What if some other flag were on the moon?

Alternate Histories of Space Travel.

Ministry of Space, written by Warren Ellis, illustrated by Chris Weston and Laura Martin.

What If? Vol 1: Russians on the Moon!, written by Fred Duval, Jean-Pierre Pécau and Fred Blanchard, illustrated by Philippe Buchet and Walter.

Graphic Novel Reviews by Kerey McKenna.

So with the anniversary of the first Apollo Moon Landing tomorrow and all this talk of new American space travel projects under a militarized “Space Force,” I started to think, what if America didn’t land on the moon on July 20th 1969? No, I’m not saying Americans never actually went to the moon—I don’t want to get punched by a national hero. What I mean to say is what if America hadn’t been the ones to take those first small steps into the cosmos, but another nation? What might that mean about the politics and technology of space travel?

Well, if you, like me, enjoy exploring a little bit of contra-history, two graphic novellas, What If?: Russians on the Moon! and Ministry of Space, play with the idea of manned space travel in the twentieth century that wasn’t dictated by America’s on again off again love affair with space.

What If?: Russians on the Moon! starts with the premise of a tragedy befalling the brave crew of Apollo 11. America’s moonshot is thwarted when a micro-meteor ruptures the hull of the lunar lander during descent to the moon, killing crew members Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin. However moon exploration doesn’t end there: a Russian Cosmonaut lands on the moon successfully, putting another tally on the board for the USSR in the space race.

Presumably because the US cannot afford a Moon Gap, they in turn send more successful missions to the moon. After about ten years of Cold War tit for tat, the USSR and America each have functioning moon bases just a moon rock’s throw away from each other. The men and women of the moon bases (the US adopts the Russian practice of sending men and women into space together, presumably fearing a Moon Gender Gap) are actually quite cordial with each other. In the harsh barren moonscape the astronauts and cosmonauts have come to value each other’s company more than ideological purity. However when the Soviet Political Officer and an American Military operative discover a pair of star-crossed lovers among the space travelers, Cold War tensions escalate and the love farce may lead to nuclear apocalypse.

In the second book, Ministry of Space, we see space travel driven not by national rivalries, but by near-unrivaled supremacy by a single nation. Neither the USSR nor the USA leads the post-World War II space race, but rather a dark horse candidate: the UK. According to this alternative history, during the closing days of the war, Britain's RAF snatches up all the German scientists and rocket prototypes they can smuggle back from the continent, and leave scorched earth behind for their American and Russian “allies.” Led by the fictional flying ace Air Commodore John Dashwood and a former German rocket scientist (unnamed but presumably Wernher von Braun), the Ministry of Space pushes Britain to the stars, reaching every milestone of space travel (artificial object launched into space, man launched into and returned safely from space, manned mission to the moon, man mission to Mars) years or decades ahead of the real-world schedule. While The UK’s earthly empire dwindles and dissolves much as it did in our timeline, by 2001 this alternate Britain has become a gleaming futurist’s dream of jet packs, space stations, (relatively) safe colonization of the solar system, and the preservation of the “British” way of life.

However, aside from the evolution of the technology and the triumphs and disasters along the way to claiming the stars, there is a lingering mystery about how the RAF managed to get the funds to launch its first satellite in 1948 and its first astronaut in 1950, amid a post-war UK economy in such a state that wartime rationing didn’t end until 1954. Among all the crisp science fiction art it’s easy to overlook that niggling question and assume it’s just the brilliance and drive of the RAF fighter pilot and German mad scientist. The fictional Doctor Wernher von Braun (presumed) is unconstrained by a risk-averse US government that kept the real-life Wernher from realizing his plans for space stations and off world colonies (not-Wernher at one point muses that the Americans lack a sense of “Opera” and that their space program would be a plodding cautious affair). Dashwood races into space under the ethos that if throwing wave after wave of men into dangerous machines that had just been invented was good enough to save England in the Battle of Britain in 1940, then that ethos will get them to Mars by 1969. However at the end of the story the Original Sin of the Ministry is laid bare, and in one final gut punch of a panel it is revealed that while their nation took giant leaps in the development of technology, they also made steps backward in their humanity.

So if you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if the Stars and Stripes wasn’t the only flag "flapping" up on the moon (or was never planted in the first place), here are two graphic novellas you should look at. Aside from wonderful space age art, they both have a different feel and scope to them. What If? is a more traditional tale with clear heroes and villains, while Ministry of Space seems more like a pretense for an illustrated guide to the space program the twentieth century promised but didn’t deliver.

And I’m going to say this again, we totally did go to the moon. USA! USA!

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

For more alternate history starring Wernher von Braun (and Hedy Lamarr!), check out this Nerds who Read review of Brad Linaweaver and J. Kent Hastings’s 2004 novel, Anarquía.

An Ending I didn't Ant-ticipate

Ant-Man and the Wasp.
Movie review by Michael Isenberg.

The trailer promised “The perfect summer movie.” Ant-Man and the Wasp delivered: it’s exciting, it’s heartwarming, and it’s very funny. Just don’t think about it too much. Summer’s not for thinking.

The curtain rises on Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) under house arrest—fallout from fighting on the “wrong” side in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War (Go Team Cap!). But the Feds aren’t satisfied with having Scott under lock and key. They want his mentor, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), along with Hank’s daughter Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), the duo who furnished Scott the Ant-Man suit that gives him the power to shrink to ant-size and benefit from that insect’s proportional strength. So Hope and Pym are on the lam and needless to say they’re not too friendly to Scott these days.

Scott passes the long hours playing the drums, learning close-up magic from Internet videos, and staging elaborate make-believe heists in which he and his daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) crawl through ventilator shafts made of cardboard boxes and slither through laser grids made of string in order to “steal” his most precious possession: a trophy she had given him for his last birthday. It’s labeled “World’s Greatest Grandma.”

The time spent with Cassie, now about eight years old, is endearing, especially since for all we’ve heard about how she’s THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN HIS LIFE, we’ve seen very little of them together.

Alas, playtime must come to end when Scott has a peculiar dream: he finds himself in the persona of Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), Pym’s wife and Hope’s mom, seeing through her eyes and sharing her memories. We heard about Janet in the original Ant-Man movie—she was Hank’s partner in superheroics, the first to wear the Wasp suit, until she shrunk too small, slipped between the molecules, and never came back. Shaken by his oh-too-real dream, Scott contacts Pym and Hope, who know instantly what happened. After Scott himself went subatomic and did come back, Pym thought that there might be a possibility that Janet is alive and could be recovered. He and Hope have been working on opening a tunnel to the subatomic realm. Somehow, their first test run has caused Scott and Janet to become quantum entangled (or ant-tangled). And so Pym and Hope bury their differences with Scott—not very deeply—and set out to work with him to bring Janet back.

The technology involved is quite advanced and absolutely everybody wants to get their hands on it. What follows is a standard MacGuffin-driven plot, with a twist—the MacGuffin is a building, Pym’s lab, reduced to rollerboard size by his shrinking technology, complete with wheels and telescoping handle.

Our first contestant is Ava (Hannah John-Kamen), who has been quantum shifted out of phase with our reality thanks to a lab accident. She is unable to grab hold of ordinary matter—hence her moniker “Ghost.” Albeit, when she wears the special suit (yes, another suit) engineered by her guardian and mentor Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne), she turns into a formidable fighter. Foster and Ghost want to get their hands on Pym’s lab to shift Ava back.

Then there’s the shady arms dealer and restauranteur Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins) who wants to sell the technology on the black market.

Finally there’s FBI agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) who just wants to capture Hope and Pym and prove that Ant-Man has been sneaking away from his house arrest. Woo is mainly comic relief, and the humor is a little corny. He is constantly on the verge of catching Ant-Man away from home, only to burst into the house with a dozen agents and discover him there doing something comical like taking a bath. It reminded me of Dr. Bellows perpetually stymied efforts to catch Major Nelson in the 60s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. I kept expecting Woo to blurt out Bellows’ catch phrase, “He’s done it to me again.”

As the lab bounces from hand to hand, there’s no shortage of action. Scott’s fighting style is humorous as he quips his way through a series of technical failures, always a little surprised when something actually works. In contrast, Hope is all sting as the Wasp. She seriously kicks ass.

Everything leads up to a big car chase through the streets of that marvelous car chase city, San Francisco. I thought I knew every chase scene trope there is, but Marvel threw me for a loop. Because the dynamics change completely when vehicles can shrink to matchbox size or be restored to their original dimensions at the touch of a button.

So, big fun. But like I said, don’t think about it too much. The science is mostly technobabble. Even the characters think so. Scott’s old partner in crime Luis (Michael Peña) asks whether the more technologically-oriented characters just put the word “quantum” in front of everything to sound scientific. Michael Peña would be excellent at Cinema Sins. By the way, he steals every scene that he’s in. (On the downside, his car horn plays La Cucaracha. C’mon, Marvel. That’s racist.)

Ant-Man and the Wasp also suffers from the absence of any real conflict. Ghost is a formidable ant-tagonist, but she really isn’t a bad person, and in any case there’s no reason why her interests are incompatible with Pym’s. As for Sonny and Woo, they never really pose a serious challenge to our heroes.

The trailer makes another promise: “The ending will ROCK. YOUR. WORLD.” They weren’t kidding. I literally gasped during the mid-credit scene—although upon reflection, I should have seen it coming. But if you want to find out what happens, you’ll have to see the movie. And if, after seeing it, you want more Ant-Man, be sure to check out the 2015 prose novel Natural Enemy, which I reviewed last week.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

Escape from Staten Island

The First Purge.
Movie review by Kerey McKenna.

Warning: contains spoilers for The First Purge and other entries in the Purge franchise.

Escape from New York, co-written by horror icon John Carpenter, is a survival action yarn that imagined a fascist America that had sealed up NYC in hopes that its denizens would destroy themselves. The First Purge deals with many of the same themes, expanding upon the politics and dialing back on the camp. If certain people feel “triggered” that dystopian fiction “suddenly got political,” they haven’t been paying attention. When used right, a political dimension to horror movies can be more effective at unsettling an audience than a jump scare.

When the Purge franchise began in 2013, the dystopian backdrop seemed to be a cheap narrative device, a contrivance to explain why, in a world with cell phones, private security, neighborhood watches, and safe rooms, an affluent, white family would be threatened by a gang of killers in fright masks besieging their gated community McMansion. In the world of The Purge, we are informed that in the not-too-distant future, America is ruled by the regime of “The New Founding Fathers” and a national holiday has been created in which Americans are allowed, even encouraged, to rob, maim, and kill their fellow citizens, without repercussions for twelve uninterrupted hours as part of a night of national catharsis. It’s a fairly straightforward scenario that seems to invite so many more scenarios and questions then a simple tale of an affluent family besieged by killers (for that you could watch The Strangers, Funny Games, or House on the Left, just to name some off the top of my head); questions like: How did the Purge engineers get citizens to start killing each other? How do they expect citizens not to retaliate against each other the next day? Can’t the citizens use the murder holiday to take arms against the regime that puts them in a murder holiday every year? Who is suffering most in the Purge and who is benefiting? It’s a premise that demands further exploration or at least spoofing by the likes of Rick and Morty:

For their subsequent installments, the Purge movies (The Purge: Anarchy, The Purge: Election Year, and now The First Purge) have been doing the hard work of expanding upon the premise and dedicating more time to world building around that scenario of national murder day (it’s logistics, it’s winners and losers) and doubling down on a very clear political hill to die on. The Purge is the haunted house reflection of neoliberalism: it’s a campfire tale centered around fears that de-regulation isn’t actually leveling the playing field in society but actually serves to comfort the comfortable while letting the poor and disadvantaged fall behind and die from neglect.

I wonder if the movie has some thoughts about current political events?

So politics aside, what should you expect from the movie? Well, this is my first outing in the Purge movies, and I found it to be a well-paced survival horror ride that put me more on edge and impressed me more with its world building than the much lauded Japanese film Battle Royale.

The First Purge is set in a future in which the ascendant New Founding Fathers Party have designated Staten Island as the proving ground for the purge concept to sell the idea to the nation. Those who choose to participate (or are unable to leave the island) are promised money if they can survive the night (with additional cash bonuses if they “participate” in the mayhem). I believe this installment features more science fiction and special effects than the previous installments, as military drones fly through the air monitoring the island and some purgers have volunteered to wear special contact lenses that will broadcast their purging activities out to the rest of the country. The contacts come in a multitude of hues and glow in the dark. Seeing the bright glow in dark eyes as purgers hunt or hide from each other invokes the idea that the purge has reduced these people to a primal animalistic state of fight or flight. The new sci-fi elements make the feature feel a bit like a blown up episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror.

In a very deliberate statement, and unlike previous installments of the series, all our heroes are black and brown. Nya (Lex Scott Davis) is a saintly neighborhood activist protesting the purge and sheltering the civilians that cannot leave the island. Meanwhile her wayward younger brother Isaiah (Jovian Wade) has snuck out to purge in order to make some much needed money and settle a score with a violent junkie (Rotimi Paul) who the Purge has let loose into the streets. The local drug kingpin Dmitri (Y’lan Noel) begins the night protecting his gang’s territory but as the true horror of the night unfolds, he and his hoods become an impromptu militia and constabulary trying to hem in the carnage. As chaos ensues, their story lines converge as they attempt to survive the night.

Overseeing the purge are New Founding Fathers party stooge Arlo Sabian (Patch Darragh) and its apolitical architect Dr. Updale (Marisa Tomei). When a few hours of the purge only result in ruckus block parties, some vandalism and a little bit of murder (i.e. a standard holiday weekend in NYC), Arlo unleashes secret death squads of military contractors and white supremacists (in classic KKK, Nazi, and tiki-torch varieties) using the Purge as cover to cull the island along racial and economic lines. For some reason this both surprises and appalls Dr. Updale, who had envisioned the Purge as a temporary and egalitarian return to a state of nature, not the night of state-sanctioned violence against only the poor that it so obviously is. If Arlo is a horror movie straw man for Republicans/neoconservatives, then Dr. Updale is presumably a strawman of libertarian thinkers like those in the CATO institute, proposing ideas that in a vacuum would provide more freedom for all but are in practice used by the powerful enrich themselves at the expense of others. Yes, if the movie has a weak link, it’s trying to set up that the architect of the Purge a) has a conscience that is so easily pricked, and b) didn’t think a political party so excited to create a murder holiday might have some shady characters in it with ulterior motives. I think it would have been stronger commentary if they had gone full on Dr. Strangelove and have her more upset that her party superiors are messing with her pure scientific data than upsetting her sense of fair play.

Like Thanos in Infinity War, the heroes face a villain that drew a lot of dangerous conclusions about population from a Malthusian reading of history and instead of working to grow and expand existing resources and infrastructure with the considerable resources they have at hand, they have concluded that a percentage of the population must be murdered for the whole to survive.

Dystopian fiction often resonates with audiences by mining societal fears and intergroup tensions. Soylent Green and Children of Man are centered around over- and under-population respectively, but both are rooted in the fear that humanity is on an unsustainable path. Judge Dredd and RoboCop patrol the streets of American cities rotting from urban decay and under siege from gang crime. Demolition Man and Wallie are farces about nanny states that have infantilized the population so much, only throwbacks from a harder more difficult time can force them to grow up again. Logan’s Run and Battle Royale are about taking ageism (against the old and young respectively) to the extreme of one group culling the other through blood sports. Death Race 2000 and The Hunger Games imagine those blood sports as modern day bread and circuses used by decadent tyrants to distract and oppress the downtrodden masses.

So if you are looking for an ostensibly apolitical scare this summer, wait for the giant shark monster movie The Meg or for the Halloween reboot coming down the pipe from the same studio (and oh-so-subtly referenced by one of the characters in The First Purge who has a HUGE Halloween Poster). But if you can deal with not just slashers and blood but your political buttons being pushed, then check out The First Purge.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

An Ant-ertaining Read

Ant-Man: Natural Enemy by Jason Starr.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

Tomorrow marks the premiere of the latest ant-ry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Ant-Man and the Wasp, which for some reason means it’s in theaters today. I’ll let you know what I thought of it, but in the meantime, since this is Nerds who Read, here’s my review of the Ant-Man prose novel Natural Enemy. Yes, there really is such a thing as an Ant-Man prose novel.

Published in 2015 to coincide with the Ant-Man origin movie, Natural Enemy picks up about ten years later. Scott Lang has had many adventures in the Ant-Man suit, and mastered his powers of shrinking to ant size, communicating with ants, and kicking ass using his proportional ant strength. He’s fought side-by-side with the Avengers a number of times and even developed a friendship with Tony Stark. Still, rather than saving the world with the big boys, Scott prefers to fight crime in his New York neighborhood. Indeed, we first see him in an action-packed takedown of an armed robber in a Third Avenue bodega.

Scott’s primary motivation in keeping a low profile, indeed his primary motivation in everything, is his daughter Cassie, who we’re told about two hundred times is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN HIS LIFE. You may recall from the first movie that it was to be with his daughter that Scott wanted to put his life of crime behind him, straighten out, and fly right. She was about five years old back then. Now she’s a teenager and living with Scott. It’s not exactly clear how his ex-wife, who has very little good to say about him, allowed that to happen, rather than taking Cassie with her when she moved out west to take care of her ailing mom, but anyway, that’s the living arrangement. Nor is it clear how Scott affords his Upper East Side apartment on his salary as a cable installer, but we are assured the apartment is a small one.

So he’s got his life in order and his daughter with him. But his world is turned upside down when one of his old criminal associates, Willie Dugan, busts out of prison and goes on a killing spree, rubbing out members of the old gang who he blames for his incarceration. The FBI shows up at Scott’s door and insists on providing him, Cassie, and Cassie’s mom with round-the-clock protection. Or maybe it’s the US Marshal’s Service—the author seems to treat the two, which are separate agencies, as interchangeable. Needless to say, with an FBI agent (or US Marshal) following Scott wherever he goes, it puts a crimp in his ant-manning. Cassie’s mom is furious and threatens to take Cassie away. The only one who enjoys the situation is Tony Stark, who texts, I’m looking for a recommendation for a babysitter, maybe you can help me out, Little Guy. I hear you’re using a good one.

But the FBI (or US Marshal Service) isn’t prepared for the likes of Dugan. He manages to kidnap Cassie and holds her prisoner in an old house out in the boonies. Scott must slip away from his minders, don the Ant-Man suit, and jump from car to car to hitch a ride upstate in order to confront Dugan and rescue his daughter. But when he gets there, he finds that Dugan is merely a pawn in a larger, more sinister plot.

I found the characters in Natural Enemy to be a bit cardboard. I’ve already commented on Scott’s one-note motivation. The female characters are even less developed. When Scott has a date for coffee with “Anne with an e,” she turns out to be a stereotype of the bitter divorcee who can’t talk about anything on a date except how awful her ex-husband is. And Cassie is another stereotype: despite some interest in technology, she’s basically the cliché teenage girl who only thinks about cute boys.

But of course, nice as it would be to have some depth of characterization, the main reason one reads a superhero novel is a good story with plenty of action. In that department Natural Enemy delivers. The story is well-paced, taking its time to unfold (which I like). The action scenes are spaced out just right to keep things moving along. There’s some humor, a couple good twists, and then a sprint to the climax.

One of my favorite scenes was one in which Cassie steals the Ant-Man suit, to get revenge on another girl who was mean to her (over a boy). Although that motivation is childish, we share with Cassie something we can no longer get from Scott: the thrill and wonder of being ant-sized for the first time, seeing the world from an ants-eye view, and experimenting with amazing new powers.

I’m seeing mixed reviews for Ant-Man and the Wasp, so I’m not sure what Ant-Man fans should expect at the theater this weekend. But I imagine they’ll come away wanting more Ant-Man, either because it was that ant-astic, or because it was that disapp-anting. Either way, I definitely recommend Natural Enemy.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com