Prehistory of Geekdom--the Final Chapter

You can argue that the title "Father of Science Fiction" can be awarded to a number of different people for perfectly valid reasons, but good ol' Jules Verne is the man most commonly referred to as such. And, by golly, he deserves it.

It was Verne who really took the idea of reasonably extrapolating what technological advances might some day be possible, then building wonderful works of fiction around that idea. It was Verne who gave us great characters like Captain Nemo and Phileas Fogg. It was Verne who really did invent science fiction.

Not that his extrapolations were always accurate. If you ever decide to travel to the moon, do not do so by shooting yourself out of a giant cannon. It's just not a good idea.

A century and a half later, Verne's novels are still wonderful experiences. His enthusiasm and imagination literally drips from each page, making the reader yearn to join Nemo on his submarine or Fogg in his lightning fast trip around the world.

H.G. Wells, the other 19th Century "Father of Science Fiction," was less concerned with scientific accuracy (something Verne was critical of) and more concerned with hiding a little bit of social commentary in his works. The trouble was that his ideas were so cool that almost no one every notices the commentary. War of the Worlds, for instance, was meant in part to be a criticism of Western colonialism. But those really cool Martian tripods ended up being so much fun in their own right that the deeper meaning pretty much sailed over everyone's head.

But, heck, those tripods are worth the price of admission by themselves. The heck with all that deeper meaning.

Anyway, these two men pretty much guaranteed the continued existence of science fiction. Without them, we probably wouldn't have had Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury or John Campbell. We wouldn't have X-Wing fighters, Federation starships, or Colonial Space Marines getting caught by face huggers. We wouldn't have AT-AT walkers or Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon.

Welles and Verne provided the final and perhaps most important ingredient for creating the modern geek. Their work, combined with those writing detective fiction, horror, Westerns and adventure stories during the 19th Century--all of whom were building on themes and characters from myth and legend--created those of us who can rattle off the secret identities of the X-Men without even pausing or tell you exactly what episode Spock first used the Vulcan nerve pinch.

As I said when I originally started this series--all of history has culminated in the creation of the comic book/science fiction geek. We are the pinnacle of civilization. Bow before us. We will soon rule over you all.

Prehistory of Geekdom, part 5

Whodunit? Well, to find that out, you need a brilliant detective. And the first modern detective to appear in popular fiction was C. Auguste Dupin, drawn out of Edgar Allen Poe’s blood red imagination to catch a killer in the 1841 story Murders in the Rue Morgue.

It’s literally impossible to underestimate Poe’s influence on the mystery genre. Other writers before him had dabbled in the idea of protagonists using deductive reasoning, but Poe gives us the first true fictional detective. He also establishes the tradition of having the story narrated by a “Watson,” a less-brilliant but loyal sidekick.

But it still took a few more decades before the detective story became a regular part of popular fiction. As the 19th Century progressed, industrialization was bringing a greater percentage of the population into the cities. Thus, the Western and frontier heroes that were popular in dime novels needed to be supplemented by urban heroes. The detective rose again to fill this slot.

There were a gazillion or so different detectives working the dime novel beat: Old King Brady, the Old Sleuth, Harlem Jack, Round Kate and Old Snap—just to name a few. The most popular and long-lasting was Nick Carter. But in 1888, the dime novel coppers were instantly and forever overshadowed by Sherlock Holmes.

“A man who never lived, but will never die,” Orson Welles once said of Holmes. It’s true, you know. Holmes may be the most perfectly created fictional character ever—all his talents, skills, foibles and faults come together in perfect synergy. His influence overshadows even Edgar Allen’s creation. Writer Arthur Conan Doyle gave Holmes Dr. Watson as a loyal friend, plopped him down into a series of nifty mysteries, and changed geekdom forever.

It was from Holmes that we eventually got Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Ellery Queen. It was a reaction to Holmes’ influence that gave us hard-boiled writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. And without Holmes, we wouldn’t have had that dark god to all geeks—Batman.

Unlike the Western, the detective story had never lost its massive popular appeal and the ranks of great detectives has grown long indeed. Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Miss Marple might very well wield an influence that equals Holmes, but other skilled writers have also provided us with countless and only slightly lesser variations on the Great Detective theme.

And, by golly, we are lucky they did. It’s the detective story, mixed together with the adventure story, the Western, the horror story and the science fiction story, that give form to most comic book heroes and a lot of the geekier TV shows and movies.

I just mentioned the science fiction story, didn’t I? I guess we’ll stay in the 19th Century for one more chapter, as we have yet to talk about Jules and Hebert George. Those two—and those they influenced—play yet another key role in the creation of geeks.

Prehistory of Geekdom, Part 4

The interesting thing about the American Western is that the genre was developed at the same time the history of the real West was unfolding. I’m not sure if any event in history was mythologized quite that quickly.


While the West was being settled and the Indian Wars being fought, the dime novel publishers back east were churning out Western fiction by the trainload. Many of these stories featured fictional characters, but many grabbed real life people like Kit Carson, Jesse James and Buffalo Bill, making them into myths often while they were still alive. And their readers couldn’t get enough of it.

So by the time the West was no longer quite as Wild, the Western was an established genre in popular fiction. All the tropes that go with it—the fast draw; the school marm in danger; the laconic cowpoke—were a part of our cultural consciousness. When the marshal and the outlaw met in the street at high noon, we didn’t need an explanation of what would happen next. We just knew.

Westerns remained popular for much of the 20th Century and the genre contributed a lot to modern geekiness. It’s almost difficult to imagine nowadays just how popular characters like the Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy were. Heck, Hopalong was the first character to appear on a lunchbox! How cool is that? During the 1930s & 1940s, Hopalong was the hero in 66 B-movies. In the 1950s, he added 52 half-hour TV episodes and a radio show to the mix. Roy Rogers’ fictional cowboy persona was equally popular.

And you know what was cool about the actors who played these characters? They recognized that many (if not most) of their fans were children. They were role models, by golly. And they embraced the responsibility inherent in this. Clayton Moore (the Lone Ranger), William Boyd (Hopalong) and Roy Rogers all lived good lives outside their films and TV shows. They knew they had examples to set about honesty and hard work and decency, so they lived in ways to exemplify these virtues. They never let their fans down.

William Boyd is especially noteworthy here, because prior to being cast as Hopalong, he had cheated and drank his way through several marriages. But when he became a role model, he cleaned up his act. He quit drinking and his fifth marriage lasted the rest of his life.

Anyway, back to the Western. We’ve had a number of excellent novelists giving us strong stories through the years: Zane Grey, Max Brand, Louis L’Amour, Alan Lemay and others. During the 1950s, when the popularity of superhero comics waned for awhile, Westerns were one of the mainstays of the comic industry. Radio gave us cool shows like The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke and The Cisco Kid. TV gave extended life to these shows and tossed in excellent fare like The Rifleman and Bat Masterson.



The Western has lost much of the hold it had on our culture, but it’s still out there. And its contribution to geekiness is undeniable.

Prehistory of Geekdom, Part 3

Orson Welles once called The Count of Monte Cristo “the most ingenious tall tale ever perpetrated by the mind of man.”

He very well may have been right. It’s well-known that Alexander Dumas used ghost writers to help produce the volumes of fiction he did, but he is still the guiding hand that dropped poor Edmund Dantes into prison, then helped create an ingenious escape plan. His was the mind that led D’Artagnan to join up with the Three Musketeers. He was responsible for turning Cardinal Richelieu and Milady de Winter into fiction’s most memorable villains. It was he who forever trapped Louis XIV’s luckless twin brother in a mask made of iron.

Dumas’ influence on adventure fiction can’t be underestimated. But during the same century he was arranging for Athos, Porthos and Aramis to once again face off against the Cardinal’s Guards, one of his countrymen was also putting his mark on the adventure genre.

It was Victor Hugo who set Quasimodo to ringing the bells of Notre Dame and had him fall tragically in love with the beautiful Esmeralda. Hugo had Inspector Jalvert obsessively hunt the escaped convict Jean Valjean for decades, only to finally realize his prey had become a better man that he was.

Dumas and Hugo created or popularized character archetypes and themes that would forever permeate geeky fiction, movies and comics. Loyalty, heroism, generosity in spirit and in action, mercy, and really cool sword fights—the two Frenchmen covered all these bases and more.

But it wasn’t only the French who were kicking literary butt in the 19th Century. Robert Louis Stevenson pretty much handed us our modern view of old-time pirates when he wrote Treasure Island. Long John Silver is another of the great villains of literature and his complex relationship with Jim Hawkins gives that adventure novel a backbone that ensures its status as a classic pretty much forever.

And James Fenimore Cooper, whose Deerstalker tales actually don’t hold up over time as well as Dumas, Hugo and Stevenson, still gets credit for popularizing tales of the American frontier, which would soon evolve into the American Western. Without Cooper, we quite possibly wouldn’t have John Ford or Howard Hawks movies. We almost definitely wouldn’t have Two-Gun Kid and Jonah Hex (the original comic book character—not the lame version that appeared in a recent film). And then where would we be? So we’ll forgive Cooper’s stilted prose and give him the credit he is due.

Of course, there had been great adventure fiction before the 19th Century: Homer’s ancient poems, Beowulf and Don Quixote all come immediately to mind. The later authors were building on that foundation. But Hugo, Dumas, Stevenson and Cooper pretty much perfected the genre, laying the ground work for much of the sort of storytelling we geeks most often geek-out on today.

Prehistory of Geekdom, Part 2

19th Century literature was the real gestation period for modern nerdiness, contributing stories and themes in a number of important genres. The century’s most important contribution to geekdom, though, is perhaps the development of gothic horror.


Mary Shelley, for instance, gave us Frankenstein. The origin of the novel is a classic tale in of itself—one dark and stormy night in 1816, Mary, along with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori, challenged one another to write a ghost story. Percy never really got started. Polidori turned out something that has been lost to the ages (which Mary later remembered as terrible), while Byron started a story but never finished it.


Mary, on the other hand, literally dreamed up her tale of a scientist who creates new life out of sewn-together corpses. Boy, did she start something! Full of themes and characters that strike to the heart of human nature (despite the novel’s often awkward plot construction), Frankenstein has become a part of our cultural consciousness.

In 1897, Bram Stoker gave us Dracula—the vampire who stands shoulder to shoulder with Frankenstein’s creation as one of the horror genre’s greatest creation.


Dracula is a great novel. A few of the heroes are marred by wooden characterizations, but Abraham Van Helsing is one of the coolest guys ever. And Stoker  literally creates the modern view of vampires (a view later cemented in our culture by a gazillion or so movies), coming up with a villain who is ever so slightly sympathetic, but still obviously evil.

And in between Shelley and Stoker we had Edgar Allan Poe. Gee whiz, Poe was a master of the English language, writing short stories in vivid, feverish prose that begs to be read aloud.


Try it. Grab a copy of “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Cask of Amontillado” and read it aloud. Even if you don’t have a real talent for reading aloud, it’s going to sound great.


A large part of the identity of us nerds come from the horror genre, which (when done right) tells a great story AND comments on the identifiable difference between good and evil. It’s a genre that has been nearly ruined over the last few decades by gross-out imagery and the absence of moral direction. But Shelley, Stoker and Poe knew how to do horror right. They knew how to scare you rather than just nauseate you.



Oh, yeah, Poe also pretty much invented the detective story—more on that in a later chapter.


Other writers—Hawthorne, Sheridan LeFanu, Guy De Mauppassant and others—also made important contributions to gothic horror. But without Shelley, Stoker and Poe, it’s quite possible that the modern comic book/SF nerd wouldn’t exist.


A world without me in it? Unthinkable.

The Prehistory of Geekdom, Part 1

Where do all us nerds come from? Well, it turns out that all of history has conspired together to produce us. We comic book/SF geeks and nerds—those of us who can discuss painfully obscure aspects of Star Trek and cite comic book events by issue number, writer and artist--are the veritable culmination of everything. We are, by golly, the very pinnacle of civilization.


It’s true. Think about it. Elements that make up the plots, themes and characters of modern comics, as well as science fiction and fantasy novels/films/TV shows, go back to pretty much the beginning of civilization.


The various myths of many different cultures all contribute towards modern storytelling. For Western culture, we look most often to the Greeks. What is Hercules (or Perseus or Theseus) if not one of the original superheroes? Heck, the Jason and the Argonauts cycle is pretty much the original superhero team-up. Without the Argo, would we have the Justice League or the Avengers? Without Hercules, would we have Superman? (We certainly wouldn’t have the Marvel Comics version of Hercules, which in of itself would be a loss.)

Take a look at the Trojan War and the events of the Iliad. Aside from it kind of being yet another superhero team-up, the story deals with themes like loyalty, envy, bitterness, courage and honor. All themes that run rampant through comic books and adventure fiction of various genres.


Stories from religious history also contribute to geekiness. The story of Moses, for instance, teaches us a myriad of things about God’s nature and His plans for us even today. But it also once again provides us with both plot elements and themes that run through geeky fiction to this day. Without Moses (sent on a journey by his parents to save his life—adopted into another culture—returns to lead his people to freedom and bring us all laws that strengthen truth and justice), we almost certainly wouldn’t have Superman (sent on a journey by his parents to save his life—adopted into another culture—grows up to become a force for truth and justice).


As civilization progressed, storytellers and troubadours continued to toss elements into the mix that helped create the comic book nerd. Medieval tale-spinners took vague historical figures and used them to build the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood (two more examples of superhero teams). Even more so than in ancient Greece—due mostly to the influence of Judeo-Christian ethics--these characters came to represent fighting for what is right, protecting the innocent and promoting justice.

These tales gave us not just the basis for comic book superheroes, but the elements needed to create characters such as Captain Nemo, Long John Silver, Hopalong Cassidy, Indiana Jones, Han Solo, and James Bond. Heck, you can argue that SF novels such as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy owe a debt to King Arthur’s Round Table. Hari Seldon assembles an organization of scientists to save civilization, just as Arthur brought together an organization of warriors to do pretty much the same thing.

So--clearly--all of human history has been working towards the creation of the comic book/SF nerd. It actually is all about us.


That’s it for now. This series will be intermittent rather than weekly, but when we return to it, I think we’ll jump forward to the 19th Century. This was a century that bred the elements of geekiness right and left—the creation of detective fiction, gothic horror, dime novels and pirate novels all come from the 1800s. Alexander Dumas had a few plots and characters to add to the mix as well.