Plum Kettle, ghost-writer for the editor of one of New York’s hottest fashion magazines, struggles with self-image and sets out on a wildly complicated road to self-acceptance. At the same time, everyone is buzzing over news reports about men, accused of sexual abuse and assault, who are disappearing and meeting untimely, violent deaths.

Kazuda Xiono, a young pilot for the Resistance, is tasked with a top secret mission to investigate the First Order, a growing threat in the galaxy.

I was delighted to be invited by my colleagues Alessandra Celletti and Ettore Perozzi to provide a foreword to their book, Celestial Mechanics: The Waltz of the Planets. Having known them for many years and long admired their work in the subject so many of us love and are fascinated by, 1 read with great attention and pleasure the text when it arrived. It is a formidable task they have set themselves, to provide a book that describes attempts by successive generations of astronomers from the dawn of history five millennia ago to observe, record and understand the phenomena of the heavens, particularly the intricate and perplexing behaviour of the planets.

The groundbreaking documentary accompanying this book (visit extras.springer.com) is presented by Arthur C Clarke with music by David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. Introduced fifteen years ago, this brought the subject of fractals to the attention of the general public for the first time; since then it has been shown in over fifty countries around the world.