Today is, of course, a frustrating day. Donald Trump clearly won the election, but the voter fraud operation is attempting to see how much cheating they can get away with today in a number of key counties, including, sadly, the one that I live in. This is a likely scenario for the actual election results, although it's still "conservative" in the sense that it doesn't involve investigating and overturning likely rampant voter fraud in Arizona and Virginia that would almost certainly flip the states. To say nothing of Minnesota and Wisconsin.
The source is AC's page, one of those linked on the side there. But given that there's little that can be done right now about it, I'm going to attempt to not think about it too much. The reality is that although senile Biden is one of the clearest choices for evil that the American people have ever been faced with, the less clear choices have won by being more discrete and careful than Biden has been quite often, not by being less evil. A second Trump victory would likely only delay the coming collapse into chaos of the American nation by a small amount, not actually make it less likely to happen. It's almost certainly inevitable, and the cards were dealt decades ago that made that the case. It doesn't matter what I think about it, and it doesn't matter what you think about it; this is just the playing out of strategic moves that Satan took long ago that weren't blunted in time to make their conclusions and consequences avoidable.
There's simply no political will to do what would be necessary to save us anyway; massive repatriations of Fake Americans, massive clean-up of corrupt officials at all levels of government from the federal bureaucracy to your local public library board. Including tens of thousand if not hundreds of thousands of executions of literal traitors by a strict legal definition. The overturning of the "dual citizenship" and "birthright citizenship" frauds and most of the avenues for "legal" immigration that have been abused for decades. The abolishment of our treaties with the UN, NATO and just about every other entangling alliance that we foolishly persist in being in. Yeah, I'm not holding my breath. It would almost be better in the long run for a massive economic and political collapse, which would at least encourage most of the Fake Americans to just pick up and look for greener pastures on their own, as well as the establishment of smaller, more manageable and accountable polities that aren't accountable to a massively over-reaching government body. Y'know, kind of like how the Founding Fathers envisioned and which we haven't had since the war of Lincoln's Proto-communist Revolution, otherwise known to the historically illiterate as the Civil War.
So again; what can be done about this? Not a whole lot other than praying, at least by folks like you and me. At least right now. We'll see as this continues to play out over the next few days and weeks what will happen. I still hold on to a glimmer of hope that some substantial swamp draining will yet take place. (As I've been typing this, thousands more "lost Biden votes" in Michigan were "discovered" making that state now "lean Democrat." Riiiiight. Funny how these mysteriously "found" ballots always end up flipping states from Republican to Democrat, and have done so every election for years. Not enough people in jail for serious felonies, I suppose. Al Franken got away with it, so they keep doing it. Maybe Civil War 2.0 is closer than a lot of people think. This kind of obvious and blatant cheating makes sure that nobody has any confidence in the integrity of the process or the legitimacy of the government, and disenfranchises tens of millions of voters. I think people really are sick and tired of this kind of crap by now.)
So, after saying that I didn't really want to talk about that, I typed more than I intended already. Let's turn to the real meat of my intended post; a manifesto on what Ad Astra is. First off, it's also occurred to me for quite a while now that Ad Astra is a bit too obvious and over-used of a title and it probably needs a bit more to truly be unique. Rather than attempt to be clever and add more Latin, I'll probably go for something a little more down to earth, or something. Ad Astra Privateers, or something like that, since I envision this as very much like a Rafael Sabatini book set in space; a kind of Sea Hawk or Captain Blood to the stars. But I don't love that either. Suggestions welcome, otherwise, I'll keep noodling around with it on my own. But, what exactly am I trying to do with this? I've talked a little bit about it before, but that was quite a while ago, and it's probably time for an updated manifesto. Especially as I'm seriously thinking (albeit again) with doing something with this other than tinkering on the world-building side. It's long overdue for some plot and character, not just worldbuilding! It's my intention to make this post be that manifesto of sorts.
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I was five years old when Star Wars came out. It's quite literally the first movie that I remember seeing in theaters. Nobody can deny that Star Wars was a breath of fresh air in the gloomy and cynical theatrical scene of the 70s; a kind of early harbinger of the 80s, in fact. The 80s were a decade which is defined in many ways in America by the fact that it was a prosperous and confident era in which the American people were confident and proud of their culture, and in many ways the last decade in which the American people were allowed to have their country and their culture without too much obvious meddling and interference from those who wanted to take it away from us and destroy it. The 80s were unashamedly American in America; the exact opposite of the siege mentality that grips Americans today. But in many ways the 80s, or at least these particular trends that we associate so strongly with the 80s, were really part of a 15 or so year period not just a decade, and it started in the late 70s and went a bit into the early 90s. Star Wars, as I said, was an early harbinger of it, even if George Lucas never meant it to be.
And I think some of the most interesting things about Star Wars are things that weren't necessarily intentional and which George Lucas would probably vehemently deny today (maybe with nervous looks over his shoulder, even) but which are obviously true nonetheless. Star Wars was made in a time when America was undeniably American in demographics. If you watch movies, documentaries, even news broadcasts from the 70s and 80s, you'll rarely see a minority, although if you do, it's generally unremarked on. We had them, and they were allowed the same grace that Americans were allowed, because they weren't here in enough numbers to show the ravenous ingratitude, entitlement and covetousness that they do now. We had good relationships with our minorities, because they were minorities, and weren't threatening to become majorities, nor was there any of the propaganda that is rampant today that white people and specifically white males are born with some kind of cult-like version of original sin. Star Wars was made in an era when Hollywood was an organization that made movies by white males, mostly (although often financed by Jewish interests) for an audience of white people, and starring mostly white people (with the obvious exception of the blaxploitation genre of b-movies.) On top of that, Star Wars was openly (and admittedly) imitating a number of genre elements that had fallen off the mainstream table during the 70s, but which earlier had been very mainstream; the Flash Gordon Republic Serials in particular, but the whole body of work that led up to them and followed in that same vein; Edgar Rice Burroughs and his John Carter stories, for instance, or Leigh Brackett and her Eric John Stark ones. E. E. "Doc" Smith, the so-called creator of space opera was obviously and heavily borrowed from in Star Wars, as was Frank Herbert's Dune and a host of other similar stuff like Edmond Hamilton, Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl and more.
One thing that you may notice, in spite of the shrieking harpies who shriek such things about diversity, inclusion and The Force is Female and stuff like that is that there certainly is a type of cultural homogeniety to the creators of space opera. About the closest thing to diversity is the fact that Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore were female, although that seems to have had little impact on their writing compared to their male counterparts, and they certainly weren't inserting feminist identity politics into their stories. To be honest, this is one of the things I miss most about space opera. The entire genre, up to and including Star Wars, was written by Americans about Americans and for Americans—although the characters weren't as overtly American in the sense that they were called Americans, they obviously and clearly always were Americans in culture and genetics nonetheless. It's our genre, or at least one of our genres. Which is exactly why seeing entitled, screeching hordes of the creatively bankrupt militantly brownwashing, blackwashing, and pinkwashing our genre entries rather than simply making their own entries, or better yet their own genres, is so offensive. It's narcissistic and sociopathic. Seeing "the Force is Female" and movies stocked with minority Mary Sues while white males only relegated to being able to be the cartoonishly idiotic villains is a mockery of the genre, and a deliberate one. It's mean-spirited and petty, meant to humiliate the creators and the fans openly.
Star Wars used to be, and should be again but isn't likely to be, a story primarily about white, American heroes carrying on swashbuckling, chivalric romances with white, American love interests. If minorities are truly to be believed, and they can't relate to stories that don't have protagonists that "look like them" on the screen (in spite of the success of Star Wars across the world in the late 70s, which would obviously tend to make that claim untenable) then I claim the same privilege. I want stories that are about people like me, written for people like me, by people like me. The failure of Star Wars in recent years can be blamed, in large part, on its embrace of the biologically and psychologically ludicrous notion that people are all the same regardless of their genetics and biology. Women are not just men in a woman's body. Black people are different than white people who are different than Hispanic people who are different from Asian people who are different from MENAs, and so on and so forth.
And white, male American fans of space opera, which remains the largest group of fans of the genre, as near as I can tell, deserve the right to have stories for them. Especially now when the zeitgeist in America is to attack all things American by the resentful, the covetous, the envious, the nihilistic, the narcissistic.
Of course, the other major problem with Star Wars is one of execution. Regardless of whether or not the concepts behind more recent Star Wars entries are good ones or not (mostly they're not) even the good ideas are marred by poor execution. Poorly written stories with unlikeable and uncharismatic characters, with missed opportunities for tension, suspense, or anything else that makes a story good and entertaining to watch are par for the course for the franchise these days. Because of these problems, Star Wars fans are actually pretty starved for entertaining content, and often greedily gobble up even mediocre content because at least it doesn't too actively insult them. This is the secret to the Clone Wars series and The Mandalorian, both are which aren't really great, but because they aren't terrible, Star Wars fans love them. Truthfully, we deserve quite a bit better, but it seems unlikely that we'll get it.
But, when I was a kid in the very late 70s, I'd play my own games with my Star Wars action figures—supplemented by G.I Joe and Adventure People stuff from the same scale, and rubber dinosaurs and other stuff from different scales. I renamed my characters, and just used the elements that I had, like a Boba Fett action figure, a TIE fighter, a submarine, a T. rex-sized tiger, Clawtron, and who knows what else. Regardless of what Star Wars was doing with these elements, I did my own thing. As Nick Cole once said in a podcast, this was pretty much the genesis of the Galaxy's Edge series that he wrote with Jason Anspach. In a discussion the two of them were having after some kind of writer meetup or get-together or something like that, Nick asked Jason what he really wanted to write, and he said Star Wars stuff. What Nick said to him was that, look—the elements of Star Wars are all scenes-a-faire, and Lucas himself borrowed them from somewhere else in almost all cases anyway. How about just make a Fake Star Wars that has the same feel, but is made up of your own take on the elements rather than Star Wars' specific take? He also likened it to playing with your Star Wars action figures out in the lawn, doing your own thing with them, which is how they see Galaxy's Edge. It's kind of like, what if I had made Star Wars the way that I'd have wanted it to be? It's deliberately pastiche, but there's nothing wrong with good pastiche. Good pastiche can sometimes be better than the original. You can certainly make a case, for example, that Flash Gordon has had more of a mainstream impact on science fiction than John Carter, and yet Flash Gordon was deliberately created as a pastiche when King Syndicates wanted to compete directly and head to head with the popular Buck Rogers comic strip but couldn't get the rights to Barsoom.
So to me, this is what AD ASTRA is, or at least what I hope it will become. What Star Wars should have been. Or to be really nitpicky, what Star Wars briefly was but then mostly lost. Just like Alex Raymond created Flash Gordon when he couldn't write John Carter stories so he could write stories pretty much just like John Carter in his own setting, and George Lucas created Star Wars when he couldn't get the rights to Flash Gordon so he could write stories pretty much just like Flash Gordon in his own setting, and Jason Anspach and Nick Cole couldn't write Star Wars stories, so they created Galaxy's Edge to write stories pretty much just like Star Wars in their own setting, AD ASTRA is doing the same thing. Borrowing from the vast body of space opera work, probably even hearkening back to more old fashioned, red-blooded American takes on the genre even than original Star Wars did, keeping to the swashbuckling, space western vibe rather than the overtly military action story take that Anspach and Cole kind of ended up doing. My own take on it, naturally, and one that avoids the many pitfalls that I believe that Star Wars has fallen into. So specifically, what makes it different than Star Wars?
Obviously, based on my earlier paragraphs, you can infer that my setting and my characters will largely be heavily influenced by classical space opera American cultural tropes. I doubt anything culturally that post-dates the hippies will really have any influences on the stories I intend to tell, unless they are specifically one of the villains of the piece. (Note that this includes the fascination with Indian Buddhism and other exotic gurus that gripped the hippies in the late 60s and 70s and was a huge influence on the Force and the Jedi. To say nothing of Lucas' Japanophilia with regards to starting out the Jedi as space samurai. Was there something wrong with Western tradition knights in space?) I also intend to rigorously pursue story arcs that cater to biologically and psychologically normal people. I refuse to have women who act like fake men; women, to be desireable and attractive need to be feminine and men need to be masculine in classical, biologically relevent senses of both words. I expect the plots and characters of my stories to more closely resemble a hybrid of swashbuckling romances, classical noir stories, or old school westerns than anything else more modern. Expect more of a Edgar Rice Burroughs meets Rafael Sabatini and Sir Walter Scott meets Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler meets Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour with a heavy dash of James Bond too. In space, of course, with a cold war between galactic superpowers heavily featuring in the region that I'll set it. There'll be plenty of magic and fantasy, but none of the childish and absurd light side dark side fake morality that marred the execution of Star Wars over time.
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The following custom figurine sculpts for Star Wars reimagined are pretty close to the "vibe" I'm kinda looking for. Very old-school pulp, in most respects.
And here's an interesting video. Make of it what you will. I suspect that even if the rumor isn't factually correct in its numbers that it's generally correct in the gist of what it's saying.
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