One of the advantages of reviewing an older series of books is that unless your readers have been living under a rock, they already know the basic storyline: Dave Bowman and Frank Poole fly to Jupiter and HAL, their hyper-intelligent computer, tries to kill them.  Pretty straight forward, or is…

In his 1962 dystopian novella, A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess coined the term “ultra-violence” to characterize the sociopathic ravagings of a young man named Alex and his “Droogs”.  Stanley Kubrick brought it to theatres in 1972.  Exceptionally controversial for the time, I remember seeing it at the Strand Theatre in…