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A reading hack for the ADHD-addled brain

I’ve got a mild case of ADHD. As a kid, I took ritalin from grade 3 through about grade 8, and as an adult, I occasionally self-medicate with caffeine (usually in the form of soft drinks, since I don’t drink coffee or tea). I can function all right without treating it, but I am more prone to getting distracted when I don’t. But leaving it untreated also makes it easier for me to make interesting connections between seemingly unrelated subjects, which improves my creativity, so it’s more of a trade-off between being more productive vs. being able to make leaps of logic and switch between subjects more easily.

In terms of reading, ADHD makes it very difficult for me to finish long books, unless I’m hooked all of the way through, which is rare. I’ll often start books but drift away from them without either finishing them or making the conscious decision not to finish them. Over time, this makes me less enthusiastic about reading, since I’ve got a huge pile of unfinished books behind me that I can’t easily get back into, because I’ve forgotten what was happening in them.

Well, I recently found a new reading technique (or rather, a new reading accountability technique) that helps me to hack my ADHD to read more, not less. It starts with keeping a reading log on a separate spreadsheet, with columns to track total pages, pages already read, and the date to finish reading, among other things.

Most importantly, it has a column for “cumulative daily pages,” which is just the sum of all the pages you have left to read up to a certain date, divided by the number of days left. In the spreadsheet above, the formula is “=(SUM(C$3:C[current row]-SUM(D$3:D[current row]))/G[current row]”.

What the cumulative daily pages tells you is how many pages you have to read each day, not just of the given book, but of all the books before it, in order to finish that book by the given date. So in the screenshot above, if I want to finish Sundiver by May 28th, I need to read 93 pages per day across any of the books listed above it. I can read all 93 of those pages in Sundiver and still stay on goal, or I can read 93 pages of Cyteen instead, or I can spread them out by reading 7-8 pages of each of the 14 books with a “due” date before May 28th. Or any other combination.

Changing the “due” date also changes the cumulative daily pages, so I can also bring that number down by extending the deadline and reordering the books in descending order by “due” date. I’ve also color coded the pertinent columns using conditional formatting, but that’s just for personal convenience. The redder a number is, the more I need to bring it down (or up, in the case of percent read). For daily cumulative pages, I like to keep the half-dozen books with the soonest “due” date pretty low, so that I don’t have to focus on them exclusively.

And that’s where the ADHD hack comes in. Because instead of trying to read just one book from start to finish, the reading log allows me to skip from book to book without losing track of which ones I still have to read. That way, when one book begins to feel like a slog, I read to the end of the chapter and skip to the next book. My ADHD-addled brain says “Oh look! Something new!” and I get excited about reading again. And I don’t fall into the trap of feeling like I’m not making any progress, because I can see it all there on the spreadsheet.

Of course, the big danger is that when I think back on what I’ve read, I’ll remember an epic tale about how rabbits colonized Mars and uplifted dolphins while the dark lord raised the cauldronborn and killed vampires for the government. In space. But hey, at least I’m reading lots of books now!

Reading Resolution Update: March

My 2022 reading resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.

So March is usually the time where people get tired of their new year’s resolutions and either give them up entirely or put them on the back burner for a while. But at this point, I’m a little more than halfway through achieving this one, so I will definitely keep pressing on since I don’t think it will take the whole year to accomplish it. In fact, I may actually expand it to include all of the short stories, novellas, and novelettes. I’ve already filled out the spreadsheet (with a huge thanks to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, which also lists all of the collections and anthologies where each story can be found).

With that said, my enthusiasm for reading all of these books is starting to flag, and I’m not pushing on as vigorously as I did back in January. There have been a lot of DNFs… a lot of DNFs. But now, I’m starting to get to the books that aren’t obvious DNFs, which is frustrating, because when you get more than halfway through a 600 page book before you realize it isn’t worth finishing, that really does take the fun out of reading, at least in the short term.

But it has been very eye-opening to see what kinds of books tend to win Hugos and Nebulas. I’ve noticed some interesting patterns that have given me real insight into the people who vote in these awards, which consists of the old guard in fandom for the Hugos, and members of SFWA (mostly professional authors) for the Nebulas.

One book in particular I found really eye-opening in this regard, and that was They’d Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley. Mark Clifton was a science fiction short story writer who was fairly prolific, but died tragically about ten years after They’d Rather Be Right came out in 1955. Frank Riley was a newspaper man who dabbled a little bit in mystery short stories but only ever co-wrote this one novel.

They’d Rather Be Right is a notoriously difficult book to get your hands on. An abridged version with the title The Forever Machine is on sale on Amazon somewhere north of $100, and neither version was available at either my local library or the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU, and that’s unusual because the HBLL’s science fiction and fantasy collection is one of the best in the country. I eventually bought a used version of They’d Rather Be Right on Amazon from a third-party seller for $10: it was an old library copy from a small town in Arizona, and I think the seller was the actual library.

In reading about this book, I discovered that it’s been widely panned as the “worst book to win a Hugo.” However, after reading it, I can definitely say it is not the worst book. It’s not the best book either, but it is far from the worst, and I enjoyed it enough to put it on the “books worth keeping” list. So why is it considered the worst Hugo-winning book, and why has it been forgotten so thoroughly?

My working theory is that They’d Rather Be Right isn’t actually bad, it’s just heretical. Science fiction has always skewed toward the political left, and this book thoroughly ridicules some deeply held left-wing beliefs of its day. For example, it goes out of its way to ridicule scientists as a class, and makes it seem ludicrous that they have any business deciding on how the rest of society should be governed. It also pokes fun at some of Sigmund Freud’s ideas, which is notable because so many of the Hugo and Nebula winning novels of the 60s and 70s are so thoroughly Freudian.

So what happened, I believe, is that after the Hugos became a regular feature of Worldcon (They’d Rather Be Right was only the 2nd novel to ever win a Hugo), the influencers and kingmakers within fandom decided that this one won on a fluke, and did everything they could to suppress it. And perhaps it really was a fluke, since the Hugo Awards weren’t yet established, and Worldcon itself was only a little more than a decade old.

Because here’s the thing: the Hugos and the Nebulas have always been radically left-wing. Science fiction in general has always leaned hard to the left, and those of us who consider ourselves right-wingers have always been a despised minority to most of the rest of fandom. That didn’t start in the 50s either: if anything, it started with the Futurians, as Donald Wollheim himself (founder of DAW Books) said that science fiction “should actively work for the realization of the scientific world-state as the only genuine justification for their activities and existence.” The Futurians were the ones who founded both Worldcon and SFWA, as well as several other establishment institutions in the SF&F field.

But I think it started before the Futurians, because it makes a lot of sense that science fiction would attract left-wingers more than it would right-wingers. Left-wingers are the kind of people who think that traditions should be thrown out and new ideas should be implemented, whereas right-wingers are the kind of people who think that new ideas should be treated cautiously, and traditions should be upheld.

There’s a cycle that happens about every 50 to 100 years, and it goes like this: someone comes up with a Beautiful Idea that almost everyone on the left becomes enamored of. They pore over this idea, ponder it, debate it amongst themselves, and spill copious amounts of ink over it, mostly in the form of academic discourses and thesis papers.

Gradually, this idea matures into a General Theory, and the left constructs a whole worldview around it. But at this point, it starts to come into conflict with reality—not in a catastrophic way at first, but definitely in a way that causes some uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. But because the Beautiful Idea was so beautiful, none of the theory’s proponents really want to give it up, so they start to build a bulwark of apologia to explain the theory’s inconsistencies and contradictions.

After a while, though, that isn’t enough, and reality begins to intrude in ways that simply cannot be ignored. At this point, the General Theory morphs into an Ugly Ideology, possessing all of its followers and driving them into incredible pathologies. Groupthink and doublespeak become de rigueur, and hypocrisy infects everyone. Values like diversity, curiosity, open inquiry, freedom of speech, and intellectual honesty are all thrown out, as nothing is more important than promoting the ideology. Right and wrong cease to matter as well: the only thing that matters is power.

Eventually, reality intrudes in such a way that the entire edifice comes crumbling down, completely discrediting the Beautiful Idea and everyone who ever believed in it. But if the Ugly Ideology persists for too long, it culminates in a reign of terror, with guillotines, gas chambers, firing squads, holocausts, and genocides.

Fortunately, there are people who drop out at every stage of this cycle: “That’s a Beautiful Idea, but it’s still flawed.” “I like the General Theory, but I don’t think it explains everything.” “I am a true believer in this Ugly Ideology, but I’m not going to pull the trigger on those people.” And if enough people drop out, the pendulum swings back, the left goes into retreat, and culture and politics swing back to the right again… until someone discovers (or rediscovers) a Beautiful Idea.

In the 60s and 70s, the left was in the early stages of the Ugly Ideology phase of this cycle. Not surprisingly, the science fiction of that time was pretty terrible. Then the Reagan era happened, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War ended, and left was thrown on the back foot for a generation. During this time (the 80s and 90s), the award-winning science fiction was actually pretty good.

But that was also the time when the ideas that underpin critical race theory began to take root—the “Beatiful Ideas” that gave us, among other things, Defund the Police, the George Floyd riots, the epidemic of smash-and-grab robberies, and the ongoing collapse of leftist-run cities like Chicago and San Francisco. In science fiction, this culminated in the sad and rabid puppies, at which point the Hugos and Nebulas became total garbage again, because the left-leaning fandom had become so ideologically possessed.

So anyways, that’s my take on it. I really did enjoy They’d Rather Be Right, and not just for the insights into fandom. In any case, here are all of the other Hugo and Nebula winning books I read or DNFed in March:

Books that I read and plan to or have already acquired:

  • They’d Rather Be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley (1955 Hugo)

Books that I read and don’t plan to acquire:

  • The City & The City by China Mieville (2010 Hugo)

Books that I did not finish:

  • Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (1962 Hugo)
  • To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer (1972 Hugo)
  • Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm (1977 Hugo)
  • The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge (1981 Hugo)
  • The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon (2008 Hugo and Nebula)

Reading Resolution Update: February

My 2022 reading resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.

I didn’t read nearly as many books in February as I did in January. Part of that might have been enthusiasm for the resolution waning a bit, but a good chunk of it was due to the fact that my grandmother passed away, and we took off a week for the funeral. Also, potty training completely upended our daily routine. I also went ahead and finished Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, after reading Annihilation, so that took off a lot of reading time that otherwise would have gone toward this goal.

But I’m not too worried about it, since I’m already well past the halfway point and should be able to finish before the end of the year. In fact, I went ahead and made a similar spreadsheet of all the short stories, novelettes, and novellas that won a Hugo/Nebula, and may move on to those after I finish the novels. It’s going to be a lot more challenging to hunt down all of those titles, though, so I might just move on to the Dragon Awards instead.

In any case, here are all the Hugo/Nebula award-winning novels that I read or DNFed in February:

Books that I read and plan to / have already acquired:

  • The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu and Ken Liu, trans. (2015 Hugo)

Books that I read and don’t plan to acquire:

  • Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber (1944 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2019)

Books that I did not finish:

  • This Immortal by Roger Zelazny (1966 Hugo)
  • Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany (1967 Nebula)
  • The Healer’s War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (1990 Nebula)
  • Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick (1992 Nebula)
  • Slan by A.E. Van Vogt (1941 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2016)

Thoughts after reading the Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer

So I recently finished reading the Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, and I have a lot of thoughts on it. I’ll do my best to avoid major spoilers, but I’ll probably end up spoiling some of it, so I’ll mark those parts as best as I can.

Overall, I can say that it started out strong, but ended rather mixed. I really enjoyed the first book, with its creeping sense of escalating paranoia that kept me glued to the page right to the end. This book won the Nebula Award in 2014, which was how I discovered it, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a Hugo/Nebula award-winning book from the past decade that I actually enjoyed.

The second book had some good moments, but overall I felt that it suffered from second-book slump. Which is understandable. It did a decent job of setting things up for the third book, but it lacked that sense of creeping, paranoid danger that really drew me into the first book—or rather, the danger was dialed down to the point where it just felt creepy instead of gripping or suspenseful.

Also, even though it explained a lot more than the first book, I don’t feel like it explained enough. This is probably because the book is clearly written to be deconstructed using the kind of literary theories that English majors spend most of their time in college learning about. There’s a lot of vague symbolism and recurring motifs, which makes for some very obtuse reading. The quality of the writing somewhat makes up for that, but if the first book hadn’t captured my imagination so much, it definitely would have felt like a slog.

And then, the third book. In some ways, I really enjoyed it. In other ways, I feel like it suffered from all the same problems as the second book, with a frustrating number of loose ends. But if any more loose ends had been tied up, it probably would have felt a bit like the ending to Lost. Which makes me wonder if behind all the pretty writing and other literary tricks, there isn’t a whole lot of substance behind any of the books in this trilogy.

But the thing that really got to me was the trope where a character is LGBTQ for no other discernible reason than to make him sympathetic—as if all LGBTQ people are sympathetic or virtuous by default. [Minor Spoiler] This particular character is also the only Christian in the trilogy, which makes me wonder if VanderMeer believes that being a Christian automatically makes you villanous by default—especially given the eerie strangling fruit sermon in the first book. [/Minor Spoiler] I see this trope fairly often, especially in modern science fiction and fantasy, and it’s super frustrating because of how it ties in with all of the other grooming and gaslighting that comes along with the religion of woke. At least if it was preachy, there would be some sort of message to ponder and digest, hamfisted as it might be.

But the saddest thing is that I can’t tell if VanderMeer fell back on this trope because he actually believes it, or because he knows that his audience (which seems to be rich, woke English majors drowning in student debt) requires it. In other words, is he merely responding to his audience, or is he leading them? Probably some of both, with a little bit of “I’m a straight, white male, so I have to prove that I’m not a white supremacist” thrown in.

Don’t get me wrong. There was a lot about this trilogy that I liked, and literary deconstruction aside, it’s clear that VanderMeer can write. But after finishing the trilogy, I don’t think I’ll be picking this one up. Unfortunately.

Unpublishing The End of Elysium

This is actually one of my favorite short stories that I’ve ever written. For a while, I was thinking about expanding it into a novel, but while the story has a 4.2 rating on Amazon, I don’t think it hit on with the readers well enough to justify that sort of an investment. Maybe at some point down the road.

In any case, I think the time has come to take it down. It will appear in my next short story collection, Beyond World’s End, which is scheduled to come out in a few months. If you want to read this story before then, now is the time to pick it up.

From the description:

For the promise of paradise, the last civilization will surrender to the apocalypse.

Elysium was a world without without pain or suffering, hunger or disease, poverty or crime. So naturally, it was a world that was already dead.

Gehenna was a dead world, poisoned by the Great Catastrophe that had driven their ancestors into the underground vault. Few knew or cared what lay beyond the ancient airlocks. The bleak and windowless tunnels of Gehenna held nothing to the shared simulation of Elysium.

Gehenna still had a Watchman who searched diligently for the promised land. But would the people of Elysium give up their truth in order to have a future? Or is cultural suicide a price worth paying for paradisiacal bliss?

Get “The End of Elysium” here!

Goodbye, Grandma

Sorry for the radio silence these past few weeks. My grandmother passed away a couple of weeks ago, and we’ve been down in Texas, dealing with family stuff and the funeral. I wrote the following author’s note for my newsletter, and it seemed like something worth sharing on the blog, so I’m posting it here too. Hopefully I’ll be back to posting on a regular schedule next week.

In my last newsletter, I mentioned that my last surviving grandmother had recently passed away. We all went down to Texas for the funeral last week, and it went surprisingly well.

My grandmother lived a very long life, and her passing wasn’t unexpected. She had a stroke about fifteen years ago, and had also been struggling with dimentia. The last time I had a conversation with her where she remembered who I was was probably a decade ago. Thankfully, she was very well taken care of by my uncle’s family in Texas and a team of nurses who helped take care of her. She lived in the old family home right until she went into hospice about two weeks before her passing. The picture above is of her and grandpa, probably from sometime in the late 70s.

My grandmother grew up dirt poor in southern Illinois during the Great Depression. My grandfather grew up in a Texas Czech community, played football for the Los Angeles Rams and the Buffalo Bills (one of my cousins actually tracked down his rookie card, which goes for something like $600 now), and later went into the oil business. One thing I learned during this trip was that grandma was actually the one who gave him the idea of starting his own company when the firm he was working at went under. From what I understand, it was a difficult time to be in the oil business, but they slogged through the hard times and eventually did quite well.

From what I’ve heard, back in those days most networking was done at formal dinner parties that people threw in their own homes. Grandma’s house was apparently one of the premier places to have a dinner party, with a huge living room, a grand piano, wool carpeting, insane amounts of Waterford crystal, and a light with a dimmer back in the 60s when nobody had dimmers for their lights. She also had her own hobby business painting knick knacks, and had a whole bedroom full of them, as well as an insane collection of nativity sets, little glass angels, snow homes, and beanie babies.

So when we weren’t at the wake or the funeral or the interment, we were all basically going through the 60+ years of stuff that grandma acquired over the course of her lifetime, trying to figure out what to do with it all. It wasn’t difficult to imagine her smiling down on us as we went through it all, finding all sorts of unexpected treasures and divying them out.

There was more than enough for everyone to take what they wanted, including the nurses who cared for her the last fifteen years: even after we’d all gone through the crystal glassware and put our names on what we wanted, only about half of it had been claimed. So there wasn’t much fighting over stuff at all; it was all very much “you should take this,” “no, you should take it.”

One of the more interesting things was to go through all of the old letters that we’d sent her. She held on to all of them right up until her stroke. I found a bunch of letters that I’d written her while on my mission (and since forgotten about), and my sister found all of the ones that she’d written while in treatment for her eating disorder. It was good to know that she treasured those.

I also found my dad’s old mechanical typewriter, from back in the 70s! It needs a new ribbon, but otherwise seems to work quite well. At some point, I’d like to try my hand at writing the way Harlan Ellison used to write: sitting in a shop window with his mechanical typewriter, tapping out stories and pasting them onto the glass for passersby to read, one page at a time.

It was also fun to go through all of her spare change, which she’d accumulated over the years. Most of the coins weren’t all that old or interesting, but my wife found a 1905 Indian Head cent, and I found about $4 in junk silver, plus some old commemorative series. So now I keep one of grandma’s 1921 Morgan silver dollars in my pocket, instead of the 1 oz round that I used to carry.

This was my wife’s first time visiting Texas, so we took some time off the last day we were there to get some Texas Bar B Q and check out the Petroleum Museum. Interesting stuff. I remember my grandpa taking me there as a little kid, and seeing the diorama that depicts how the Permian Basin used to look in the Paleozoic period. The museum itself has been renovated since then, but they kept the original diorama, which was cool.

So that was basically our visit. The wake was a lot more formal than we were expecting, and we missed half of it because our baby got hungry and had to be taken back to the house, but the funeral and interment went very well. Standing there at the grave brought back some memories from when we buried grandpa back in 2003, just before my mission. Other than that, it was good to see everyone and spend some time together as an extended family.

It’s an interesting exercise to ponder the trajectory that our full lives take. Growing up in a broken home during the Great Depression, or during the early years of grandpa’s business when everything was so uncertain, I think that if grandma could have seen how things would eventually turn out for her and her future family, she would have been blown away. When I look back on the trajectory of my own life, I wonder if I’ll have similar feelings. We’ve been very blessed these last couple of years, even with all of the craziness that’s been happening in the world, but keeping up with the writing industry is still very much a struggle, and there are still a lot of uncertainties. But I’m confident that no matter how things work out, it will be for the best in the end.

Those are some of my current thoughts, anyways. How about yours? As always, thanks for reading!

Joe

Reading Resolution Update: January

My 2022 reading resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.

I had expected to DNF a lot of these books, but I was a little dismayed at how terrible they are. Or rather, how some of them can be so well-written and yet so idelogically possessed.

For a while, I worried that I was pre-judging some of these books too harshly, based on my opinions of the author. After all, shouldn’t art be treated separately from the artist? But then I decided that it would be better to lean into that bias, and trust my intuition. After all, it’s impossible to approach reading without a personal bias—and even if it were possible, it wouldn’t be advisable.

One of the key things I’m hoping to take away from reading these books is a better understanding of my own personal tastes. Toward that end, it’s much better to DNF early and often, since that tells me something valuable about my own tastes. I’ll get much more out of this exercise if I pay attention to that than whether or not I’m being “fair” to a particular book or author.

As for how my bias against an author might prejudice me against a book, I don’t think that’s too much of a problem so long as I’m aware of those biases. Yes, it makes it more likely that I’ll read a book with a critical eye, and not in the way that I typically read for enjoyment, but that goes both ways, since if I do enjoy a book, that’s going to improve my opinion of the author (or at least make me reconsider my opinion). So long as I’m aware of my biases and make sure that they aren’t set in stone, I think it should be fine

Besides, it’s not like I have anything to prove. Sure, China Mike Glyer might pull out an excerpt from this post to use as content (hi China Mike!), but I couldn’t care less what that particular corner of fandom thinks about my public ruminations. I will know if I’m being too “unfair” to a book or an author, and the only criterion that really matters is whether I have a clear reason for DNFing the book, separate from my biases about the author.

And honestly, what I’ve found so far is that my biases are pretty spot on. Authors who behave insufferably in public or on the internet tend to write some pretty insufferable books, especially if they’re woke.

Fortunately, I have found a few new-to-me books and authors who are really fantastic. And my decision to DNF early and often is helping to keep it from becoming too much of a slog, which is good. It also means that I may complete this resolution a lot sooner than I’d expected, at which point I’ll probably move on to the Dragons or the Prometheus awards.

In any case, here are all the Hugo and Nebula awared-winning novels that I read or DNFed in January 2022:

Books that I read and plan to / have already acquired:

  • Way Station by Clifford D. Simak (1964 Hugo)
  • Foundation’s Edge by Isaac Asimov (1983 Hugo)
  • The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold (1991 Hugo)
  • Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (2015 Nebula)

Books that I read and don’t plan to acquire:

  • None

Books that I did not finish:

  • The Big Time by Fritz Leiber (1958 Hugo)
  • A Case of Conscience by James Blish (1959 Hugo)
  • The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber (1965 Hugo)
  • The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany (1968 Nebula)
  • Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner (1969 Hugo)
  • Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin (1969 Nebula)
  • Man Plus by Frederik Pohl (1977 Nebula)
  • Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre (1979 Hugo and Nebula)
  • A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (20000 Hugo) (My wife recommended this one, and I will probably try it again, since I took a break midway through and forgot who all of the characters were. But for now, I’m counting it as a soft DNF.)
  • Camouflage by Joe Haldeman (2006 Nebula)
  • The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (2010 Hugo and Nebula)
  • Redshirts by John Scalzi (2013 Hugo)
  • Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (2014 Hugo and Nebula)
  • All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (2017 Nebula)
  • The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal (2019 Hugo and Nebula)
  • A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (2020 Hugo)
  • A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker (2021 Nebula)

The Evolution of Science Fiction

  • The 50s: We’re going to SPACE, baby! By the end of the century, space travel will be cheap and we’ll have a permanent base on the Moon, and probably on Mars too.
  • The 60s: We’re going to have a free love future, but relations between the sexes will remain essentially unchanged. Also, communism will win in the long run.
  • The 70s: By the beginning of next century, the Earth will be so polluted and overpopulated that it will practically be unlivable. And then, we’re all gonna die in a big nuclear war.
  • The 80s: Yeah, Earth will probably suck, but that’s okay because we’re gonna build some massive, sprawling space empires! Humanity’s future lies among the stars.
  • The 90s: Oh good, we didn’t all die. Let’s have some fun with time travel and space empires. Better yet, let’s go to Mars, since that’s obviously humanity’s next big step.
  • The 00s: …are we sure we’re not all gonna die? Maybe not in a nuclear holocaust, but climate change will be even worse, and who has time for space empires anyway? So unrealistic.
  • The 10s: If you’re white, or straight/cisgender, or Christian, or your politics are to the right of Stalin, GET OUT! We’re queer, we’re here, and the future belongs to us now!