bloomsbury, $30) explains why. It is said, he writes, that from the sky the city resembles an elephant’s head (“khartoum” means “trunk” in Arabic). But on his visits, he saw that Khartoum’s outward face had changed, studded with towering buildings courting oil-industry wealth. Beneath the boomtown mask, he detected a palimpsest of the past, from imperial interference (Egyptian, British) to the rise of the charismatic “Mahdi” to the demise of Maj. Gen. Charles Gordon, which provoked Lord Kitchener to reassert British influence. When, in 1956, the British relinquished their hold, Khartoum was reborn as the capital of the Republic of Sudan. Why, Mahjoub asks, has his country made so little use of its freedom? “Out of half a century of independence Sudan has seen 40 years of civil war.” With this book, he wanted to trace “the evolution of the tragedy of a nation never achieved,” a task he likens to “trying to throw a rope around a cloud.”

While Mahjoub’s fascination with Khartoum is largely political, the journalist and political scientist Kushanava Choudhury takes his own hometown extremely personally. Passionate and pugnacious, Choudhury’s EPIC CITY: The World on the Streets of Calcutta (Bloomsbury, $28)reveals a man head over heels in love with a badly behaved but alluring metropolis. Westerners see his city as “the epitome of urban hell, the Detroit of the world,” but to him, the city’s flaws can’t dispel its enchantment. Although born in Buffalo, Choudhury lived in Kolkata, as the city is now known, until he was almost 12, when his family moved back to the United States. Resistant to American transplantation, he pined for the chaotic hubbub of West Bengal and after graduating from Princeton returned to Kolkata to work for an English-language newspaper. Back in Bengal, he exulted in the “aimless, digressive” conversational pastime known as adda; savored the street food; admired the gaudy chariots and costumed revelers that thronged narrow lanes during Hindu festivals; and embraced the whoosh of the monsoon rains that send the tarpaulin roofs of sidewalk restaurants “flying open like giant capes.” He left again to study at Yale, but returned after he got his doctorate, with his grad-school girlfriend, soon-to-become wife, Durba, in tow. Immune to her husband’s magnificent obsession, she protested when he mocked her preference for Western-style coffee shops over tea wallahs whose stands faced open gutters. “Who do you think you would marry who would be happy here?” she exclaimed. But “Epic City” makes it clear that Choudhury’s heart already belonged to another. What living woman can compete with an immortal old flame?

A more placid female smoothed Shoba Narayan’s re-entry to India when she moved with her husband and young daughters to Bangalore — southern India’s tech hub and finance center — after nearly 20 years in the United States. That female was a cow, whom she encountered in her building’s elevator, “angled diagonally to fit,” heading three floors up to bless a housewarming. “You’d think that a modern democracy like India would get over this cow obsession,” she thought, amused; but after mulling it over, she hustled upstairs to ask the cow to bless her apartment, too. The friendship Narayan struck up with Sarala, the cow’s escort, forms the subject of her amiable memoir, THE MILK LADY OF BANGALORE: An Unexpected Adventure (Algonquin, $24.95). At first, Narayan was wary of the earthy, grassy-smelling unpasteurized milk Sarala sold, produced by cows that grazed in the neighborhood. Before long, though, she became an “evangelist,” inviting neighbors over for coffee in hopes of converting them to fresh milk. Soon she resolved to buy a cow to donate to Sarala’s herd, scouring nearby villages for a candidate. “This is a good cow,” the owner of a Holstein-Friesian assured her. “Its milk will taste like ambrosia.” Sold. As her new acquisition munched betel nuts, coconut and bananas, Narayan decided the creature was “positively Zen” and named her “Blissful Lakshmi,” for the goddess of wealth.

Rick Bass had other sacred cows in mind when he began a multistop literary and gustatory pilgrimage a few years back. Reeling from an unsought divorce and yearning to reinforce his bonds with the authors and artists who had shaped his writing life, he devised a soul-nourishing, road-burning act of tribute. He would leave his log cabin in Montana’s remote Yaak Valley, travel to the homes of his mentors and thank them by cooking them a meal. In the record of this culinary catharsis, THE TRAVELING FEAST: On the Road and at the Table With My Heroes (Little, Brown, $28), Bass serves up a rich smorgasbord of a memoir, truffled with pungent anecdote, sometimes funny, sometimes sorrowful, always savory. The melancholic power of these reunions is heightened by the reader’s awareness that some of these literary lions (Peter Matthiessen, Denis Johnson, John Berger) were soon to roar their last. But there’s also abundant hilarity, usually provided by Bass’s mountain-man approach to the dinner table. Whether the GPS points to Wisconsin (Lorrie Moore), the “meadow-scented green wonder of West Sussex” (David Sedaris), the French Alps (Berger) or northern Idaho (Johnson), Bass loads the cooler with salmon, elk and rhubarb, like a bear on holiday. At Tom McGuane’s place in Montana, he attempts to grill a turkey, producing a “sonic blast” that rocks the house, burns “like a comet” and blazes in a golden “molten, gurgling, flaming corona.” At Berger’s farmhouse, on the other hand, where a crowd of friends and family has gathered, every course is perfection. As Berger pours out wine “like rich paint in our sunlit crystal goblets,” Bass reads grief in his host’s eyes. Remembering that Berger’s wife of 40 years, Beverly, had died not long before, he recalls the emotion that gave rise to his pilgrimage: his fears, as a suddenly single man, about what the rest of his life would look like. “What do I need?” he asks Berger. “Courage” is the reply.

THE ROAD TRIP BOOK: 1001 Drives of a Lifetime (Universe, $36.95)requires a different kind of courage, as well as, in some cases, “nerves of steel, a seriously capable vehicle and very good health insurance.” Covering “every country on the planet that was feasibly accessible at the time of publication,” this ravishing and sometimes hair-raising bucket list for the bucket seat was assembled by ace road-tripping writers and edited by the “motoring journalist” Darryl Sleath. Don’t mistake it for a mere coffee-table book: Although its lavish photographs invite armchair daydreams, this tome doubles as a reference work. Each entry includes a Google Maps link and helpful tips (if driving in Bhutan, be advised that roads are generally eight feet wide, tops, unpaved and “subject to severe landslides”), and the drives are organized according to an orderly geographic scheme and meticulously indexed. Especially tempting entries include the Beartooth Highway drive, which starts in Montana, with stunning views onto Yellowstone’s glacial lakes, pine forests, waterfalls and mountains; the Trollstigen National Tourist Route in Norway, whose hairpin curves reward those who don’t need Dramamine; and, in Northern Ireland, the “Game of Thrones” drive, which begins at the Titanic Studios in Belfast, heads north past the Antrim coast, and loops round to the Cushendun Caves, before descending to the spooky Dark Hedges on the King’s Road. Fasten your seatbelts!

Liesl Schillinger, a critic and translator, is the author of “Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century.”

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The New York Times Book Review!! This is the type of email that authors like to get-- to put it mildly. Hi Shoba—I’m so excited to share your review in the 

[aion-rsa]

Space Sweepers and the History of Working Class People In Space

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This week saw the release of Space Sweepers, Korea’s first big budget special effects space movie extravaganza. There are a lot of interesting things to say about this movie, but one of the things that makes it stand out is it’s an excellent portrayal of people in space who are skint.

See, I hate to break it to you, but you’re probably never going into space. Unless you’re a highly trained technical specialist (well done!) or a billionaire (pay your taxes!), your best shot at seeing Earth from space within your lifetime is the development of realistic-yet-cheap VR headsets.

And the thing is, a lot of the time this holds up in sci-fi as well. Space travellers are either living in a post-scarcity utopia, are part of the military, or are some kind of genius scientists.

Even where we see supposedly salt-of-the-Earth relatable types, like Han Solo or Mal Reynolds, their scruffy outfits and roguish ways can’t quite cover for the fact that they own and live in the equivalent of a massive luxury yacht or private plane. Serenity may look like a rust bucket, but it’s far from the equivalent of a white van, and while Mal is constantly complaining about the costs of fuel and repairs, that doesn’t change the fact that he seems to own the ship outright, and in “Oxygen” he appears ready to buy the ship for cash.

As for Han Solo, leaving for a moment his humble origins and that he won the ship in a card game, within the Galaxy Far Far Away the ratio of space travellers to non-space travellers doesn’t seem that different from the one on Earth. Yes, there are lots of smugglers and Tie-fighter pilots and interplanetary bounty hunters, but for every one of them there are millions of Tusken sand raiders, Jawa scrap merchants, moisture farmers and Corellian street rats. Spacecraft might come and go from the spires of Coruscant as regularly as buses, but the population density is such that most people on that planet will be lucky to see sunlight, let alone the stars.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the chances of an ordinary person getting into space even in the foreseeable future vary between Willy Wonka Golden ticket level lucky, or truly dystopian. On the one hand, Elon Musk has announced the first all-civilian mission to space, led by billionaire Jared Isaacman (so, not what you’d call an everyman), two seats given to people who have won a place by donating to St Jude’s Hospital (it probably won’t be one of the smaller donors), and finally, one lucky front-line health worker.

But Elon Musk wants to colonise Mars, and sadly billionaires still need people to clean the toilets, so Musk has other ideas for how ordinary people might get into space. Unfortunately that idea is indentured slavery, demonstrating that the most prescient science fiction writers of our generation are the writers of first-person shooters.

This is why, outside of post-scarcity-fully-automated-luxury-space-communism, and the military, science fiction is always oddly quiet about money. With a few honourable exceptions.

We Just Work Here

The first and most obvious reason why any ordinary working-class person would end up in space is “they’re paid to”.

Pretty much the codifier of working-class people in space is Alien. The crew of Nostromo aren’t scientists, they’ve not got The Right Stuff. Nobody on that ship is getting a high school named after them. The crew of the Nostromo are basically truck drivers who venture off the highway and run into something nasty. Yes, ironically they show a great deal more competence, professionalism and intelligence in encountering an alien threat than the actual scientists in the prequel movie, but the first conversation these characters have when they come out of hyper sleep is about money. From the outset, these are people in a place of work.

It’s a model that set the format for gritty-industrial-working-class-people in space movies going forward for better or worse. Event Horizon just lifts Alien’s aesthetic completely for the rescue ship Lewis & Clark, as does the videogame series Dead Space, like Alien, set aboard a mining ship.

Away from the horror genre, Outland sees Sean Connery play sheriff in a final frontier mining town that could have taken place in the same world as Alien.

And of course, Red Dwarf, which not only made good use of the Alien aesthetic, but also cast the colony commander from Aliens as their Captain, to tell the story of chicken soup repairmen in space.

Across all of these stories, and of course the aforementioned videogames, the life of the blue collar space traveller is an unpleasant one, exploited by a company that not only controls your life while you work, but also owns all of your food, water and air. Indeed, it’s not rare for them to go further. In Moon, another film where the spacemen-to-earthmen ratio seems not far what it is now, Sam Bell’s employer decides to save the cost of training employees and ferrying them back and forth from Earth to the Moon by taking one employee and filling a cellar full of his pre-programmed, short-lived disposable clones.

Space Sweepers

Public Transport

But maybe you don’t want to work for “the Man”, not an unwise call given the Man is probably trying to feed you to something horrible in the hope of creating a new bioweapon. One surprisingly under-utilised method of getting into space is public transport.

In The Fifth Element, Bruce Willis plays a special-forces-operative-turned-cab-driver who, as part of his cover, wins a ticket to go on a space cruise. Although looking at the sets and the extras in this movie, as well as the packed-in-as-tightly-as-we-can apartments back on Earth, one gets the impression this is not an option open to the majority of working joes.

Perhaps the best example of this is in the shockingly under-loved 2018 flick, Prospect, featuring future Mandalorian Pedro Pascal.

In Prospect, the spaceship is little more than a rotating framework filled with cargo containers in front of a massive engine. The father and daughter prospecting team are on board a lander that resembles nothing so much as an old Apollo Lunar Lander on the inside, and as the mothership approaches their destination the ship doesn’t even stop, it just releases the lander, tells them when the ship is going to be passing back that way and warns them the line is being terminated, so there won’t be another ship passing that way.

This is a model it would be fantastic to see more of. The landing module is small enough that it’s entirely plausible that even these not-very-well-off characters could buy, hire or rent one. Rather than having the freedom of the space ways like Mal or Han, their travel options are entirely restricted by what destinations are profitable for large shipping companies and whether they’ll let you tag along. And while on the surface the aesthetic looks a bit Alien, in truth it feels far more like it’s cobbled together from relics of the actual space age.

Borrow Your Way Into Space

And finally, of course, there’s the Elon Musk solution. Borrow your way into space. One of the early places to use this idea was Gateway, by Frederik Pohl. Frederik Pohl in particular is fantastic at writing science fiction worlds where people actually have to worry about money. In Gateway and its sequels humanity has discovered Ancient Aliens left a space station nearby, stocked with a lot of spaceships. Being alien technology, humans can’t control the ships accurately, they’re limited pretty much to pressing the “Stop” and “Go” buttons, and when the ship flies off it might land on a world of fabulous riches, or it might chuck you into the heart of a star.

Prospectors who want to try their luck in these ships have to take out a loan to get to the station, and throughout the novel the protagonist is constantly aware of how many credits are in his account.

Which brings us back around to Space Sweepers. At first glance the Space Sweepers set-up might seem similar to that of the Millennium Falcon or Serenity – an extremely “used” looking ship run by a rag-tag bunch of misfits. But the first time we see the protagonist, Tae-ho, he’s in a pawn shop. As soon as he gets back to the ship we learn the crew are still paying off the cost of the ship, as well as the costs of repairs and parts.

We see an awful lot of “Space sweepers” throughout the film, junk collectors gathering up salvage from Earth’s orbiting collection of derelict spacecraft and defunct satellites. But these people don’t seem like roguish space pirates, the impression they give is more akin to app-based gig workers.

This is compounded by another issue – that to work in space you need a visa, with citizenship limited to the wealthy few who are able to afford a place on the deluxe orbiting space habitats.

Everything in Space Sweepers is driven by money, whether it’s Tao-Ho’s attempts to raise enough money to find his daughter, the robot, Bubs, and her attempt to get a humanoid body that reflects her gender, and of course, the $2 million reward for “Dorothy” which drives the whole plot.

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Often space-based sci-fi is about the fantasy of freedom, of exploration. Even shows like Star Trek give us characters whose job isn’t much more than to fly around having adventures. But there is rich storytelling to be done about the people who have to clean the space toilets.

Chris Farnell’s novella series, Fermi’s Progress, is about a ship whose FTL drive vaporises planets, and features at least one space traveller who isn’t a scientist, super soldier or billionaire (although to be fair the other three characters are exactly that). You can find part one here.

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