In a making–of documentary of Back to the Future Part II (1989), filmmaker Bob Zemeckis deadpanned the facetious “fact” that hoverboards were a real invention being kept from American streets by regulatory red tape. A remarkable number of people believed this.
“I’LL CONTROL-ALT-DELETE YOU!”
—WEIRD AL YANKOVIC
EVERY GEEK KNOWS WEIRD AL—usually more comprehensively than said geek’s roommates would prefer. If Al’s not turning gangsta rap into a computer-nerd anthem, he’s recasting the roughest, toughest hits of balls-out hard rock as bouncy polka melodies. And if the universe is just, Al will live to enjoy the serious critical acclaim he deserves as a creative visionary. It’s easy to write off songs like “Eat It” and “I Think I’m a Clone Now” as goofy, juvenile parodies. But when you get right down to it, Al was pioneering the musical trend that would eventually lead to DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album and subsequently to the spinoff literary phenomenon of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. By inserting elements of an unexpected genre into the chart-toppers of another, Al arguably became the first superstar of mash-up culture. To those who argue that such Frankensteined hybrids cheapen the original art, we’d point out that they usually serve to make the original sell better. And to those who argue that there’s no true creative spirit at work in this kind of endeavor, we would invite them to take a serious stab at doing it themselves first, to find out just how wrong they are.
Why is Weird Al shaking a tambourine in the Hanson brothers’ 2010 music video “Thinking ‘Bout Somethin’ ”? We presume it’s for the same reason that there was a watermelon in the laboratory in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension.
“WITHIN A FEW YEARS,
A SIMPLE AND INEXPENSIVE
DEVICE, READILY CARRIED
ABOUT, WILL ENABLE ONE TO
RECEIVE ON LAND OR SEA
THE PRINCIPAL NEWS, TO
HEAR A SPEECH, A LECTURE,
A SONG OR PLAY OF A
MUSICAL INSTRUMENT,
CONVEYED FROM ANY OTHER
REGION OF THE GLOBE.”
—NIKOLA TESLA
“WITH THE OPENING OF
THE FIRST POWER PLANT,
INCREDULITY WILL GIVE WAY
TO WONDERMENT,
AND THIS TO INGRATITUDE,
AS EVER BEFORE.”
—NIKOLA TESLA
THANKS TO (A) THE WORK of a certain ’90s-era hair-metal band, and (b) the Internet’s existence providing a forum for large masses of geeks to casually research history, popular culture has rediscovered the awesome genius of Nikola Tesla, the Austrian American who was Thomas Edison’s more brilliant but less business-savvy rival. Tesla invented the process for alternating-current electricity, made a host of electromagnetic breakthroughs that made possible today’s information age, and, oh yeah, by the way, envisioned the technological future more fully than just about anyone else then or ever—not just the scientific and engineering feats humanity would accomplish, but the social ramifications that would follow in short order. Geek culture has begun to idolize Tesla as the Smart Rebel Underdog Who Was Right in conjunction with demonizing Edison as the Ruthless Monopolist Who Crushed Dissent. And, you know, it’s true, but it’s also worth asking if our instinctive fetishizing of nerd martyrs isn’t a bit counterproductive. When visionary geniuses get marginalized, get relegated to second-dog status beneath Machiavellian power players, we shouldn’t only identify with their unappreciated minds. We should recognize where and how they failed to build the relationships that might have made things come out differently—and resolve to make that human factor a priority in our own endeavors.
In addition to lending his name to that metal band, Tesla has also appeared in Christopher Priest’s novel The Prestige (adapted to film with a portrayal by David Bowie) and, more recently, been used as the namesake for a cutting-edge electric-car manufacturer.
“VIDEO GAMES ARE BAD FOR YOU? THAT’S
WHAT THEY SAID ABOUT ROCK AND ROLL.”
—SHIGERU MIYAMOTO, CREATOR OF MARIO AND THE LEGEND OF ZELDA
ROCK AND ROLL isn’t always good for you. There’s a reason it usually gets paired with sex and drugs. There’s nothing wrong with the former if it’s consensual and safe, or with the latter if it’s legal, but we all know that isn’t always the case. Video games have their unpleasant baggage, too, though nothing as cool as sex and drugs—more on the order of repetitive-strain injury and MMORPG-fueled poverty. Thing is, video games are for geekdom what rock and roll was to the post–World War II generation: a kind of coming into our own. We have created a unique entertainment form spawned from unexpected and disparate sources—computer science, film, tabletop gaming, art, fiction—whose appeal reaches far beyond the audience that created it. And like rock and roll, video games have their share of detractors who warn feverishly that they bring doom and destruction. We should hope so. Games are always more fun when stuff blows up.
“FANTASY IS THE IMPOSSIBLE MADE
PROBABLE. SCIENCE FICTION IS THE
IMPROBABLE MADE POSSIBLE.”
—ROD SERLING
WE GEEKS SPEND AN INORDINATE amount of time defining and categorizing the ways in which we retreat to worlds that do not exist. Looked at closely, however, Serling’s variation on the distinctions usually drawn between fantasy and science fiction serves to underscore not the differences between genres but, rather, the similarities. In doing so, it ties geek culture together as a community of daydreamers. Intelligent daydreamers. Ultimately, we all want to see and experience worlds that are not our own. Our motivations may differ: We want escape; we want to envision what the world could be; we want to explore dreams both possible and impossible. Yet our need to daydream remains the same. Whether it stems from dissatisfaction with our lives or from an impulse to see shades of fantastic in an otherwise mundane world, one thing is clear: We geeks all share an important trait. It’s not just that we can imagine—everyone can—it’s that we’re not afraid to.
Serling’s Twilight Zone, like the magazine Weird Tales that presaged it, inhabited a funky storytelling space where the tropes of science fiction, fantasy, and horror swirled around and through one another rather than maintaining rigidity. Over the past decade, geekdom has begun to break down those artificial boundaries once again.
“MY NAME IS TALKING TINA,
AND I’M GOING TO KILL YOU.”
—THE TWILIGHT ZONE, “LIVING DOLL”
IN 1970, ROBOTICIST MASAHIRO MORI coined the term the Uncanny Valley—at last putting a name to what generations of children have innately understood: Dolls, masks, mirror images, and other not-quite-fully-human faces can be unbelievably creepy. Many theories surround this response, ranging from an evolutionarily reinforced fear of difference to a Freudian fear of death. So it’s not entirely surprising that so many geeks see these fears and raise them by murder—or even scale up to genocide in the form of the android or zombie apocalypse. There is an added dimension to this fear for geeks, however: fear of obsolescence. We eagerly anticipate the posthuman Singularity—which science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod dubbed “the Rapture for nerds”—yet secretly fear that, when it comes, we will be left behind. We fantasize that magic or spiritual manifestations might bring our toys to life … and then, finding us useless or a hindrance, those new beings might make toys of us. It wasn’t Talking Tina’s appearance that most of us found terrifying—it was her superiority to her human master, whose death she orchestrated with implacable efficiency. After all, anything that so closely emulates humanity is likely to contain its own measure of the human urge to dominate and destroy.
Also: clowns. We must never forget to beware clowns.
“IT’S A MAGICAL WORLD, HOBBES,
OL’ BUDDY … LET’S GO EXPLORING!”
—THE FINAL CALVIN AND HOBBES STRIP
THE WORDS ARE SIMPLE and seemingly uplifting, but also heartbreaking. Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes was more than a mere comic strip—it was a window int
o the sometimes carefree, sometimes cynical, and always absurd mind of a kid who was, if we’re to be honest with ourselves, a little slice of you and me. Yet, for all its deliciously ironic sensibility, Watterson ended Calvin and Hobbes on a note of beauty and hope and vast possibility. That’s because he realized childhood never has to end. Not really; not in any lasting way. We grow up and have families and pay bills, yes. But those of us blessed with the heart of a geek never really let go of the excitement of creation and discovery, do we? Watterson saw what even we geeks too often forget: It’s a magical world. Let’s see what happens next!
Calvin and Hobbes were named after two very old-school geeks: philosophers John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes.
“PEOPLE ASSUME THAT
TIME IS A STRICT
PROGRESSION OF CAUSE TO
EFFECT—BUT, ACTUALLY,
FROM A NONLINEAR,
NONSUBJECTIVE VIEWPOINT,
IT’S MORE LIKE A BIG BALL
OF WIBBLY-WOBBLY,
TIMEY-WIMEY … STUFF.”
—THE DOCTOR, DOCTOR WHO
AS THE LAST of the Time Lords—an ancient alien race who watched over the proper flow of time across the cosmos—the Doctor has a unique relationship with the endless stream of instant to instant, day to day, year to year. He sees the odd quirks of chronological existence: for instance, that sometimes it’s impossible to predict how a seed planted today will blossom and affect life four years hence, or four hundred. That sometimes you can’t even be sure the rules of cause and effect will point reliably from past to future. That, basically, our perceptions of reality are fragile and open to debate. While the Doctor is a handy fantasy-myth device for exploring such ideas, once we’re open to them it’s hard not to see them at work in the real world. Was there a massive conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, or did we do such an intense job of speculating about one that we planted the idea in the mass consciousness and made such a thing more likely in the future even as we retroactively inserted it into the history books? Interestingly, Doctor Who first premiered the day after Kennedy’s assassination. We’re sure there’s no connection.
Actually, you can still find the occasional used copy of the 1996 exposé Doctor Who: Who Killed Kennedy?
“MY GOD–IT’S FULL OF STARS!”
—DAVID BOWMAN, 2001: a space odyssey (NOVEL)
ONE DAY—PERHAPS—the human race will progress past this mortal coil, transcending the terrestrial and leaping headlong into the unknown next stage. In fact, it already happened once ten years ago. It’s right there in Arthur Clarke’s history book 2001 (from which director Stanley Kubrick spun a very successful documentary, which you may have seen). In case you missed it on your local news, astronaut David Bowman discovered that a giant obsidian monolith in orbit of Saturn was in fact a gateway to the next stage of our evolution. At that moment, standing at the precipice of human understanding and overlooking the infinite, Bowman sent one final, garbled message back to Earth that attempted to ground what he was seeing in the spiritual and the scientific. But he found that both modes of thought were simply too small to encompass the totality of what he was experiencing. What would you say in that situation? What would any of us say? Maybe one day—if we’re very lucky—we’ll get to find out.
This quote, which plays such a large role in the sequel to 2001, is—like the Saturn-vs.-Jupiter question (this page)—an anomalous difference between the novel and film versions of the science-fiction classic. It appears only in the former.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
STEPHEN H. SEGAL (editor and cowriter) is the Hugo Award-winning senior contributing editor to Weird Tales, the world’s oldest fantasy/sci-fi/horror magazine, and a staff editor at Quirk Books. His geek portfolio includes work for Tor Books, Viz Media, WQED Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon. A native of Atlantic City, he lives in Philadelphia.
ZAKI HASAN (cowriter) is a professor of communication and media studies whose commentaries on politics and pop culture have been featured at the Huffington Post. His regular meditations on geek movies and television can be found at his award-winning blog, zakiscorner.com. A Chicago native, he lives in Northern California.
N.K. JEMISIN (cowriter) is a Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated science fiction and fantasy author whose 2010 novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (Orbit Books) has been praised by Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Romantic Times, and more. A counseling psychologist by day as well as a political blogger, she lives in Brooklyn.
ERIC SAN JUAN (cowriter) is the coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock, writer of the indie comics anthology series Pitched, and author of Quirk’s recent release Stuff Every Husband Should Know. He also edits a chain of seven weekly newspapers around his Jersey Shore hometown, and is currently writing a dystopian science fiction novel.
GENEVIEVE VALENTINE (cowriter) is a pop-culture columnist who has contributed to such venues as Tor.com, Lightspeed, and Fantasy Magazine. Her debut novel, the steampunk circus tale Mechanique (Prime Books), was published in spring 2011, and her short fiction has been featured in The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog, genevievevalentine.com.
Many thanks to research assistant Ryan Brophy.
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