52 Essentials: No. 8, Starlog (1976-2009)

Welcome to Maps & Legends, a project by two new parents looking forward to sharing our favorite art and culture with our new edition. Each week in this space, we'll pick a personal favorite of ours (or at least a favorite of one of us) and write about what it means to us and why we're excited to pass it down.

A few months back, I took my son to see the Star Trek 50th Anniversary Exhibit at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle--his first museum experience(!), though he mostly slept through it--and on my way out of the gift shop, I picked up an old copy of Starlog from 1989. Starlog was a monthly magazine that ran from 1976 to 2009 and covered sci-fi and fantasy in media. It folding after bankruptcy in 2008 and lives on as an online archive. Picking up that issue in the gift shop was an adrenaline shot of nostalgia for me, taking me back to my pre-teen years when I'd pore over every issue together with my older brother, Max's uncle.

Even though we were roommates through the better part of my childhood, my brother and I were separated by fives years and the gorge between junior high and high school. Sci-fi, fantasy and avant garde were our lingua franca--the surest, steadiest bridge between us. I didn't have much of a sense of what he did on weekends or who he was dating at any given time. But I could name his favorite episodes of Star Trek and the last good comic book movie he'd seen. After music, we still talk more about Star Wars and David Lynch than anything else, now that we're on opposite sides of 40. Somehow, it still feels like our world. A place for anticipation, speculation and wonder. 

"What does The Last Jedi mean? Will there ever be a Marvel adaptation as good as Dark Knight? WHAT IS GOING ON WITH TWIN PEAKS SEASON 3???"

When my wife saw the old issue of Starlog that I'd picked up from 1989, she noticed that nearly every headline on the cover could've described a movie or TV show in development today. And she's not wrong. Batman is going strong (more or less) in the current DC cinematic universe, a new Star Trek series is in development, a live action Beauty and the Beast will hit the big screen later this year, and both Dr. Who and James Bond will keep regenerating in one manner or another as long as there's a sun is in the sky. Insert your favorite joke here about the bankruptcy of new ideas in Hollywood (which isn't really true), or the zombie-like quality of intellectual property (which isn't exactly false), or the fact that--on a long enough timeline--every character I just mentioned will be owned by Disney (which, well ... moving on).

Still, the fact that she could recognize all of the characters on the cover underscores just how times have changed. Unlike his dad, Max's mother was no geek growing up. Not a genre geek at least. She wasn't hanging out at conventions, or hanging up movie posters on her bedroom walls. She wasn't picking up comic book adaptations of movies based on comic book characters. She wasn't waiting in two-hour-long lines for the signature of a cameo character from a show cancelled before she was born.  

And she wasn't picking up Starlog to read interviews with Harlan Ellison, or on-set reports from the next Terry Gilliam movie, or sketches of concepts for story treatments of movies that would never escape from development hell. All of the things my brother and I would obsess and--in the process--bond over.

On the one hand, that magazine has been rendered redundant a dozen times over by the internet. The internet is flush with websites doing all of the same work, if not always as well or in the same positive spirit. What might set the publication apart today from the hundreds of websites that it undoubtedly inspired is its upbeat attitude. Each issue celebrated as much as it reported on developments in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. There were no message boards back then. There was little room for snark for its own sake, or one-upsmanship among fanboys setting out to prove they're the bigger devotees. The editors of Starlog were too busy fostering and growing a fan community to tear it down the way so many members seem intent on doing in the internet era.

That's not to say the articles were never critical, or that fanboys wouldn't come out in force to attack productions they thought betrayed the spirit of their characters. Just ask Michael Keaton. But before the internet, if you stumbled upon someone speaking your language, who knew what IDIC stood for or could debate which Dr. Who was the best, the impulse to bond was stronger than the impulse to correct. (Not at least until you got to know each other a bit first.)

You bonded because you knew it actually took work to be a geek back then. It was badge of honor of sorts. Properties and characters and backstories that I'd hunt high and low to find in junior high have super-saturated our culture to the point that they're basically inescapable. Max's mother doesn't know Dr. Who because she developed a fondness for low-budget, be-scarfed British sci-fi. She knows it because, well, the internet happened. And Kevin Smith and Quintin Tarrantino and Seth MacFarland happened. And our culture began eating its own tale, until a scene like this was allowed to air on prime time television, packed dense with reference upon reference, a six-minute punchline sixty years and two fictional universes in the making:

There's something truly amazing about that. The universality, the catholic nature of the internet era. We are now one family of geekdom. One omnicorp. One collective of cross-marketing and crossovers. Of course, something gets lost along the way, too.  Patton Oswalt famously declared the Death of Geek Culture in a lengthy essay published in WIRED magazine in 2010. 

He began by rejecting the labels "nerd" and "geek", as well as all the lonesome isolation those words used to connote. Instead, he declares himself an "otaku":

In Japan, the word otaku refers to people who have obsessive, minute interests—especially stuff like anime or videogames. It comes from a term for “someone else’s house”—otaku live in their own, enclosed worlds. Or, at least, their lives follow patterns that are well outside the norm. Looking back, we were American otakus. 

For Oswalt, being an otaku meant having a secret, special language that set him and his friends apart from the rest of the herd.

When our coworkers nodded along to Springsteen and Madonna songs at the local Bennigan’s, my select friends and I would quietly trade out-of-context lines from Monty Python sketches—a thieves’ cant, a code language used for identification. 

Yet, that all changed in 1987, the year he marked as the turning point when his personal quirks began to slide into the mainstream until "all America is otaku":

Fast-forward to now: Boba Fett’s helmet emblazoned on sleeveless T-shirts worn by gym douches hefting dumbbells. The Glee kids performing the songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And Toad the Wet Sprocket, a band that took its name from a Monty Python riff, joining the permanent soundtrack of a night out at Bennigan’s. 

For Oswalt, one big difference between then and now is availability . "There are no more hidden thought-palaces," he lamented, "they’re easily accessed websites, or Facebook pages with thousands of fans." But even worse than availability, Oswalt wrote, was that " lets anyone become otaku about anything instantly." The trade off, though, for having instant access via the internet to just about anything you could ever want to know is that we don't take the time to consider what we know.

Oswalt goes on from there to warn of a stifled culture, one in which everything is "immediately awesome" and--as a result--we lose the drive to create, to fill in the gaps between issues of the Avengers, between Star Wars sequels, between not-knowing and knowing what happens next. I won't spoil where he goes from there. I couldn't summarize it if I tried. (Really, just go read it. The man's a genius.)

I'll say instead that I have my own lamentation over the death of Geek Culture. Oswalt touched on it when he talked about the creative engine powered by "wanting more of something [you] loved in the past." But Oswalt spoke from the perspective of someone who eventually learned all that he wanted to know, even if he had to wait a few weeks, months or even years to take it all in. For me, part of the true wonder of geekdom, the engine driving me to grab each new issue of Starlog as soon as left my brother's hands, was knowing that I'd never know it all.

It was the not knowing that created room for wonder. Not knowing if I'd ever stay up late enough to catch Dr. Who on PBS, if I'd find a video store that stocked Buckeraoo Bonzai, or a book store that had a copy of A Princess of Mars, or The Man Who Folded Himself. These places seemed to be out of biking range, even with a ten speed and little else to do on weekends. Instead, I knew enough to know there was a lot I didn't know. An infinite universe of stories still to be told. There were no lines on those horizons, nothing that couldn't possibly be.

Those were the space that I shared with my brother, and that we still talk about today whenever we catch each other for more than five minutes. It's the space that I hope to take Max some day. That is, if he hasn't already downloaded the map, listened to the director's commentary and edited the Wikipedia page before I even have a chance to show him the way.

I don't expect him to ever pick up those old Starlog magazines, but I hope he does find his own cracks in the mundane day-to-day, his own rabbit holes to fall into, his own space to wonder what else is out there. And, hopefully, he'll find someone to share that with (even if that someone it isn't me).