I am now back from my newborn induced hiatus, and I’m picking up right where I left off. On a prior episode of Jax Book Nook, I wrote about Star Trek, which is a television show. I will now write about Fallout, which is a video game. That’s Jax Book Nook everyone. We have movies and video games here. Just like the library now.

Anyway, what I said about Star Trek was that is was better than Star Wars for several reasons, the most pertinent one being that Star Trek understands that the future will be more prosperous than the past and yet still somehow finds a way to add tension to the show by leaning into the idea of chosen suffering: the crew of the Enterprise faces hardships, but only because they have chosen to explore the universe. Most science fiction requires some kind of future disaster to recreate a world of scarcity in order to create conflict.

In that sense, Fallout is not that different from other science fiction. The games take place in an alternate world where the Cold War never ended, or rather, it ends in the year 2077 when nuclear war breaks out between the U.S. and China, wiping out human civilization. The survivors in America take shelter in Vaults which protect them from the destruction, though most of them are being experimented on. The original game takes place in the year 2165, nearly a century after the Great War, and subsequent games take place in the 23rd century, which is ironically also when the original series of Star Trek took place.

Star Trek also had a great disaster, which is referred to alternatively as the Eugenics War or the Third World War. This was caused by the existence of enhanced humans like Khan Noonien Singh, and it also ended in nuclear war. However, by the 23rd Century in that universe, humans are exploring the universe and having copious amounts of sex with aliens as part of an intergalactic federation of planets.

In Fallout? They haven’t even managed to get the corpses out of the street! The roads are littered with people’s bones, and some of those bones look like they’ve actually been there for 200 years! Human beings live in city-states constructed out of junk, as they haven’t even formed central government capable of ruling over states on the East Coast. (Things are a little better out west under the NCR, but they still can’t control roving bands of raiders and regularly get rolled up by LARPers dressed up as Roman Centurions) People still live in buildings from before the war, which are falling apart, as the construction industry appears to be non-existent. Hell, commerce is practically non-existent, with the exception of caravans that trade centuries old goods left over from the old world. Nobody manufactures anything anymore (this time, for real!). Slavery has reemerged. They don’t even have a working road system, not that it matters as very rarely do people own functioning cars! This would be acceptable if we were talking about a world ten, maybe twenty years after the bombs fell, but the Fallout world has had two hundred years to get their act together. What gives?

Now, I know what you are saying. “Jack, it’s not so easy. You have to remember that they have to deal with Super Mutants and Feral Ghouls. Not to mention all the radiation everywhere.” You’re just listing other problems they should have solved by now. First, they can deal with radiation. They have the technology. The plot of Fallout 3 revolves around a device called the GECK which can clean all the water in the D.C. area. There are multiple GECKs, as there was one in Fallout 2 as well. These things can clean up radiation and make soil arable again. Feral Ghouls are basically zombies, and like zombies they can’t use weapons and have no higher brain functions. As predators go, they’re inferior to wolves. As for Super Mutants, yes, they are stronger and immune to radiation, but they’re also dumber than humans and they can’t breed because their genitals have fallen off.

I’m going to circle back to the technology issue: they have way better technology in the Fallout world than we do in ours. Sure, they don’t have semiconductors, but they do have laser weapons, stimpaks, robots, and utopia-creating devices that can make the water in the Potomac potable even after a nuclear bomb was dropped on it. Yes, some of those robots will shoot you on sight, but they can be reprogrammed.

Why haven’t they been able to rebuild yet? I don’t have an answer, so I’ll take some time to think about it. Do any of you have any answers? I’ll get back to you mid-next week.