Author: J.S. Pailly

IWSG: 42

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 18 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by PJ Colando, Pat Garcia, Kim Lajevardi, Melisa Maygrove, and Jean Davis.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  Well, then this is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more.

I’m turning 42 this month, a truly momentous age in the life of any geeky person.  For much of my life, I’ve been a collector of inspiring quotes, so I thought this would be a good time to share a quote that’s come to be one of my favorites:

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

– Douglas Adams

I have to admit, the first time I heard this quote, I did not like it much.  I was very young at the time, and I was very ambitious.  I had a very clear vision of what I intended to do with my life.  I had what I called my “master plan,” and I believed that so long as I followed my master plan I would become a rich and successful author.  The notion that Douglas Adams, one of the authors young me admired most, could end up where he ended up in life by accident didn’t make any sense to me.

I managed to stick to my master plan fairly well for a while, up until the 2008 financial crisis.  Master plans don’t hold up well in the face of global financial crises of that magnitude.  Anyway, very little in my life has gone according to plan since then.  Young me would have been distressed to hear that.  Young me would have assumed that meant I’d given up on writing by now.  Writing careers are hard.  How could anyone pursue a writing career without a plan?

Well, it turns out my love of writing is more resilient than that.  No matter what happens, I keep writing.  Even on days when I hate my own writing, I still feel that urge to write.  And I’ve come to appreciate how all the unplanned events in my life and in the world around me help make me a better writer.

How about you, friends?  Whatever age you are, whatever place you’re at in life, are there any inspiring quotes that have helped you along the way?

Does Science Make the World Less Magical?

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 5 Comments

Hello, friends!

For some reason, whenever I show up at parties, I end up having conversations with people about space.  I swear it’s not always my fault.  I am not always the first person to mention space; however, if anyone does happen to mention space in my presence, my brain contains a wealth of random space trivia, and I am all too eager to share that wealth with others.

A few years back, I was at a dinner party where somebody said something about Mars.  I think this was shortly after the Opportunity rover died, so Mars had been in the news.  Anyway, I love Mars.  I love talking about Mars.  Mars has the largest volcano in the entire Solar System, and also the deepest canyon, and sometimes the dust storms get so bad they conceal the entire planet’s surface from our view.

I could talk about Mars all night if you let me.  Unfortunately, there was one woman at that dinner party who would not let me.  All my Mars facts, all my space facts, all my science facts… she didn’t want to hear any of it.  As she explained herself, she loved to look up at the stars.  She loved to see the stars and wonder about them.  She loved wondering so much that she was afraid all my facts and information about space might spoil her experience of wonderment.

As the evening progressed, I learned that this wasn’t just about space facts.  She also enjoyed wondering how mountains could form, how birds could fly, how a tiny seed could grow into a massive redwood tree.  She loved wondering about these sorts of questions, but she adamantly refused to learn the answers.  It’s not that she was anti-science.  She agreed that science is necessary and valuable.  It’s just that science also made her sad because (in her view) it spoiled all the magic and mystery of the world around us.

I was, and still am, utterly baffled by this point of view.  It sounds like a celebration of ignorance to me.  I mean, I do understand the joy of wonder.  I wouldn’t want to lose the experience of wonderment either.  But science does not diminish wonder.  It enhances it.

Consider looking up at the night sky, noticing one slightly orange, non-twinkling point of light, and saying: “Gee, I wonder what that is.”  Now consider looking up at that same orangey point of light and thinking: “That’s Mars.  That’s a whole other world.  In some ways, it’s eerily similar to our world, and in other ways it’s wildly and terrifyingly different.  Long ago, that world was covered in water, and maybe also life.  Then something went wrong.  The whole planet dried up, and all that life (assuming it was ever there in the first place) most surely died out.  I wonder what happened.  I wonder if we’ll find fossils.  I wonder if we could ever turn Mars into a living planet again.”

Who’s having the greater experience of wonder?  Rather than spoil any magic or mystery, science has given me far bigger and far more interesting questions to wonder about.  Science has enriched my life, and if you are the kind of person who enjoys (who genuinely enjoys) the experience of wonder, I promise you that learning even a little about science will enrich your life, too.

The art used in today’s post is my own original work.  If you like my art, please consider visiting the I-Love-Space store on RedBubble.  Shopping on RedBubble is a great way to support artists (like me) so that we can keep doing what we do.  Thank you!

IWSG: What Are Books For?

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 21 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Feather Stone, Janet Alcorn, Rebecca Douglass, Jemima Pett, and Pat Garcia.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  Well, then this is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.

What are books for?  When I was young, the answer seemed self-evident.  You read a book, and the ideas and information on the page get absorbed into your brain, like uploading data into a computer.  But over the years, I’ve come to realize that books can do something far more magical than that.

You see, there are a handful of books that I’ve read and re-read over and over again.  The Lord of the Rings, The War of the Worlds, and Dune are probably my top three most re-read books.  I’ve read each of them half a dozen times at least over the course of my life.  Weirdly enough, each time, the reading experience feels different.  Some characters seem more relatable, or less relatable.  Little details seem to gain or lose significance, and the overall meaning or moral of the story seems to keep changing.

How can this be?  I haven’t bought new, updated editions of these books.  The text on the page is the same as it’s always been.  Even the typos (for some reason, my copy of Dune has a lot of typos).  So what’s happening?  If my reading experience keeps changing, but the books themselves always stay the same, then the only other factor in this equation is… me, the reader.  I’m the one who’s changed.  And every time I re-read one of my favorite books, I get a glimpse of who I am now compared to who I was five, or ten, or twenty years ago.  In the case of The Lord of the Rings, it’s been almost thirty years since the first time I read that book.

Books can impart ideas and information from the author to the reader.  That is one of their functions.  But there’s a deeper magic at work, too.  Books can also serve as psychological mirrors for their readers.  When you read a book that you love, what does that tell you about yourself?  What is the book reflecting back at you that makes you so happy?  Or, if you hate a book, what is that book reflecting back at you that makes you so mad?

As writers, our job is not merely to put words down on the page.  Our job is not merely to inform and/or entertain our readers.  Our job is also to make good mirrors.  To offer people a chance to see themselves a little more clearly.  To help them catch a glimpse of their own hearts, their own souls.  What an awesome and helpful service we writers provide!

P.S.: Oh!  Maybe that’s why they talk about “polishing” your manuscript!

Living with a Star

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 6 Comments

Hello, friends!

I love space, you love space—lots and lots of people love space.  It’s easy to get large numbers of people hyped up about outer space!  But as soon as you start talking about funding space exploration, the mood shifts.  Folks get uncomfortable, and it turns out that space can be a controversial topic after all.  So today, I want to talk about one of the reasons (just one of the reasons) why space exploration is worth the high price tag.  It has to do with the Sun.

Earth has a complicated relationship with the Sun.  Sure, the Sun gives Earth something to orbit.  It also provides Earth with light and heat and generally makes this planet livable.  However, the Sun also throws spectacular temper tantrums, flinging all sorts of high energy radiation and electrically charged particles out into space.  Sometimes, when the Sun throws a temper tantrum, it flings all those charged particles and all that super scary radiation directly at Earth.

Fortunately, Earth’s magnetic field protects us, deflecting the danger away or redirecting it toward Earth’s poles (this is what causes auroras).  And so, for the vast majority of human history, the Sun could throw all the temper tantrums she liked, and we haven’t had to worry about it much down here on the ground.  That changed on September 1st, 1859.

On that day, English astronomer Richard Carrington was studying sunspots on the Sun (using the proper safety filters on his telescope, I presume) when he observed an absolutely stupendous flash of light.  Most likely, Carrington witnessed what we now call a coronal mass ejection, or C.M.E.  Seventeen hours later, that C.M.E. hit Earth.  It’s said that the resulting auroras stretched from the poles to the tropics and were bright enough to turn night into day.  I’ve read some versions of this story that claim auroras were even visible at Earth’s equator.

The Carrington Event, as we now call it, in Richard Carrington’s honor, must have been a beautiful sight.  However, this was also the first time a C.M.E. of that magnitude hit Earth while Earth was wired up with telegraph lines.  As Earth’s magnetic field reacted to the impact of the C.M.E., induced electric currents wreaked havoc up and down the world’s telegraph network.  Telegraph operators received electric shocks.  Telegraph equipment started shooting sparks.  In some instances, those sparks started fires.

The world today is even more wired up with technology than it was in 1859, so how bad would it be if something like the Carrington Event happened again?  No one really knows, but the Sun doesn’t need to produce another Carrington Event to mess with our technology.  Much weaker solar events have damaged or disabled our satellites in orbit, triggered power outages here on the ground, and caused radio communications blackouts.  Solar storms pose radiation hazards for astronauts, obviously, but they can also put the passengers and crew of aircraft at risk, especially if those aircraft are flying anywhere near Earth’s north or south poles.  Solar storms are enough of a problem that insurance companies are paying attention, and they get nervous whenever the Sun stars acting up (see the “want to learn more?” section below if you want to learn more).

So in the early 2000’s, NASA created the Living With a Star program, or L.W.S.  Because, for better or worse, the Sun is right there, and we have to live with it.  As of this writing, there are three active L.W.S. missions in space, plus a few other solar science missions that operate outside the L.W.S. program.  They’re all monitoring the Sun, gathering new data about solar physics, doing their best to give us a least a little warning whenever the Sun decides to hurl a giant, radioactive fireball our way.  In time, perhaps these missions will teach us why the Sun’s temper tantrums happen in the first place, so that we can better predict when they’ll happen next.

I heard something on a podcast recently: there is a difference between knowing the cost of a thing and understanding the value of that thing.  Space exploration costs an enormous amount of money.  There’s no denying that.  But for a society like ours, on an increasingly technological world like ours, the value of something like the International Living With a Star program far exceeds the cost.  This is just one example of why space exploration is worthwhile, despite the high price tag, and in upcoming posts I’m planning to offer other examples, too.

Thank you for reading, friends.  I hope to talk to you again soon.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Click here to read “The Carrington Event: History’s greatest solar storm” from Space.com

Click here to visit NASA’s website for the Living With a Star Program.

I mentioned that solar storms can make insurance companies nervous.  Click here for an article on how much money the insurance industry could potentially lose due to an “extreme space weather event.”

And lastly, here’s a link to the podcast I mentioned near the end of my post.  The podcast is called Stories from Space, and the episode is titled “WTF is Happening at NASA?”

The art used in today’s post is my own original work.  If you like my art, please consider visiting the I-Love-Space store on RedBubble.  Shopping on RedBubble is a great way to support artists (like me) so that we can keep doing what we do.  Thank you!

IWSG: I Believe in Fairies

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 24 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Jennifer Lane, L Diane Wolfe, Jenni Enzor, and Natalie Aguirre.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  Well then good news!  This is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.

As you can probably tell from the name of my blog, I love space.  I also love science and science fiction.  I’ve been loving space, science, and science fiction for such a long time now that I’ve developed a highly scientific, highly evidence-based view of the world.  I don’t pay attention to astrology.  I don’t take tarot cards or Ouija boards seriously.  I don’t knock on wood or worry about black cats crossing my path.  I don’t believe in any superstitions except one: I do believe in fairies.

That’s because I happen to know a fairy.  I call her my muse, and she can be super annoying sometimes, always pestering me with new ideas and nagging me about writing whenever I take even the shortest possible break from writing.

It’s hard to deny the existence of fairies when there’s this one fairy who just will not leave you alone, not even for one goddamn minute!

Anyway, the real point I’m trying to make is that there is a highly scientific, highly evidence-based approach you could take to writing.  You could learn all about the craft of writing.  You could study plot and characterization.  You could memorize all the heroic archetypes and all twelve steps of the monomythic journey.  You could find out what words like synecdoche and antimetabole mean and then apply those concepts to your writing.

And… okay, sure, you should spend some time learning about those things.  But don’t get too technical about writing.  Don’t take too scientific of an approach.  Leave room for sudden inspiration.  Be prepared for things to suddenly make sense, and you can’t explain why.  That’s probably your muse sprinkling fairy dust on your head, causing the magical side of writing to happen.

P.S.: Of course, the great science communicator Carl Sagan once said exactly what I’m trying to say, except much more succinctly: “A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

Who Is J.S. Pailly?

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 14 Comments

Hello, friends!  Every once in a while, I think it’s good for bloggers to reintroduce themselves.  My name is James Serain Pailly, and I love space.

I love other things too, of course.  I love good food.  I love a glass of fine wine.  I love taking naps in the middle of the afternoon.  I collect books.  I have a few really nice leather-bound classics that I’m really, really proud of.  I also collect Lego, and I have several Lego sets on display in my house that I’m really proud of, too.  I love making art.  I love… well, sometimes I have mixed feelings about writing, but when the  muse is with me, I do love to write.  Oh, and I have a few close friends whom I love very much (you know who you are!).

But on this blog, I mainly talk about my love for space.  And on that note, dear reader, there is something I want to make sure you understand about me: I am not a scientist.  I’m not an aerospace engineer.  I don’t have any professional experience with space exploration whatsoever.  I’m just really enthusiastic about this stuff.  I read a lot about space, and I’m always trying to learn more.  Thanks to all that learning and all that reading, plus all that enthusiasm, the way I talk about space sometimes makes people think I must work at NASA, or something.  So I just want to clarify, for anybody who might get the wrong impression, that I don’t work at NASA.  I don’t work in the aerospace industry.  I’m just a big, big fan of space.

I also want to clarify (because this is another assumption people sometimes make about me) that my obsession with space and space exploration does not extend to U.F.O.s.  I used to be more openminded about U.F.O.s (or U.A.P.s, which seems to be the more politically correct term for them these days), but time and again the evidence never seems to hold up to scrutiny.  So no, I don’t take U.F.O.s seriously.  Or alien abductions, or conspiracy theories about reptilians running the government, or anything else along those lines.

I’m also not into astrology, though I do enjoy the astrology aesthetic.

One last thing I feel I should tell you: I’m in the LGBT community.  To be more specific, I’m a genderqueer bisexual.  That’s not super relevant to anything we talk about on this blog, but I also don’t want anyone to think I have something to hide or that I’m ashamed of who I am.  In other words: I’m here, I’m queer, now let’s get back to talking about space.

I haven’t been blogging much these last few months.  That’s due primarily to work-related stress.  You may be wondering: “So James, if you don’t work at NASA, where do you work?”  Well, dear reader, I work in news.  News is a depressing line of work, even at the best of times, and these are not exactly the best of times.  All the stress and all the anxiety of my day job has kept me from blogging, which is a real shame because blogging about space (i.e. blogging about a thing I love!) is one of the best ways I know to manage my stress and reduce my anxiety.

But I’m hoping to turn that around.  Today, I’m recommitting myself to writing this blog and posting on a more regular basis, because despite everything, I still love space.  If you also love space, then I hope you’ll join me on this adventure.

Thanks for reading, friends.  I’ll talk to you again soon.

IWSG: I Wish I Were…

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 14 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and cohosted this month by Ronel Janse Van Vuuren, Pat Garcia, and Liza @ Middle Passages.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  Well, then this is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.

Each month, IWSG asks its members a question, and this month’s question is kind of a strange one:

If for one day you could be anyone or *thing* in the world, what would it be?  Describe, tell why, and any themes, goals, or values they/it inspire in you.

I wasn’t sure how to respond to this question at first, and I was considering skipping it and talking about something else.  But then I got thinking….

I’m pretty unhappy at the moment: unhappy with the state of my personal life, the state of my art/writing progress, the state of my financial situation, the state of my country and of the world at large….  Given all that, there are plenty of other people I’d rather be right now.  Transforming into an inanimate object doesn’t sound so bad at the moment, either.

But despite all of the problems I’m facing, there are a few things I wouldn’t want to give up.  Chief among them: my stories.  The weird, Sc-Fi worlds I’ve created inside my own head.  All the characters (humans, aliens, robots, etc.) who inhabit those worlds.  No matter what, I wouldn’t want to give any of that up.  I especially do not want to give up the two or three new story ideas that popped into my head within that last few months.

And the thing is all of the story worlds I’ve created are the product of my experiences.  My good experiences, my bad experiences.  My hopes and dreams, my successes and triumphs, and also my failures.  My disappointments.  My mistakes.  Swap my life with the life of somebody else, replace my experiences with the experiences of another person, and those stories wouldn’t be the same.  And the two (or maybe three) new story ideas that I’m currently working on… the ones that I am most excited about right now… they wouldn’t exist at all if not for the particular blend of fears and anxieties that I’m dealing with right now.

So despite everything, the only person (or thing) that I want to be right now is myself, because I am the only person who can tell the stories currently sitting in my head.

P.S.: Okay, after writing this whole post, I reread the initial question and realized that I’d misunderstood it.  I missed the “for one day” part.  If I could become someone else for just one day, I’d want to be an astronaut on the International Space Station.  I think my writing would benefit from me knowing, first hand, what it’s like to be in space (provided I got to go back to being myself the next day).

IWSG: How Writing Changes You

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 12 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Joylene Nowell Butler, Louise Barbour, and Tyrean Martinson.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  Well, then this is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.

I am not the same person I was 20 years ago.  In some respects, I’m sickened to think of the person I was 20 years ago.  My outlook on life and on the world has completely changed.  I left my church, I switched political parties, I came out of the closet, I lost a lot of friends, I went no contact with my family… it’s been a rough 20 years.  It was also about 20 years ago that I began my writing journey.

Which ties in nicely with this month’s question.  Each month, IWSG asks us an optional question, and this month’s question is:

Is there a story or book you’ve written you want to/wish you could go back and change?

Oh yes.  Very much yes.  When I think about my writing from 20 years ago, I’m sickened by some of the things I wrote.  Fortunately for me, very little of that old writing was published, and even less of it is still out there on the Internet today.

But while I’m glad that those old stories aren’t out there to be seen, I do not regret writing them.  You see, one of the magical things about writing is that it reveals to you who you really are and what you really believe.  I was raised to believe certain things.  I thought I knew who I was and what my place in the world was supposed to be.  But whenever I tried to express those beliefs in a story, the story felt… disingenuous.  Halfhearted.  Unconvincing, even to me.

Writing can reveal deep, personal truths to you.  Sometimes it will reveal truths that you’re not prepared to deal with just yet.  And you don’t have to be super introspective or meditative about your writing process for this to happen.  It could be as simple as thinking “Huh, my protagonist seems like a hypocrite,” or “Huh, my antagonist raises some really good points.”  (Or maybe—I don’t know, purely hypothetical example—that Sci-Fi utopia you’re working on keeps sounding like a dystopia, no matter what you do).  That could be the first sign that your own writing is trying to teach you something about yourself.

I suspect a lot of older, more seasoned writers already know what I’m talking about in this post.  As for any new, younger writers who might be reading this, keep an open mind.  Pay attention to what your own writing is trying to tell you.  If you do, the act of writing may change you.

What’s It Like Seeing Earth from Space?

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 6 Comments

Hello, friends!

I don’t know about you, but whenever I stop and look up at the nighttime sky, I feel… something.  It’s hard to explain.  And if I take out my telescope to look more closely at the planets and nebulae and galaxies up there, I feel that same indescribable something even more.  Whatever it is I feel, it’s a powerful, almost spiritual thing.  But as powerful as that experience is, I’m told it’s nothing compared to the feeling you get when you’re up in space, looking not farther out into the cosmos but rather looking back at the Earth.

In 1987, American author and space exploration advocate Frank White coined the term “overview effect” to describe the experience so many astronauts report having when they first see the Earth from space.  These astronauts don’t just look at Earth and think, “Huh, neat view.”  They describe this as a life changing experience, a dramatic shift in belief and perspective, a sudden realization that our world is precious and fragile and that we all must set aside our differences and work toward the common good.

If only more people could have an experience like that, maybe the world would be in a better state than it is currently in.  That would be great, wouldn’t it?  Well, there are individuals and organizations working to make this an experience more people can have.  One option is, of course, to make commercial spaceflight more affordable.  Another is to try to simulate the overview effect in virtual reality.  But if more people could see our planet for what it truly is—not as a globe crisscrossed by national borders but rather as a singular world that we all must share—that might bring about some real change.  It might, right?

Now obviously there’s been some criticism of this idea, and I do think some of the criticism is valid.  Even among those who’ve been to space, who’ve experienced the overview effect for themselves, and who’ve come back eager to do good things for our planet and our species… even among those people, some of them still say some troubling things.  For example, during the Cold War, Soviet cosmonauts would sometimes remark that seeing the Earth laid out before them reinforced their belief that communism must be spread all across the world.  American astronauts occasionally say similar things about spreading freedom and democracy.  Even if we all want to do good things for our planet, we’ll still disagree about what good things our planet needs us to do.

Frank White has acknowledged this issue in some of his writings.  If you’re one of the people lucky enough to see the Earth from space, cultural and political biases, religious beliefs, personal history… all sorts of factors may influence how you describe the overview effect to others, or how you interpret the experience for yourself.  But it does seem that no matter who you are or where you come from, seeing the Earth from space is a powerful and humbling experience.  Maybe White and others in the overview effect movement are right.  Maybe it would do some good if more people could have this experience for themselves.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

A few years ago, William Shatner (a.k.a. Captain Kirk from Star Trek) went to space aboard a Blue Origin rocket.  What he saw moved him to tears.  Regardless of how you might feel about Blue Origin or its owner, Jeff Bezos, I think what Shatner had to say about the experience is worth hearing.  Click here.

Friend of the blog Matt Williams had the chance to interview Frank White a few years back, and I’m super jealous about it.  Click here to listen to that interview on Matt’s podcast, Stories from Space.

Jordan Bimm is one of the most noteworthy critics of the overview effect and the overview effect movement.  Click here to read his paper “Rethinking the Overview Effect,” which lays out his main points.

I’d also recommend reading Frank White’s response, entitled “Rethinking ‘Rethinking the Overview Effect.’”  Click here for that.

The art used in today’s post is my own original work. If you like my art, please consider visiting the I-Love-Space store on RedBubble. Shopping on RedBubble is a great way to support artists (like me) so that we can keep doing what we do. Thank you!

IWSG: Hope for the Future

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 16 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Rebecca Douglass, Beth Camp, Liza @ Middle Passages, and Natalie @ Literary Rambles.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  Then this is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.

Each month, the Insecure Writer’s Support Group asks us a question.  The question is totally optional!  IWSG member can answer it if they like, or they can talk about something else if that’s what they want (or need) to do this month.  No pressure, no judgment.  This month’s optional question is:

Describe someone you admired when you were a kid.  Did your opinion of that person change when you grew up?

Oh boy… so I had an assignment in school once.  I had to pick an American historical figure I admired and give an oral presentation on that person to the class.  The teacher said we could pick anybody, so I picked Gene Roddenberry.  Then the teacher said to take this seriously and made me pick somebody else.  I’ve been bitter about that ever since, but now—finally!—I can satisfy little kid me’s dream and tell you why I admired Gene Roddenberry so much.

Truth be told, though, little kid me didn’t know much about Roddenberry.  All I knew was that he created Star Trek, and I absolutely adored Star Trek.  When I was happy, Star Trek was the most fun and exciting thing on television.  And when I was no so happy, Star Trek offered hope and the promise that the future would be better than today.  No matter who was bullying me at school, and no matter what I was dealing with at home, Star Trek reassured me that the future would be better.

It’s also one of the main reasons I started writing.  Some of the first “books” I wrote as a kid were just Star Trek fan fiction.  I then branched out into writing Jurassic Park fan ficiton, Aliens fan fiction, Star Wars fan fiction, Battlestar Galactica fan fiction, Doctor Who fan fiction….  Later, I created my own original characters and sent them off adventuring in my own original Sci-Fi universe.  Meanwhile, I started reading Scientific American, Sky and Telescope, Universe Today… I tried reading more challenging, more technical sources of science info, too.  I didn’t understand everything I read, but the more I learned about space and science, the more convinced I became that Star Trek got it right: the future will be better than today.  Or at least, the future can be better, if we don’t lose faith in ourselves.

This isn’t a message unique to Star Trek.  All Sci-Fi, regardless of how realistic or unrealistic the science may be, offers us hope for the future.  Even darker, more dystopian visions of the future still offer hope, in their own way: hope that we may yet choose a different path forward.

As an adult, I’ve come to learn that Gene Roddenberry was kind of a jerk.  He cheated Alexander Courage (the guy who wrote the Star Trek theme song) out of half of the royalties he was owed.  He was wildly unfaithful to his wife.  He had a notoriously short temper and created a toxic work environment on set.  In short, Roddenberry was not the hero little kid me might have thought.

Still, Roddenberry had some good ideas, and (with the help of many other talented people) he made something that made a real difference in my life.  Now more than ever, here on this blog and in all my other creative work, I hope I can pass on some of that Star Trek-ian optimism to others.