"Powerless" by Harry Turtledove is an alternative history novel set in a world dominated by the Soviet Union. The first two chapters of this full-length novel originally appeared in slightly different form in the September/October 2018 issue of " The magazine of Fantasy and Science Fictio n."  Greg Benford suggested to Harry Turtledove that he extended it into a novel and this is the result. Like the majority of Turtledove's alternative history novels, the story in this book operates on two levels. On the surface level, it is a work of fiction set on an alternative version of Earth. On a deeper level, it is an account of a real-world series of historical events told from an alternative perspective. The world of "Powerless" begins to diverge from our own with the Confederate States of America successfully winning independence in the 1860's. By the time in which the novel is set, many years later - and we are never told exactly how much later - the a...

 

Book Review: "The Klingon Hamlet The restored Klingon version, prepared by the Klingon Language Institute" Nick Nicholas and Andrew Strader   In "Star Trek VI - The undiscovered county" Klingon Chancellor Gowron says  " You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon. " Essentially, this book, an illustration of just how far the devotees of some science fiction genres are prepared to go to bring the worlds of their favourite stories to life, has been written to give the reader the opportunity to do just that. The forewords and appendices depict the belief of the Klingon Empire at the time of "Star Trek" that " Wil'yam Shex'pir " was a Klingon author and playwright, who lived at the time which on Earth we will call the 23rd Century who wrote all the works we ascribe to "William Shakespeare." The Klingons are supposedly convinced that Shakespeare was one of their own and all the massi...

The Final Countdown, sung by Europe, with video of the first battle of Geonosis, from Star Wars II, "Attack of the Clones."  Because the clones in this, their first battle, look a lot like Imperial Stormtroopers, when this film came out, many of us watching at this point thought something along the lines of  "Ah, so this is where stormtroopers come from, and when they're shooting at targets who don't have plot armour, they CAN shoot straight."  Of course, we learned much, much later in "The Bad Batch" that Republic Clone troopers and Imperial storm troopers are not in fact the same, but never mind!