Now listen. I've never met a gay person, and I don't expect to, but I'm sure they're all fine individuals, except for the lesbians, who I'm told are very angry (which does not, frankly, jibe with the extensive online research I've done into their lifestyle). Anyway, if it were just about them getting married, hey, fine, whatever.

But it's not just about that. It's about what gay marriage will inevitably lead to.

You see, allowing new kinds of marriage always inevitably leads to even newer kinds of marriage. Long, long ago, when the world was perfect (and how wonderful it would be if we could return to that time, except with cars and air-conditioning and TiVo), only white males were permitted to marry. Then, after a long fight (which almost certainly ended in tears and a lot of apologies made through a locked bathroom door), white females were given the right to marriage as well (also known as "sufferage" because, boy, do you ever! Am I right, folks?). Then black people revolted and Abraham Lincoln was all, "OK, you can get married too."

I may be a little fuzzy on some of the specifics — I'm not what the fancy-pants intellectuals call "a nistorian" — but that's basically how it broke down. Now gay people want to get on the marriage bus too (and presumably sit in the front, the better to dispense fashion advice to straight people as they board), and I think you can see what must necessarily follow.

ROBOT MARRIAGE.

And I'm sorry, but I am so against robot marriage, for so many reasons. For one thing, robots can't procreate, and procreation is one of the two primary reasons for marriage.* "Oh," you say, "but old people are allowed to get married, and they can't procreate." To which I reply: Dude, gross.

For another thing, tax breaks. You get tax breaks when you get married, and you can be darn sure robots are going to expect them too. Except here's the thing: Robots don't pay taxes. And what does a tax break mean for someone who doesn't pay taxes? It means we have to give them money. I will be A MONKEY'S UNCLE if I'm going to give my Roomba A SINGLE RED CENT when it keeps shutting itself off UNDER THE DAMN BED and I have to CRAWL UNDER THERE MYSELF TO RETRIEVE IT. I don't know what sort of moron would marry that little nardnut anyway, but who among us can unriddle the vagaries of love?

And that's the other thing: What happens when my smartfridge decides it wants to propose to my Wiimote? What is the protocol? Is there a ceremony? Do we have to rent a hall? Can you store the booze for the reception in the fridge, or is that considered déclassé? Is there a honeymoon, and if so, do I rent a replacement in the meantime? What if I want to play a two-player game?

And then living together. I lived with a married couple for three years, and let me tell you, it's pleasant at first, and the sex is nice, but it all ends with your best friend socking you in the face and calling you a homewrecker. I don't need my fridge socking me in the face. And don't even get me started on what happens when my smartfridge falls in love with a robot in a different house. That's even more likely than it falling in love with the Wiimote, considering that the fridge spends the whole day on the Internet. (Which is something, by the way, we should think about getting rid of. The Internet, I mean.) Also, I hope I don't sound like a jerk here, but the Wiimote has been kinda letting itself go.

Commenter Moff's real name is Josh Wimmer. He is darn proud to be married to an Iowan, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

*The other is gold-digging, which apparently robots can do — in Australia, which is where Hitler was born.

I fall into that third group, and you probably do, too. It's not because we're scared, although global warming is some heavy shit. I've been watching my hometown sit on the brink of disaster all week, and basically, if tens of thousands of North Dakotans — scientifically recognized as the hardiest, wisest, and most beloved by God of all the Earth's peoples — can barely hold back one stupid river*, then it's horrifying to envision all sorts of similar crises popping up on a planetwide scale. What, for example, will the Italians do? Italians are very lazy.**

You may take offense to my saying that, but I will just note that if any Italians are truly upset, they can write me a letter (not likely — too much work), and more importantly, that you probably don't know that many actual Italians (grandmas do not count). Which brings us to the primary reason most of us don't think about global warming, even if we do believe in it:

The world is just too fucking big.

It has, of course, become popular in the last few decades to note how small the world is, and there's some truth to that, especially relative to how things were for most of history. It used to take months to ship goods from one side of the globe to the other; now we can do it in hours. Sending messages is even faster — we can do it in seconds. Mere moments after I'm done writing this column in Madison, Wisconsin, people in Venice will be able to read it (if they've finally woken up from their "siestas," that is). And since this speeding up of everything is comparatively New and Exciting, and usually involves computers (which are our glowing idols that command our devotion for hours every day), we tend to focus on it.

But, truth is, our brains are still crude products of evolution that haven't changed that much since we rode on dinosaurs, and anything that's farther away than the pterodactyl nest on the next ridge over is difficult to grasp in a fashion that resonates. Oh, a big event — like a September 11 — will get our attention, briefly, but something as slow to happen as climate change is a nonstarter. Especially when, thanks to the newish smallness of the world and the speediness of information, there are more ways than ever to take our minds off of gloomy news.

And this is a problem, I think. Because if global warming — not that I am some kind of weatherologist here — is half as bad as the experts say it will be, then the whole planet is in trouble, particularly if it jumps on top of the daunting dogpile of crises we're presently facing, namely the economy, predicted shortages in fresh water and energy, and the awful standard of living already endured by millions of humans.

(And let me add that even if you don't believe in global warming — well, is that really a gamble you think we should take? I mean, have you ever gone back home to make sure the stove is turned off? Ever double-checked that you locked the car? Ever had a lawyer look at something before you sign it, just in case? If you're that careful with just, like, stuff, all of which is either replaceable or get-by-withoutable, doesn't it kinda seem like we should be really careful with the, uh, planet? At least until we have another one?)

What to do, though? Before we moved from New York almost a month ago, Mrs. Moff had been a volunteer docent at the American Museum of Natural History for many years, where the current exhibition on climate change has been, um, not nearly as well attended (I am told) as the Harry Potter-inspired one they did on mythical beasts. That could be because of the economy, or it could be because jeez, depressing. Even more depressing was the news from the exhibit that, despite the recent push toward greener technology and living, at this point, very little of what we do on a personal basis can make a marked difference in halting the progress of global warming. If useful action is going to be taken, it will have to be on the part of national governments and multinational industries.

There's the paradox. We can't really comprehend the problem on a massive level, and yet our individual efforts aren't enough, on their own, to counter it. I can't believe there's no solution — or absolutely no way to mitigate things, at least — but what is it? Because I'm afraid the technology to clone millions of North Dakotans, who could save us all, is still too far off.

*Which is not to diminish the amazing efforts of all the Fargo-Moorhead residents and others who've been laying sandbags, etc., for days now. But as they all know, it's a close thing, and still will be for at least another week.
**It's OK for me to say this, because not only am I a quarter Italian, I am also very lazy. Identity politics.

Running Man — as in the show the movie is about* — is the wrong kind of reality TV. Oh, and there's one more problem, too:

To the best of my knowledge, no one has seriously proposed remaking The Running Man. I made that up to get you to click. Sorry about that. That said, it's surely only a matter of time before someone does start mulling it over, so consider this a preemptive strike.

As I was saying, The Running Man highlights the wrong kind of reality TV. Audiences of the future would never go for it, if they're anything like audiences of today. Because while audiences of today do love Personal Triumph Over Overwhelming Odds (which The Running Man has in spades), as well as Terrible People Doing Awful Things (another of its hallmarks), and while they have no problem with, or even register any awareness of, Misleading Editing on the Part of a Show's Producers (on which the film's plot hinges), one thing they hate is People Getting Killed For Real.

This might not have been so clear in 1987, when The Running Man was released. Back then, it felt like half of primetime — Hunter, The Equalizer, Simon & Simon, Crockett and Tubbs, the Scarecrow, even Mrs. King — was packing steel, and if you followed that trend to its logical conclusion, it was easy to imagine widespread disregard for human life spilling over into the real world, too. Tack the TV listings to the wall today, though, and toss a dart at them, and odds are far better you'll hit a show about making soufflés than shooting bad guys. Heck, even the one faintly (and I stress that) sinister reality program, Survivor — well, is that still on? It is, apparently, but ratings-wise, it's no Dancing With the Stars.

So, no. If the most intense conflict that most viewers can handle now involves a group of people known as "cheftestants," we're not going to tune in to watch anyone get gunned down in cold blood, not any time soon. At the same time, it seems equally unlikely that Western civilization is going to stop declining. Here, then, are a few of the not so violent, but still sublimely asinine reality series I'm sure we'll see before God or His servant, the four-foot Cthulhu worm, are kind enough to put us out of our misery:

Scoring With the Spur Posse. What two elements of reality TV are more proven successes than (1) bringing back people who were famous a decade ago but aren't anymore and (2) sex? This show combines both.

Up for grabs is membership in that early-'90s version of the Rat Pack, the (reunited) Spur Posse. As one of the competing dudes, all you have to do is score more points than the other contestants by sleeping with more girls. Potential challenges include the Three-Way Challenge, the Friend's Sister Challenge, and the Convincing Her to Have Sex With All the Guys in the Posse, Too Challenge. Bonus points for cockblocking an opponent, and even more bonus points if you manage to score with the girl you blocked him from, bro. The second season, in which half the contestants are female (yes, they're trying to have sex with girls too), sees unprecedented ratings, and the unfiltered extra material available online earns record traffic for Spike TV's website.

Make Me a Topless Dancer. Are you pretty, but self-aware enough to know you're never going to be anywhere's next top model? Do you have too much dignity to be a Pussycat Doll? This is your show.

I can't think of any celebrity strippers, so who will host it? Probably Lindsay Lohan. The challenges here should be fairly clear-cut: learning to work the pole, selling the most private dances, smoothly removing a customer's belt and then fastening it around his neck like a collar, before leading him on all fours around the stage while spanking him. The heartbreak at the end of each episode, though, when one contestant is forced to turn in her Lucite platform heels to Lindsay and then is shown crying in the confessional booth about how she'll never be able to pay for med school now — devastating.

Flame Wars. Take ten Internet users. Stick them together in a house somewhere with a gorgeous climate and all sorts of places to visit and fun activities to take part in nearby.

Then give the contestants each their own computer and have teams employed by the producers (these teams will be posing as single, anonymous individuals, of course) start arguments with them on random message boards, about pretty much anything. Never let the contestants get the last word in, no matter how late it gets or how long the fight goes on. The first of the ten with the presence of mind and willpower to leave the house for at least an hour (and then not get sucked back into the fight when they come back) wins.

I Want to Be on a Reality Show. This, I think, is the inevitable omega point of reality television. As it currently stands, thousands — shit, possibly millions of people desperately want to be on reality shows so that they can be hairstylists, or fashion designers, or dancers, or comedians, or lose weight, or just get married.**

There's only so much TV time, though, so there'll have to be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff. Or rather, the chaff from the even chaffier. The winner gets to be on the program of his or her choice. The losers...

The losers get hunted by opera-singing Stalkers who shoot lightning at them, actually. America might never be ready to watch that happen on TV, but that doesn't mean we can't do it without the cameras.

Commenter Moff's real name is Josh Wimmer, and like Buzzsaw, he had to split. He can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

*I should probably note here that this essay is dealing exclusively with the movie version of The Running Man, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yes, I know the movie was a book first. Yes, it is a very good book. Yes, an actual movie version of the book would be awesome. You should write a blog post about it.

**In fairness, this was how I met Mrs. Moff, although the show in question was The Ultimate Fighter.

It's because they're basically saying the same thing... or, at least, not mutually exclusive things. How faithful an adaptation is to its source material doesn't determine whether it does that material justice — for example, the Lord of the Rings films took some liberties, but they convey exactly the sense of close friendship and epic adventure that made Tolkien's trilogy classics. Moreover, lack of faithfulness can actually make for superior adaptations. The novel that inspired Die Hard stars an aging detective named Joe Leland, who presumably never would have screamed, "Yippee-ki-ay, motherfuckers!" — which is why almost no one knows that a novel inspired Die Hard. And scrupulous adherence to the original story is no guarantor of quality: As best I can tell, Clint Eastwood stayed true to Robert James Waller's book when he made The Bridges of Madison County, and that movie still blew.

So, what about Watchmen? Someday, if we're lucky, they'll invent something that lets you suppress specific memories temporarily (or permanently, in the case of my first marriage — hey-yo! ), because it would be nice to know how it felt to see the movie going in cold, without any idea of what the story was about. As it was, I felt like I was watching...an adaptation. It reminded me of the Harry Potter movies, to be honest, especially the first one: the painstaking replication of everything from the book, down to the verbatim dialogue.

But where the Harry Potter movies sweep me along into the action, with Watchmen I felt more like an observer. Obviously, that wasn't because I already knew the story, as shown by the HP counterexample (as well as that of Star Wars, Die Hard, and the countless other films I can get caught up in over and over again). In fact, I actually didn't quite know the story, and knew I didn't know it — since, like anyone who glances at this blog at least once a week, I'd heard there was no giant squid.

What was the issue, then? It wasn't the acting or direction or cinematography, the quality of which you might debate but which more or less satisfied my own, not all that critical tastes (remember: I never turn off Daredevil if I happen to catch it on TV). It wasn't that we all know Doctor Manhattan is supposed to sound like J'onn J'onzz on the Justice League cartoon, and not the youthful anthropomorphic protagonist of a Pixar joint. It wasn't even because I was still disappointed that Ozymandias hadn't won the first season of Project Runway.

It might have been because the naysayers were right, and Watchmen doesn't work as anything but a comic book, and especially not as a movie, a medium that's in some ways the antithesis of the comic form. As anyone who's been to my blog or been stuck alone with me after I've had too many drinks knows, I'm a big believer in the work of Marshall McLuhan, who labeled movies a "hot" medium (figuratively speaking, they're of a high resolution — the film provides every last detail) and comics a "cool" one (they demand that you fill in sound and movement yourself, in your brain).

And that's part of what snagged me, I think. There are, of course, comics that do translate neatly into movies — Alan Moore's own V for Vendetta leaps to mind — but in those cases, we're not talking about stories as tied up in the comic-book medium as Watchmen, or movies that hew so closely to their sources. When you do hew as closely as the Watchmen movie does, the transition's bound to get a little clunky somewhere. Example: There's a noticeable difference between hearing Rorschach's diary entries in your own head as you read them — a convention that works perfectly in the book — and actually hearing them read as a voice-over, which makes them sound a bit silly. Actually, some of Rorschach's regular old dialogue — specifically, when he speaks in single words and sentence fragments — comes off as unbelievable heard aloud, while it makes total sense on paper.

Comic-booky dialogue can certainly work on the big screen — see, for instance, Blade. But Blade is comic-book dialogue, and comic-book situations, all the way through. Where Watchmen runs into trouble is that it plays by comic-book rules sometimes, while at others, it becomes something closer to real life. In low-res comic form, that comes off as pure elevation; in the theater, we see the contrast more sharply, and it's disruptive.

Intertwined with all this is the fact that, like it or not, we come into the cineplex expecting certain things out of a superhero movie, and those are things that Watchmen as a story doesn't really deliver. The liveliest parts of the film for me — the parts where I did get caught up — all involved Nite Owl and Silk Spectre fighting bad guys or saving people. Ironically, of course, those parts aren't really essential to the story, whereas the parts I liked least — the emotional moments: Laurie learning about her father and Jon deciding humanity was worth saving after all — are. It's not that the movie cuts out too much of the foundation the comic lays for those emotional moments (it does cut out some — the book's prose interludes do more heavy lifting than we may appreciate); it's just that there are differences in pacing between the two media, such that the moments ring true in one and false in the other.

All that said, I should say that I did like the movie, or at least that I'm glad I saw it. It made me think; I noticed things about the story that I hadn't before. (For example, if you were a roomful of reporters who'd just learned that the guy in front of you might have given everyone close to him cancer, would your first reaction be to crowd around him?) It didn't sweep me up, but then, the comic never has either. The comic — which we shouldn't forget is as much a murder mystery as a superhero story — doesn't make my heart soar. It intrigues me, and it demands reflection.

The movie does, too. At least for me it does, as the previous 1,000-plus words demonstrate. And in that sense, even if it's not the masterpiece that the book is, it does do it justice.

Commenter Moff's real name is Josh Wimmer, and he would have helped Kitty Genovese, he swears. He can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

22 February 1999

Cher M. Henshaw,

OMG, I cannot wait. In just a few short weeks, the culmination of all my hopes, dreams, and fears (ha — not!) will come to pass as Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace hits theaters nationwide.

This shit is gonna be so good.

It doesn't look like any early copies have leaked online — believe me, I would torrent that shit so fast — so I've contented myself with watching the trailer over and over and over again on YouTube. It may be only two minutes long, but that two minutes is enough to validate George Lucas's status as an unsupplantable genius. This movie has it all — the classic slightly-beat-up Star Wars look, the crazy yet believable aliens, the lightsaber fights, and a beautiful girl.

Yup: Natalie Portman, who is like a super-talented actress. She was in The Professional when she was like eight, and I'm pretty sure she won an Oscar for it, because everybody talks about it all the time. I'm not quite sure how Lucas got her, because she's more of a "serious" artist — probably wouldn't want to see her host Saturday Night Live — but she'll surely bring a touch of sophistication to the proceedings. That's a fine thing, because she's obviously an eventual love interest, and one of my favorite things about the original trilogy was how potent but not over-the-top the romance between Han and Leia was. That's what we like. No one wants to see lovers running through a field of fucking daisies.

The whole cast, really, is something to behold. I have to admit, I kinda hoped Lucas would do like he did with the first three movies, and hire total unknowns (although I guess now that there's Wikipedia, no one's really unknown!), but I trust his instincts. I mean, three words for you, M. Henshaw:

Samuel. L. Motherfuckin'. Jackson.

That's right, a little of the old "Royale with cheese" magic is coming to the Galactic Republic. (Speaking of which: Quentin Tarantino — there's another director who's gonna keep the hits coming for decades to come. I'm never taking this Pulp Fiction poster off my wall.) Seriously, though, you could put Sam Jackson in a movie and not even show it to reviewers in advance to promote it — just stick in a scene where he swears a lot — and it would be a runaway success. Between him and this Captain Panaka dude who's in the very first teaser they released, looks like people of color are finally gonna get the respect, and the screen time, they deserve in the Star Wars universe.

And on a totally unrelated note, there's a kick-ass new alien companion to meet! Instead of being a furry dog-bear-thing like Chewbacca, he's more like a dragon. Maybe he breathes fire? (Watch out, Republic — if this guy's not careful, he'll destroy you all by himself! Ha ha!) Anyway, looks like he's got some dialogue, which is cool. Chewie's awesome, but it always seemed like a wasted opportunity that we didn't get to hear the nonhuman take on things more often. I bet this new fella will have a lot of good stuff to say.

Hmmm...went to Taco Bell for lunch and got a little cardboard promotional "coin" from the movie. This one shows Ric Olié, starship captain. Interesting. Looking forward to finding out more about him.

Looking forward to finding out more about the movie's villain, too! Darth Maul — he has a double-bladed lightsaber. It's pretty clear they put a lot of time and effort into his character, so I guess we'll be seeing quite a bit of him. And rumor has it we might just get — hells yeah! — a serving of Boba Fett besides. Well, it might not be Boba himself — it'll probably be a whole army of Mandalorian warriors. That's something we've been waiting to see for a long time now, so I know Lucas won't let us down. He's a master of his craft, and he knows the secret to good storytelling is about a lot more than special effects.

Fuckin' A — he wrote the whole screenplay himself. We are in good hands, M. Henshaw.

Anyway, I don't know what the plot's gonna be like, but I hope it's pure rollicking escapism, because in this post-9/11 world, we've all had our fill of politics. I'm sure I'll be thoroughly familiar with it by the time the movie's been out for a day, though — we're gonna go to the midnight showing and then see it four more times in a row! I confess, when they announced the title, I had some reservations, but the more I think about it, the more I convince myself that The Phantom Menace really does sound pretty cool.

Yeah, this is gonna be so good.

P.S. Saw another trailer the other day for something called Fight Club. How lame does that sound?

Commenter Moff's real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

See, U2 occupy a strange valence these days: Likely the most popular music group in the world, they also might be the most derided. They make too much money (a charge usually leveled at them by upper-middle-class bloggers who've had air-conditioning their whole lives and have never driven anything worse than a Honda Accord); they play shows for tens of thousands of people, which proves they're not "authentic" (rock'n'roll should only be played in small, dirty clubs with shitty equipment, as Elvis and the Beatles intended); and their lead singer won't shut up about how we should help poor people, most of whom aren't white (gross).

Science-fiction fans, however, should love the shit out of U2. Here's why:

They've put on the trippiest, future-shockiest, most technologically advanced rock concerts to date. The U2 most people make fun of seems to be the U2 of the 1980s, when Bono first started shouting about Africa, or the U2 of the 2000s, when he started actually working directly with high-ranking politicians on solving third-world poverty. The U2 of the '90s, arguably their artistically richest period to date, is conveniently forgotten. But find a DVD of 1993's Zoo TV show in Sydney — the concept of which was inspired in part by William Gibson's Neuromancer, as well as Marshall McLuhan and other futurists — and then tell me today's other musicians, a decade and a half later, couldn't be a teensy bit more adventurous when it comes to the concert experience. Beyond all the bells and whistles, the band also took advantage of satellite link-ups to broadcast live footage of war victims trapped in Sarajevo speaking to the rest of Europe in the middle of some shows; it was a controversial move — "like throwing a bucket of cold water over everybody," as drummer Larry Mullen Jr. put it — but a courageous one, and it presaged the present phenomenon of bloggers in war zones getting the word out about what's really happening in their countries.

(Their next tour, the PopMart show in '97-'98, was almost as techy, and featured a 40-foot-tall disco-ball lemon — from which the band emerged, UFO-style — rolling out at the start of the encore. A few times, the lemon didn't, uh, work.)

They make great science-fiction music. Hey, I love Queen as much as the next guy, assuming the next guy is, like, an average-level Queen fan and not someone who owns their entire discography. And the soundtracks to Flash Gordon and Highlander are inimitable and fitting. But they're campy, too, and tough to take seriously removed from the video they accompany.

Not so with U2's contribution to the SF canon: "Until the End of the World," an Achtung Baby song that appears in a different, possibly better mix on the soundtrack of the Wim Wenders film of the same name. The Tomb Raider remix of "Elevation." "Alex Descends Into Hell for a Bottle of Milk/Korova 1," a B-side that is the only piece of work to surface from the opera of A Clockwork Orange that Bono and the Edge were commissioned to write. And the whole album the band wrote with Brian Eno as a soundtrack to films that didn't exist. Not to mention the Edge's theme to the WB's The Batman cartoon, which was better than a lot of the actual episodes; and of course, "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me," the only good thing, some would say, to come out of Batman Forever. (The animated video is fucking marvelous.) That song manages to be both take-seriouslyable and campy, and if U2 can approach its quality with the upcoming Spider-Man musical — well, that bodes well for those of us who'd like to see Peter Parker redeemed after the last movie.

They, like, believe in shit. "Of science and the human heart," Bono sings on "Miracle Drug," "there is no limit...Love and logic keep us clear / Reason is on our side." So many SF stories, even the darkest ones, hinge on the notion that slowly but surely, we can do better, as individuals and as a species. Yep, it's corny, and Bono and the rest of the band's problem is that it's even cornier in real life than it is when, say, Captain Kirk or Picard says it. But the corniness, I submit, is an illogical response: We hear about so many failed plans and failed people — not because they're the norm, but because they're not — that our knee-jerk response is to assume that no one, especially not a multimillionaire rock star, could actually be genuinely committed to making the world a better place.

Yet all of us, I bet, know some people — and may even be those people — who really do want to leave things better than we found them. Statistically, how could there not be some celebrities like that, too? And the facts available indicate that, while they're far from perfect (and readily admit as much), U2 truly do try to use their powers for good.

And they will keep you in schwag forever. I bitched about all the schwag at Comic Con last week, but the truth is that if you replaced Martian Manhunter action figures and Halo Wars postcards with old 45s and posters, I'd look like a terrible hypocrite. Yes, I've dropped a lot of money I didn't have on U2 vinyl LPs. And vinyl EPs. And cassingles. And promo CDs. And foreign versions of albums I already owned. And remastered reissues of albums I already owned. And at least one comic book. No, two. And maybe a Pez dispenser.

And I have barely begun to scratch the surface. There are fans out there whose collections would destroy mine, who probably have entire rooms devoted to U2, instead of just a box in my parents' basement. And this is something my wife needs to understand when she is on the verge of stabbing me just because I spent $70 on a simple super-deluxe limited-edition box set version of their new album. It could be worse, honey — there are people out there who are buying all five versions.

So, anyway, if you need more shit in your life that you can't take out of the box or touch, and may or may not be able to move on eBay for what you paid for it, should your child ever need expensive surgery, there's that, too.

Commenter Moff's real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

And it is this: Why is an event that should be a celebration of the future and the imagination so old-fashioned and same ol', same ol'?

Don't get me wrong — when Meredith said she'd give me a ticket if I could cover a screening this weekend, I was thrilled and delighted, and I had a good time. And I appreciate that some of what does drive me nuts about Comic Con has everything to do with me and nothing to do with it: I burned out on festival concerts at least half a decade ago, strip clubs discomfit me unless I'm pretty intoxicated, and while I am a capitalist, the Mall of America makes me feel guilty about it. And with its crowds and $4 bottles of soda, paid models and attendees in slinky costumes getting ogled by grubby dudes, and yards upon yards of questionably utile merchandise, your average SF con replicates all three of those places rather aptly.

But, y'know, it's OK that it's not exactly my bag. Obviously, based on the billions (slight exaggeration) of people crammed into half of the Javits Center with me, it is many other folks'. Nonetheless, I think the question broached above is worth asking. Because it seems to me like, if cons like this weekend's have been around for almost four decades now (the San Diego Comic-Con started in 1970), they sure haven't changed much:

• There are booths, with things at them. People sit behind the tables at the booths, or stand in front of them.

• They generally give away cheap schwag, like flimsy introductory comics and pins and maybe (if they're going all out) DVDs or pens; none of it is exceptional or really useful beyond five minutes of entertainment value. I would be sincerely surprised if a solid 90 percent of the schwag didn't end up in a landfill or (I hope) recycling facility within a week.

• And of course, there are boobs. Everywhere. Except in the places where there is already ass instead — girl ass, that is, naturally. I don't wanna sound like a sensitive ponytail man — and Lord knows I have built my commenting career here on a steady diet of seventh-grade sex jokes — but whatever our individual opinions about it are, it seems to me only fair to acknowledge that your average con's depiction of sexuality is more or less one-sided and, while hardly on the level of most Internet reality porn, leans closer to "exploitative" than to "healthily lusty." That we may be inured to it at this point doesn't make it less true.

So now that some of you are annoyed enough to stop looking at Internet reality porn to log in and comment (and I know your pain — I had to do the same thing to get this thing written), let me suggest some things I think would be cool to see at cons of the future — so that they'd really be more like Cons of the Future:

1) Thinking beyond the booth. Sure, you may need someplace to set up your stuff, and you may not have the money to trick it out, but why leave yourself subject to capricious Fate and whomever she happens to send walking by? If I were trying to get noticed in a giant room full of people dressed as everything from Norse gods to extragalactic holy men, the last thing I'd do is sit still. I'd have a crew out on the floor, and not just passing out flyers. They'd be handing out food or toys or carrying a video camera and doing quick Q&As — anything to get someone's attention — and then passing out a flyer.

2) Awesome (cheap) technology. Better still, what if you passed out a bunch of gadgets like those buzzy remotes that restaurants use to tell you your table is ready, marked with your booth location? And then signaled the people carrying them, either individually, in small groups, or — for an awesome effect — all at once, to show up for a kickass presentation or giveaway? There'd be some overhead, but if you pulled it off, you'd make an impression. And even if that wasn't doable, heck, instead of a crappy poster, give out a few branded USB thumb-drive key chains with something fun on them — at least those'll get used for a lot longer than a week.

3) Live entertainment. The SF-and-fantasy crowd is full of people who are incredibly creative, even if they don't have the money to make a summer blockbuster themselves. How tough would it be to put on short plays throughout the day? Or a Spock Vs. Q–style dialogue? Or story readings, or poetry slams, or interpretive dances, or mini concerts, or video confessions?

4) Live interactive entertainment. And for that matter, since we can play games while we're browsing the Web, why shouldn't we be able to play games while we're browsing the stalls? Some creative wizard should come up with a live-action-role-playing-style game you can play and score points at — and even meet new people during — while you buy trade paperbacks and attend panels.

5) More sexy dudes. There. I said it. Everyone's always paying lip service to how SF ought to be more accommodating to people who aren't heterosexual men, but since the aforementioned boobs aren't going anywhere, let's at least balance them out with more testosterone than a blue evil He-Man android statue. And they don't have to be Fabio clones — actually, they probably shouldn't be. Someone should hire a few buff tan dudes who look like trainers at expensive health clubs, strap leather baldrics on 'em, and see what kind of response they get.

Commenter Moff's real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

See, I’m about two-thirds of the way through this book I got for Christmas: The Canon, by Natalie Angier. It is, per the subtitle, “a whirligig tour of the beautiful basics of science,” and if you, like me, have long fancied yourself an appreciator of the hard, lab-coated disciplines but don’t actually know what an ion is and, except for getting halfway through The Elegant Universe, haven’t actually studied any of them since taking Physics for Poets your junior year—well, then, the book is worth your time.

The chapter I was most excited for when I asked for the book was the one on chemistry—first, because of the ions thing. And second, because every single other piece of literature I’ve read purporting to make chemistry accessible to dummies, including Chemistry for Dummies, has left me utterly baffled. I’m not sure why chemistry, of all sciences, has been so tough for me (although Angier testifies to the pervasiveness of the perplexity perpetuated by that particular permutation—usually with phrases like that), but it has. Thanks to this book, though, now I finally know a little bit more about what I’m made of (and what everything else is made of, too). And I’m happier. I guess my therapist was right.

But: Less book-plugging, more Star Trek. OK, so, the aliens on every incarnation of the series have long been derided as looking pretty silly, except for the Klingons, whom we refrain from mocking not because we’re scared but because we probably saw an episode of Reading Rainbow where Geordi asked Michael Dorn to explain just how long it took to get all that makeup on, and just how uncomfortable it was. Hail, Kahless.

A lot of the other aliens (hi, Bajorans!) are considerably less impressive, and certainly not up to Mos Eisley cantina speed, because television budgets are smaller than movie budgets and if you don’t want to pay for (1) a load of makeup and (2) a load of makeup people working long hours, it makes solid financial sense to slap a nose ridge on three actors and call it good. Yes, the audience thinks it’s cheesy, but they don’t care, because on the whole, the aliens are just there to serve as metaphorical humans in whatever parable is being played out, and everyone is just busy hoping it’s a sexy mind-control episode, anyway.

If there are any real-life aliens out there, though, what if it’s more than a metaphor? What if they really do look a lot like us?

That’s not a very exciting thought, but entirely plausible if I’m reading Angier’s book correctly. Check it out—

In the aforementioned chemistry chapter, she explains why the element carbon is the optimal choice as the basic building block of life:

“The strength of the carbon bond helps explain why it is the basis of life: we need molecular stability now, and we really needed it when life was new and the world was a considerably harsher place than it is today. At the same time, the carbon bond under ordinary conditions can bend, spring, and curl, hence the capacity of carbon molecules to array themselves as rings, cages, and coils. Carbon is as good as Goldilocks for building the spiraling, switchbacking molecule called DNA, and so the sugar spine of the double helix, and the individual chemical letters of which its code is composed, are carbonated through and through.”

And near the close of the next chapter, which covers evolutionary biology, she discusses the ability of entirely separate species, in entirely separate places, to evolve independently of one another and come out looking almost the same—simply because they’re subjected to very similar conditions and there are only so many ways to adapt. American cacti and the euphorbias of Africa have different genetic codes, for example, but pass for each other well enough to fool the layperson. If you’re growing up in a desert, it just makes sense to develop a round, water-holding body, spines, and thick, waxy skin.

You can see where I’m going with this. Nature is nothing if not minimal—it uses the least energy possible to do whatever it has to do. If carbon was the most convenient and obvious material for life on Earth, oughtn’t it to be in many, many other places throughout—if not all of—the universe?

And if bodies more or less like ours are the end result (insofar as we know, so far) of the evolutionary process working on that carbon-based life here, wouldn’t that be the case all those other places, too?

So that’s my awesome hypothesis for the week. Many of you surely know a lot more about chemistry and biology than I do (you probably love ions), and so I happily put it to you to hash it out and tell me if I’m crazy or not.

And it would not surprise me at all if you told me that someone else, or lots of someones, has already thought of all this. Like George Carlin said, there’s nothing new under the sun. And maybe not under any other suns either, dammit.

Commenter Moff’s real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

I used to love books myself, until the fateful day when my father showed up with two knives and two women. “It’s knives and women for you from now on,” he said, giving me one of each. “Books have nothing to teach you. When you were a child, you spake as a child. But now that you’ve become a man, it’s time to put away childish things.”

“Uh, where did you learn that saying?” I asked him.

He turned his girl around. “It was carved on this woman’s back with a knife.”

And I couldn’t argue with that, especially because his knife was a lot bigger than mine. But some of you probably would, because you love contemplating the future of your darling books, and weeping and gnashing your teeth and donning sackcloth over it. Well, I’m here to put your worries to rest with my precognitive powers. And yes, I am serious about just about everything that follows, and once history has proven me correct, you will all have to respect me and James Randi will owe me one million dollars.

All right, so, the problem as I see it—or the alleged problem, anyway—is a combination of the fact that people aren’t reading and that ebooks aren’t catching on.

But I submit to you that neither of these things is true! First, it may indeed be the case (and almost certainly is) that people are consuming more television, movies, and video games than literature. But it is difficult indeed to believe that no one cares about books if you have ever tried to find a place to sit down at your local Barnes & Noble, particularly on a Saturday afternoon. In my experience, lots of people enjoy books, and they all snag the good chairs before I do, no matter how early I get there.

As for ebooks, it’s true that the Kindle and its kin have not become killer apps on the scale of their cousins, the BlackBerry and iPod and even the Nintendo DS. And this is problem a result of the fact that they still cost one million dollars, coupled with the tiresome refrain that book lovers have to join in on every time the subject of ebooks comes up, about how they “just love holding a real, physical object” and “the feel of the pages crinkling between their fingertips” and “you can’t hide nudie pictures in a Kindle as easily” and “it’s harder to start a fire with one, too, despite the name.”

To which I reply that we once said the same thing about CDs and videotapes and the floppy drives in our Macs and horses (“Oooh, daddy, I’ll never ride in a motor-car! I love Chestnut too much! His big, strong flanks, and his soft brown hair, and his sad eyes—I’ll never stop riding Chestnut, daddy! Never!”). And now some people do still use CDs and videotapes and horses and maybe even floppy drives, just as some people will continue to use real books—but they’re in the minority, as I imagine real-book users will eventually be, too.

And I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be the Kindle that does it, although I think it’s undeniably serving a purpose by pushing e-reader technology forward. More likely—barring some Singularity-type development that frees us from having to use any kind of physical artifact at all—is that as we continue to move rapidly toward portable computing, we’re going to see increasing convergence between BlackBerries and iPods and DSes and Kindles, so that whatever the brand of the device you’re carrying, it serves as your phone, your email client, your media player, your gaming device, and your e-reader.

A consequence of this, and of the present collapse we’re seeing of our old-media institutions—in particular, print journalism—is that someone is going to finally find a profitable way to deliver quality writing over the Internet.

It’s been almost taken for granted for the last fifteen years, since the Internet took off, that you can’t make substantial money off of online writing because there’s too much out there available for free. But I am pretty sure all that “free” content has actually been provided on the backs of still-functioning old-media businesses—e.g., the AP and Reuters are still around to provide the news you read for free on Google because they’re still selling subscriptions to newspapers.

Once those newspapers can’t afford those subscriptions, though, what happens to the AP and that news you’re reading for free? Same goes for the blogs you read for free now—the bloggers performing the best independent work are doing so because they’re being paid by print institutions like The Atlantic. The content of a lot of other blogs, like our own dear io9 and the rest of Gawker Media, is in part independent but also largely composed of posts inspired by newspaper and magazine articles. I don’t know the numbers, but while io9’s editors certainly have the ability to act as firsthand newsgatherers, I suspect they don’t have the budget and time to do that.

So what’s going to happen? I can tell you one thing: If old-media businesses can’t provide online content anymore, we’re not going to stop wanting that content. We’re deeply addicted to it now, and that need is not going to be served by funny cat pictures and Cosby Show bloopers alone. Necessity is invention’s mom, and we’re going to invent a way to pay to read things online, on our handheld KindlePods. We won’t have to pay much, either, given the large number of subscribers out there. Would you pay $12 a year for access to all the Gawker Media sites through some kind of encrypted RSS feed? I think you would.

And once that kind of system is in place, we’re only a small step from delivering text in larger blocks—short stories, novels, serialized fiction, etc.—over it, too.

And that, people, is what’s going to happen to your precious books. Before your lifetime is out (unless you have a terminal illness or get hit by a car, in which case I am very sorry), you’ll be buying and reading them digitally. Me, I’ll be buying them with the one million dollars James Randi will owe me for predicting the future so well. I want it delivered in a briefcase, Randi!

(Note: In the meantime, those of you who luuuurve your “real” books should check out commenter Braak’s new novel, which I can personally attest to being a Work of High Quality. And he is absolutely not paying me to say this—nor did he even ask me to—although I will probably make him buy me a beer later, if some of you buy a copy. WHICH YOU SHOULD DO.)

Commenter Moff’s real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

I got a dose of it just this past week, standing in my boss’s office. “Hey,” I said to her. “You watch Lost, right?”

Her head snapped up, and she went pale. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t talk to me about it. Please—we haven’t started season four yet. We watch it on DVD.” It sounded like an apology. “Please. Please.” I could see tears pooling in her eyes, so at that point, I nodded and backed slowly out the door and went back to work.

It happened again, the next evening, when I was out for beers with my friend Jon. I’ve known Jon for more than a decade; we’ve lived together in at least three places, and I’ve watched him get his glasses knocked off his face by a coked-up stripper’s breasts, and he once made out with my girlfriend in college. Actually, now that I think about it, he did that twice. Anyway, we’ve been through a lot!

So when I finished a long sip of my Guinness and said to him, “So...Lost can get pretty crazy, huh?”—well, I most definitely did not expect him to choke abruptly on his own beer and then spit it all over the table, eyes wide with terror. He shrieked, hurled his half-full glass at my face, almost fell off his stool, and ran for the exit. When he got outside, he set himself on fire for good measure, before screaming down Amsterdam Avenue in the direction of his apartment. I sent him a text, but he never responded.

Conversations with total strangers yielded more or less the same thing. A big, tough dude I mentioned the show to on the subway stuffed his own tie into his mouth until he swallowed it and started choking. A new mother in the park offered me her baby if I would just stop talking and leave her alone. (Related note: Anybody need a baby?) And in the encounter I feel most guilty about, two teenage boys paid full price for tickets to The Spirit just to escape. (Tyler, Jeremy, if you’re out there—I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.)

Yes, Lost is like a strange, second-wave J-horror film come to life, where watching the show won’t hurt you, but talking to anyone else about it will. Or at least, talking about it is a process so fraught with peril that it’s almost not worth it. You must approach potential conversation partners with trepidation, carefully, like John Locke stalking a wild boar or Sawyer considering having a feeling. Which makes it an interesting development in United States culture: I mean, even if we’ve traded touch football for Madden, even if we’ve given up Boy Scouts for Planet Earth, even if we’ve let all the real horses die because horses are more fun on the Wii, even if our legs have turned to jelly-like pseudopods and the pseudopods have merged with our couches and we have not gone outside in two years but only watched television programs about being outside—well, even if these things haven’t exactly encouraged social interaction, they haven’t quite precluded it.

With Lost, though...well, obviously you can watch and enjoy it with other people, and in some ways, it even reinforces preexisting bonds—at least, if I sat down to see a single new episode without my wife, and got ahead of her on our viewing schedule, she would destroy me. Obviously, yes, you can find other people with whom to discuss it, and that you are reading this column is a testament to that. But you can’t discuss it with just anybody, the way you could discuss the vast majority of ultrapopular mainstream American shows—including similarly weird ones like Twin Peaks—up to this point. No, there’s a relatively small, select group of people—people you know who are at the same point in the show as you (because so many folks I know aren’t watching new episodes as they air)—to talk about it to.

Really, it’s like—sit down because I am about to BLOW YOUR MIND—it’s like you’re on an island with those people and you can’t communicate with the outside world.

Whoa.

Now, once you’ve wrapped your head around that, what I’m thinking we need is some kind of simple system by which we can identify other Lost fans to whom we can speak, so as to avoid spoilers on either side. Something like a number code—for example, if you were 15 minutes and 16 seconds in to the eighth episode of the fourth season, you’d say, “4-8-15-16.” This is just an idea, but it might allow for greater discourse on the subject, which would mean we could talk about what’s really scary about the show, namely:

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I’m not even through the first fucking season yet, and even after I’ve watched 71 more episodes, the fucking Smoke Monster is still going to be a mystery??!!? I haven’t even SEEN the Smoke Monster yet. AAAAAGGGGGHHHHH.

Whatever. Anyway, don’t spoil it for me.

Commenter Moff’s real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

(OK, yes—way, way back, back when George W. Bush was still the president, I confessed to giving up on BSG after only a season and a half. And no, nothing has changed since then. So why, given my admittedly limited knowledge, should you even want to listen to my guesses?

For one thing, as Sir Francis Bacon said—and I think the guy who invented bacon knew what he was talking about—knowledge is power. And we all know that power corrupts. In fact, what sort of person is best suited to wield power? The person who doesn’t want it. Because you can trust them. Ergo, because I lack knowledge of BSG, and don’t really want it, you can trust me. Wow, why am I not a billionaire yet?)

Ahem. On to the guessing.

Excellent Guess #1: The final Cylon is my wife. What do we know about the final Cylon, you guys from actually watching the show and me from looking at the Internet? We know he or she isn’t in the Colonial fleet (probably). And my wife is definitely not in the fleet! I’m pretty sure I would notice if she ever traveled light-years away. Further, all of the lady Cylons so far have proven to be very attractive women, and my wife is a very attractive woman. Furtherer, why would she brush off my persistent attempts to consummate our marriage if not to hide the fact that her back glows red during lovemaking? And furtherest of all, why have I repeatedly come home to find Ramón, the Venezuelan repairman from downstairs, in our apartment, if he isn’t there to perform covert maintenance on her robot body? So, honey, Ramón—I’m on to you guys! Guess I’m a little sharper than you thought!

On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that Ramón is simply helping my wife plan the grandest surprise party ever for my birthday in August. In that case, it’s quite likely that the final Cylon is my wife’s best friend. She, too, is not in the fleet. More important, back in season one, Leoben Conoy, or Number Two, tells President Roslin that “Adama is a Cylon.” Well, most folks agree that if that wasn’t an outright lie, then it’s still misleading in some way, like maybe he meant an Adama other than the commander. Or maybe (and I think you’ll agree that this makes a lot more sense) he meant that the Cylon was “Ada ma”—in other words, the mother of Ada. And my wife’s best friend’s daughter is indeed named Ada. Ada is a baby, and what do Cylons love to do? Have babies. Q.E.D.

But oh, you brainos whine, Number Two wouldn’t have known who any of the Final Five were. Nyeeeeah. Nyeeeeah. That’s what you sound like, and it hurts my ears. You probably want Barack Obama to be the last Cylon! Well, sorry—he’s in this picture, right smack-dab in the middle:

...and the last thing we know about the final Cylon is that she or he isn’t in that picture, according to series creator Ron Moore. Sorry, hopefaces!

But I think you’re close. Because Battlestar Galactica has aimed since its inception to be more than a boilerplate spaceship show about lasers and robots. It wants to tell us something about who we are; it wants to show us there are no easy answers, no black-and-white divisions of right and wrong, no heroes who are wholly good and no villains who are wholly despicable.

And so I am confident that when the final Cylon is revealed, a hush will fall over the characters who are present, somber music will play, and the camera will pan slowly across the gathered faces, until it comes to rest on...

A mirror. Yes, because you are the final Cylon. (Time’s Person of the Year for 2006, not 2008.) You are the final Cylon, and I am the final Cylon, and my wife is the final Cylon, and her best friend is the final Cylon, and Ramón is the final Cylon. We are all the final Cylon. Except for Barack Obama and the other people in that picture with him.

Commenter Moff’s real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

Mom turned from her computer. “I don’t think I understand,” she said, carefully. God. I should have known she was going to make this complicated.

“Greatness,” I said. “I need to achieve it. Pothead Space Ninja isn’t going anywhere, and I think it’s because you guys are still alive. Don’t you want me to achieve greatness?”

“That depends,” she said. Typical. “I’m still confused.” Even more typical. “What is Pothead Space Ninja?”

I sighed. Normally, I don’t think personal issues like hopes and dreams and aspirations are one’s parents’ business, but in this case I figured it was a moot point. Or would be soon, anyway.

“Pothead Space Ninja is my novel. Or it will be. I mean, it is, but it’s more like a Platonic ideal of my novel right now. It’s gonna be so good, though.” I flashed her a big, confident grin, the kind I reserve for moms.

She nodded and started to rise. “I have a show on in fifteen minutes, and I really want to watch it...”

“No!” God. This was just like when I was nine and she made me go with the family to visit my grandma in California for two weeks instead of letting me stay home by myself so I could go to Josh Biteler’s birthday at Showbiz. “Listen to me!”

Deep breath. “OK,” I began, “so everyone knows that, like, orphans are the best at achieving greatness—”

“Like Annie?” Mom interrupted. “Because I think Annie would have rather had her parents alive than have gone to live in a mansion with Daddy Warbucks.”

“Not like Annie—” I started.

“Gosh, you loved that movie. We couldn’t get you to stop singing those songs. I remember, you told me you wanted to be Annie for Halloween, and oh, we had to argue with you for hours that sixteen was too old for trick-or-treating at all, much less dressed as a little girl—”

“I don’t mean like Annie!” I yelled. “I mean like Bruce Wayne! Clark Kent! Peter Parker! Luke Skywalker! Harry Potter! The deaths of their parents shaped all of them in ways that can’t be appreciated by those of us who are progenitorically advantaged. And ‘progenitorically advantaged.’ Is that a total oxymoron of a saying or what?”

“It’s not a saying,” Mom said, shaking her head. “And I don’t think you can just kill us and suddenly—I don’t think it works that way.” She looked at me closely. “You know those are all fictional characters, right?”

“Stephen King isn’t fictional! And his dad died before he was born! His mother raised him, but still.” I glared at her.

“I guess that’s good news for me,” she said. She turned back to the computer. “But you still can’t kill your father.”

“What the fuck?” I was so mad now. “You want me to end up like, I don’t know, Hawkeye? I bet Hawkeye’s parents are still alive and they’re embarrassed for him. ‘That your boy, Barton? In the purple suit?’”

“I don’t know who that is—” Mom said.

“Exactly,” I snapped.

“—but you used to love wearing that purple hat of mine. If I hadn’t taken it back, you would have brought it to college with you.”

AAAAGGGGHHHH.

“Listen,” she went on, her fingers dancing on the keyboard. “I want you to succeed. Your father does, too. If this is actually about those power-skating lessons we made you take, I have already apologized for that over and over again.” She moved away, revealing a Wikipedia page on her screen. “Look. Stephen King’s father didn’t die—he just left. After Stephen King was born.” She touched a finger to her chin. “And you know, Luke Skywalker wasn’t technically an orphan, either.”

“It’s like—” I gritted my teeth. “It’s about the principle, or the archetypal forms or whatever. It’s just—you have to trust me. I don’t have time to explain it. You should read Joseph Campbell—”

“Oh! We watched him on PBS!” she said. “That was neat.” More typing. “If Ninja Pothead is so important to you, I think you should just sit down and write it instead of killing anyone. And you should write down those stories about Stripey. You were so funny when you used to tell them to your little brother. She was a good cat.”

GOD. “It’s Pothead Space Ninja,” I said. “And that’s not even the real ti—”

“Here,” she said, pointing to a new Wikipedia page. “Hawkeye was an orphan, too. So I guess it’s no guarantee of anything. You certainly cannot kill your father and me if you’re only going to be in charge of the West Coast Avengers. There’s a reason I moved away from California. It’s an unhappy place.”

I just stared out the window. She was never going to get it.

“I think maybe you just need to (a) get better at doing your research, and (b) doing your work.” She stood up. “Now, my show is on.” She left.

OK. It took me a few minutes, but I regrouped. This was nothing new. And if Mom, as usual, wasn’t going to go for it, there was only one thing to do.

Dad was in the basement, moving some boxes. “Hey,” I said to him, “I gotta kill Mom. Don’t worry—I’m not going to have sex with you.”

Commenter Moff’s real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

It’s pretty open-and-shut, to my mind; and frankly, I’m surprised to have seen any support at all for tweaking your kids’ genetic makeup to taste on a forum like this one, where the taste of the mainstream public is routinely derided. How much of science fiction teaches us that people, and especially large crowds of people, tend to make terrible decisions? Cripes, look at how much of history teaches us this:

Salem Witch Trials

Nazism

The Macarena

And why would we expect it to be any different when it comes to passing on our DNA?

And therein lies the problem. It can be entertaining and illuminating to delve into the philosophical points of whether we should choose a baby’s sex or eye color or give them a chocolate-flavored penis, and whether we even have the right to do so in the first place—but ultimately, we have to look at the practical aspects of the question, too. And one of those relevant realities, sad or not, is that people love fads.

On a small scale, that might not seem like such a big deal. Like, OK, so violet eyes become popular—and you know they would; we’d have preschools teeming with little purple-eyed monsters named Carson and Sequoia—but what’s the damage? And perhaps there wouldn’t be any, although there are many people still alive who remember when differences in color determined, say, which water fountain you got to drink out of.

Sex selection is more worrisome. Again, maybe it would just all pan out that about half of parents would choose boys and half would choose girls—although, as was pointed out in last week’s post, even without science that allows them to choose, there are people who clearly lean one way. Yes, you could argue that this is actually a point in favor of sex-selection technology (as commenter icelight did)—that if a culture is going to kill its daughters, for example, then letting them opt for sons from the outset at least keeps babies from being murdered. That’s a fair point, but there’s an inherent danger in it, beyond the fact that it could be seen as implicitly condoning the culture in question’s inherent sexism (which, for the record, is not what I think icelight was doing).

The danger, which figures into all questions of designer offspring, is simply that we might skew our genetic portfolio the “wrong” way—and I put wrong in scare quotes because, short of being able to predict the future, there’s no way to tell which attributes may or may not be valuable two or three generations down the line. Is it good to be tall? Sure, unless something bad happens to your planet and you have to move underground, in which case a population whose average height is six-foot-two is a gross inconvenience. Is it good to have a super-efficient metabolism that keeps you from getting obese? Absolutely, unless food for some reason abruptly becomes much less plentiful.

Even in the case of predetermining and preventing a child’s predisposition for disease or disability, I’m wary. When it comes to cancer, it’s pretty cut and dry, but what about autism or dyslexia? The case has been made that these aren’t inherently crippling conditions so much as different modes of perception that aren’t aligned with the traditional or mainstream way of experiencing the world. By eliminating them from the gene pool just because we’re sure they’re “bad,” we may risk cutting ourselves off from a valuable kind of knowledge.

The thing about nature is that it makes our genetic choices for us randomly, impersonally, and incontestably. We can assume with some certainty that by leaving our biological makeup in its hands, we’re not going to end up with too many tall people, too many women, too many redheads, or too many or too few of anything else. I’m all for scientific progress, but I’m even more in favor of caution, particularly when it comes to something as irreplaceable and still well beyond our understanding as humanity’s genetic constitution. We have not, in my opinion, demonstrated sufficient wisdom to convince me that we can be trusted to ensure our future as a healthy species once we start futzing around with the biology that determines it. Once we do, hey—give your kids all the chocolate-flavored penises you want.

Commenter Moff’s real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

Yes, He-Man. Maybe it’s because of that fateful December 24 when I, at the tender age of five or six, snuck out of bed and discovered that Castle Grayskull had appeared under the tree, and the milk and cookies next to it had been consumed—despite the fact that my parents were still awake in the next room. “Holy fucking shit,” I thought. “Santa is fucking fast.” Or maybe it’s because of that same night, several hours later, when I woke up my mom and dad to ask if we could open presents yet, and my mother said something to me that I have never forgotten: “Joshua, it is four o’clock in the fucking morning. Get your ass back in bed and stay there.”

Maybe. Or maybe it is because I love both Christmas and He-Man, and yet both get hated on time and time again. The big complaint about He-Man, after all, is exactly the same one you hear about Christmas: that it’s a corny, mawkish fantasy camouflaging little more than an exercise in crass materialism. That whatever myth might surround it, its core reason for being is (or was) to get people to spend money.

Well, to that critique of both, I say: Bah. Humbug.

Oh, sure, both Christmas and He-Man do (or did) get people to part with their hard-earned; there’s no question of that. And I’m not going to deny the corniness or mawkishness of either. What I do deny, though—vehemently—is the implicit presumption that because something has commercial, corny, or mawkish qualities, it is wholly devoid of substance. Further, I’ll bite the bullet and argue that those corny and mawkish qualities are often exactly where the substance lies.

Take, for example, He-Man & She-Ra: A Christmas Special, which I just watched for the first time in almost a quarter-century. The premise of the special—which would probably not qualify as “science fiction” under Harlan Ellison’s standards—is that two Earth children are accidentally brought to He-Man’s home planet of Eternia by his friend Orko, and then kidnapped by villains Hordak and Skeletor, whose boss wants them and the Christmas spirit they’ve brought with them (it clings to Earth children like the scent of pine needles) destroyed.

After a series of battles, the kids end up stuck with Skeletor, and a cyborg puppy, in a snow-covered mountain range. And as in so many of the best Christmas stories (Orko, incidentally, delivers the last line—“Merry Christmas, everybody!”—in perfect Tiny Tim intonation), the heart of the plot sees the bony ol’ grinch from that point on starting to redeem himself, at least temporarily.

Is it absurd? Not really—Skeletor has always smacked of being a softie (how else could his henchpeople have survived for so long, and why else would he have hired them in the first place?), and you always suspect that he’s secretly happiest on the rare occasions he deals with He-Man and the Masters as peers instead of enemies. (At the end of the special, when he protests, “I don’t like to feel good! I like to feel evil!” and everyone chuckles, the moment is much more Oscar the Grouch than Cobra Commander.) Still, it’s definitely cheesy.

Nonetheless, there is something very important, very substantial, about the lesson here, however clichéd, which is of course that there’s good in everyone. That’s not to say you should be overly trusting in the case of someone who has repeatedly tried to overthrow King Randor’s peaceful rule. But which lesson—“There’s good in everyone” or “Don’t be too trusting”—is ultimately more important?

Well, if the former is evocative of a He-Man cartoon, I’d say the latter suggests The Wire, that critically acclaimed HBO series that was anything but sentimental. But while the former is a straight-up moral of the story, I don’t think that’s true of the latter. No, although “Don’t be too trusting” is something I think most of the characters in The Wire would agree on, the message you take away from the series is that the only truly bright moments in a bleak existence come when people hew to the sappy ideals He-Man lurrrrves so much.

So, O jaded readers, as you go about your lives this holiday season, maybe don’t be so quick to dismiss the mushy, the maudlin, or even the trite out of hand. Immersed in the sickly sweet bathwater may be the Baby of All That Is Meaningful. And the baby’s name may just be Jesus. Or it could be Dylan—that’s a pretty popular name lately. Dylan, get your ass back in bed and stay there. Merry Christmas, everyone!

He-Man & She-Ra: A Christmas Special: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Commenter Moff’s real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

(It may also surprise you, especially if you are Neil Gaiman, when I say that the absolutely true story—told here for the first time ever—of how Delight of the Endless became Delirium ties in to this rallying cry, because you may not remember telling anyone that story, least of all me. Relax. All will be revealed.)

Many of us, especially those in the science-fiction community, take it as a given that knowledge is a good thing, and that the more of it we have, the better off we will be. But too much of anything—except for love in the truest sense of the word, and pet cheerleaders—can be dangerous. (And frankly, though it pains me to admit it, even the cheerleaders can be trouble, once you get beyond a single squad.) And of course, this is actually a common theme in SF: the scientist with the God complex, the poor sap marked for death because he knows too much, the experiment gone horribly awry—or gone all too perfectly, with unforeseen consequences. As Delirium’s older brother Destruction, from Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics, puts it: “‘Are not light and gross bodies intraconvertible?’ Alas, they are. And from that follows the flames...the big bang. The loud explosions.”

Which is not to say I think we should turn back the clock on scientific progress—first, that would be a futile case to make, and more important, I would miss microwavable burritos too much. Nor do I think that the most earnest plea to the world’s thinkers that they stop and consider what they’re doing before they clone anthrax or build golem-lady toast-butterers would be heeded. But in the personal sphere, too, there can surely be great benefit to not knowing things.

For example, not knowing what the hell three big seniors from another school’s wrestling team were talking about, when they accosted my friend Pat and me at Hardee’s in ninth grade, saved us from a terrific beating, and I don’t think it would have worked if the blank looks on our faces hadn’t been genuine. (It was only after they left and our friend Harleigh returned from getting ketchup that he revealed he’d murmured something pejorative about their sexuality as we’d walked past their table earlier. Jackass.)

And some of you can probably attest to ignorance’s beneficent effect on getting laid. Yes, I’ve missed a couple of chances to sleep with someone because I never caught on, but I bet I’ve closed the deal as many or more times because I just didn’t catch on right away, which kept me from saying too many, uh, “witty” things to demonstrate how “awesome” I was at an early, fragile stage of the game.

And while that kind of authentic ignorance is certainly more pure, I would argue there is good to be had as well from the straight-up willful brand: How many bad internet fights start because even though you’re pretty sure you know the answer, you can’t help but wonder what numbskull thing someone will say if you push them a little bit (and I say this as someone who has started a few of these in his time)? How many hurt feelings—and maybe more important, hours that could be devoted to more productive pursuits—might be saved by simply quashing that desire to know exactly what kind of idiot you’re dealing with?

So this isn’t a call to arms for stupidity—I just want to give ignorance its due. I mean, it can even be fun! As a literary device, ambiguity is to be prized, after all. And even if you don’t want to get as highfalutin as all that, plain old not-knowingness can be pretty great on its own. Speaking for instance, as we were, of Neil Gaiman, there’s the case of the “forgotten god” in American Gods, whose identity I for one hope he never reveals; it’s annoying not to have that resolution, but annoying in the best way possible, not unlike when the cat jumps in your lap while you’re trying to work. Same goes for the aforementioned absolutely true story of how Delight became Delirium...

Which, as you the wiser among of you have probably figured out, I have decided not to reveal after all. It seems apparent to me, on further reflection, that it’s one of those things that’s more fun to be ignorant of, at least for now. As Delirium herself puts it, “Not knowing everything is all that makes it OK, sometimes.” And if you don’t agree, there’s also always bathtub gin. Cheers!

Commenter Moff’s real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

OK, it was kind of like that.

My actual earliest memory of science fiction—and I suspect I am not alone in this—is not of something I saw, but a sound: I mean the hum of a lightsaber coming to life, of course. Ben Burtt deserves a lot of credit, because at least where I grew up, anything—a broomstick, a dangerously rusty piece of rebar, a flashlight (which worked best)—could be a lightsaber so long as you made the noise with your mouth. That’s sensory branding, motherfuckers.

It’s ironic, I suppose, that a sword should have been my entry point into a genre that hinges on new technological developments. But like most kids, I had an instinctive understanding of what was awesome (I drew so many pictures of tanks that could transform into both a submarine and a space plane), and swords had the benefit of kicking so much ass. It was, in fact, the total lack of lightsabers in Gene Roddenberry’s universe that kept me firmly on George Lucas’s side of the Wars/Trek debate for many years. That, and the fact that phasers looked retarded compared to blasters.

I got older, though, and became less attached to blasters and lightsabers, figuratively and literally—I somehow managed to lose Bespin fatigues Luke’s weapon in the not-at-all-deep carpet of our living room (it was yellow? why was that? did Kenner just have a surplus of yellow plastic? did they think we wouldn’t notice?), which was tragic, but not as sad as forever losing C-3PO in a motel room on a family trip to Disneyland, when my aunt unknowingly flushed the Sarlacc pit. I mysteriously lost Chief Chirpa on another trip with the same aunt, who has always been more of a Trekkie than a Jedihead, so maybe she was waging a stealthy campaign to convert me.

What did end up getting me interested in Star Trek was much more mundane: Fargo’s Fox affiliate started running it after Scooby-Doo and He-Man. These reruns of the original series were, honestly, kind of boring to me—I couldn’t for the life of me understand why Spock didn’t neck-pinch someone, like, every episode, that sort of physically demonstrable superpower seeming to my young mind to be the whole frickin’ point of science fiction. Eventually, though, I started to appreciate that less could be more; the episode “The Devil in the Dark,” with the Horta, stands out especially in my memory as the one that converted me. (Wikipedia says it’s William Shatner's favorite, too, so I clearly had excellent taste.)

It was my friend Patrick who ultimately solidified my standing in SF-nerd-dom, during the second incarnation of our friendship. (The first incarnation ended with him taking a running punch at me while someone else held my arms behind my back, and me kicking him in the nuts.) My first Dungeon Master, it was in his basement that I watched the original broadcast of “Encounter at Farpoint,” which blew my mind because the captain was bald. My friend Andrew, who lived down the street from Patrick, introduced me to Doctor Who, which I never felt I quite had a handle on—our local PBS station showed episodes somewhat sporadically—until my mom bought me the RPG and I found out where the Daleks and the Cybermen came from and who the Rani was.

Role-playing game manuals actually provided me with a lot of important stuff back then, notably masturbation material (Deities & Demigods—hello, Aphrodite!) and a voluminous knowledge of the Marvel Universe (TSR’s FASERIP game) that I gleaned a lot more quickly and cheaply than if I’d bothered to read all of the comics. I was pretty weak on DC until the last couple of years, when Wikipedia remedied that.

And now I really do while away the afternoons, sometimes, in Bellona or on Urth—although probably a little more often in Metropolis, at least if Boomerang is showing a Justice League marathon, and definitely even more often here with you people. It’s kind of fascinating that a genre that does lend itself so well to losing ourselves in our own secret worlds also makes for such great community fodder. I am sure glad it does, though.

Which is to say: Does anyone have a copy of Deities & Demigods I can borrow? Hello, Aphrodite!

Commenter Moff's real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

We will lose weight! Americans are disgusting, and this is borne out by the fact that the only significant advances we have made in the 21st century are (1) getting foreigners to answer the phone for us and (2) combining fried chicken, mashed potatoes, cheese, and gravy into a single foodstuff. Except for those of us who are throwing up three times a day, we all weigh at least 400 pounds. Well, you fat fucking fuck, once the eschaton has been immanentized, no one will ever be able to call you a fat fucking fuck again. Because either you will have burned off all that weight fleeing from the ravening hordes, or they will have eaten you.

We will have horses! Even before doomsday arrives, you will not be able to run your car anymore, because gas will be more expensive than water, which in turn will be only slightly less expensive than your eyes. And then, even if you manage to get some gas, you won’t be able to drive anywhere, on account of having traded one or both of your eyes for water. You will need a horse. You will name it “Steel” or “Charger” or “Lemondrop,” or, if you are wise, nothing at all, because eventually you will have to eat it.

We will read books again! If you, like me, are finding it impossible to finish, or even substantially begin, your space-opera novel Pothead Space Ninja because there is just so much Internet to look at every day, take heart! On Third Earth (which is what we will call our world, in an effort to maintain our sense of childish wonder), there will be no Internet to look at at all. There will probably be no paper either, or alphabet. The best stories will only be told by old men or women sitting in front of a fire, as the Ancient Ones intended.

Steampunk! Steampunk only makes sense when it is set in the shattered remains of a technologically advanced society—but then it makes perfect sense. We will use oil lamps, and our Turing machines will be powered by winding cranks. We will need trench coats and boots to protect us from the weather and radioactive fallout and the ravening hordes. We will all carry truncheons. We will all wear goggles.

Swords! Bullets will come at a premium, and so those of us who are too good for truncheons will carry swords instead. They will be made from the remains of our cars, which will prove to the benefit of those folks who are still buying American right now, rather than a European or Japanese import, because sure, better mileage with the import, but who wants a plastic sword?

We will have open relationships! Sort of! You, readers, will want to make sure that you have a sword, and that it isn’t a plastic one, because all those lame social mores and conventions that make it so hard to sleep around today will be rendered obsolete in a matter of weeks. If you are male, plan on immediately establishing yourself as a “chief” or “warlord” or “only medical doctor around for miles,” because: harem. If you are female and for some reason not interested in a career in the concubinal arts, set yourself up as a wandering warrior woman. Remember not to give your heart, or your purity, to any man but the one who can best you in single combat, or you’ll get a reputation as the wandering warrior woman who’s kind of a slut. Even in the future, some things will never change.

We will genuinely appreciate things! "We all ask," wrote W.H. Auden, "but I doubt if anyone can really say why all age-groups should find our age quite so repulsive." Gloomy, but I think he has a point: No matter how many Wii DVDs we have on our MySpace phones, a sort of emptiness pervades contemporary life. Post-Ragnarok, though, as we sit around celebrating the Great High Harvest—our swords sheathed, the horses fed and asleep, our thin wives with their goggles pushed atop their heads—and an old man in front of the fire regales us with tales of the battles of the network stars, we will be truly thankful for all that we have. At least until the ravening hordes show up and eat us.

Commenter Moff’s real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

I am speaking, of course, of the decline of print media.

Yes, newspapers are dying, and even if flying backwards around the earth to reverse time really worked, it would only delay the inevitable: The Internet would just get invented again, revenue from classified ads would drop sharply, Franklin Stern would be forced to conclude that pay-to-view was a flawed model and abandon the PlanetSelect program, and where would that leave Metropolis’s favorite couple?

As a two-reporter family, almost certainly screwed, that’s where. You think tenure counts for something? Alas, it does not. Lois might get to keep her job, for a time at least, but Clark? Clark Kent? The guy who disappears as soon as anything interesting starts to happen? Sure, he types fast, and his copy is clean, but editors will have to make choices, hard choices, and Perry White will be looking for any excuse he can find. He’ll be counting on Clark, the affable dope, to make this easy on everyone. Maybe he’ll offer him a spot on the copy desk. But that won’t work—copy editors have to be at their desks all the time, and besides, they’re weirdos. Real weirdos, worse than the Toyman. No, Clark will take the buyout.

That’s better than the other famous superhero-cum-journalist will do, since freelancers just get dropped on their asses. But at least Peter Parker is young and has science to fall back on. Clark is an old superdog, and as Krypto will verify, that makes it hard to learn new tricks. Anyway, he’s got ink his blood (permanent ink that gives transfusion recipients superpowers). Once that severance runs out, he’ll be left with one option.

Yep, he’ll have to become a blogger.

Which is, frankly, a gross injustice. I mean, there is a certain dignity to newspaper work, or at least, there used to be, and still is in the anachronism that is Superman’s corner of the multiverse: You file your story, you see your byline on the front page, you smile, repeat. There’s no real fallout—at worst, maybe a couple of letters to the editor, presumably written by weirdos who couldn’t cut it as copy editors.

But blogging. Great Caesar’s ghost! You file your post, you see your byline on the front page, you smile...and then the comments start coming in, and you think, I know I addressed that point in plain English. Hey, I didn’t say that, why are you attacking me for saying that? Seriously, do you not get that it was a joke? Hey, I didn’t say that either. I do not even know what that means. No, that’s not socialism. Hitl—really? You went there? Did you even read what I wrote? That’s what passes for logic in your world? THIS WASN’T EVEN ABOUT THE WATCHMEN MOVIE!

And that’s just if he's lucky enough to write for io9. We commenters over here are, by and large, Pulitzer nominees compared with what they get at, say, newsweek.com. And Clark would probably end up somewhere like that; he’s not hip enough for Slate or New York. There’s something terribly wrong about the Last Son of Krypton being publicly critiqued by centralcity_dad42. Plus, invulnerability doesn’t protect you from getting your feelings hurt. The blogosphere is no place for a nice guy from Kansas.

Nor does it bode well for folks with secret identities. Put all the career troubles aside, and Kal-El still has a serious problem: Superheroes, like politicians, have been banking on the goodwill and ineptitude of the so-called “mainstream media” for decades. The bloggers who are taking over the mantle of the fourth estate know little to nothing of goodwill, and there are so many of them, with, collectively, so much time on their hands, that it renders their individual ineptitude moot. It’s not going to take a Luthor-level genius to figure out who Supes really is. It’s gonna be some asshat at Daily Kos.

Given all of the above, I’d head for the final frontier, too. I am told, anyway, that they make a mean risotto on Oa.

Commenter Moff’s real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

I. Chewbacca should have fought a wampa. For three Star Wars movies, we take it on faith that you don’t want to get a Wookiee angry, after he successfully threatens, uh, C-3PO. What evidence do we actually see? Chewie knocks down a couple of stormtroopers, once, by surprise, and manages to hijack an AT-ST with some Ewoks’ help.
     The fix: Han is gearing up to hunt for Luke. “Sir,” the deck officer says, “the temperature’s dropping too rapidly.”
     “And,” Leia adds, “you’ll miss Chewie’s cage match.”
     “I know,” Han answers, leaning down from his tauntaun to hug his friend. “Good luck, buddy.” He turns to the deck officer. “And I’ll see you in hell!” He bounces off.
     Scenes of him searching for Luke, battling the cold, and slicing open the tauntaun while the wind howls are interspersed with scenes of Chewie searching for a way to defeat the snow monster, battling it, and slicing it open while the crowd howls. Symmetry.

II. The bounty hunters should have fought each other in a Bloodsport-style tournament. All those awesome characters, and all George Lucas can give us is the non-canon Tales of the Bounty Hunters, which is in book form, making it very hard to imagine how everything that happens looks. In ESB, we see Bossk sneer at Boba Fett—and that’s it. That breaks one of the cardinal rules in Robert McKee’s Story: If one character sneers at another and they don’t throw down later, the movie is ruined.
     The fix: “You are free to use any methods necessary,” Vader says, “but I want them alive. No disintegrations.”
     “As you wish,” Fett answers. He looks at the other bounty hunters. “Not that you crumbheads will have to worry about finding them anyway.”
     Dengar bristles. “Who are you calling a crumbhead?” [Note: "Crumbhead" is a total Corellian insult.] He steps to Fett.
     “Watch it,” Fett says. “My dad killed most of the Jedi.”
     There is silence. Finally, IG-88 says, “That’s quite a stretch.”
     “Enough!” Vader yells. “We will settle this in the cage.”

III. There is only one strong woman character. OK, this is a genuinely serious concern. Name one female besides Leia in the original trilogy whose name doesn’t start with an M or a B. By my count, you should be left with Jabba’s dancers and Sy Snootles. And none of them appears in ESB or is anything close to dynamic or well rounded. Sure, Leia is a formidable presence by herself, but this still smacks of sexism. Even that pig James Bond usually encountered at least a couple of tough women in every story.
     The fix: Instead of hiding from the Imperials in the asteroid belt, Han pilots the Falcon to an out-of-the-way planet called, like, I don’t know, Sororia, maybe, ruled by a faction of fierce—and very beautiful—Amazon types. Leia, sensing a bond with these proud warriors, tries to convert them to the Rebel cause. But their leader, whose name is, like, Kylissa or something, thinks the Alderaanian princess is trying to usurp her power.
     “Enough!” Kylissa yells. “Get the warm baby oil. We will settle this in the cage.”

IV. We don’t learn enough about Lobot. I dunno, he just seems like a cool guy. When he stops abruptly and gestures, and the Bespin guards disarm the stormtroopers, that’s solid.
     The fix: Just give him a little more screen time. Or a DVD extra. Maybe a talk show.

V. There are no references to Grand Moff Tarkin. Probably some of you nitpicky nancies can find flaws in the flaws I’ve mentioned above—WHOA META—but I hardly think you can argue this one. When a major character, especially a very handsome major character, dies in a movie, the sequel usually acknowledges it. It’s poor form not to.
     The fix: “The Force is strong with him,” the Emperor says. “The son of Skywalker must not become a Jedi.”
     “If he could be turned, he would become a powerful ally,” Vader replies.
     “Yes. Yes. He would be a great asset. Can it be done?”
     Vader nods. “He will join us or die, my master.” He kneels, and there is a pause. “I miss Wilhuff.”

Commenter Moff’s real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

Well, I probably shouldn’t drink so much, at least not at work. The opera was actually called Doctor Atomic, and it was about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of the, uh, Manhattan Project, and covered the time immediately leading up to the first nuclear weapon test. I got the other two names wrong, too. We were about a third of the way through the show when I figured out it wasn’t at all Watchmen-related, which at least was sooner than the last time I got burned like this, at a special naked performance by the Blue Man Group.

This time, what clued me in was the abundance of fedoras.

If you ever need to evoke the dawn of the Nuclear Age, dear readers, step one is to stick a fedora on every man in sight. You can’t get enough fedoras. Get a group of six to eight behatted guys huddled in a circle, hands in their pockets, chatting rapid-fire, drop a couple of wooden crates next to them, and tell two men in military uniform to wander around a few feet away, possibly smoking. Everyone who sees that tableau will know atoms are gonna get split sooner or later.

In Watchmen, however, Rorschach is sporting pretty much the only fedora in sight—which is no coincidence. As the Cold War went on and men realized that felt offered little to no protection against hydrogen bombs or even the attendant fallout (and with the concurrent improvements made to hair product), most of them chose to enjoy feeling the sun shine on their naked heads before it was blotted out of the sky forever. Rorschach, of course, is a throwback; he wears his fedora not because it’s practical, but out of loyalty to an earlier time (and also, presumably, because he thinks Vidal Sassoon is part of a Communist plot).

That time he’s remembering is back when an individual person was still somewhere in the same order of magnitude as the weapons that could be leveled against him or her—even the worst bombs used throughout most of World War II could take out a neighborhood at best, and would leave some neighbors surviving. That changed during the handful of days marked in Doctor Atomic.

And if the opera, which draws directly from the characters’ history for source material, is right, the change was entirely deliberate. It was tempting, as I watched, to associate Oppenheimer with his fellow scientist Jon Osterman, especially when he quoted John Donne in the aria that closed the first act: “Overthrow me, and bend your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.”

Really, though, he was closer to another Watchmen character, whose identity I won’t reveal here for fear of spoiling a book written before spoilers were invented. Those of you who’ve read it will know whom I’m talking about: After his colleagues come forward with petitions for President Truman asking at least to warn the Japanese before unleashing their “gadget” upon them, Oppenheimer dismisses them, explaining that bombing cities containing civilians is the only way to “make a profound psychological impression” that will end the war for good. Essentially, he says, the only way to stop war is to scare people out of it by killing a bunch of them.

He may not have been wrong. No conflict in the last 63 years has approached the scale of World War II, anyway, and the philosophy of mutually assured destruction was what kept both sides safe throughout the Cold War.

But although the Soviet Union is gone, we’re still dealing with some of the consequences of that conflict, only in a much less stable world. And I couldn’t help but think about that when Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, sang at the start of the second act that “the peace the spirit needs is peace, not lack of war—but fierce, continual flame.”

Is it enough for those of us who want peace to be satisfied with less war, like I think that Watchmen character is? Or do we have to actively cultivate peace? Because I think that’s harder.

You go to the opera because you’re married, after all—but not just with a sigh, because you’re afraid your wife will be upset if you don’t. At least, not if you’re doing it right. You go and you smile about it, because you want her to be happy.

Commenter Moff's real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.