Books

The Beatles had a lot of music in them, and it’s the best music in the pop/rock universe. They are the all-time best selling band in history, with more #1 hits - both as a band and as solo artists - than any of their peers.

But they also had a great deal to say. As the pacesetters of pop culture in the Sixties, they were at the forefront of young...

Unlike Her Majesty, the Beatles had a lot to say. And the world had much to say about them.

So much so, in fact, that one book can’t hold it all. It would take dozens of books, we can safely assert, to capture everything of value that the Beatles offered up during their tenure as the heralds of youth culture, sexual revolution, and the quest for...

If the Beatles hadn’t written and recorded “A Day in the Life”, “I Am the Walrus”, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “Blue Jay Way”, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and other proto-progressive songs - if they’d never cobbled together “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”, applied Western tuning to a sitar on “Norwegian Wood”, flipped George’s guitar on...

In his previous book, The Progressive Beatles, Scott Robinson asserted that without the Beatles, there would have been no Yes, no ELP, no Genesis, no King Crimson - no progressive rock genre. In this new work, Robinson argues that without Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and other classical influences, there would have been no Beatles - or at least not...

For seven glorious years, Aaron Sorkin’s masterpiece The West Wing served up a vision of American democracy and governance that informed us, challenged us and inspired us. In this collection of more than 20 essays, all prompted by memorable moments in the series, Scott Robinson surveys the issues, crises, and core principles of greatest impact,...

When I was watching The West Wing during its original run, I was appreciative of how Aaron Sorkin and his team didn’t just serve up good drama, but built stories out of what was going on in the real world. And as time passed after the series ended, and I re-watched it over and over, I was struck by how prescient it turned out to be: many things...

The West Wing generates loyalty on a par with that of Star Trek fans and Deadheads. The most loyal fans own the DVD box sets of all seven seasons and watch them over and over, and know the show inside out.

This book is for them. It contains quizzes for every episode of the series, as well as a number of topical trivia challenges.

Those of us who deeply love The West Wing, and would choose TWW reruns over the finest muffins and bagels in the land without even thinking about it, are all too aware that it is the most quotable TV show in history (surpassing even Star Trek). When we hear a colleague in a meeting at work say, innocently, “What’s next?”, we can’t help but hear...

The West Wing has a fandom that rivals that of Star Trek, Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad. As with those shows, fans like us buy the DVD box sets and put the show on endless loop – or we used to, until it started streaming. Some re-watch all seven seasons every few years; some watch it annually; some just never stop at all (I’m somewhere...

Democracy. It’s messy, it’s uncomfortable – but it’s better than the alternatives, as Winston Churchill famously assured us. And it is certainly better than Authoritarianism.

The idea of a self-governing society, where all are considered equal, is humankind’s dream. It’s one of the things that makes The West Wing so attractive to its tens of...

“Star Trek was explicitly crafted by its creator, Gene Roddenberry, into a humanist manifesto; the stories Trek told were humanist parables, putting forth the core philosophies to which he was devoted: equality, reason, integrity, fairness, opportunity, community. I was soaking them up before I even really understood what they were. I didn’t...

When Gene Roddenberry conceived Star Trek, he imagined a future very different from what was typically put forth in science fiction - a future where humanity has overcome greed, bigotry, misogyny, materialism, conflict and war. Star Trek’s fans embraced that vision. But many consider it unattainable, if admirable, even those who wrote and...

We first became acquainted with the power of Federation democracy in “Journey to Babel” in the original series, when Kirk’s Enterprise trucked more than 100 Federation delegates to a neutral planetoid to discuss and vote on the admission of Coridan to its ranks. We saw argument, contentiousness – and a serious, violent effort to disrupt the...

It’s hilarious these days to watch misguided, insecure fanboys and transparent political panderers break out in rants and whines that Nu Trek – Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds – is ‘woke’. Anyone who knows Trek, old or nu, can only laugh; Trek has, of course, been utterly woke since 1966.

Woke. Shining a light on racism. War. Sexual...

Smart people love Star Trek. And smart people love thought experiments.

It seems a pretty natural thing, then, to bring the two together. Trek offers up a number of thought-provoking problems all its own, from the questions of identity emanating from the Transporter to the question of Data’s sentience; but thought experiments emanating from...

Trek fans the world over know the following names: Nomad... M-5... Landru... V’Ger... Finnegan... and, of course, Data. Star Trek has given the science fiction universe some of its most interesting and provocative AIs and androids, and with them an insightful flow of concepts to consider as AI makes its way into the real world. Now that we’ve...

Star Trek’s Cmdr. Data... Alien’s Ash and Bishop... Skynet and the Terminator... the androids of Westworld... Ex Machina’s Eva, the Stepford Wives - and the granddaddy of them all, HAL 9000... These and other famous artificial minds are at the heart of this exploration of AI and the possibility of machine consciousness, suggesting the directions...

Review after review of Space: 1999, in the Seventies and since, has noted that its more philosophical style is distinctive, not just from Star Trek, but from most TV sci-fi. It is one of the show’s trademarks – in its first season, anyway – and made it an important entry in the genre, over and above its groundbreaking look and style.

The show...

“The Robinson Biography, written as it was in the mid-21st century (and thankfully published on paper, we estimate around 2080-90) notably references, and thereby confirms, a number of sources thought by many to be apocryphal: the originaldocumentaries of HAL 9000, including the two scholarly Clarke accounts, and the two visual summaries by...

Can machines be intelligent? Yes, that seems settled; but can machines be conscious? That’s not nearly as clear. The dream of machines that not only think, but feel and experience consciousness as humans do has been a canvas of fantasists, a goal of technologists and a conundrum to philosophers for decades. Here in this brief collection are...