“I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed that aspect of it,” Adams says in Episode 497 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I thought maybe the science fiction stuff or the humor stuff would be done well, but not both.”

The movie is intended as a metaphor for climate change, but Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley says the film’s portrait of a culture poisoned by triviality and narcissism invites multiple readings. “The climate change metaphor is pretty obvious when it’s scientists trying to alert the media to danger and being ignored,” he says. “But I feel like so much of the satire is directed at the media that that’s what sticks in my mind more.”

Don’t Look Up is currently the number two most-watched movie on Netflix, but it has received mixed reviews from critics. Humor writer Tom Gerencer says the film may have struck a little too close to home for some reviewers. “I think a lot of the critics went into this thinking, ‘I know what this is. It’s going to point the finger at the people I don’t like,’” he says. “And then it pointed the finger at everyone, including them, and they’re like, ‘That’s really uncomfortable. I don’t like that.’”

Fantasy author Erin Lindsey enjoyed Don’t Look Up but wishes it had shown a bit more depth and ambition. “I would like to see more movies that attempt to do what this movie was attempting to do,” she says. “I would just plead with the writers to please not make it so American-centric, because it is deeply ironic to me that you would make an allegory about global climate change so obsessively navel-gazing on the United States.”

Listen to the complete interview with John Joseph Adams, Tom Gerencer, and Erin Lindsey in Episode 497 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Erin Lindsey on politics:

I worked for the UN for a very, very long time, including sitting in on Security Council meetings—the closed door meetings, not the ones you see on TV … It was funny to me because one of the scenes that my sister singled out as being ridiculous was that first scene in the White House, where they brief the president and she’s not overwhelmingly alarmed by this news. And actually I thought that scene was, perhaps depressingly enough, relatively realistic. I’ve seen the way world leaders can actually become inured, to a certain degree. There’s a point where Meryl Streep’s character says something to the effect of, “Do you have any idea how many ‘end of the world’ meetings I’ve had?” And really that’s only a slight exaggeration. So a lot of the way that went down—those opening scenes—really was quite realistic.

Tom Gerencer on religion:

Toward the end there’s this scene where Jennifer Lawrence’s boyfriend starts praying. And I was like, “OK, here we go. They’re going to start dragging religion through the mud.” And I was like, “Whatever. They’re dragging everybody else through the mud. Who cares?” But they really didn’t. They had him start praying, and he was like, “Do you think it’s stupid?” And she was like, “No, I think it’s kind of sweet.” That develops later on in the movie and becomes sort of a theme, that he has this genuine religion or connection to God, whatever you want to call it, that they didn’t make fun of at all. They treated it kind of reverently, and I was touched by that. Here’s where they had an opportunity to lampoon religion, and they didn’t.

John Joseph Adams on The Hopkins Manuscript:

When they want to mine the comet for rare minerals, that reminded me of this satirical apocalypse novel called The Hopkins Manuscript … In the book, the moon comes loose from its orbit, and it’s going to crash into the Earth, and people are doing similar things where they’re bickering—though they don’t disbelieve that it’s happening. This is right after World War I, and the world has just had this immense conflict, and then there’s peace. But then the moon crashes into the Atlantic Ocean, and it just smashes flat like a pancake, making new land in between North America and Europe that’s full of minerals, and so everybody goes to war again over this new resource. [Don’t Look Up] reminded me a lot of that, just because there were so many different commonalities.

David Barr Kirtley on the environment:

There’s something about [the last scene] that was so memorable and horrifying. I feel like 20 years from now, when I think of this movie, that’s the thing that’s going to pop into my head … I guess one very slight misgiving I have about this movie is that so often I hear people say really dumb stuff like, “Oh, if the environment gets too bad on Earth, we’ll just go to another planet,” and this sort of fed into that. I’m sure most people understand that that’s not going to happen, that we’re nowhere even remotely close to being able to send people to another planet. But I feel like there are enough people who don’t understand that somehow that I just want to do whatever I can to get the message out. As environmental activists say, “There is no Planet B.” We’re not going to another planet. You can get that out of your head right now.

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“I definitely think it was secondary for Lana that people actually like the movie right away,” Jordan says in Episode 496 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I don’t think she cares. And that’s the subtle genius of it. I think it’s going to become really appreciated over time, but not soon enough that they’re going to make her make more movies.”

Over the past 20 years, Wachowski has seen fans and critics largely pan the third Matrix movie, seen the Matrix’s “red pill” imagery co-opted by the political right, and faced relentless pressure to churn out more Matrix sequels. Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley sees clear parallels between those struggles and Resurrections’ “swarm mode,” in which the heroes are attacked by waves of mindless enemies.

“In the first movie, the symbol of the oppressive system that is keeping you down is a government agent, and in this one it’s masses of people on their phones,” he says. “To a large extent, anxiety about people controlling our lives has shifted from the government to online hate mobs.”

Resurrections features the return of Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss, now in their fifties. Horror writer Theresa DeLucci enjoyed seeing more mature actors headlining a sci-fi action film. “I think [Reeves] did a wonderful job conveying decades of exhaustion, regret, weakness, and fallibility,” she says. “I loved it when they’re like, ‘Are you going to fly now?’ And he’s like, ‘Screw that.’ Right, you’re fifty-something years old. Screw that, you don’t have to fly anymore.”

Science fiction professor Lisa Yaszek says that despite its focus on aging and loss, Resurrections manages to retain an optimistic streak.

“It feels to me very much like a contemporary cyberpunk story, not just in that it’s moved from a gee-whiz sort of attitude about the internet to a more jaded attitude, but really more in terms of hope,” she says. “There’s this hope that people can connect and think logically and rationally and creatively and maybe make the world a better place. And I think that’s the ultimate science fiction message.”

Listen to the complete interview with Rafael Jordan, Theresa DeLucci, and Lisa Yaszek in Episode 496 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

David Barr Kirtley on The Matrix:

For people who weren’t around when The Matrix came out, I feel like it had this cultural impact that’s hard to overstate. I remember people saying, “This is our generation’s Star Wars,” and that’s really how it felt. Everyone had seen it. Before that there had been some movies about virtual reality, like Johnny Mnemonic or The Lawnmower Man that really only the hardcore science fiction fans would have gone to see, but with The Matrix everybody saw it, and everybody was familiar with all these concepts—like the idea of uploading martial arts skills into your brain in a second—these really cool sci-fi concepts that now everyone was familiar with.

Theresa DeLucci on The Matrix Revolutions:

I really can barely remember anything about it … I remember being in the theater though. Everyone was very excited. It was the IMAX movie premiere in New York City, the biggest screen ever. It was like a nightclub. People were in all their Matrix gear—glowing goggles and light sticks. My friend was so excited. And then you get toward the end of the movie, when Trinity dies, and her death scene was just so overwrought and bad that people started heckling. Neo’s like, “You can’t die,” and she says, “Yes I can,” and someone in the theater just yelled out, perfectly timed, “So do it already!” I remember that more than anything else in the movie.

Lisa Yaszek on The Matrix Resurrections:

I went in with no expectations, and I enjoyed it. Was it as groundbreaking as the first one? No, but how could it be? It’s the fourth in a series. But I still thought it really did honor to the series. I thought the story was logical. Since day one the Wachowskis have insisted that these movies are really about love, and I thought, “Boy, Lana really doubled down on that this time.” I think that that’s interesting, and it almost makes me want to go back and rewatch the three original ones through this different frame. Not thinking about, “Is it a metaphor for capitalism? Is it a metaphor for trans-ness? Is it a metaphor for our media-saturated society?” Maybe it’s just a science fiction story about love.

Rafael Jordan on screenwriting:

In the first film, Neo is unplugged from the Matrix in the 32nd minute. That marks the end of Act 1 and the beginning of Act 2—like I said, that first script is airtight. In this one, he doesn’t wake up in the real world until the 52nd minute, and that’s just way too long. That’s when Act 2 starts, when they finally go to Io and all that stuff. The audience isn’t necessarily aware of these screenwriting rules consciously, but they start to check out of a movie when things aren’t progressing fast enough, and it’s no coincidence this film was 20 minutes longer than the others, because it took too long to get to that point. So I just wish it had been a six-episode, four- or five-hour [TV show].

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“I wanted to write a story that Voltaire might have written if Voltaire had been able to read the last 70 years’ worth of science fiction and have all of those tools at his disposal,” Palmer says in Episode 495 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Palmer says that Voltaire could actually be considered the first science fiction writer, thanks to a piece he wrote in 1752. “Voltaire has a short story called ‘Micromégas,’ in which an alien from Saturn and an alien from a star near Sirius come to Earth, and they are enormous, and they explore the Earth and have trouble finding life-forms because to them a whale is the size of a flea,” she says. “They eventually realize that that tiny little speck of wood on the ground is a ship, and it’s full of living things, and they make contact. So it’s a first-contact story.”

Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is often considered the first science fiction novel. Voltaire was writing much earlier than Shelley, so does he deserve the title instead? It depends on your definition of science fiction.

“[‘Micromégas’] doesn’t involve technology,” Palmer says, “so if you define science fiction as depending upon technology—and being about, in the Frankenstein sense, ‘Is man’s knowledge giving us access to powers beyond what we’ve had before? What does that mean?’—it isn’t asking that. But aliens and first contact is a very core science fictional element.”

So there’s no clear-cut answer to the question of who should be considered the first science fiction writer. Given a sufficiently loose definition of the term, even a 2nd-century writer like Lucian of Samosata could be a candidate. Ultimately, Palmer says it’s more important to ask the question than to arrive at any particular answer.

“I don’t want to argue, ‘Yes definitely, everybody’s histories of science fiction should start with Voltaire,’” she says. “But I do want to argue that everybody’s histories of science fiction will be richer by discussing whether Voltaire is the beginning of science fiction, or whether it’s earlier or whether it’s later. Because that gets at the question of what science fiction is.”

Listen to the complete interview with Ada Palmer in Episode 495 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Ada Palmer on science fiction conventions:

The wonderful thing about science fiction and fantasy fandom, unlike so many other literary genres, is that when you go to a conference, the author isn’t off in the green room and only occasionally appearing for an event and then vanishing; the authors are hanging out in the halls, and you can chat with people, and you get to know people through the internet. So I got to know lots of authors from meeting them at conventions, and from being a panelist before I was an author—because I would be talking about music, or I would be talking about history, or I would be talking about anime and manga and cosplay, which were all arenas that I worked in. So I got to know people, and be known by people, through that wonderful and often so supportive world.

Ada Palmer on the Terra Ignota series:

There’s this global network of flying cars so fast they can get you from anywhere on Earth to anywhere else on Earth in about two hours. So suddenly everywhere on Earth is commuting distance. You can live in the Bahamas and have a lunch meeting in Tokyo and eat at a restaurant in Paris, and your spouse—who also lives in the Bahamas—can have a lunch meeting in Toronto and another one in Antarctica, and this is a perfectly reasonable travel day, especially with self-driving vehicles that let you do work while you’re in the car. So once that’s been true for a couple of generations, people don’t live in a place because they have political ties with it, they live in a place because there’s a great house there that their parents really liked at the time their parents were buying a house, and it no longer makes sense for geography to be the determiner of political identity.

Ada Palmer on the Terraforming Mars board game:

The players are each a corporation, and the UN is giving you funding to incentivize this, but you also make profits on your own, and you’re competing with the other corporations to terraform Mars best … I’ve noticed from playing Terraforming Mars that if you play it competitively, and then separately you play it collaboratively, where you say, “OK, we’re going to ignore competing with each other for points, and we’re going to work together to try to make sure that all the resources end up in the hands of the company that will use them the most efficiently,” you terraform Mars way better, way faster. So the board game is intended to be a celebration of this capitalist model of doing space but actually also shows that just teaming up and everyone helping everyone get ahead makes everyone score more and achieve more terraforming of Mars.

Ada Palmer on Diderot:

[Jacques the Fatalist] is Diderot’s strange 18th-century philosophical novel about the meanderings of a man who’s a valet in the company of his master. It has this exquisitely warm prose style, in which Diderot directly addresses the reader with great intimacy and vulnerability … Reading that book feels like reading a time capsule, where you’re meeting Diderot and being his friend, in a way that’s very different from any other book that I’ve ever read. You come out of the end of it feeling like Diderot has shared his raw, incomplete, uncertain, deeply, deeply human thoughts and feelings with you, and asked for your thoughts and your opinions in return, in a way that’s just exquisite.

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“I pretty much watched the entire thing with my jaw on the floor,” Kail says in Episode 494 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It was insanely terrible in every possible way.”

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley remembers loving Howard the Duck when he watched it as an 8-year-old, but agrees that the movie is a train wreck. “It’s a really weird combination of a kid’s movie, an Animal House-style sex comedy, and a horror movie,” he says. “Some of those things could go together, but the kids and the sex comedy part doesn’t work together.”

Howard the Duck was produced by George Lucas, hot off the success of the original Star Wars trilogy. Humor writer Tom Gerencer says that fame had clearly gone to the director’s head. “[Howard the Duck] works as a comic,” he says, “but then thinking that you could take that and it would work as a live-action movie just takes the kind of egomania you only get after you just made the biggest-selling movie of all time and you think, ‘I can do anything.’”

Science fiction author Matthew Kressel was appalled by Howard the Duck, but notes that the film does have its defenders. “I know some people love this movie,” he says. “If you go on the Gen X Reddit forum, every now and then they do, ‘What was your favorite movie of the ’80s?’ and Howard the Duck came up. Some people are like, ‘I love Howard the Duck! Oh yeah, it was so funny.’”

Listen to the complete interview with Andrea Kail, Tom Gerencer, and Matthew Kressel in Episode 494 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Tom Gerencer on Weird Science:

“I still love it as a story of two nerds who desperately want the wrong thing and then almost learn to want the right thing. Having said that, I do want to get into the politics. I feel like every movie from the ’80s that we discuss, we spend 10 minutes excusing the casual racism and sexism. ‘Well of course they killed puppies in this movie. Back then that’s what we did. We killed puppies.’ I think after a while I start to feel like I’m doing something wrong by saying that every time. … Every kid in my class endlessly quoted the [jazz club] scene, and we thought it was great. And watching it as a grown-up I was cringing through the whole thing. I was just like, ‘Ugh, this is horrible.’”

David Barr Kirtley on Innerspace:

“The character arc, I think, is supposed to be that Dennis Quaid is confident but not caring—and that’s why he has this whole fight with Meg Ryan at the beginning—and Martin Short is caring but not confident. They form this team, and then over the course of the movie Dennis Quaid teaches Martin Short to be more confident and Martin Short teaches Dennis Quaid to be more caring. And it sort of does that in terms of Martin Short’s character development, but doesn’t really do anything with Dennis Quaid’s character development. And I think that’s the biggest missing hole in this movie for me, is that then he gets back together with Meg Ryan at the end, and they get married, and it’s like, ‘Well wait, none of their relationship issues were addressed or resolved or even really mentioned in this whole movie.’”

Matthew Kressel on Escape from New York:

“I think the setup of the film is great. I love this idea of: ‘Crime is so bad, let’s just wall off Manhattan and put all the criminals in there and let them fend for themselves.’ … You know the scene in the film where they’re like, ‘Oh, this is Broadway! Why are you driving down Broadway?’ And everyone’s just throwing stuff at their car. This actually would happen if you drove down certain streets in the city. I remember people throwing stuff at our car, like fireworks, and of course there were the squeegee men who would put stuff on your windshield, then clean it off and ask for $5. The city was pretty bad. So I love it that John Carpenter is like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to just take this to the extreme. The city’s so bad it’s now a prison colony.’”

Andrea Kail on Night of the Comet:

“I think I did see it in the theater, and I was—I’m fairly sure—the same age as the characters at the time. It really hit me exactly where it should. I knew those characters because I was those characters—selfish, self-involved, rebellious against parents. There’s the scene where she goes, ‘The stores are open. What do you want to do?’ And they go shopping. Everything about it was exactly who I was. … And watching it again, it held up to me. There are some quibbles about the ridiculousness of the science, but just as an adventure story it moves really well, the characters are fun, and it’s funny. The scene in the shopping mall with the evil stock boys is fantastic.”

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“The book is a hybrid,” Spiner says in Episode 493 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It’s a thriller, it’s a memoir, it’s primarily a black comedy, it’s a novel. There are things that are inspired by true events in it, there are real people in it, and there are completely fictional people in it. So it just seemed that was a good way to describe it, as a ‘mem-noir.’”

Fan Fiction gives a fascinating look into the life of a working actor while also featuring a zany mystery plot that sees Spiner romancing a pair of beautiful twins who may or may not be stalking him. “I could have written the book and made it a completely different sci-fi show that this actor worked on who had a completely different name, but I just didn’t think it would be as fun,” Spiner says. “It takes place 30 years ago, so it was fun for me to be young again, and try to think as my young self.”

The book features appearances by many of Spiner’s Next Generation co-stars, including Patrick Stewart, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden, and Marina Sirtis, all of whose voices appear in the audiobook. “Patrick came in to the studio, and we read together,” Spiner says. “LeVar came in, Dorn came in. Jonathan and Genie were in Maine, so we had to do it over the phone. Gates came in too. Marina was in London, so we did it over the phone intercontinentally.”

Spiner’s main goal was to entertain the reader, but the book also deals with serious themes of trauma and obsession. “Two of the themes that I was dealing with—or trying to deal with—were fear and fandom, and I think both of those things are common denominators to all people,” he says. “We all experience fear—that may be the common denominator—and the fact that we all admire or hold someone in high regard is also, I think, common to everybody.”

Listen to the complete interview with Brent Spiner in Episode 493 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Brent Spiner on Star Trek and philosophy:

“[Star Trek] has grown into a cultural phenomenon. I don’t know that anybody actually lives their life based on the teachings of Star Trek, but certainly they come into play, because they’re all very positive, and I think there are a lot of people who plug into that. There are a lot of things about Star Trek that are really high-minded, particularly just sort of the general acceptance of everyone&mdsah;no matter what you look like or sound like or believe in, there’s acceptance. [Gene Roddenberry]’s whole thing was that in the future we’ll celebrate the differences in one another, and that would be really nice, wouldn’t it? And to a degree there are people who do that, and I think they’re among our healthier people.”

Brent Spiner on celebrity:

“It’s a really fulfilling experience to put someone on a pedestal, but it’s even better to knock them off of that pedestal once you’ve put them on it. So I would say don’t take it too seriously. In most cases it’s not particularly real. I hear from a lot of people on social networks who feel they have a personal connection to me, but I don’t think it’s really me. It’s Data. And I think that sense of entitlement is the result of playing a character that was accessible to all beings without judgment, and that’s really attractive. So I don’t think it’s really about me so much. … It’s not just fans, it’s humanity, I think, to love someone and then to hate that person because you love them so much. It’s like somehow they’ve taken control of you in some way.”

Brent Spiner on Data and autism:

“[Oliver Sacks] told me about it years before, but I didn’t really put it together, because I didn’t quite understand it at the time. But since the years that I started doing conventions and meeting a lot of people one-on-one, I’ve had so many kids who’ve come up to my table and said, ‘I have Asperger’s or ‘I’m somewhere on the spectrum,’ and ‘Data was the character I could identify with on television, and that’s been so meaningful to me.’ If I had known about it in full, if I’d really understood it at the time, I probably would have pushed the writers to write towards that more, and I probably would have blown the whole thing, so it’s better that I didn’t understand, because I think it worked out pretty well.”

Brent Spiner on watching Star Trek:

“We were working 16 hours a day most of the time, 10 months out of the year. I had read the scripts, I’d memorized the lines, and then we were into the next episode. I think I watched maybe the first 10, just to get a feel for the show and what was going on, and after that I didn’t really feel it was time effective to watch it, because I’d already been Data 16 hours a day, I didn’t really need to spend my off time watching the thing I’d already read. I knew how they all turned out. I did a thing last weekend at the Skirball Center here in LA. It’s a museum, and they’re having a whole Star Trek retrospective, and they asked me if I would come because they were screening ‘The Measure of a Man.’ … I said, ‘I’m happy to come, but I have to be transparent and tell you I’ve never seen it.’ So I came in early and watched the show with everybody else, so I would at least be semi-articulate.”

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“It’s so great,” Adams says in Episode 492 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It pushes all the sense-of-wonder buttons; it’s got all this cool character stuff in there. It feels enormous. There’s so much going on in the story. I just love it.”

The story riffs on the Von Neumann-Wigner interpretation of quantum mechanics, positing a future in which advanced AIs are unable to function without humans present. Guest editor Veronica Roth, author of Divergent, found the story extremely creepy. “I reached the part where the machines were using people attached to the front of themselves to keep time moving, and I was like, ‘This is revolting. I love it,’” she says. “It has haunted me ever since I read it. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Fantasy author Yohanca Delgado agrees that “The Beast Adjoins” is an unsettling story. “It’s such a beautifully realized and chilling premise, this reversal of what we imagine AI can do for us,” she says. “There’s a passage where [the AIs] are creating human tail lights—humans in jars that are just an eye and a blob of flesh. It’s such incredibly horrific writing. I’m a huge fan.”

For now “The Beast Adjoins” exists only as a stand-alone short story, but Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley wonders if the story could be expanded. “I just feel like this is such an interesting premise—these AIs that can only function when humans are observing them,” he says. “I feel like there are probably a lot of other narratives you could spin out of that.”

Listen to the complete interview with John Joseph Adams, Veronica Roth, and Yohanca Delgado in Episode 492 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Yohanca Delgado on the Clarion workshop:

“At Clarion I skipped a week, and was just rocking back and forth in a panic in my room, because I was like, ‘I have to write something. I have this idea, and I can’t seem to write something else, but I also feel—you know that feeling when you want to write something, but you’re not quite ready? Like, you don’t feel like you’re the writer you need to be to tackle it yet … And the schedule at Clarion is relentless. I’d already missed a week, I couldn’t miss another one. I talked to Andy Duncan, who is a wonderful human, and basically he was like, ‘I don’t understand why you’re not just doing this.’ Which is sometimes what you need to hear. You need somebody to shake you by the shoulders and tell you, ‘Just go do it.’”

Yohanca Delgado on her story “Our Language”:

“My family is from the Dominican Republic and Cuba. I didn’t know of any Latin American or Caribbean monsters, so I set off on this research project to find them … The ciguapa is this woman—there are some stories that have it be male as well, but I was interested more specifically in the idea of it being a woman—who is very small and charming, in a feral way, and whose legs grow backwards. I found that to be a really interesting monster to think about. What would her powers be? What does it all mean? In researching this, I found that it’s really rooted in indigenous and enslaved folks’ stories. Because her real superpower was being able to escape. And I thought that dovetailed really beautifully with some conversations around gender and gender oppression.”

John Joseph Adams on the pandemic:

“Most people who are publishing a science fiction/fantasy magazine are not doing it as a job—it’s a side thing that they’re doing. They have some other regular job that pays the bills. So maybe because they were saving an hour commute to and from work every day, they had more time to work on their [magazines]. I honestly would have expected there to be a lot more closing up and ceasing publication, just because a lot of people lost their jobs once the pandemic hit, and there was just a lot of belt-tightening that was needed for almost everyone. So I was really surprised to see that everyone was so resilient. Maybe it was partly because everyone was thinking, ‘People need this right now.’ So it was more important to stick around, rather than close up, because we need this to look forward to when we’re dealing with all this scary bleakness out in the real world.”

David Barr Kirtley on “The Pill” by Meg Elison:

“One way in which this story is science fiction, in a really good way, is it doesn’t just present an idea then stick with that static situation, it keeps complicating it and keeps introducing these new twists … One of the things that is often said about science fiction is that a science fiction writer’s job isn’t to predict the automobile—anyone could predict the automobile. Your job is to predict the Interstate Highway System and the suburbs, to look at the second-order effects of these technological changes. And I thought the story functioned really well in that way as a science fiction story, where it’s not just about ‘How does this new technology affect the protagonist?’—though it certainly goes into that—but also ‘How does it affect the wider society?’”

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“It lived up to every single one of my expectations,” Kail says in Episode 491 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It was exactly what I was hoping for in an adaptation of one of my favorite books of all time.”

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley agrees that Dune is a first-rate adaptation. “It’s just so nice to have science fiction movies made by people who actually respect the source material,” he says. “In contrast to the ’80s, where so often they would take a book and the director would just be like, ‘I have so many better ideas than this stupid book,’ and they would change everything.”

Fantasy author Rajan Khanna enjoyed the film, but wishes it had included more of the novel’s rich worldbuilding. “A lot of the weird stuff got skipped—a lot of the stuff about the mentats, and Dr. Yueh and his whole conditioning, and more in-depth on the Bene Gesserit and the Kwisatz Haderach, and the guild navigators,” he says. “That stuff being given minimal exposure in this film was a disappointment to me, because I think one of the great things about the novel is the weird stuff that he comes up with.”

Science fiction author Matthew Kressel is hopeful that an extended edition of Dune might restore some of his favorite scenes from the book. He’s also excited to see more of the Dune universe in the upcoming sequel Dune: Part Two. “This was the Dune film that I’ve wanted for so long,” he says. “And I’m excited about the sequel. It’s a long time to wait, but we waited long enough for this one, so I can wait another year or two.”

Listen to the complete interview with Andrea Kail, Rajan Khanna, and Matthew Kressel in Episode 491 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Rajan Khanna on adaptation:

“I’m not the target audience for this film. Even though I love Dune as a novel, film adaptations are mostly not necessary to me. I have a book that I can read, and that book has certain things, and a film adaptation for me is always going to be an exercise in ‘Oh, they changed that’ and ‘Oh, interesting how they handled this.’ Sometimes it can be amazing, but I’m not one of the people who is like, ‘I really hope they remake Dune as a movie and make it really good.’ So that comes into play in terms of my expectations. If this was a terrible movie, I would have been disappointed, but I wouldn’t have felt betrayed in any way, or that it ruined my one chance at having a good Dune adaptation.”

Matthew Kressel on pacing:

“There was a part in the film, maybe two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through, where I felt like we were just playing ‘chase the mouse.’ It was basically like, chase scene, pause, fight scene, chase scene, pause, fight scene. There was a point, right around the time where they go to that research station, and Dr. Kynes shows them the plants and explains that she wants to make a green Arrakis, where I was like, ‘This is cool,’ and then immediately there was another fight scene … All those scenes were really great, but there was a moment where I was a little less invested in it because it went on for a so long. I think I wanted, in those moments, just a beat more story.”

Andrea Kail on characterization:

“It’s a coming-of-age story. [Paul] is becoming a man—not only assuming his father’s role as Duke, but also breaking away from his mother’s control. Because she says, ‘We have to get off-world,’ and he cuts her off and says, ‘No. Our path is through the desert,’ and she just has to accept it. There’s a shot, right near the end, where he and Chani are looking at each other, and then he looks at his mother. She knows he’s been having these dreams, and she’s figured out that this is the girl he’s been dreaming about. They smile at each other a little, then Paul walks off, and you see this very subtle change in Jessica’s face from ‘happy’ to ‘stony.’ And the implication is, she doesn’t want him with her.”

David Barr Kirtley on Hollywood:

“I always just assumed that every two or three months there would be some big, blockbuster science fiction movie coming out that we could talk about, and there really haven’t been for the last two years, because of the pandemic. I never really appreciated how much of a loss that would feel to me, and how difficult it would make it, honestly, doing a weekly science fiction podcast. … So I appreciate all the more how precarious Hollywood actually is. It seems so powerful, but it could all go away if people don’t watch these movies and go to theaters. So I have a newfound appreciation for directors like Denis Villeneuve and movies like this, and I just hope everyone does what they can to support them, if you want things like this to keep existing.”

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“I remember really liking this movie when I saw it however many years ago, but it did not stand up to my memory,” Kail says in Episode 490 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It was shot like a B-movie. Dennis Quaid was over-the-top, the music was overwrought. I just found it so much less enjoyable than it should have been.”

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley agrees that the film is lackluster, which is a shame considering that it’s based on an award-winning novella by Barry Longyear. “The [novella] is really, really touching,” Kirtley says. “It’s the story of this guy learning to understand another culture, and then passing it on to a child. That’s what it’s about. It’s beautiful.”

The movie builds to a corny, tacked-on finale in which the human soldier goes on a gory rampage. Humor writer Tom Gerencer says the ending is particularly odd given the pacifistic themes of the rest of the film. “The whole part where he’s killing everyone, I’m like, ‘What’s the point here?’” he says. “Now he’s learned to be peaceful, and he’s just killing all these people?”

Science fiction author Matthew Kressel says the time is right for a new version of Enemy Mine that stays closer to the source material. “I think this movie could be remade, if they did it with modern special effects,” he says. “I think it’s a timeless message—that we shouldn’t dehumanize somebody just because they’re unfamiliar to us.”

Listen to the complete interview with Andrea Kail, Tom Gerencer, and Matthew Kressel in Episode 490 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

David Barr Kirtley on The Last Starfighter:

“When I saw it as a kid, it seemed much more serious and dramatic to me, and watching it now the tone is more like Galaxy Quest. It’s really, really silly—in a fun way. … I think they say this is a federation of 800 worlds or something, and they only have 12 fighter pilots to fight for them? And then they have this wall of satellites to defend them from the bad guys, and it’s like, ‘No, dudes, we’re in outer space.’ I mean, presumably it would have to be a sphere around all 800 worlds. So how many of these things are we talking about? Maybe that’s why they only have 12 fighter pilots—because they spent all their money on this gigantic wall.”

Matthew Kressel on Enemy Mine:

“Whenever we fight another group, we dehumanize them in order to be able to kill them. ‘Oh, they’re inhuman monsters!’ When you see them as another person—in this case it’s an alien—but when you see the soul of them, face to face, and that they’re just like you, and in some ways better than you, I think that’s a powerful message. … [The alien] says, ‘We were here a thousand years before you,’ and clearly it’s one of those things where both sides think they’re right, but they both essentially want the same things. So when we get to the end, where Davidge is reciting the ancient lineage on the Drac homeworld, I found that unexpectedly moving.”

Tom Gerencer on Flight of the Navigator:

“I had only ever seen the part where he’s flying around on the spaceship with Pee-wee Herman talking to him, so I was like, ‘That movie is absolutely stupid.’ And then when I had to go back last week and watch this movie from start to finish, I was like, ‘Holy crap, that’s so cool that he shows up, and he hasn’t aged, but it’s eight years later, and his parents are all bereaved.’ I was like, ‘Wow, I had no idea this movie had something cool about it.’ So I really enjoyed that, and by virtue of that I enjoyed watching the rest of the movie too, because I was like, ‘Now there’s context, and I understand what’s going on.’ So I really enjoyed this movie, but mostly because I had only ever seen the part with no plot in it.”

Andrea Kail on Short Circuit:

“I have very fond memories of this movie. I remember when I was a teenager thinking it was absolutely hilarious. There was one line that I hadn’t thought of in years, but as soon as Fisher Stevens said it, I was like, ‘Oh my god. I remember saying that back and forth with my friend at the time,’ because we thought it was so hilarious. It was the line, ‘I’m sporting a tremendous woody right now.’ And we would say it in that horrible Indian accent. I thought it was hilarious then, and I see it now and it’s so cringeworthy and awful. We’ve been doing all these ’80s movies—the bad ones, the good ones—and it feels to me like we’re not only being nostalgic, but also confronting the ghosts of our past: the casual racism, the misogyny that was so prevalent in the ’80s.”

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“I managed to find enough sources that most of the questions I thought were interesting I can at least shed some light on,” Peterson says in Episode 489 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “A lot don’t have definitive answers, but I think I can at least paint enough of a picture.”

Game Wizards may come as a shock for many D&D fans. Peterson’s account quotes extensively from primary sources, including letters and legal documents, many of which paint Gygax and Arneson as deeply flawed people. “It’s not fun to write something that is, ultimately, pretty negative,” Peterson says. “But at the same time, I think it’s necessary. If you don’t get the nuances of these business and legal circumstances, there are just causes and effects that you’re not going to understand.”

Peterson tried hard to treat all of his characters with respect and sympathy. “Everyone made mistakes, and everyone had their egos and everything else,” he says. “But I think they were trying to make the best of a situation nobody expected they’d be in. Suddenly they’re in it, and what are they going to do? So I hope no one comes across in this as a villain.”

As for the question of who should be considered the true creator of Dungeons & Dragons, Peterson believes the game was clearly a group effort. “It’s drawing on all these different sources and experiences, and all these different inputs that went into it—whether that’s Braunsteins, whether that’s all these different phenomena that were going on in the time leading up to D&D,” he says. “It’s never the right thing to break down the invention of something with this kind of cultural significance to one single individual.”

Listen to the complete interview with Jon Peterson in Episode 489 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Jon Peterson on Dave Arneson:

“There were three awards that were given to D&D [at the 1978 Origins Game Fair], including the award for “Best All-Time Role-Playing Game Rules.” It’s an awards ceremony, and it’s not a huge one, but TSR employees would go up and get their trophy, and thank people, and sit back down. Arneson actually ran up on stage to grab that all-time greatest role-playing rules trophy, and there was a bit of a dispute. Should these trophies go to the company that published the game, or should they go to the designer? Arneson ran this whole publicity campaign to try to convince people that awards like this should go to designers and not to companies. … But ultimately there wasn’t a lot of sympathy, even among the wargame publishers in the industry, for his position, and he did not end up getting all three trophies for himself.”

Jon Peterson on Gary Gygax:

“Gygax was great in person. Everybody who met him—before he became ‘Gary Gygax’ and everyone had all this anger over the success of D&D—just remarked on how eager he was to help, how he wanted to sit down and play games with you, help you design games, help you perfect your own rules. He was a really gregarious, outgoing, friendly guy. … It’s just once those skills start having to be applied to running a medium-sized business, where now there’s a lot of people on staff, there’s many layers of management, there’s process, and this group needs to agree with this group, and they need to go execute on this general strategy, and you can’t micro-manage everything, as soon as it became that kind of company, he just hated it. He wanted out.”

Jon Peterson on the Satanic Panic:

“You see people [at TSR] saying things like, ‘Yes, there’s all this gnashing of teeth about the occult, but the reason people find the occult compelling is that there might—just maybe—be something to it.’ I don’t think they meant anything more with that than they do with, say, astrology. When you read your horoscope in the newspaper, is there something to it? Probably not, but there was just this background level, especially coming out of the 1970s, of crystals and New Age-ism and American watered-down spiritualism. And I think they did want to tap into that—or at least they were aware it was part of the market that was out there. But Gygax and Arneson identified as Christians—strongly—so as a consequence of that I don’t think they were really trying to take some provocative stand about the possible veracity of occultism.”

Jon Peterson on Ben Riggs:

“Ben Riggs is putting out a book that will come out next year, which is called Slaying the Dragon. It focuses mostly—though not exclusively—on the period after Game Wizards ends. … As soon as Game Wizards was announced, a lot of people who follow Ben, who knew that his book was coming, were like, ‘Oh my god. Is somebody trying to beat you to the punch? Is Peterson trying to sneak this in before you?’ So we did a video at Gen Con this year just to say, ‘Actually, we’re buds. We have known that we’re both doing these books forever, and we’ve been coordinating about this to make sure that they’re going to be on the same page.’ This isn’t going to be something where you’re going to be asking, ‘Is Riggs right or is Peterson right?’ Hopefully we’ve aligned these pretty much as well as we can.”

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“I think there’s been a lot of panicking about social media that’s disproportionate to the actual harm,” Soave says in Episode 488 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “A lot of this is hyperbole; a lot of this is overblown.”

He says the current furor over social media is reminiscent of the way politicians talked about video games like Doom and Mortal Kombat back in the ’90s. “Everything that was said about video games 20 years ago turned out not to be true—they don’t promote violence, they don’t turn young men into school shooters,” he says. “And I wonder if 10 or 20 years from now we’ll look back at this moral panic in a similar way.”

Much has been made over the power of algorithms developed by Facebook and Google, which Soave says recalls earlier panics over the danger of subliminal advertising. “I like that when I’m on Facebook, I’m getting [ads for] Dungeons & Dragons merchandise rather than commercials for cars,” he says. “If I watch TV, I get commercials for cars. I’m not going to buy a car. Not relevant to me. I wish I could fast-forward through them. On Facebook I see things I might actually like. That’s a good thing.”

Tech companies are taking fire from across the political spectrum, with everyone from Donald Trump and Senator Josh Hawley to President Biden and Senator Elizabeth Warren calling for new regulations. Soave says it would be a huge mistake to let politicians exert too much power over one of America’s most innovative industries. “Maybe for a lot of people, they go, ‘Well, if everyone in government wants this, that means it’s right,’ whereas I go the opposite way—if everyone wants this, it’s definitely bad,” he says.

Listen to the complete interview with Robby Soave in Episode 488 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Robby Soave on Dungeons & Dragons:

“Right now I’m [dungeon mastering] two groups, and I’m playing in a third, although that one came to an end and I think they’re going to rapture my character into a different group. So there’s a lot of overlap between my various worlds and characters. It’s so much fun … Because I write for a libertarian magazine, my primary group is very libertarian in play style. The other group tacks a bit further to the right. The main difference I’ve noticed is that the group that tacks further to the right does like combat and killing everything they encounter, and killing characters I come up with, whereas the libertarians want to talk their way—or exchange things—out of every situation. They will avoid combat at all costs.”

Robby Soave on cancel culture:

“I’ve written a lot about cases of what people call ‘cancel culture,’ of people coming under attack or criticism for having written something or done something that was maybe insensitive or offensive in some way, but they didn’t kill someone—it shouldn’t be the end of their lives … It’s very weird, especially for the progressive left, who often believe in criminal justice reform, which is something I support—the idea that formerly incarcerated people should be able to live normal lives, and they should be able to get jobs again, and you shouldn’t necessarily have to ask them about their incarceration status—you can be forgiven. Which I totally agree with, but then someone who said something maybe racist when they were 15, and you found the tweet, they should never be employed again? That makes no sense to me.”

Robby Soave on the media:

“Really the villain of my book is actually the mainstream media and The New York Times in particular … You can go back through time, and every invention, especially in the communication space, you can find them absolutely panicked about it … But it makes sense from an industry’s perspective, because a lot of these technologies were perceived by The New York Times, by the newspapers, as a competitor.”

Robby Soave on Silicon Valley:

“The culture of Silicon Valley has become somewhat hostile to innovation, and it has made people leave [California]. My point in bringing that up was, let’s not repeat that nationally. The anti-tech rhetoric coming from everyone in Congress is so totalizing. They are treating social media like Big Tobacco right now—we heard that over and over again. But Big Tobacco has killed millions of people, and even the most serious accusations against Instagram, no one thinks it’s killed hundreds of people. So it’s a ridiculous comparison. This kind of knee-jerk anti-tech sentiment coming from policymakers and lawmakers does not serve our country well, does not serve our society well, and does not serve innovation well.”

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