Word: mooning
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This recognition is the source of Lessing's strength. As interested as she has become in grand designs or configurations of enormous powers, she does not forget the here and now. She will still pause for moments of liquid beauty, stop to portray a sliver of the moon reflected in a dusty courtyard pool in Morocco. Shikasta invites argument. There is something unsatisfying about a vision of history that suggests humans could not, after all, help making the messes they have, that their blunders were all ordained by a small tic in the cosmos. But belief in Lessing...
Mailer has tested this magic on the Viet Nam War, American presidential politics, the women's movement, the moon program. He tries it now upon another American public event that possessed, even before he wrote about it, a certain Mailerian quality: the execution, early in 1977, of Gary Gilmore, 36, a Utah murderer who refused to appeal his conviction and death sentence and demanded that the state kill him. Utah obliged, but only after a ritual that turned Gilmore into a grotesque celebrity. Shortly before the prisoner was seated in front of a dirty mattress to face the firing...
...have caught our first glimpses of the ammonia clouds and great storm systems of Jupiter; the cold, salt-covered surface of the moon; and desolate crater-pocked, ancient and broiling Mercurian wasteland; and the wild and eerie landscape of our nearest planetary neighbor, Venus...
...possibility of extraterrestrial life is the cause to which Sagan has dedicated much of his life. His earlier book The Cosmic Connection, treats this exclusively. When scientists examining the samples brought back to earth by Apollo found no signs of life, Sagan proclaimed to their collective infuriation that the moon was "dull." This polemic grates in the course of Broca's Brain. It pops up in almost every chapter, tied tortuously to whichever theme is central at the time. Sagan ought to have called his first book "Why I Think There's Life on Other Planets" and been done with...
Bova conveys his message entertainingly. His writing is competent, if not spectacular, and while the "futuristic technology" involved--killer satellites (gasp!) and moon bases--is old hat to science fiction fans, the interplay between science and politics and the bitter metamorphosis of Chester Arthur Kinsman should keep readers interested...