Geek Wisdom

by Stephen H. Segal

  It’s fascinating that the evolution of zombie tales has followed the same path as the evolution of rational thinking: Early myths present the shambling undead horrors as supernatural, whereas the most recent stories find scientific explanations for the reanimation of dead tissue.

  “THE FORCE WILL BE WITH YOU.

  ALWAYS.”

  —OBI-WAN KENOBI, STAR WARS

  WE’RE BORN ALONE, WE DIE ALONE, and we spend our entire lives trying not to be alone. However that need manifests, whether physical companionship or comfort from the divine, it’s something Ben Kenobi spoke to when issuing his valediction to Luke Skywalker, and it’s something George Lucas understood when creating Star Wars in 1977. With the Force, the mystical energy field that serves as the spiritual underpinning of his entire fictional universe—quoth Kenobi, “It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together”—Lucas created a catch-all upon which audiences religious and irreligious could hang their respective beliefs without shouldering anyone out. Of course, that was before The Phantom Menace tried to tell us the Force was parasites in our bloodstream, making it the intergalactic equivalent of ringworm. We didn’t take that bit of exposition very happily, did we? No—the Force withstands any such attempts to ground it explicitly in science, because it transcends reason and speaks to something more fundamental about human nature: our desire to hold onto something bigger than ourselves.

  In the same breath that The Phantom Menace (1999) gave us a gimmick to scientify up the Force, Lucas revealed that these very “midi-chlorians” meant Darth Vader was a virgin birth, just like the story of Jesus. Has there ever been a ballsier attempt to have something both ways?

  “COME ALGEBRA, ANATOMY, ASTRONOMY,

  BIOLOGY, CHEMISTRY, GEOLOGY, GEOMETRY,

  MATHEMATICS, METEOROLOGY, MINERALOGY,

  OCEANOGRAPHY, PALEONTOLOGY, PHYSICS,

  PSYCHOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, TRIGONOMETRY,

  AND ZOOLOGY!”

  —PETER DICKENSON, THE FLIGHT OF DRAGONS

  NOTHING KILLS THE (LITERAL) MAGIC of childhood faster than watching an evil wizard ground into dust by the furious recitation of scientific disciplines. This diatribe, uttered by New Yorker inventor-hero Peter, is an act of last resort that both saves his magical allies and locks him out of their world forever. There’s no denying it was a clever way to rid oneself of an insurmountable sorcerer, but it sent a clear message about the Pauli Exclusion Principle of fantasy: Science and magic can’t occupy the same space at the same time. Admittedly, the acceptance and understanding of a scientific universe is a critical part of growing up—try as you might, you ain’t gonna summon that salt shaker to you with the Force—but many geeks never stop pining for the days when every broomstick was a lightsaber. Nor should they. Myth, too, holds power in the world. The trick is to remember the element that magic and science have in common: imagination. It’s both a world-builder and a problem-solver and, when properly applied, can lead you to triumph over just about anything.

  The beloved 1982 cult classic animated film The Flight of Dragons was based in part on a children’s book of the same name by namesake author Peter Dickinson [sic] as well as on the even more classic adult fantasy novel The Dragon and the George by Gordon R. Dickson.

  “WHAT POWER WOULD HELL HAVE IF THOSE

  IMPRISONED HERE WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO

  DREAM OF HEAVEN?”

  —DREAM, AKA MORPHEUS, NEIL GAIMAN’S SANDMAN

  OUR WOES HAVE LITTLE POWER over us without the knowledge of greener grass on the other side of the hill. The search for a perfect, trouble-free world is an inherent part of human nature—a holdover from our days in the African savanna, dreaming of an oasis over the next rise even as we dreaded the den of predators in the next grove. Heaven and Hell are merely those ideas taken to a logical extreme. Neil Gaiman’s king of the dream realm knows this. He recognizes that the darkest things we can imagine are meaningless without something to contrast them against. One need not have faith in a higher power to see this in action: What misery does poverty offer without the knowledge of wealth? How repulsive is ugliness if it cannot be set next to beauty? In some respects, ignorance truly is bliss. Yet look again. If humankind cannot see the possibility of a better world, how can we ever strive to create a better world? Our figurative heavens give power to our hells, but so, too, do our hells inspire us to reach for our heavens.

  Hell in Sandman is ruled by a Lucifer whose appearance is clearly modeled on David Bowie, thus once again proving our theory that geeks love David Bowie.

  “KLAATU BARADA NIKTO!”

  —HELEN BENSON, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL

  “LIVE LONG AND PROSPER.”

  —SPOCK, STAR TREK

  “HASTA LA VISTA, BABY.”

  —T-800, TERMINATOR 2

  WE GEEKS LOVE OUR CATCHPHRASES. Whether brandishing split-fingered salutes and encouraging one another to “Live long and prosper” or saying see-ya-later in a mock Teutonic accent, there are certain sci-fi bromides imprinted on the geek collective to such a degree that we divine meanings from them both profound and profane. Of these, one of the most interesting is the collection of alien gibberish “Klaatu barada nikto”—deemed “the most famous phrase ever spoken by an extraterrestrial” by critic Frederick S. Clarke—used by the Christ-like alien Klaatu to stay the alloyed hand of his robotic emissary Gort from fulfilling its mission to end humanity. Think of it as the most important safety word of all time. The specificities of its meaning lie shrouded in mystery (and remained so even when Bruce Campbell dispatched the same phrase—to unfortunate results—in Army of Darkness), but its portent is easy to see. It serves as an uncomfortable reminder that our destinies are sometimes shaped, if not outright decided, by forces beyond our choice and even, sometimes, our comprehension. We want to know the answers—but sometimes, we don’t get to.

  “Klaatu” has also been the name of a minor alien in Star Wars, a minor alien in Marvel Comics, and a Canadian prog-rock band.

  “HE CHOSE … POORLY.”

  —THE GRAIL KNIGHT, INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE

  WOULD-BE HOLY GRAIL HUNTER Walter Donovan thought he could identify the Last Supper cup of Jesus Christ by its glory. He was wrong, and the divine power of the Grail destroyed him. The immediate humor of the guardian Grail Knight’s dry response comes from our delight in seeing Donovan get his comeuppance—he’d just shot Indy’s father, and man, ain’t karma a bitch. But the deeper appeal of the quotation is the truth we find in its sincerity. Anyone who thinks the glory of Christ can be equated to earthly riches, finery, luxury—in short, to any kind of expression of egotism—is engaging in utter folly. The whole point of God incarnating as man is humility, as is pointedly expressed in Matthew 25:45: “I tell you the truth,” Jesus says, “whatever you did not do for one of the least among you, you did not do for me.” In other words: God may be great, but that greatness is found in its very smallness and humanity.

  The Holy Grail is one of very few supernatural artifacts of legend to impact modern pop culture twice over, in both a semiserious story (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 1989) and an utterly frivolous one (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1975).

  “THERE ARE MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN

  AND EARTH, HORATIO, THAN ARE DREAMT

  OF IN YOUR PHILOSOPHY.”

  —HAMLET

  LIKE HAMLET AND HORATIO, many of us are conditioned to view existence in “real world” terms. We comfort ourselves with the idea that reaching the limits of worldly education will prepare us for everything that life will throw at us. In the geek canon, this immortal selection from Shakespeare’s immortal play sits comfortably alongside Socrates’ “All I know is that I know nothing” and (believe it not) “May the Force be with you” as acknowledgment that, no matter how much we think our education has prepared us, sometimes we simply reach the limits of understanding. It’s a realization that the Bard’s Danish prince arrived at rather suddenly—(being spurred to vengeance by the spectral
image of your dead father does tend to make you question things)—but it’s a realization that we’ll all likely come to at some point in our lives, though probably not by exactly the same means.

  Hamlet has been a nexus of geekery in the past decade—not just the London production starring Doctor Who’s David Tennant, but the many references found in the instant-classic comic book series Y: The Last Man.

  “MAY THE SPIRIT OF PEACE IN WHICH

  WE CAME BE REFLECTED IN THE LIVES

  OF ALL MANKIND.”

  —INSCRIPTION ON APOLLO 17’S LUNAR LANDING MODULE

  WHAT SOME GEEKS CAN DREAM OF, some others will do. As Americans set their sights on the moon in the late 1960s, a boom in science fiction on the page and on the screen created a feedback loop of the thrill of space travel. The moon landing of 1969 was a scene straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, made real by those who had caught the fever of imagination from generations of dreamers. Unfortunately, imagination and funding don’t always go hand in hand, and eventually the plug was pulled on the Apollo program. This plaque is bolted to the stairs of the Apollo 17 landing module, the last manned mission to another world, and is a bittersweet acknowledgment of the end of an era. It’s all the more poignant in light of NASA’s decision to shut down the space shuttle program. Having traveled no farther than we did in 1972, another era of human exploration is over, and this plaque might be the last ambassador from Earth any alien sphere will see for a while.

  A question with no particular answer: What does it say about our cultural values that a hit movie has been made out of a moon-mission disaster (Apollo 13), but not out of any of the successful moon voyages?

  “WE’RE ON A MISSION

  FROM GOD.”

  —ELWOOD BLUES, THE BLUES BROTHERS

  CONVICTION. Without it, you got nuthin’. And we’re not talking about the sort of conviction that Jake Blues had on his police record. When Jake got out of jail, he was a man adrift: what to do, what to do? He could easily have ended up wandering through his days alongside brother Elwood, feeling nothing but vague dissatisfaction until he ran afoul of the law again—but then he was inspired. Inspired through such an abrupt and unexpected epiphany that surely it must be divine inspiration: He would raise money to save his old Catholic orphanage by getting his old blues band back together and playing to a sold-out crowd. Okay, so it was an unlikely plan, but it gave Jake a reason to live—a reason larger than himself. That’s what makes the difference between a life and an epic life: the ability to envision the big picture and commit to it, to resolve to leave a mark on the world that goes beyond the imprint of pure self-gratification. And that’s true whether the god fueling your mission is Jake’s God, a secular awareness of the larger cosmos, or something else entirely.

  “THIS IS AN

  IMAGINARY STORY.

  BUT THEN, AREN’T

  THEY ALL?”

  —ALAN MOORE,

  SUPERMAN: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE MAN OF TOMORROW?

  From the 1950s through the 1980s, DC Comics would occasionally publish Superman stories based on offbeat scenarios that weren’t part of the ongoing continuity of the regular monthly serial. The editors distinguished these fun hypothetical tales (President Superman! Superman’s bratty kid! Superman and Batman as adopted brothers!) by noting on the cover: “An Imaginary Story”—as opposed to the “real” continuing saga of the familiar Superman. Yet this terminology begs the obvious question, which DC finally allowed postmodern comics pioneer Alan Moore to pose in the introduction to Superman #423. Yes, indeed, they are all imaginary stories—a fact that can get lost sometimes by the devoted fan of any serial set in a long-running, carefully consistent fictional world. DC, its rival Marvel Comics, the Star Trek franchise: all these massive narrative constructs created fans who frequently loved cataloging and cross-referencing the details of the world as much as they loved the characters themselves. That’s one big reason why geeks often get so upset at the news that their favorite fictional property is going to be “rebooted” for a new audience. But the thing is, that’s precisely how a legend grows and endures—by being retold again and again. Would anyone remember Hercules today if the Greek storyteller who first spun his tale insisted on maintaining creative control? If the fifteenth-century balladeer who sang rhymes about Robin Hood had been able to force all those who came after him to refrain from spinning their own variations, would Maid Marian or Richard the Lionheart have ever shown up? As hard as it may be to look at a long-running quasi-epic and admit, “You know, this was awesome, but I’m bored—let’s start over and do it differently,” there’s probably no better way to take a regular old good story and elevate it to the realm of timeless myth.

  VI.

  IN THE YEAR 2525

  (WISDOM ABOUT THE FUTURE)

  “END OF LINE.”

  —CYLON HYBRID, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA;

  ALSO, MASTER CONTROL PROGRAM, TRON

  “RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.”

  —THE BORG, STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION

  “UPGRADING

  IS COMPULSORY.”

  —THE CYBERMEN, DOCTOR WHO

  THERE’S SOMETHING EXISTENTIAL about modern culture’s fear of “the Singularity,” author Vernor Vinge’s name for the moment when technology will have advanced so far that it transforms humanity, or perhaps transcends it, in a way we cannot yet anticipate. That hasn’t stopped us from envisioning that posthuman future in stories, and usually we figure it’ll be pretty terrible for those of us still confined to meat-sack bodies when the time comes. That’s because the mechanized consciousness—which we imagine will approach the world with algorithmic fascism, uttering stark declaratives that allow no dissent—is always terrifying, whether it comes in the form of evil software like Tron’s Master Control and Terminator’s Skynet or flesh-and-blood entities like Battlestar Galactica’s Hybrid and Star Trek’s Borg, so cyberneticized as to be unrecognizable as human. But why are we so sure future evolution will produce souls lesser than the ones we have now? Humans are always afraid of anything they see as “the Other.” But isn’t it likely that new intelligences will look upon us “old” earthlings—so biased, change resistant, and irrational that we don’t even need to wait for tomorrow’s people to enthusiastically slaughter groups of our fellow humans today—and find us much scarier?

  When the Borg debuted on Star Trek in 1989, Doctor Who fans immediately lamented that they were an improved rip-off of Who’s Cybermen, first introduced in 1966. Both spacefaring cyborg races would ultimately be pwned by the badassery of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica’s Cylons (2005).

  “ANY SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED

  TECHNOLOGY IS INDISTINGUISHABLE

  FROM MAGIC.”

  —CLARKE’S LAW

  SOMEDAY, history will look back and name science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke one of the twentieth century’s most visionary thinkers. Never mind that he invented the concept of the modern satellite communication network back in 1945 (and not just in a work of fiction; he formally proposed it in a technical paper). Clarke’s Law posits a truth that ought to remind atheists and believers alike to be humble about their philosophies. If you could go back in time and land a helicopter in front of a crowd of ancient Babylonians, they would think you must be a god or a wizard. This teaches us two things: First, the obvious conclusion that things appearing to be magic aren’t truly supernatural but are merely based on knowledge unknown to the viewer. And, second, the too-often-neglected corollary that, at any given point in human history (including right now), a vast amount of knowledge still is unknown to us. Clarke’s Law sums up the point of his classic 2001 in just eight words—for all the miracles science has uncovered and produced, we’re still just infants in the perspective of the cosmos. And the idea that “the ultimate truth of existence” can even be imagined by the human mind is hilariously preposterous.

  Clarke offered up three laws of futuristic prediction in the 1960s and “70s; it was the third that grabbed the popular im
agination and was remembered as “Clarke’s Law.”

  “THE SKY ABOVE THE PORT WAS

  THE COLOR OF TELEVISION, TUNED TO

  A DEAD CHANNEL.”

  —WILLIAM GIBSON, NEUROMANCER

  TECHNOLOGY is not the warm, inviting thing we’ve been led to believe; so says William Gibson in the opening line of Neuromancer. Our world is blanketed in tech—so much so, we don’t notice just how amazing it is. Yet despite these remarkable devices that hold us together, that feed us information, that wire us into something much larger than ourselves, the world can be as empty and ugly and barren of genuine humanity as it has ever been. It’s a dead channel, flickering, gray, unclear. So Gibson asks: As we march inexorably forward into our world of circuits and wireless, when do we look back to consider what we’re leaving behind? In the world of Neuromancer, we don’t. It’s as bleak and hopeless as the Black Death or the Great Depression. In the end, technology in and of itself changes nothing. The poor are still poor. The streets are still dangerous. And human beings are still human beings. So we’ve got to ask the follow-up question: How do we make sure that doesn’t happen to us?

  William Gibson coined the word cyberspace and was a key figure in launching the science-fiction subgenre of cyberpunk. We should not, however, blame him for science fiction fans’ corollary practice of adding the word “punk” as a suffix to anything else they’ve subsequently wanted to dub an exciting subgenre.

  “ROADS? WHERE WE’RE GOING,

  WE DON’T NEED ROADS.”

  —DOC BROWN, BACK TO THE FUTURE

  HEARING DOC BROWN’S FAMOUS oh-by-the-way line today, twenty-five years after Back to the Future’s release, with nary a flying car or floating skateboard in sight, one can be forgiven for thinking screenwriters Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale may have missed the mark just slightly when positing their far-flung future world of 2015. However, as Doc shuffles Marty McFly into the newly airborne DeLorean time machine, the import of his words can be seen reverberating through the history of human innovation going as far back as the mind can wander, in our ability to consistently rethink reality and expand the boundaries of the possible. To enact the paradigm shift. That phrase, popularized by Thomas Kuhn in the 1960s before it morphed into a clichéd business buzzword, may have withered from extreme overuse in the ’80s and ’90s, but it remains a potent concept that’s put into practice every time we venture off the beaten path for a great advancement that changes the world, whether you’re talking about the invention of fire or the cellular phone network. Those flux-capacitor moments aren’t as rare as they seem, but they’re every bit as profound.