Imagine a movie in which you see a set of characters being put in a weird setting where they can get killed by sudden moves, where there is no recollection of why they are placed in that location, and where answers need to be figured out, and tested out one by one (and where figuring out the puzzle incorrectly can result in serious injury or death). It would almost seem like the viewer only knows as much as any of the characters, and even the characters keep on changing personalities through the movie. Combine that with the movie being made by a newbie director, and being made on a low budget, and you can consider such a movie to be a ‘blink and miss’ kind of movie. Movies like this come and go, and you won’t miss much.
Well, Cube was nothing like that. The movie was a decent commercial success, including overseas (especially Japan and France) and is now considered a cult hit. The movie inspired 2 more movies – Cube 2: Hypercube (2002) and the prequel Cube Zero (2004). It was also nominated for a few awards (not the Academy awards though). The movie was a real low budget one, and had some complex mathematics involved if the viewers wanted to figure out what the logic being used inside the cube were.

Cube is the story of a group of people who find themselves inside a white room, cube shaped, with no idea of why they are there. When they compare their professions, there does not seem to be any commonality between them, with people being a police officer, a doctor, and so on. They resolve to move as a group and to try to escape, but are foundering about what to do. There are 6 doors in the room, one in each wall, one in the ceiling, and one in the wall. The doors lead to more rooms, and problematically, some of the rooms are booby trapped; entering could lead to a painful death – as happens to one of them when he enters a room and is sprayed in the face with acid that kills him.
The set of people are facing 2 main issues
- Quentin, the police officer and the one who seemed to be the most responsible is losing his head, and attacking the others in the group. On the other hand, Dr. Holloway, who seemed to be the most unstable at the beginning, begins to show a great deal of stability as the movie progresses
- The mathematics involving prime numbers to figure out which cube was a trap or not was complicated enough (until the idiot savant Kazan shows his great mathematical talent for doing these calculations), but then they learn that the cubes are also on the move, doing a complete movement before returning to their original position, and that the timeframe to escape is limited.

The Sirens of Titan was a novel that was nominated for a Hugo Award, published in 1959. It is acknowledged to be one of the best books by Kurt Vonnegut, even though he has several other famous books such as Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions. The book is not actually true science fiction in the mould of books by writers such as Asimov or Arthur C Clarke, more in the lines of satire, a satire on humanity. The book is especially critical of concepts such as religion, treating religion as a concept that can make its followers do weird acts, as well as how these concepts are used as a powerful weapon to influence people, and equally and weirdly, how people allow themselves to be influenced by such use of religion.

This novel was controversial, given its treatment of religion, and churches, and how the fervor of the book was seen to be almost similar to Marxist disdain for religion. At the same time, there are a huge set of fans of Vonnegut, who cannot understand the controversy about the book. The book should be seen as a funny and humorous look at overall society, and this book is indeed pretty funny.
The novel is supposed to be about the richest man on Earth (in the 22nd century), Malachi Constant, who is extremely rich, but whose life is mostly stagnant. In actuality, the novel seeks to portray the entire human existence, its civilization, its development, all this as something that was necessary only to help an inter-galactic traveller. This traveler, called Salo, from a place called Tralfamadorian, is a robot meant to carry a message to another galaxy. However, his ship breaks down, and needs a new part. And this is where the meaning of humanity takes on a different air, since the entire human existence and development was meant for the level of civilization to reach a point where this part can be manufactured and given to Salo.
Constant is actually manipulated by a strange set of events, manipulated by Winston Niles Rumfoord. Rumfoord is a person who knows the past, present and future, and can appear on different planets, primarily because his ship entered a strange phenomenon called ‘chrono-synclastic infundibulum’, something not defined, but which gives him strange powers.

Isaac Asimov wrote a huge amount of science fiction over the years, and is known for many of his books such as the Empire Series, and most famously for the Foundation Series. The 3 main Foundation books were the ‘Foundation’, ‘Foundation and Empire’, and ‘Second Foundation’. It was later, in order to try and fill more details, that Asimov wrote more books for the Foundation, that include books that were both prequels and sequels. The last such book that he wrote was called ‘Forward the Foundation’, and was released in 1993, a year after Asimov died. Forward the Foundation was a sequel to ‘Prelude to Foundation’, carrying on with the story of Seldon’s search for how to develop the story of psycho-history.

In end of Prelude to the Foundation, Hari Seldon learns that Otto Demerzel, the powerful advisor to the Emperor ‘Cleon 1′ is actually a robot. He solicits Demerzel’s help for continuing the research into psychohistory, and Forward the Foundation continues into that effort, and is meant to show 4 different time stages in Seldon’s life. The novel starts 8 years from the end of Prelude to Foundation, as Seldon gets more involved in politics, helping Otto fight off attempts, and then moves a further 10 years down the line. Demerzel has vanished, and Seldon is now First Minister. However, after the assassination of Cleon 1, Seldon slowly starts losing his family members. His wife, Dors, is killed when trying to save him from an assassination attempt, his adopted son (the 12 year he met in Prelude to Foundation) dies elsewhere in another violent act, his assistant Yugo Amaryl dies of over-work, and it is left to Seldon and his grand-daughter Wanda to try and set a process in place to guide events when Seldon is no more. And so starts the story of 2 different Foundations, one of the physical base, and the other, a society of mentalics.

The complete name of the book is called “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space” and it was another non-fiction book released by Carl Sagan (the famous astronomer and scientist) who wrote a series of books on science and space, and is most famous for his works, Cosmos and Contact. The name of the book is based on a photograph taken by the space explorer spacecraft, Voyager 1. Carl Sagan had pushed for the spacecraft to take a photograph when it was at a huge distance from the earth, a distance of 3.7 billion miles. In this photograph, the Earth seems nothing more than a Pale Blue Dot in the midst of empty space, and this is all that mankind has got.
Carl Sagan also described this photo in a speech he was giving, with these starting words: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

The book takes a look at previous theories of the geocentric Earth-centered universe, and how that was the idea that could not be challenged, with torture awaiting those who dissented. Slowly, that idea was overturned and we started learning about reality, about our true size in the enormity of the universe, starting with the scale of the solar system, and then continuing with the idea of how to explore the planets in the solar system. Carl Sagan also talks in detail about the Voyager program. The book also has some great photos of the Solar System, courtesy of NASA.

Chapters

Wanderers: An Introduction
You Are Here
Aberrations of Light
The Great Demotions
A Universe Not Made for Us
Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?
The Triumph of Voyager
Among the Moons of Saturn
The First New Planet
An American Ship at the Frontiers of the Solar System
Sacred Black
Evening and Morning Star
The Ground Melts
The Gift of Apollo
Exploring Other Worlds and Protecting This One
The Gates of the Wonder World Open
Scaling Heaven
Routine Interplanetary Violence
The Marsh of Camarina
Remaking the Planets
Darkness
To the Sky!
Tiptoeing Through the Milky Way