Jax Book Nook

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    

Hey, if you’ve tried to sell a book before, then chances are you’ve traded review with people, and if you’ve traded reviews with people, you’ve had to hold your nose and give five stars to book that couldn’t even bother to spell its own title correctly. In honor of that, I’ve decided to start a series of such reviews.

***

The Adventures of Duncan Crockett is an unconventional, post-modern story that some might call “nonsensical,” “dumb,” or “exploitative.” However, pull the veil back, and you will find a stark expose of the tropes of Christian Romance novels. Duncan Crockett, clearly an exaggerated archetype, is an ex-Navy Seal who personally shot Osama Bin Laden and now hunts down human traffickers for free. (He lives off his great personal wealth made by selling his own line of hunting equipment.) The story follows how he meets his wife by rescuing her from Jeffery Epstein’s private island.

That plot line is evidently absurd, which is why no one is supposed to take this book seriously. Clearly, this is some kind of joke. I mean, the author is clearly a skilled humorist, as he paints an absurd world where human traffickers try to randomly kidnap beautiful women waiting in line outside a movie theater. Crockett saves his wife from the clutches of her captors by vaporizing them with his heat vision. At the climax, Crockett discovers a world-wide sex slavery ring run by Nancy Pelosi. I mean, clearly it’s an act of satire. That’s why it’s so brilliant.

And as satire, it’s hilarious. Crockett kill 50 sex traffickers with his bare hands and then eats them. When he and his wife have sex on their honeymoon, angels visit them and bless their union by joining them. The angels are said to look exactly like “Reese Whitherspoon in Legally Blonde” and “Chevy Chase’s wife in Vacation.” The government doesn’t solve the human trafficking problem because they’ve all been hypnotized by Satanic powers, who have also gotten to Wall Street and Hollywood. No one could really believe this stuff.

The one place I would caution the author is with his explicit portrayal of racial stereotypes. I won’t repeat them here, but this book does contain very uncomfortable portrayals of blacks, Latinos, Jews, East Asians, Indians, Native Americans, immigrants, Arabs, Muslims, Jews again, East Europeans, Russians, and the Dutch. Now, I don’t hold this against the author, as clearly these ugly caricatures were meant to push the boundaries of good taste. That being said, others, hell, most, might find these portrayals to be offensive.

Overall, I give this book five stars. It’s an excellent book, once you understand it’s a satire. Yes, I know some of you in the comments are telling me its real, but you lack the trained eye to know a joke when you see one. Whoever wrote this is a comic genius.

I feel the need to begin this post with that disclaimer because it appears people are getting very sue happy these days and as an attorney I know I’m protected by Hustler v. Falwell if its satire. Of course, the truly funny thing about this is the sad reality.

***

I recently received some unfortunate news. It appears that my blog posts will no longer be automatically posted on Twitter due to a disagreement between Twitter and WordPress. While I have no problem posting links myself, I find this fact to be a little indicative of Twitter’s management as of late. Finding myself a bit frustrated, I decided to call Twitter and complain. The following is a transcript of my call.

(Dial Tone Three Times, then a pickup)

Heavily accented English: Hello Customer Service, this is Elon.

Me: Elon Musk? What the Hell are you doing answering the phones? You own the company.

Elon: Well, in case you haven’t heard, I made some layoffs to make the company profitable, and someone needs to man the phones.

Me: I mean, there’s no way you could be this understaffed.

Elon: Then there were the people who quit, because they hated working here, and then when others tried to tell me that, I fired them because you’re not supposed to tell the boss bad news.

Me: Okay, I get it. It’s for the best. I mean who better to complain to than you?

Elon: Well, I am pressed for time, so if you could hurry up.

Me: It’s about the WordPress thing. You know. Twitter isn’t automatically tweeting my blog posts when they go out.

Elon: You can’t do that on your own?

Me: Yes, but I am wondering what kind of disagreement you would get into with WordPress that would cause you to stop this service. It’s a small thing, but it makes people wonder.

Elon: They just weren’t being reasonable. I only asked to increase their annual fee by 500 percent.

Me: How much was the old fee?

Elon: Like, five dollars a year. They couldn’t pay $30?

Me: Mr. Musk, I think this goes to the fact that you never really understood how the internet worked.

Elon: I know how the internet works! I tweet! I watch YouTube videos! I’m not a Luddite!

Me: I mean you decided to buy Twitter without any experience running any social media company. It’s not like building electric cars or space travel. Being good at one thing doesn’t make you good at another.

Elon: Oh, so you are so smart. Well, let me ask you: how would you make money with Twitter?

Me: Most social media companies make money by selling ad space. Have you tried that?

Elon: (Hurried scribbles, as if desperately writing something down)

Me: (Sigh) Mr. Musk, maybe you should consider selling Twitter.

Elon: I won’t sell unless I have a buyer who will rigorously pursue the truth.

Me: Mr. Musk, Twitter isn’t about a pursuit of truth. It’s about seeking out your personal political echo chamber and shouting your views into it to have them repeated back to you. It’s about a million bots trying to sell porn or cryptocurrency to the most desperate people on the vast cultural desert that is the internet. It’s about hundreds of thousands of amateur authors trying desperately to sell their self-published books against all hope. Social media is a black hole of despair that people fall headlong into due to the lack of meaning that exists for them in the flesh world. Political correctness is just a symptom of the problem where people try to find community through online political groups that they can’t find in their daily lives. Making Twitter about the pursuit of truth would require abolishing it and founding some other website where people could explore complex subjects at length rather than being limited to three short sentences.

Elon: Huh, I guess you’re right.

Me: Right, so you will sell Twitter?

Elon: No, I’m going to continue destroying it with my shitty management born of mindless slogans and assumptions about business taken from entirely different industries. Then, after it’s dead, someone can found that other site you were talking about.

Me: I think it’s called having a blog.

Elon: Really? How do you do that?

Me: I use WordPress.

Elon: Great. Fuck you.

(The other side hangs up. Phone rings dead)

Here’s a short story I tried, and failed, to get published. I may as well put it on my blog. Hope you all enjoy it.

***

CEASE AND DESIST

            “And so, the Mothman caused the Silver Bridge to collapse, resulting in the deaths of 46 people!”

            Brian announced this with a well-practiced air of certainty while pointing to the site of the old collapsed bridge, now completely demolished. He stood on the cliff face overlooking the Ohio River with the setting sun behind him. The crowd clapped politely at the recitation of Brian’s unique spin on the Mothman myth. The younger ones gave a few hoots and hollars. The older fans up front took pictures of the place where the old bridge would have stood if it were still around. When you charge $20 for a Mothman tour, generally you weed out the sarcastic teenagers and get down to the real fans.  

            “Thank you for coming on the tour!” Brian finished. “Please visit the gift shop at the Chamber of Commerce before you leave town.”

            The collection of middle-aged monster enthusiasts, young cheap thrill seekers, and old school hippies dispersed from the end point of the tour back toward the direction of the center of town, no doubt headed anywhere but the Chamber of Commerce. Brian promised the Chamber he would make that pitch when the city council let him set up this business. All he had to do was promote the gift shop at the end. There didn’t have to be any actual increase in sales. He also agreed not to do anything to bring the city or its inhabitants into disrepute, so when he talked about the Mothman attacking teenagers in their car, he couldn’t mention what they were doing at the time.  

            One man with black hair and thin-rimmed glasses remained. Brian noticed him during the tour. It would be difficult to miss someone who went on a “Mothman” tour in a dark business suit, carrying a brown leather briefcase. The man stepped forward. 

            “I’ve seen enough,” he said. “Mr. Hostetler, I’m going to have to ask you to cease and desist telling lies about my client…immediately.”

            “Lies? What do you mean lies?” Brian asked.

            “The Silver Bridge collapse?” the man responded. “That little story you told about how the Mothman caused the bridge to collapse, killing 46 people? That’s not what the government concluded.”

            Brian rolled his eyes. Yes, technically the evidence pointed to poor maintenance and a higher weight load than expected being the cause of the collapse, but that book from ’75 connected the bridge collapse with the Mothman. Brian just filled in the blanks. 

            “I know it’s a stretch, but it sells tickets,” Brian said.  “Who are you again?”

            “My name is Mr. Jonathon Stanley,” the man said. “And yes, I bet it does sell tickets. So does claiming that my client threatened teenagers and killed a dog.”

            “Well, that’s part of the legend,” Brian said. “Wait…your client?”

            “…Is very protective of his reputation, sir,” Stanley said. “This is a cease-and-desist letter, whereby we are asking you to stop conducting this little tour of yours without my client’s permission, as he owns his publicity rights, and turn over what remaining profits and assets you have collected by running this libelous tourist trap.”

            Stanley handed Brian a letter on official firm letterhead claiming that Stanley represented the Mothman, or more specifically, John Mothman,and telling Brian to stop his “Mothman tours” or face “immediate legal consequences.” Brian giggled as he perused this very “serious” letter. Oh, it looked so very legit. The firm name “Stanley & Rothbard” even sounded real. 

            “Oh, boy,” Brian mused. “I guess I better stop.”

            “Yes, you should,” Stanley said. 

            “No, thank you. I think I need to consult my own attorney,” Brian said, chuckling. “Of course, he lives in Washington, being a Sasquatch, so it may take a while for me to respond.”

            “If that’s your attitude,” Stanley said. “I’m afraid we’ll have to meet you in court.”

            “Really? Well, will I get to see your client if we have a trial?” Brian chortled. “I mean, I’d like to get a picture of him. So would every Ufologist and conspiracy theorist between here and Mars!”

            At this moment, Stanley’s eyes turned bright red. Two antennae sprouted out of his slick black hair, and two large insectoid wings emerged from his back. Brian stopped laughing. 

            “Gah,” Brian emoted, struggling to find words.

            “If you would like a picture, we aren’t exactly shy, Mr. Hostetler,” Stanley responded, now fluttering above the ground.

            “Hmmm….” Brian managed to say. “You know, any attorney who represents themself has a fool for a client.”

            “Who’s doing that?” Stanley buzzed, his voice now vibrating in tune with his wings.  “My client is a cousin of mine.”

            “So, nepotism then,” Brian said. 

            “Another slander,” Stanley said, taking out a notepad and scribbling it down. “I’ll have you know I graduated from Washington and Lee Law School and attained Order of the Coif.  I argued a case in front of the Fourth Circuit last year.”

            “Right….” Brian responded, not knowing what half of that meant. “Could I offer an apology?”

            “For claiming my client murdered 46 people? It will take more than that, Mr. Hostetler,” Stanley buzzed, his red eyes shining like traffic lights in the quickly darkening evening sky.  “I’m afraid you must compensate my client for the harm you’ve done to his standing in the community.”

            “Standing in the community?” Brian begged. “Why he’s never been more popular since I’ve started doing this! The festival has doubled in size! Last year, we got people from Poland!”

            “You were told to burnish the town’s reputation, Mr. Hostetler,” Stanley said, flying around Brian in a circular manner. “My client has an understanding with the city council, and I believe the city council had an understanding with you. You were to not bring the city or any of its residents into disrepute. My client has lived here since the 1960s, and you’ve slandered him as a violent criminal.”

            “What?! That thing about the bridge?” Brian pleaded.  “That’s just puffery, man! I sell the sizzle, not the steak! Nobody believes that!”

            “Oh, how I wish that were true,” Stanley buzzed, now directly over Brian’s head.  “Unfortunately, our people have faced special hostility this year. I have siblings who’ve reported being attacked when they travel outside of Mason County. When you have antennae and compound eyes, people shoot first and ask questions later. Might have something to do with you telling tales. Something must be done about you.”

            Brian closed his eyes. He shook with fear as the buzzing of the wings approached his ears. Brian fell to the ground, groveling in fear. Then, he felt a piece of paper fall gently on his head. It was the cease-and-desist letter. 

            “Close up within 10 days and turn over your remaining business assets, or I’ll file a complaint in Mason County Circuit Court,” Stanley said.

            And with that, the buggy attorney turned in the direction of Gallipolis across the river and flew, leaving behind a business card indicating he was licensed in Ohio and West Virginia.  Brian watched as Stanley disappeared into the distance.

            “Damn,” he said. “I wonder if Champ has lawyered up yet. It’s still probably open season on him, and I hear Vermont is lovely this time of year.”

I have completed my first draft of Beer Run II. As it currently stands, it is 32,000 words. I will wait a few weeks before revising it for draft two.

Let me provide you with a brief outline of the plot: Bill and Cassandra come back from Earth, tailed by the world’s most incompetent government spy, to find someone has set Bill’s lawn furniture on fire. It turns out to be Jethro Duff, a prominent member of the Lunatic movement. A brief internet search reveals Jethro was inspired by an online conspiracy theory known as the Great Reckoning, a conspiracy whereby Bill’s father invented the self-aware android in order to drive millions of people out of work, leading them to alcoholism, making them vulnerable to being dragged down into Bill’s brewery where they are eaten.

After an angry mob appears at the brewery, pelting the building with garbage, Bill hires an attorney named Blinda Botzel to start a lawsuit against the Great Reckoning LLC, owned by a man named Cody Duncan. To investigate Duncan’s operation, Botzel employs Jimmy, Bill’s intern at the bar, as a private investigator. Jimmy finds that the Great Reckoning, along with the entire Lunatic movement, is really an elaborate scam to sell merchandise by Duncan, who is a classic con man.

Duncan quickly spots Jimmy as a spy, but rather than telling him to buzz off, he instead offers to mentor him in the art of the con. Duncan creates the character of James P. Greenburg, scion of the family that owned a robotics factory in town that was bought out by Stiltson Industries, who now walks the streets, homeless thanks to the deindustrialization of the moon. While the character exists to sell T-shirts, Jimmy loses himself in the role, even participating in a riot that ends up breaking into city hall.

Meanwhile, Bill finds that Cassandra has a broken part that can only be replaced with the same model part made by Greenburg Robotics, which went out of business decades ago and the remaining parts are in the possession of Jethro, currently in jail for torching Bill’s picnic tables. Bill offers to drop the charges in exchange for the pump, but the prosecutor wants Jethro to squeal on the Great Reckoning. Furthermore, much to Bill’s surprise, the DA’s office has started taking an interest in Jimmy, apparently believing that he, not Duncan, is the ringleader.

Okay, so how does that sound for a pitch? Would any of you change anything? Looking forward to any criticisms before I start my revisions. Will eventually look for beta readers, too. Let me know if I have any early volunteers for that.

Okay, thought I would come out swinging on a timeless pop culture debate. Yes, Star Trek is better than Star Wars. This seems rather obvious to me, but I’ll put up with opposing arguments if for no other reason than to humor my adversaries.

How do I prove this? Well, to the extent one of these debates can be proven, I would point to consistency. Star Trek as a franchise has consistently produced quality entertainment since the original series in the 1960s. No one denies it’s had low points (Star Trek V, the kookier time travel episodes, Nemesis), but the fact is that most episodes of Star Trek are watchable, even enjoyable.

Star Wars is a franchise based on three great movies from 1977 to 1983, followed by a fifteen-year hiatus, culminating in twenty-five years of soul crushing mediocrity. Yes, there have been some bright spots (the Clone Wars cartoon, Rogue One, the first two seasons of the Mandalorian), but for the most part it’s a mess of stilted dialogue, thinly veiled racial stereotypes, and rehashing old tropes and characters from the original series.

Why is this? Star Trek is logical (“Logical,” says Spock. “Fascinating.”) Star Wars is romantic. (“Feel, don’t think,” says Obi-Wan. “Trust your instincts.”) The Original Trilogy of Star Wars was like a whirlwind romance and every addition to the franchise since then is an attempt to get back that same feeling you got the first time you saw Luke blow up the Death Star. A typical episode of Star Trek by contrast is about a group of competent and likeable people, whom you’ve seen enough to grow fond of, encounter a new phenomenon, and work together to solve it.

This becomes evident when each franchise tries to do what the other does well. Star Trek is capable of being emotional and pulling it off. Think Spock’s death in Wrath of Khan or Jean-Luc Picard coming face to face with the Borg in First Contact after being assimilated and trashing his own ready room. A logical person can show emotion in a situation where it’s warranted, like a funeral or at the birth of a child. An emotional person can rarely be logical. When Star Wars tried to be logical in the prequels, we got psuedo-scientific mumbo jumbo about midichlorians and overwrought soliloquies about how democracy dies.

You also have to look at how each series treats religion and science. Star Wars famously borrows from eastern mysticism to create the religious worldview of the Jedi. Star Wars does that well, but in Deep Space Nine, Star Trek proved it could speak about the religious dimension of life in its exploration of Bajoran and Klingon spirituality. Looking at it from the other end, Star Trek famously tried to get the science right to the best of their ability, having scientific and technical advisers on staff to help out the writing. By contrast, Star Wars can’t even be consistent with its in universe rules. In the Last Jedi, it’s a major plot point that the First Order just now learned how to tract a ship that goes into hyperdrive. This is odd because in the first movie, and I mean the very first movie, Princess Leia points out that the Millenium Falcon is likely being tracked after they escape the Death Star. She turns out to be right, which means that unless Yavin was really close to Aldoran, the Empire had no problem tracking people in hyper-drive.

I should quickly point out that Star Trek is better in that its heroes are generally more iconic than the villain. It’s actually a pretty solid claim to say that Darth Vader is the center of Star Wars. Taking the prequels and the OT as one series, the main character is Anakin Skywalker, who appears in all six films. Star Trek has a few iconic villains like Khan Noonien Singh or Gul Ducat, but rarely do they outshine the regular cast.

On a political level, Star Trek asks much more profound questions than Star Wars from the perspective of a liberal democracy. Star Wars’ original trilogy has us root for the underdog rebels, which is an easy thing to do. The prequels pondered why democracies die and came across as heavy handed and dumb. The sequel trilogy didn’t even bother, but just had StarKiller Base blow away the New Republic and let the Resistance replace the Rebellion and the First Order replace the Empire, and ta-da, instant nostalgia.

Star Trek, however, takes place in a world where the good guys are the Empire. The United Federation of Planets is a superpower in the galaxy and the main characters have to regularly look in the mirror and ask if they are still the heroes. In Deep Space Nine, a Maquis double-agent points out to Captain Sisco that the Federation actually is a little like the Borg, that they too assimilate other worlds in their own way.

Star Wars is about overthrowing the Empire, and once they’ve done that, they have nowhere to go and so they just go back to the well and create some new Empire. Star Trek asks a more jarring question of how can we be a good empire, which is a more relevant and profound question from the prospective of the United States and western democracies in general. How do you keep power from corrupting you? Star Wars had that question in front of them in the sequel series and they punted.

Finally, Star Trek faces the central problem of science fiction and takes it head on. Science fiction addresses how humanity and technology interact. The problem is that human beings create technology to make our lives better, and we largely succeed in doing that. As a result, in terms of human living standards, the future is likely to be much better than the present, much like how the present is much better than the past. It’s not just technology. The number of wars in the world is actually at an all-time low. Why is this a problem? For humanity, it isn’t, but for a science fiction writer, it is a problem because any good story depends on the existence of conflict. If the world of the future is likely to be better, where does the conflict come from?

The typical response is to turn technology into a bad thing. Think of the Fallout world showing us the aftermath of a nuclear war, where apparently people are not able to get bodies out of the street even three hundred years after the bombs fell. Others show us a world ruled by evil corporations, like the Weyland-Yutani Corporation in Alien. Star Wars has the dystopian Empire, which uses technology to blow up planets. But this doesn’t tract with the real impact technology has on our lives, which is mostly positive. Sure, some people use technology for evil, like the Nazis using Zyklon B to perpetrate the Holocaust or Kim Jong Un threatening the world with nuclear weapons, but for the most part, technology has extended our life spans and made us infinitely wealthier. The typical use of technology is represented by anti-biotics, not Sarin gas.

Star Trek gets this right. The world of the United Federation of Planets is a better world than the world we live in, yet somehow they still face adversity. The difference is that Starfleet engages in chosen suffering. They come into conflict with the Klingons and the Romulans because they are exploring the galaxy by their own free will. That’s more like what the future will probably look like.

So, that is why Star Trek is better than Star Wars. Star Trek is so good, I might have borrowed a few of its concepts to write my own book, which is here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BLSVRZN5  

I was not going to write about Harry Potter again. I had an entire post about Star Wars v. Star Trek all set up in my head. This will be the fourth post in a row, and I know that. It’s just that it’s kind of hard to ignore what HBO just announced. Apparently, HP will be rebooted as a seven-season television show, with one season for each year at the school. That’s right, not stories in the Harry Potter universe, but a reboot of the original book series as a television show. I can’t think of a worse idea that will make people billions of dollars.

This is not about J.K. Rowling. I know she’s a controversial figure these days, and she is involved in this, but it’s really more that this is a bad idea. Just a really, really bad idea. This shows that HBO and Hollywood in general has failed to learn any lessons from how they’ve screwed up other major franchises. What do I mean you ask? Let’s go over it.

Lesson One: Don’t Reboot the Story when Nothing was Wrong with the Original and it wasn’t that Long Ago. Disney should have learned this one by now after redoing the entire Disney Renaissance in live action. Or in the case of the Lion King, “live action.” No one asked for a new Aladdin. No one asked for a new Beauty and the Best. No one asked for a new Little Mermaid. Disney gave them to us anyway, and though they made money, I can’t think of anyone who said “Wow, that was what was missing from my life.” Cinderella and Jungle Book kind of worked, because the originals were released in the middle part of the twentieth century, though it should be noted that neither of those reboots were as iconic as the original.

The original Harry Potter series was not that long ago. The first film in that series appeared in 2001. The last film in that series appeared in 2011. That was twelve years ago. I know. I saw both films in theaters. I can’t say that for the Little Mermaid. The films did extremely well. Pretty much everyone I know owns all the films. So, even if this show is well written, it will live in the shadow of the original. The temptation to constantly compare the show to the movies will be irresistable.

Lesson Two: Certain Characters are Impossible to Recast. After making forgettable reboots of its own movies, Disney decided to make a forgettable Star Wars movie when it made Solo, recasting Alden Ehrenreich the lead. The problem was evident from the beginning: Harrison Ford does not play Han Solo. Harrison Ford is Han Solo. Certain characters like superheroes can be recast over and over again. We get a new Batman and Spiderman every five years it seems. But those characters were built up by comic books for years before they were introduced in film, so the character and the actor playing the character had independent identities. As I said, the first Harry Potter Movie was released in 2001, a mere three years after the first book came out, and lasted for ten years, and throughout that time Daniel Radcliff, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson were the main characters. Not exactly Han Solo-Harrison Ford level identification, but close. Whoever they cast as the golden trio, those child actors are being set up to fail.

Lesson Three: Don’t Stretch Out the Story by Adding a Bunch of Extra Stuff. When the Lord of the Rings came out, a bunch of superfans got mad that they cut out Tom Bombadil. Then, they decided to stretch the Hobbit, which was the shortest of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books, out to three movies, and we all learned that as bad as cutting stuff out can be, adding stuff that wasn’t there in the first place is worse. You need more material to fill up a season of television than a movie, and what we’re being told is that there will be additional storylines which are going to be added in order to fill up space.

I don’t oppose additional stories within the Wizarding World. It’s like additional Star Wars movies. It’s kind of hard to oppose something that is inevitable. Going back and changing the original stories, however, never ends well. This is less like releasing additional Star Wars movies and more like changing the first Star Wars movie to have Greedo shoot first.

And yet, inevitably, it will make money. Once again, whatever you think of J.K. Rowling, the wizarding world makes money wherever it is. Some people were down on the latest Fantastic Beast movie. It still made over $400 million. And that’s with COVID keeping people away from theaters, one group of people who hate J. K. Rowling, another group of people who hate Johnny Depp, and the fact that this is now the eleventh Harry Potter movie. It still makes money, and that’s why we keep getting more of it.

The real problem here is that we need to be pushed to embrace new stories. Remember when America produced new stories? Yeah, I know Hollywood has been doing reboots forever, including like 25 versions of the Wizard of Oz in the 1920s and 1930s, but they knew to stop after they finally got it right. There’s a lot of 80s nostalgia going on right now, but I think that what was great about that era is the fact that the stuff Hollywood keeps regurgitating at us was new. Yeah, remember back when Ghostbusters was a smash hit that came out of nowhere and not a franchise that just pumps out one movie after another in hopes of getting a few guaranteed hundred million? Our culture used to come up with new ideas.

Well, here’s a new idea: a man trying to run a microbrewery on the moon. You can order that book here: