Jax Book Nook

“Bring him in.”

Disney CEO Mohandas Patel thus commanded his assistants to usher in the talent. They nodded solemnly, though he got the subtle feeling that they dreaded this task. He wondered why. Not everyone got to meet a grade A celebrity like this.

Still, they performed. Patel’s assistants came back a minute later, carrying in their arms the emaciated, desiccated body of Harrison Ford, now 253 years old, kept alive by an unholy mix of genetic reprogramming, cryogenics, and robotics. The two assistants held him by the elbows, or rather, the well-oiled joints of the two steel limbs science had bestowed upon him as a “gift,” right along with his metallic legs, artificial heart, and titanium skull. He was more machine than man now. The only remaining organic part of him, his face, stirred as Patel’s assistants sat Ford down in the leather chair opposite of Patel. His mouth moved, slowly, until he was finally able to form words. A few seconds later, Ford’s electronic vocal cords kicked in.

“Let me die,” the wraith spoke. “Every day I pray to Shiva, let me die.”

“No, no, Mr. Ford,” Patel forbade, holding his hand up in false concern. “We would never let that happen. Our shareholders would have my head. You are a great asset to the company.”

“I would sell my soul for you to unhook me from that blasted device!” Ford moaned.

He was referring to his preservation chamber, right next to the cloning vats where they produced an endless supply of Mouseketeers and the Dybukk box Uncle Walt’s soul supposedly resided in. Patel rolled his eyes.

“The executor of your estate signed a contract, Mr. Ford,” Patel reminded him. “You must perform your most lucrative roles for eternity. In return, your descendants live like kings!”

“Fortune and glory,” Ford muttered. “That’s what they’ve gotten.”

“Yes, they have,” Patel continued. “Which means you will be starring in our latest production: Indiana Jones and the Lost City of Chicago!”

Ford moaned at the thought. It might have brought back bad memories. Ford was alive when Chicago sank into Lake Michigan during that seismic instability a century ago. Patel began to explain the plot. This story would occur fifty years later, where Indiana Jones, now immortal after having shamelessly retrieved the Holy Grail from the wreckage of its final resting place during the seventh sequel, decided he needed a book from his old house, now deep underwater, and would be willing to risk his life in a submersible to get it. Little does he know he is being pursued by a clan of Neo-Incels led by an attractive blonde German woman, a combination which made no sense on its face. The Neo-Incels kidnap Indiana and dangle him above a snake pit in Wrigley Park (how it got there while being underwater for decades no one could tell). Indiana would escape the snake pit, get into a fist fight with a giant Incel who would die in a horrifying way, engage in an absurd chase scene, obtain the book from this shelf, and then go home with Rhys Davies, currently kept in another preservation chamber, making jokes about his name.

“No, no, no,” Ford begged. “This will never work.”

“You don’t believe in the script?” Patel asked, with an evil smile growing on his face. “You will, Mr. Ford, you will become a true believer!”

Patel laughed evilly and held up the script, which exploded into flames. No one would stop them. They would shoot another entry for this franchise, even if the last one caused people’s heads to melt and explode during its opening weekend. Another crappy Indiana Jones movie. Then Ford interrupted Patel’s evil celebration.

“What about the flashback sequence?” he asked.

Patel stopped laughing. The script ceased burning in his hand, as if someone had poured water on it.

“Flashback sequence?” Patel asked.

“Yeah, in every one of these shitty movies you make now, there’s a flashback sequence,” Ford answered. “They de-age me, set the scene back in the 40s, let Indiana fight Nazis again.”

“Yes, we have a scene like that,” Patel admitted, nodding his head gravely. “It’s our way of tormenting the audience by reminding them that you used to be cool.”

“Why not make an entire movie like that?”

“What?”

“Forget this stupid bullshit where Indiana Jones is still alive at the age of 200 or something,” Ford continued. “Just have an entire movie where Indiana’s still young and fighting Nazis. You have the technology to produce that.”

“Well,” Patel stalled. “Some people find that use of CGI to be creepy.”

“Creepier than this?” Ford asked sarcastically, moving his robotic hands over his Frankenstein body. “Look, you’re not going to stop making these movies. I wish you would, but you won’t. So at least make them the best you can. It’s just a new form of animation. I’ll even voice act in it. Just please don’t subject the American public to this again. I mean, you want to make a good movie, don’t you?”

Patel stroked his chin in evident thought. Did he want to make a good movie? He’d come up in the company being taught the Disney way: take previously popular properties and beat them to death until the audience cried for mercy. Maybe there was a better way to make money than just throwing out content like fish chum. Could they actually understand what made these properties great before the company bought them and recover the things audiences loved about them in the past?

“No, I’d rather do this,” Patel responded. “My assistants will wheel you out to the back lot where we’ll be shooting the underwater scene. The submersible is pretty cool. Can you believe the guy we rented it from uses a PlayStation controller to steer it?”

Ford, surprisingly, smiled. He looked up at the ceiling and closed his eyes.

“Well, Shiva, looks like you finally got around to answering that prayer.”

You know who gets a bad rap: Darth Vader. I mean, he was complicit in the creation of the Galactic Empire which killed hundreds of millions of people on Alderan alone and likely murdered billions more off screen, but who’s counting? That and he killed little kids at the Jedi temple, but what where the Jedi doing taking kids that young away from their parents anyway? And he tortured his own daughter, though he didn’t know Leia was his daughter when he used that little ball device in Episode IV. Though given how strong with the force he was, I suppose he should have felt bad or something. (Admittedly, most people would feel bad for torturing a teenage girl regardless of other issues.)

Okay, starting over, the main rap against ole’ Darth is that he was supposed to “bring balance to the force” and instead he betrayed the Jedi, helping set up the Galactic Empire in the process. That’s what Obi Wan said on Mustafar.

I think it’s horseshit. Anakin did bring balance to the force. How you might ask? Well, by doing just what he did. Stick with me. There are two sides of the force, right? Light side and dark side. Or pure side and dark side. They really aren’t clear what the good side is called. So for the force to be in balance, the amount of good and evil in the world has to be roughly equal, right?

Episode I, if you can stomach remembering that film, introduces us to the world of the Galactic Republic before the Imperial period. It’s a world where a large part of the Galaxy has been governed peacefully through democratic means for millennia. The Sith haven’t been a factor in a thousand years. We later learn there are currently two of them. By comparison, there are hundreds of Jedi, and they are directly connected to the governing structure of the Republic. The Trade Federation is causing trouble, but they get beat by Jar Jar Binks and a pint size Jedi who accidentally gets stuck in a fighter ship. There’s a lot more good in this world than evil.

By the end of Episode III, that’s all gone. The number of Jedi and Sith are roughly equal. Yoda, Obi-Wan, and apparently, Ashoka, are out there on one side, and the Emperor, Darth Vader, and Darth Maul, are out there on the other. Now, you can argue that with the Galactic Republic becoming the Empire, a polity that has no problems blowing up planets and shooting moisture farmers for fun, the amount of evil in the universe is now greater than the amount of good.

That’s actually kind of a complex question philosophically though. There are arguments that the Empire was on the whole good for the galaxy because it was better able to enforce rules against slavery. I personally am a little skeptical of that. I haven’t seen much evidence that slavery was abolished on Tatooine, as Jabba the Hutt has women in chains in his palace in Return of the Jedi. That being said, while evil, the Empire still performed a lot of the basic functions the Republic did, such as maintaining the peace between systems, enforcing the law, and enabling trade between the various planets. Even a tyrannical government can be said to do some good by performing the normal tasks a government is supposed to do.

In any event, that argument becomes moot by Episode VI. By betraying the emperor, Darth Vader allows the Rebel Alliance to claim a major victory over the Galactic Empire, leading to revolts across the Galaxy. It does not lead to the end of the Empire. From the Mandalorian the Sequel Trilogy, we know that the Empire continues as “imperial holdouts” or “the First Order.” New name, same great service. Return of the Jedi implies the Empire is gone and the galaxy is at peace, but really what has happened is that the Rebellion has blossomed into a full-fledged civil war.

So, in the end, Anakin Skywalker fulfills the prophecy: he has brought balance to the force. At the end of his life, the powers of good and evil are relatively equal in the universe, a situation which guarantees decades of conflict that millions of people will doubtlessly die in. You’re welcome.

This brings us back to the original point: why would the Jedi want there to be balance in the force to begin with? At the beginning of Episode I, evil’s pretty much been beaten, save for a small revolt by some Asian stereotypes. Why would you want balance between good and evil? That’s not like other kinds of balance, like work-life balance, or balancing between recklessness and cowardice. You don’t want a balance between good and evil. You want evil to not exist. That’s because evil is well…evil. Yet the Jedi talk about Anakin like he’s supposed to be some sort of Messiah, and are then surprised when he turns out to be space Hitler. What did they think “bringing balance to the force” meant?

Okay, so I’ve had something happen to me twice in the last month that hasn’t happened to me since I started writing over three years ago. Someone agreed to Beta read my work and then stopped one or two chapters in. I am not going to name names because clearly that’s a dick move, but I do need to ask: is that normal behavior?

Let me set the stage. I have been trying to sell my full length novel, Christmas in Pandemonium, to literary agents for over two years now. I’ve recently decided to go the independent publisher route, going for some of the better known horror indies. This entire book has been through seven or eight beta readers before, and I think about 15 people have read over the first chapter and prologue. However, this guy agrees to beta read my book and then sends it back to me after that first chapter (the one that had already been looked over by 20 or so other readers) and tells me that he just can’t go any further. I won’t go into why other than to say it wasn’t spelling and grammar. I shrugged my shoulder and moved on.

Then it happened again. This time, it was someone from an online critique forum, and he’d already read the first chapter and decided to critique the entire book. By the time he gets to the second chapter, he says it isn’t ready for a complete manuscript review. Once again, based on his comments, spelling and grammar weren’t the issue. Really more stylistic stuff, but he says its not ready.

This time, I was a little peeved. I wrote back. Told him he was rude. I said that while the comments he had so far were valuable, nothing he pointed out seemed like the kind of thing that would cause most rational people to refuse a critique credit. I told him I was surprised he was part of this forum, because I had seen much rougher manuscripts than that and never thought of doing what he did. Then I told him I would review my manuscript and get back to him in two weeks if he still wanted to look at it.

I’ve got to say, the first time this happened, I was a little shocked. As I said, I’ve had 20 people go over that same first chapter and no one reacted that way. Then when the second person does that to me in a month, and with the nitpicks he was basing this off of, I really felt the need to tell him off. Maybe that wasn’t the best way to handle that, but I have this thing about people who demand perfection: they’re assholes.

I’ve had bosses who were like that. I worked for a guy who fired five people before he hired me, fired five people while I was there, fired me, and then fired five people after me. From what I can tell, the firm doesn’t exist anymore. He demanded perfection, and it drove him out of business. What amazed me was that no matter how bad his reputation got or how many people he lost, he refused to train people. Thought it was beneath him.

I guess that’s what annoyed me about these people. Could my book have been better? Yes, that’s why I submitted it to Beta readers. That’s the point of Beta readers. It’s supposed to be about improvement. You don’t need to improve something that’s perfect both because that is what perfect means and also because perfection does not exist in this universe. I’ve read more than enough really bad manuscripts and still given constructive feedback. Jesus actually didn’t have a problem with the Pharisees applying high standards to people. He had a problem with them putting heavy burdens on people without doing anything to help people lift them. To get a little more religious, don’t curse the darkness, strike a match.

So, that’s how I feel. Did I overreact? Have you ever met someone who said they would read something and then throw it back at your face? How did you react?

My short story, “Hostile Work Environment” is now available online through Quagmire Magazine. Read it here: “Hostile Work Environment” By John Willems — Quagmire (quagmiremagazine.com). My thanks to the people of Quagmire Magazine.

Great news! I’ve gotten another short story published at Quagmire Magazine. Hostile Work Environment will be published at Quagmire Literary Magazine – A literary paper where pigs can fly. (quagmiremagazine.com) this Sunday! My thanks to all the editors of Quagmire Magazine.

What’s the story about? If you’ve ever been to a workplace harassment seminar, you know they can be a living hell. My story merely takes that dynamic to its natural absurdity.

Have you ever had a favorite restaurant that made it big, and you regretted it? That pizza place you loved that decided to franchise, but the secret ingredients got lost in translation. The fried chicken place that showed up everywhere, but they couldn’t keep up the quality. You know what gets you? All the people who never knew the original restaurant that thought the knockoff was amazing. You feel sorry for all those people.

I think every preteen boy in the late 90s and early 2000s were like those people who only knew the knockoff, because every preteen boy would come home, park himself in front of the television, and watch Dragon Ball Z. I know because I was one of them. We thought it was amazing. The never ending fights. The storytelling. The long, awkward yelling and so-so animation.

And to think, we were getting the knockoff version. Before Dragon Ball Z, there was the original series we never saw until years later. I didn’t watch the original Dragon Balls until I was an adult in my 30s. The original Dragon Ball was a better show, and I would argue it’s for one reason: power levels.

Power levels were introduced in the first episode of the first season of Dragon Ball Z. An alien named Raditz crash lands on Earth with a device that rates the fighting ability of various fighters. It finds that Goku, our hero, and Piccolo, his old rival, both have power levels in the 300s, while Raditz has a power level 1500. However, Goku’s and Piccolo’s power increases when they concentrate it. Instant tension. As a kid, I thought that was amazing.

This was before I started writing and someone quoted me the phrase “Show don’t, tell.” Yes, we dumb kids felt instant tension, because they told us to. The original series had to show us Goku struggling against the Red Ribbon Army or King Piccolo. This successor show could just have a character read off some numbers to tell us “this is how much more powerful the villain is compared to the hero.” And what that did to the series was just absurd.

It begins with Raditz. with a power level of 1500. The next big baddie is Nappa with a power level of 4000 (I’m getting these from a web site, it may not be completely accurate.) So Nappa must be exactly 2 and 2/3rds as powerful as Raditz. Then comes Vegeta with a power level of 18,000. So Vegeta is 4 and 1/2 as powerful as Nappa. Each fight downgrades the last one.

Then it gets really absurd. Frieza, in his final form (because he has four, you know), has a power level of over one million. So, basically, the fight that Goku and Vegeta had last season was basically nothing you know. Then Cell has a power level of 20 million. And none of these fights really get more impressive than the last when you look at it. Trust us, say the writers, it’s more epic. We just have no visual way to prove that.

Side note. One of the problems with this is that at a relatively low level, Vegeta destroys a planet without really trying. It was a planet with bug people, and after overthrowing the emperor, Vegeta just blows it up witout even having to break a sweat. Frieza does the same at the one million power level by just throwing some energy down into the ground. This begs the question: how the hell do the Z fighters and their nemeses not destroy the planet accidentally, while fighting? No, really, if Vegeta can casually destroy a planet at power level 18,000 by just pointing a laser beam at the planet from afar, doesn’t Goku or even Krillin or Gohan have to worry about blowing up the Earth whenever they shoot a laser beam of moderate power and miss?

But back to the subject at hand, I just find the fights in the original series to be better without the power levels. I don’t need to know that King Piccolo has a power level 200 compared to Goku’s power level of 180. I need you to show me Goku getting his ass handed to him, which in the original series is exactly what they did.

What I really don’t need you to do is tell me that King Piccolo is really kind of a pushover compared to this Raditz guy who is seven times as strong, and then further dilute that by introducing people who are twelve times, 100 times, 500 times as strong, etc. to the point where the comparisons get silly. By the time the show gets to Namek, the world Piccolo was originally from (or that his double was from, it’s complicated), you get the idea King Piccolo actually wasn’t that much stronger than the average Namekian, and even might have been pretty weak. The series never gives a power level to King Piccolo during the show, but given how much more powerful Frieza’s gang must be by pure power level, there’s really no other conclusion you can draw because some Namekians appear to put up a little resistance.

The writers start having to make ridiculous leaps to keep our characters up with these ludicrous numbers. Gohan becomes a Super Saiyan at, what, age 10? Humans practically have no role in the defense of their own planet as even the strongest humans like Tien, Krillin, and Yamcha, have no way to keep up the absurd power levels of the alien and android characters. When Garlic Jr. comes back after the Frieza saga, his minions have received a bump in power levels with literally no explanation as to how they could have increased enough to keep up with the Z Fighters while Garlic is locked away in the Dead Zone. Objectively, the power levels just make Dragon Ball Z absurd.

You might argue that humans flying and throwing power beams at each other was absurd to begin with. Yes, but within its own world, the original Dragon Balls at least made sense. Z, however, has to really stretch things to create internal consistency. All because they decided to add this strange plot device to add momentary tension in the first episode. It would have been better if those stupid little visors never existed.

Last week, we asked the universe, or God, or the people who created Fallout, whatever, why society hadn’t recovered in the two hundred years after the bombs fell. Now, I hope to answer that question: frankly, the pre-war society was just too good.

Wait, you may be saying, wasn’t it like some kind of fascist cult that eventually turned into the Enclave? Yeah, the government was that way, but the economy was apparently pretty bitching. I mean, they could product so much Nuka-Cola, that even with the bottling plants shut down. They still haven’t run out of it two centuries later. Robot butlers and nannies. Medicine where you can heal wounds by just injecting yourself with whatever they put in stimpaks. To say nothing of machines that can perform surgery and get people off drugs.

As I said in earlier posts, the world is getting better, not worse, which generally means technology is getting better at producing goods and services. While they lack the semi-conductor, the Fallout world could be expected to have much higher productive capacity than our world. Then a nuclear war reduces the population to a fraction of what it was. Suddenly, the normal output for one year is enough for the entire country to live off of for centuries.

Indeed, those consumer goods could have been so abundant that there was no need to travel to other parts of the country to obtain anything other than very rare goods. No need to rebuild the roads. Or the factories. Or even the power plants. A few generators can keep the lights on. And it doesn’t take much work to do that.

You might argue that the clothes and foodstuffs would rot pretty quickly. I think people actually did argue that when Fallout 3 occurred. However, that’s assuming that people in 2070 America don’t have access to preservatives and fabrics that are capable of keeping that stuff fresh.

Necessity is the mother of invention, or activity generally, and the people in the Wasteland don’t have to work to get food, medicine, and energy. They just need to rifle through the next building. That’s probably why nothing has been rebuilt. Rebuilding means working and working means having to deal with people, some of whom may not be the most trustworthy.

It’s an allegory for modern society. The system is so good at providing for our basic needs, we don’t need to go to the lengths previous generations did. This doesn’t stop us from working. It stops us from socializing. Why go to the grocery store when you could just have DoorDash deliver? When you don’t leave the house, you stop forming civic groups and start forming chat rooms.

We always imagine the collapse of society to be some kind of nuclear wasteland or zombie filled Hellscape. What if it’s just the collapse of relationships? Maybe we don’t need to blow up half the buildings on the eastern seaboard to destroy society. Maybe we just need to be so good at producing and delivering goods and services that no one needs to go out and meet other people to have their desires fulfilled. We’re getting closer there with AI. How quickly will the day come when a single person can survive without actually talking to another human being? Imagine a future where there is no poverty or war, but we all spend our day talking to Alexa? Maybe that’s what the real apocalypse looks like.

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.

Please help welcome into this plane of existence, Anthony Luke Willems, my second son, born Wednesday evening in Charleston, West Virginia! Rachel and I are very proud to have created this little guy who will no doubt win both the Pulitzer and the Nobel Peace Prize in the future. I also expect Tony to be a start athlete, a famed academic, and a billionaire. Not that I want to put too much pressure on him. Right now, we’re focusing on getting him home from the hospital. I’ll teach him string theory next week.

I won’t be blogging for the next two weeks or so. I am on indefinite hiatus due to my wife giving birth. Will try to maintain activity on Twitter somewhat, but have to concentrate on what is important. Consider this an FMLA request and my readers are like the HR Manager. In the meantime, you could read Beer Run to pass the time. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BLSVRZN5