I can solidly state that Star Wars: The Force Awakens includes nearly everything a Star Wars fan loved about the Original Trilogy (1977), while leaving out much of what was problematic about the Prequel Trilogy (1999).

In many ways, The Force Awakens feels a tad like a remake or reboot of the first film, 1977’s A New Hope. At its heart — during the new and dark time in which it takes place, the new characters very literally represent just that — a new hope and much needed new energy to fight the antagonists we face: The First Order, a dastardly remnant of the failed Galactic Empire. Little guys versus well-armed baddies? Definitely familiar territory, but here and now, 38 years after the debut of the original films, that’s a good thing.

Marvel’s Jessica Jones
Episode 1.1 “AKA Ladies Night”
Created by Melissa Rosenberg
Starring Krysten Ritter, Mike Colter, Rachael Taylor, Carrie-Anne Moss, David Tennant
Netflix
Premiere date: November 20, 2015

Marvel’s Jessica Jones starts off with a dramatic bang. Taking place in the same dark Manhattan of fellow Netflix seriesDaredevil that contrasts so heavily with the New York that Iron Man and the Avengers saved just a little while ago, the grit and overt noir feels more like something out of Christopher Nolan’s depiction of The Dark Knight. The difference here is that Ra’as Al Ghul’s Detective is 5’9″, female, and doesn’t need a mask to intimidate the baddies.

The first episode, “AKA Ladies Night,” does some interesting things when it comes to its depiction of women. Jessica Jones takes place in a woman’s world. The first ten minutes of the show is bereft of male-speaking roles. The next five introduces a father trying in vain to cope with his daughter’s missing status by attempting to fix a door, while his wife, deals with the business. The next male character you meet is likewise neutered: he’s a video artist. Number 3 is a pathetically portrayed Alpha Male — contrast that with the title super heroine in Krysten Ritter, a woman running the board room in Carrie-Anne Moss top-rate lawyer, and the missing female’s mother, who’s clearly running things at home. This is a wholly different paradigm for the Marvel Cinematic Universe that started off with the male chauvinist Tony Stark in Iron Man less than a decade ago. As comic book content goes, it’s a whole new bag.

The Martian
Paperback | Kindle
Written by Andy Weir
Broadway Books
Publication Date: February 11, 2014
Cover Price: $15.00

Let’s get the opinion stuff out of the way: The Martian, the book upon which the recent movie starring Matt Damon is based, is pretty fantastic. The premise, like most science-fiction, doesn’t initially come across as compelling. There’s an astronaut named Mark Watney who, through chance and misfortune, was left for dead on Mars by his team. He’s got to find a way to let humanity know he’s still around, and he’s got to figure out how to survive for as long as possible, hoping all the way that NASA can figure out a way to get him back home.

Rather than yet another science fiction blockbuster epic, Andy Weir‘s novel eschews the grandiose space empire stuff in favor of focus and intimacy. In that respect, The Martian is a minor work with major scope. The author achieves this in some interesting ways. There’s a focus on the “how” things get done. Put another way, Weir’s protagonist, Mark, delivers the action of the story to the reader with both high-level strategic sci-fi love (“I have to generate food”) and then drills down into the tactics of how that’s achieved (“I’ve created 192 square meters of farmland and have 600 liters of water for the potatoes I’m about to plant, which should last me 200 Sols beyond my NASA rations”).