In the morning of April 12, 1961 the Vostok 1 took off, went into orbit and after travelling around the world Yuri Gagarin began re-entry procedures. The service module had to come off but some of the cables kept it attached to the rest of the ship for a bit longer than expected before breaking. During the landing Gagarin ejected and opened his parachute while the Vostok service module landed with its own parachute.
The great director Sidney Lumet died today because of a lymphoma. Sidney Lumet’s films are often characterized by a moral sense. He often raised issues about social injustice and was critical of the obsessive pursuit of success of a typical American way of seeing. The protagonists of his films are often ordinary and isolated people who are opposed to much larger opponents.
“No Ordinary Family” has as its protagonists a family which goes on a trip to Brazil where they have an accident where the plane they’re traveling in plunges into the Amazon. They save themselves but they discover that they have developed extraordinary powers. The family members have to learn to live with these powers which start heavily influencing their lives, also forcing them to find a new balance within the family.
The novel “Gather, Darkness!” by Fritz Leiber was published for the first time in 1943 in the magazine Astounding. It’s set at the beginning of the XXIV century in a theocracy that took power on the Earth and the space colonies after a terrible nuclear war which took place a few centuries earlier. Humanity is ruled by the Hierarchy of the Great God, whose priests exploit religious beliefs to keep ordinary people in a state of ignorance and submission.
