Thermians Ruined My Childhood

As a child, I loved science fiction. I was a nerd with terrible social skills so how could I not? As an eight-year-old in the early 80s, I became obsessed with Doctor Who just as it hit its least interesting creative period. In this pre-video world, I mostly experienced this series through novelisations (often adapted for book form by the prolific Terrance Dicks) and the monthly Doctor Who Magazine. I also liked Star Trek – again relying on the James Blish novelisations when the 60s originals weren’t being repeated. Somehow, I became aware of science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Harry Harrison, Brian Aldiss, HG Wells, and John Wyndham – then the related comedies of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. I was not a particularly discerning reader – preferring to revel in these works rather than subject them to critical thought. My life was safe and secure and dull and embarrassing. Why not live in a world of spaceships and robots and aliens?

In my later teens, I became ashamed of these pre-pubescent concerns. I moved onto reading more respectable, literary fiction. Perpetually insecure and never seeming to be cool, I avoided those slightly nerdier than me and scorned their passions and commitment if I thought doing so could bring me a sliver of advancement. Which I now realise was dumb and cruel. In the late 90s, I did briefly return to the nerdosphere when I hung out, first online and then face-to-face, with some comic book obsessives into chaos magic.

Many years on, I am now mostly at peace with my nerd tendencies – although I am less at peace with the nerdosphere as a whole. I wonder if I am a “fake geek guy”. While I sometimes enjoy the movies, I don’t especially crave going deep into the Marvel or DC worlds. I have little interest in online gaming. While my literary diet is mostly non-fiction, I occasionally have SF binges (one such binge covered reading Dune, the Broken Earth and Imperial Radch trilogies). I just don’t feel the urge to commit to these worlds – although I do not begrudge those who do. I enjoy vacations in alternate realities but no longer want to live there.

The stories that I grew up with – the Foundation and Robot series of Asimov, the novels of Clarke – were products of their time. The writers varied in their scientific knowledge and their willingness to let facts get in the way of a good story. They redeployed existing tropes in their work – the exploration of space often seems very close to European exploration, colonial contact and the manifest destiny of the Wild West. Some writers did this to critique current events (e.g., Vonnegut, Le Guin), others simply were after a good yarn – Westerns or War Dramas in tin foil. Above all, you had to be quick. The economics of mid-century pulp fiction favoured speed of composition. Successful writers emitted a rapid stream of short stories, novellas and novels in the same way that a pulsar emits regular bursts of electromagnetic radiation.

But if these cultural products were, if not grace, then certainly productivity under pressure, then they were consumed in a different manner. Nerds are notorious for an approach to reading that can most charitably be described as “overcommitted”. Texts are not so much read as adored, scrutinised and obsessed over. In much the same way that theologians might discuss verses of the Bible, the hermeneutics of “Foundation and Empire” might be investigated for their ultimate meaning. Above all, nerds crave escape from where they are now. If you don’t have a rocket ship then perhaps the book you have in your hand can become a vessel for taking you somewhere else. If you invest in it enough. If you believe.

One of the funniest satires on SF as both genre and community was the 1998 movie Galaxy Quest. With a cast including Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver, it featured a Star Trek adjacent TV show, the washed-up actors who had made their fame it, and an obsessive fan base who prevented it from shuffling into oblivion. The most obsessive fans being an actual alien race called the Thermians - beings whose supernatural engineering skills were counterbalanced by their total inability to comprehend fiction. For the Thermians, Galaxy Quest was not a camp TV show, it was a historical documentary. The Thermians are a limit version of fans who fail to understand that their cultural product is not real, who take the whole thing a bit too seriously.

When I see the news stories about the space antics of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, I think of the Thermians. These are men with unimaginable wealth and power who obviously grew up with literary diets similar to mine. Both have been explicit in their love of SF – esp. writers such as Asimov and Heinlein. These are men who insist on reading SF literally rather than allegorically. Who read of spaceships and robots and said: “This is not fiction”. As the graffiti during the 1968 Paris Uprising said: “I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires”.

When we face planetary catastrophe through climate change and Musk talks about creating colonies on Mars or Bezos talks about moving polluting industries into space, it is hard to know how to respond. These suggestions are ludicrous. And yet these men are not insane. They have led successful businesses, often built on contrarian bets – esp. that people would one day shop online. But they have also taken the stories of their childhoods as gospel. And those stories themselves are the reworked fables and myths of the first half of the twentieth century.

It’s hard for me to go back the Foundation series now knowing that it’s the inspiration for a delusional sideshow. There are things that one can hold against Isaac Asimov but people taking his made-up stories seriously isn’t one of them. The Thermians are real - but they are terrifying rather than adorkable. Their desecration of my childhood is not the worst thing that they have done - but it is the act that I hold most against them.