by Ryan Britt
He also gave me a break. Technically, Captain Space Pirate shouldn’t have hired me at this bookstore at all, because it was against the larger company policy to take on anyone under eighteen. But he’d given me a job because I’d consistently attended the geeky gaming nights and Star Wars book club stuff since the age of fourteen. When I got the job, I couldn’t believe my luck: I was getting paid to read books and talk about Star Wars all day long. I was beginning my rock-and-roll fantasy of living in the protected world of geeky stuff I loved, surrounded only by people who “got it.” And, prepare to be shocked: plenty of my co-workers claimed that they did in fact “get it.”
The year 1999 was a very good one for hot-blooded geeks getting their ire up about all the things they hated to love and all the things they loved to hate. If you’ve seen High Fidelity, then you’re familiar with a certain amount of overly informed pseudo-intellectual banter that pervades a place where people are way more into the things than the people they’re selling them to. Jack Black’s character, Barry, epitomizes this in High Fidelity: someone who is such a snob that he won’t sell a certain record to a patron because the patron doesn’t like it the “right” way. At my bookstore, we had four sci-fi Barrys on any given shift, all quick to cut me down to size about my severely underdeveloped opinions on everything from Star Trek to Babylon 5 to the death of Superman to whether or not the Dune series is inherently ruined by virtue of the fact that it’s read at all. Back then (and occasionally, shamefully, now) I was sometimes that guy, too, the snob accidentally lecturing someone about the “real” Buck Rogers or why a certain interpretation of Batman or Sherlock Holmes “sucks.”
Captain Space Pirate, however, was too soft, too sweet, to correct me the way some of the other angry clones would. He wasn’t bitter or jaded, but instead steady and tolerant of my nerd-rage outbursts. If I wanted to pretend to know everything about the history of werewolf films, Captain Space Pirate would simply allow me to embarrass myself on my own, letting me stick my own monster-clawed foot into my ignorant young mouth.
Notably, for complicated hormonal, contrarian reasons, I’d decided to come out as an iconoclast and pretend like I totally hated the at-the-time-brand-new movie The Matrix, even though, objectively speaking, it was awesome. In case you forgot: The Matrix is a 1999 movie in which Keanu Reeves lives an ordinary, boring life, only to learn his real life is fake and everyone in the world is actually strapped into a big old computer program being controlled by aliens. And the jam is, once Keanu is in the good part of “the Matrix” he can do all sorts of crazy kung fu stuff and essentially turn into a rapid-punch video game character while listening to songs from Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, or—wait for it—Rage Against the Machine. And very lazily, I hated it. I told myself that this whole Matrix thing was messy and filled with bad angsty music, which made it all way too close to home. The Matrix was science fiction, but because I personally couldn’t actually escape into it, I decided it didn’t do science fiction “the right way” and overreacted by telling all my fellow Barrys that it was “crap.” The easiest way to do this was to make claims leaning on a fake sense of superiority and imagined sci-fi education I affected that I already possessed. I’d say things like “it’s not original” and then sort of just imply that everyone knew there must be some sort of crusty old sci-fi text from which The Matrix ripped off all its good ideas. To be clear: I wasn’t actually sure this was true, but chose to act like I was right anyway. It’s backward science: here’s my hypothesis, don’t bother checking my research, and now, let me get mad that you don’t agree! I guess I figured everyone else was totally full of shit, too, and since no one was really keeping track of this stuff, it probably didn’t matter if I was right or wrong about The Matrix. The thing to do was to have an opinion, and if you were a true geek, the default opinion was probably always going to be negative. This, more than anything, explains the painful popularity of the character of Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons, who is always dismissively declaring everything the WORST THING EVER!
I imagine I made life very difficult for Captain Space Pirate with all of my bullshit back then. Probably one of the reasons Luke Skywalker is such a compelling character is because Mark Hamill plays him so specifically without irony in the first Star Wars film. Luke alternates between eager to please one minute and whiny and questioning the next. It might seem like an inconsistency in his character, but it’s beautifully accurate to what it’s like to be young and a “rebel without a cause.” Even before the Imperial Stormtroopers murder Luke’s family,* he’s a frustrated, angry person. Once his aunt and uncle are reduced to smoking skeletons, he’s got an excuse, but most of us don’t have that. We’re just pissed-off adolescents. Maybe you were, but I was, definitely. There’s a great Louis C.K. joke about how guys on first dates try on “all kinds of other guys,” while attempting to figure themselves out, and I think that’s what Luke Skywalker is doing in his first outing, and I think that’s what a lot of us do as teenagers. Regurgitating half-baked opinions from things we’ve read, while trying to piece together what kind of person we might be. Luke had Obi-Wan Kenobi to steer him in the right direction, and I had Captain Space Pirate.
As far as actual work-in-the-bookstore stuff went, Captain Space Pirate didn’t run a tight ship at all, and I often got the impression that he was under a lot of pressure from his corporate superiors to get his merry band of disaffected nerds to actually shelve the books properly. You’d think the Star Wars books would be organized. And because I was generously assigned to organize the science fiction and fantasy book section, you’d think that I would have made sure everything there was tops. Instead, it was a mess. An unruly joke factory, a bookseller’s nightmare combined with the kind of disorganization necessitating hypnosis for librarians to repress.
I’ll never know if Captain Space Pirate sabotaged his motorcycle that one night, or whether it genuinely wouldn’t start, but the net result was that I had to give him a ride home, and we had to load his motorcycle into the back of my pickup truck. Captain Space Pirate lived forty-five minutes away in a housing community where he was that guy on the urban- planning board who would wonder aloud why they wouldn’t let him paint his house all black. We talked about this a little on the drive, but also about work. This is when he asked me why my section wasn’t really as organized as it could be.
“So what’s the deal with the Star Wars books?” he said, and my memory has added that he’s holding a cigarette, even though he really didn’t smoke.
“What do you mean?” I said, merging onto the U.S. 60 while turning down “One Headlight,” by the Wallflowers, on the radio.
“It’s a fucking mess, man.”
“Is it?”
“Yeah,” he said. “And you know, I don’t really care, but I thought you’d at least try a little harder when it came to the things you’re actually interested in. I mean, of all the people that work there, you’re the most qualified to make that section look better.”
“But nobody cares, man,” I said, feeling guilty, and doing what all teenagers do when they’re guilty: fight back.
“Well, I care.”
When Captain Space Pirate threw a Luke Skywalker quote back in my face, I knew something needed to change. I realized something right then that would inform how I viewed not just my own adult life, but science fiction and fantasy specifically. The angry nerds we worked with at the bookstore might not care if the Star Wars books were organized properly, and the average customer might not give a damn either, but Captain Space Pirate noticed and I should, too. Just because something is silly, or is involved with dubious standards of legitimacy—like science fiction and fantasy—doesn’t mean you don’t take it seriously. Which is exactly like real rock and roll.
Living a rock-and-roll lifestyle sometimes means sex, drugs, and being irresponsible, but people have to take their music seriously to actually exist, to matter. You know, to be rock stars. Being angry or contra
rian about sci-fi and fantasy wasn’t enough. My friend and mentor was holding me to a higher standard, one that meant I wouldn’t devolve into being someone who just started arguments by declaring something was or was not “the worst thing ever.” Being rock and roll means a little more than just breaking guitars on a stage, since you’ve got to know how to play that guitar in the first place. And thanks to Captain Space Pirate, I realized a lot of our buddies were just breaking guitars without knowing what to do with them. Science fiction and fantasy was our rock and roll and it was up to us to do it right.
By the time I turned eighteen, that particular corporate bookstore had an incompressible magazine section, a ridiculously mis-shelved philosophy section, and a self-help section that would actually cause people to have new emotional breakdowns. But the science fiction/fantasy section was now meticulous. In an era before Wikipedia could guide me, I’d created subgenres other branches of our chain bookstore wouldn’t have dreamed of, and within a specific author section, the book titles were no longer shelved alphabetically. No, no, no. Now, those titles were shelved in publication order, meaning back then, we had The Chronicles of Narnia in what many today would consider the “right” order.
When it came to the Star Wars books, though, doing it by author or publication order made zero sense, and here, Captain Space Pirate was super-impressed with what I’d come up with. Back then, when the Internet was more like a bad special effect than something pervading our real life, I’d put the Star Wars books in an order I’m fairly confident existed only in a handful of other places at the time. Just as John Cusack’s Rob organizes his records “autobiographically” in High Fidelity, I put the Star Wars books in a specific reading order; each section told the specific biography of a particular character. There was a small Han Solo section; a section for books that were more Princess Leia–centric; a section for some of the anthologies out at the time that focused on the minor, briefly seen characters; a Chewbacca section; plus larger stretches of shelves for Luke, and his dad, Darth Vader.
Meanwhile, was I right about The Matrix? Well, as a real adult, I’ve come up with a fairly comprehensive Matrix rip-off list, including a good chunk on William Gibson’s cyberpunk stuff and the famous 1967 Harlan Ellison story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” In that particular short story, people are tortured by a gleefully malevolent computer program that hates them. The story ends with a dude literally being turned into a blobby thing that doesn’t have a mouth, like Keanu losing his mouth at the start of The Matrix.
I’ve never lost my big mouth, but I did figure out having one wasn’t the thing that made science fiction like rock and roll. Instead, you had to really be cool to be cool. Like Captain Space Pirate, I figured out the best way to look at this stuff is to wear your leather jacket over your button-down and tie, and to talk about science fiction like it is the only thing that matters, but know your stuff, too. Even if you loved Star Wars, you probably wouldn’t have noticed my bizarrely nuanced shelving system, which evokes that age-old question: if you can speak perfect Ewokese but there’s not an Ewok around to hear it, does it still count as perfect? I think Captain Space Pirate knew the answer, and after that summer, so did I.
Luke Skywalker Can’t Read
Growing up, I thought I was just like Luke Skywalker. While Luke lived on a desert planet called Tatooine and I lived in a desert suburb called Mesa, Arizona, we were both weirdo loners with outsider interests, and we both longed for adventures that were seemingly prohibited by our sweaty, outdoor, sunburn-causing chores. I bet about a billion little girls and boys felt (and feel) the same way as I did. When Luke Skywalker stares off into the setting suns while the strings of John Williams swell and tell us the desire of his heart, there’s nothing that needs to be said here; everyone gets it. It’s our society’s collective sigh of wonderment, of angst-ridden youth, of the longing for something more. If Luke were a mermaid in a cartoon it would be his moment on the rock, thrusting his chin and chest out to the horizon, daring, wishing he were part of another world.
Maybe I was wrong and I was nothing like Luke Skywalker, and my childhood differed from Luke’s in other substantial ways: he had robot friends, and screwy aliens as neighbors, or an ability to fly spaceships without any formal training. But I had those things, too, because like so many of us, they existed in my brain, in my shows, and in my books. Hey, what’s Luke’s favorite book anyway?
Sadly, Luke Skywalker doesn’t have a favorite book. And even though he’s the ultimate dreamer, a craver of adventure, a wide-eyed Joseph Campbell archetype hero, he’s initially presented to us as kind of a philistine. This supposed pop descendant of Odysseus and Perseus lives in the zip code of a galaxy far, far away, meaning he’s got no Shakespeare, Homer, Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, or even J. K. Rowling to get him excited about packing up and seeking adventure. In Star Wars, romantic notions of adventure don’t spring from literature or a received tradition of storytelling. Instead, Luke wants to get out of the house and go to space because he’s bored as fuck. And this boredom might not just be because Luke Skywalker doesn’t have a favorite book; it’s because he actually can’t read.
As depicted in the first “real” Star Wars film, in 1977, Luke Skywalker—when you consider a substantial amount of evidence—is a functionally illiterate person, and his fellow citizens might not be much better off. Not once in any of the existing Star Wars movies does a person, droid, or creature pick up a book or newspaper, magazine, literary journal, or chapbook of Wookiee poetry. Instead, if something is briefly read by someone in Star Wars, it’s like one sentence, read off a screen—and even then, almost certainly being “translated” by R2-D2. I say Luke and his buddies are functionally illiterate because this tiny amount of reading ends up being the difference between someone being fluent in a foreign language and having learned just enough to ask for directions. And any way you look at it, no one in Star Wars is reading for fun.
To be fair, finding a popular science fiction or fantasy universe richly populated with its own indigenous art—and more specifically, its own literature—is rare. The funnier-than-everyone novelist and book critic Lev Grossman once said to me, “No one reads any books in Narnia.” Then, with the kind of shit-talking zeal that can only happen when one is bashing the things we love, Lev switched from C. S. Lewis to J. K. Rowling and explained to me that he felt like Harry Potter wasn’t really his “kind of hero” either because Harry Potter didn’t seem to be a reader. And he’s right, because when you think about it, Harry’s pal Hermione really digs reading, but her bookish tendencies are treated as an aberration in a world of magic and adventure. More frighteningly, Hermione’s love of reading and Harry’s and Ron’s doltishness actually just mirror most high school clichés and accidently reinforce them. The bookworm kid living in our world who really loves and reads the Harry Potter books can probably only identify with Hermione. More broadly, Harry’s nonreader status is totally par for this particularly illiterate course of fantastic heroes. But maybe it’s not his fault. Maybe an overabundance of stimuli might be to blame. I mean, if you lived at Hogwarts or were roommates with Princess Leia or had a house in Narnia, it stands to reason the escapism reading provides might not be in high demand. Instead, in these kinds of narratives, books tend to be plot devices the characters use to solve problems rather than truly wonderful ends in themselves.
Now, like me, you’re totally aware there’s a reason why long scenes in novels or movies with characters turning pages and sighing haven’t ever once been a thing. You can’t depict your characters reading books and hope for a lot of excitement, particularly if they’re only reading for pleasure. So, I’m not saying we should “see” characters sitting around and reading. But books and reading change us, make us smarter, and so it bugs me how main characters from big sci-fi or fantasy epics don’t seem to really dig reading. The existence or even suggestion of these activities in certain made-up worlds is alarmingly low.
; In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf’s reading comes in the form of scrolls and prophecies to figure out what the hell is going on. He’s blowing a lot of dust off this shit, too, because it always seems like no one has taken up this kind of thing for a long, long time. Even here in Middle-Earth, a world born from the very literate linguist J. R. R. Tolkien, a place where books do exist, they’re treated like something other people used to handle. And then—either in the novels or the films—Gandalf’s reading of old legends and myths is more like a training montage from a Rocky movie than anything else. Reading powers, ON! Plus, the suggestion that The Hobbit or There and Back Again exists as some sort of real book (Bilbo’s life story?) is borderline insulting to a real memoirist. Because no one seems to ever read anyway, Bilbo writing his life story comes across like a delusional hobbyist deciding he can write a memoir, even though he’s never read one.
Still, I love the Hobbits, and the Middle-Earth people, because even though they all don’t read as much as I’d like them to, it’s clear they do have books, which in part is why they get hip to so much cool stuff so fast. Gandalf might be cramming with those old books and scrolls, but at least he knows what he’s looking at.
Very popular science fiction does a little bit better here, with characters on both Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica being totally down with theatre, novels, and poetry. And even though both the 1978–79 and 2003 versions of Battlestar Galactica take place in a similar Star Wars–esque galaxy (they’re searching for “Earth,” so they’ve got to be far, far away), people from Caprica and the other colonies read all the time. They’ve got so many different kinds of literature, in fact, that President Roslin even likes trashy murder-mystery novels, ones Admiral Adama reads to her by her beside. True, a lot of this made-up literature in Battlestar comes across as a little forced, but the attempt to at least create it is in staggering contrast to the paperless Star Wars universe.