We all fight over our favorite books, but I find the more interesting question to be: what are your most frequent books?

WHY DO WE RETURN TO BOOKS?

With no conscious decision, there are some books I’ve read dozens and dozens of times, and in contrast, there are some books I love so much or that are so life-changing, I know repeated exposure will never match the feeling, so I’ve never gone near them again. WHAT distinguishes them? I don’t know.

This isn’t a definitive list of the best books or anything like that, but just a peek into the weirdness and deeply personal experience of reading. I’ve covered my favorite libraries in fiction before, some other books I’ve read again and again.

BOOKS I’VE READ DOZENS OF TIMES

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Mostly because I needed something slightly engaging to fall asleep to and a British accent reading Jane Austen was perfect. I can quote large chunks of this book. Like full chapters at a time by now…

Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver

It’s set in New Mexico, and I was living in Europe when I was reading this on repeat. I love the message, but I mostly read it for this quintessential Western American story, so familiar to where I grew up.

Treachery in Death, JD Robb

This is one of her endless futuristic mysteries. This one focused on leadership, and I picked it up just as I jumped into management and was definitely feeling the crunch. It was so idealized and perfect that I just kept returning to it.

Ghost Mountain Shifters, Audrey Faye

This group of werewolves live collectively in the woods and the community support and healing were completely addictive during the pandemic isolation.

Starship Mage, Glynn Stewart

This is like Star Wars, only woke (in the best way), with a hero with huge integrity and a fascinating world. It’s just…entertaining. I go searching for cool new books and just find myself redownloading these when I need to turn off my brain.

BOOKS I’VE LOVED BEYOND REASON AND NEVER TOUCHED AGAIN

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

I read this in middle school, one of the first “adult” books I picked up, and I remember being so shocked and rocked at every turn that I knew I would never feel that shocked again and would rather have a perfect memory.

Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A Heinlein

The origin of the slang “grok,” this alien comes to earth story is one of the first Sci-Fi books I read, and the contrast between this and Dicken’s endless wordsmithing was…marked.

Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien

I think I haven’t revisited this one simply due to the size. I have a friend who can tell you what is happening on any day of our calendar year in the book, and I’ve felt so inadequate in comparison.

A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving

During the climactic scene of this book, I remember dropping the book, running out the door of my house, and about three blocks before I slowed down, it was that shocking, in the best way. And knew I could never return to it.

What are the books you’ve read a thousand times and what are the books you’ve read once? I realize this says so much more about who I was as a person and where I was than about the books.

The post What Books Do You Read Again and Again? first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY ARE ALWAYS ABOUT NOW

Whether authors intend it or not, speculative fiction is always a commentary on the present. Ironically, often more than a lot of contemporary fiction.

One of my favorite short stories by Asimov, and I wish I could find it again, had miners working in space with essentially, nanotechnology. But the conflict of the story was about women working in the mines, which was eventually solved with a priest. Women in the mines turned out to be fine, so long as there was somebody there to marry everybody! This is what I’m talking about. Successfully predicted nanotechnology, but thousands of years from now, everyone will act like it’s the 1950s…

Frank Herbert was particularly topical, whether he intended to be or not. He anchored Dune in politics, government, religion, power and those evolved to match the world from the 50s to the 80s.

So I did a little thought experiment. Here’s how I think Dune would have been different if Frank Herbert had been writing in 2020.

METOO COMES TO DUNE

The Bene Gesserit warrior concubines of the Dune universe had a lot of conflict in 98 hours, but questioning the ethics of their sacrifice wasn’t one of them.

Things like consent and bodily autonomy in and gaining power through sex with powerful men would all have been fascinating themes to explore if it was being written now. There’s a lot of conflict within the Bene Gesserit, but not one woman refused their assignment as they definitely would have now!

SECRET SOCIETIES WOULD HAVE NOT SO SECRET SCANDALS

Sex would rear its ugly head again in the other warrior disciplines. Most of the eastern contemplative communities to spring up in the 60s that were aped so favorably in Dune have almost universally been rocked by sexual scandals. Yoga, Buddhism, martial arts, the New Age. You name it and someone’s got caught doing something with somebody and the shine is definitely off.

GOVERNMENT WOULD STILL SUCK

Dune started as an empire and ended as a broken empire. At no part, did anyone get any more rights. And unfortunately, I don’t think this would have changed in 2020. If anything, his prophecies about tyrants seem only more and more accurate as time goes on.

PEOPLE WILL WORSHIP ANYTHING NOW

The deep antipathy towards religion in Dune I don’t think we have changed in 2020, but I do think it would have spread beyond just the official religions of Dune.

In 2020 with a wellspring of cult research and cult-like groups have greatly expanded our definition of religion.

We have wellness, political, beauty, and diet cults now. And sometimes we have diet cults that morph into political cults or vice versa. They all have the trappings of high demand group with fervent followers, but with none of the traditional religious expression. It’s a fascinating phenomenon. These days, religion does not stay its lane and it wouldn’t in Dune either.

PLANTS MATTER…MORE THAN EVER

People read climate change into Dune, which I don’t think was the case when he wrote it in the 60s. Yes, the environmental movement was just getting its start, but the focus really was on getting noxious chemicals out of our air and water and food supply.

Did people know about climate change? Yes! People have known about climate change for centuries! But it wasn’t a part of the national consciousness.

If you were written today, I think it would have been more of a critique or a metaphor for climate change. The desiccated planet as metaphor is just too perfect.

DRUGS ARE A HEALTH PROBLEM!

Drugs (Spice) probably changed the most in the book from this amazing thing that granted everybody powers to a kind of shameful addictive weakness.

Today, it’s morphing, (rightly!), into a medical problem with a raft of failed policies behind it. So perhaps that same tension between the realm of criminal and the realm of health would infect Dune.

What story do you think would change if it was written now?

The post The Future is Now… In Fiction first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune

I listened on audiobook to all of the Dune books written by Frank Herbert. (There are over 30 now completed by his son Brian after his death, but I had to draw a line in the sand somewhere!)

WHAT DID I LEARN? WHAT DID I NOTICE? WAS IT WORTH IT?

WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW

Herbert started the first book, Dune, in 1959 (published in ’65) and published the last book Chapterhouse: Dune, in 1985. Those were pretty important decades in our history, and the change from the unrest and idealism of the 60s to the stability and disillusionment of the 80s drenches the text.

WHO WAS FRANK?

During my English major, we always debated how much of the author you could really find in a work of fiction. And whether it was useful or appropriate to play a game of Author Gotcha as literary critique.

So now I’m going to do just that…

Because this was by far my most shocking takeaway. Dune, like Lord of the Rings, is historical fiction now.

This old article from NK Jemison has the best take on Lord of the Rings, I think. Tolkien was progressive for his time, which matters! But given that he was a man of his time, he still seems pretty racist to us.

Which to me means: don’t cancel Tolkien or his work based on today’s morality. But definitely cancel anyone wanting to use Tolkien’s morality today. In other words: more fantasy characters for everyone!

Like Tolkien, Herbert’s beliefs and morals and those of the original readers are so changed from now that they are becoming inscrutable.

He was officially conservative in life, but his death was over 20 years ago, and his birth was over 100 years ago, and that kind of conservative doesn’t exist anymore. And we’re so much more than our political party, but it’s a useful shorthand for a drastically different worldview.

The morals of these made-up people and the critiques of government, ecology, religion, sex, gender, and sexuality else do not feel current anymore. Not any less genius or fun to read or important in the canon of Science Fiction! But they are a social commentary on a world that’s gone. And it’s completely fascinating.

HOW IT STARTED: 1959

MASTERY OF MIND AND BODY = MASTERY OF THE WORLD. AT FIRST.

The fifties and sixties saw an explosion of hippies and Eastern practices become The Way to deal with the suffering of modern life. It’s very much apparent in the first few books how deeply that interested Herbert.

One of the central myths: we can train ourselves out of our weaknesses. That’s the joy of fiction, in Dune, they succeed!

His Mentats (human computers) train their minds. Sardaukar, Fremen, Fish Speakers, and other warriors train their bodies. And Bene Gesserit (warrior concubines) do all of the above (mind, body, and especially, sex.) You see what I mean about the ’60s?

GOVERNMENT SUCKS

All of these were basically monkish disciplines to get better and overcome the horrors and slovenliness of the fat bureaucrats through personal asceticism at a time with inflation and stagnation and unrest were sweeping the world.

The fight between the slovenly, enslaving aristocrats and the noble Atreides is the main plot of the first books.

In Dune, power doesn’t just corrupt, it makes you fat. (And sometimes a pedophile…)

RELIGION SUCKS MORE

All throughout the books, there’s a deep antipathy towards religion. The concubines seed worlds with Messiah narratives so that later any disciple who needs to can “fulfill” a prophecy they themselves have foretold in order to be treated well. The later books are basically the evolution of Atreides from Messiah to Tyrant. And over and over again priests and prophets get mowed down for their faith.

Believing in anything except your own physical and mental discipline is a really, really bad idea in Dune.

PLANTS MATTER

How do you get oxygen on a world without plants? (Answer: you can’t, they just live deep below the desert!) It was genius at a time right after Rachel Carsen’s Silent Spring launched the modern environmental movement. The evolution of Dune from desert to water was, and very much in line with the ’70s environmental consciousness.

ESPECIALLY IF YOU SMOKE THE PLANTS

This first book obviously was also very concerned with Spice and the supernatural powers that drugs give you, which are, again, huge themes of the time!

HOW IT ENDED: 1985

Fast forward to the last book, published 25 years later, and though it’s about the same universe, the stakes change completely.

MASTERY FADES IN FAVOR OF POWER

The warrior monks continue to have supernatural powers. Still, we spend most of the time watching them jockey for political power as they use their mastery to maintain their positions. And the horrors of personal power just… go away. The main bad guys of the first book die out in favor of the supposed good guys acting A LOT like them.

This is justified because if they didn’t, all of humanity would perish. PERISH, I tell you! A journey we took as a world, not just in Dune.

PLANTS DON’T MATTER ANYMORE

(Especially big spoiler alert!)

The books end with Dune destroyed and a worm on a new planet making new spice. Which is… kind of the thing they were all trying and failing to do for most of human history and the central problem of the first books? Dune has a monopoly on spice that controls everything about the universe. And it’s suddenly done! How? I don’t know. They just do it. Ecology clearly faded from importance.

BUT IMMIGRANTS DO MATTER!

The ecology is all but ignored in favor of a panic about immigrants who have the warrior monk’s power, but none of their integrity, and so are wrecking everything as they come in from the scattering of humanity speaking a weird form of Spanish and are evil because… Yeah, that’s also never clear. And also indicative of the times.

DRUGS ARE BAD NOW

Spice’s evolution is fascinating! It’s necessary for interstellar travel, but they figure that out with the technology they used to hate more than anything. But it’s suddenly better than spice! People still use it, but hide their glowing blue eyes and become ashamed of their addiction. Sound like the ’80s?

GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION STILL SUCK

Governments get more and more corrupt and religion gets more and more gullible as the books go on. This is one thing that doesn’t change throughout all the books.

“Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most. I distrust the extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat.”  ― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

HOW IT’S GOING

THINGS I LOVED

I appreciate how the success of the book allowed him to really play as the series went on. The first novel was a fairly standard hero’s journey welded onto a Shakespearean family tragedy. By the last book, the story had taken fifty different turns exploring sex, youth, history, cloning, space travel, and so much more. 

I also loved that for all its epic scale, it stayed intimate on a few characters, still focused around an Atreides. And I also loved on the timescale that went on for thousands and thousands of years. It was clear he had a lot of fun imagining the implications of a Messiah figure ten or twenty generations down the line.

THINGS I COULD HAVE DONE WITHOUT

The central message, if there is such a thing, is that if you do not control humanity, humanity will die out. Even though, it seems to me, through the control, all of the fun parts of humanity have died out in the process, what exactly is worth saving at the end of the process?

That and the outdated gender roles and homophobia and stereotyping and the dominance and illiberalism were surprising. I feel like people see the hippie stand-ins in the first book and take them for radicals, but they are completely not. At all.

But again, that became more swallowable as I related to this as historical fiction. Important not in spite of those flaws but because of them. 

WAS IT WORTH IT?

I enjoyed them all. The world is fascinating.  The characters were bizarre and relatable. Race relations and gender relations were hard to stomach sometimes and were bloody brilliant at other times. This is seminal science fiction. It’s an important part of our canon and it’s also an amazing snapshot of this moment in time in our culture change from the 50s to the 80s. Dune is historical fiction now. Who would have thought?

So yes, 98 hours later – more than worth it.

The post Do Judge Authors by Their Time? Dune, Tolkien, and Outrage first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

I love getting lost in a library. It is extra fun when I get lost in a library in a book. And the most fun is when I get lost in a magical library in a book. Here are the best ones.

1984, George Orwell

Definitely not a favorite, but a HUGE influence. The Ministry for Truth, where “ignorance is strength” rocked my world as a sophomore in high school. It was really the first true dystopian novel I read and I had no idea such a thing was possible! Little did I know how relevant it would be.  It was a WARNING, not an instruction manual!

The Midnight Library, Matt Haig I read this recently, (the inspiration for this post, actually), and was surprised to see a true parable getting mainstream play. It’s a clever book about regret, choices, and quantum physics. And like I said, it’s just a straight-up, unapologetic parable.

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. Time and Fate fall in love in a library for all stories beneath the earth. Also, there are bees. And the librarians get their tongues cut out. The ending fumbled a teeny bit as the story got away from her, but my god, the library was spectacular!

The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman. A spy steals fiction from alternate realities and brings it back to one huge library of everything ever written anywhere. This one is a teeny bit slow to get started, but it’s another with multiple universes. (What is it about a library that lends itself so well to different versions of life?

Abhorsen Trilogy by Garth Nix. Technically there is only a library featured in one of these books, but this trilogy is classic! Who would have thought a necromancer would have been so romantic? This is YA, and the contrast between the girl who can see the dead and the rest of her people who can see the future broke my heart the first time I read it.

The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monae. Multi-hyphenates are all the rage these days, but a singer who can write like this?  I’m slightly jealous. This is a series of stories set within her albums in this unique Afrofuturism book less about a library and more about who curates the rest of our information.

These are some of my favorite books. Please send your suggestions if you know of any other good magical libraries! Truly, they are one of my favorite things.

The post The Best Magical Libraries in Fiction first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

There’s an apocryphal story about racing Grayhounds and how when they catch the dog or the bunny, they cease to race. Though there is no confirmation of this story anywhere in actual racing circles.

I am a little suspicious of it because, though I’m allergic to anything with fur, when normal dogs catch anything, they seem to be quite happy to repeat the experience all day.

But it’s a useful metaphor about human behavior, so let’s pretend it’s true, which is also very common human behavior.

Either the dog is completely satisfied by that one bone and never tries to run again, or he’s so pissed off that the bone or the bunny is made of cardboard, he also never runs again.

This past week, I caught the bunny. Twice. 

One day this week, I checked off everything on my to do list. Not just the explicit list that has a prayer of occasionally looking realistic, but also the unspoken expectations I hold myself to, that if I ate vegetables, exercised twice, got to bed on time, called my friends and actually talked to them, and smelled all the flowers – life would be… perfect?

Yes, I had a perfect day, according to some past version of myself that put down a list of tasks that when completed would mean this day was not wasted.

And then a couple nights later, I slept through the night! I put my head on my pillow, closed my eyes and opened them 8 hours later when the sun was coming up. I have nuclear levels of insomnia and can count on my fingers the number of nights I’ve gone to bed and woken with the sun. In my entire life.

It was the perfect day and the perfect night. In the same week!

It was terrible!

ASPIRATIONS ARE THE EPIC FANTASY VERSION OF YOUR LIFE

The day after the perfect night’s sleep, I was actually kind of groggy. It was hard to get started in the morning. I wasn’t calmer, more clearheaded, or more articulate. Or any happier. In fact, I was just still me. And then I slept like absolute crap the next night.

The day of perfect productivity, I felt kind of frenetic. Too busy. Too rushed. I wasn’t more accomplished, peaceful, connected. Or any happier. I was also still just me.

I’ll leave the sociopolitical antecedents of productivity from the Protestant reformation to modern hustle culture for another newsletter. We definitely have a really screwed up relationship with work and leisure, but I think the heart of our difficulty with getting things done is more fundamental than our present stopwatch age.

My favorite book on this subject is the Gap and the Gain, by Dan Sullivan, though there are many that cover reality vs aspiration, the real vs expected self, and many other synonyms for the fact that human brains can imagine the future.

One scientist calls that improvisational intelligence, or more prosaically, creativity. We can picture something that hasn’t happened yet.

That little jump in intelligence means we are forever living two lives:

• Today: the exhausting, smelly,  inconvenient, delicious, disgusting, crying, silly, distracted experience of reality.
• Tomorrow: the productive, calm, impulse-free, benevolent, successful perpetual future.

Sometimes imagination sucks.

Sullivan says that handling the gap is a key skill to life satisfaction. Note, I didn’t say closing the gap and finally living up to tomorrow, getting everything done, and fulfilling all your dreams.

Today and on the day of your death, there will still be a gap between what you want to happen and what happens.

We will always have to manage that gap. It’s a skill I deeply suck at, by the way, so this is not sage advice on how to do this. This is that I am here in the trenches next to you, and I peaked out for a second.

This week was proof positive that closing the gap does not make life better, because for twenty four hours, I lived as close to tomorrow as I think I’m ever going to get.

I lived exactly how I wanted to, perfectly, and felt like the exact same as all the days I fail miserably.

HERE ARE A FEW TIPS FOR HANDLING THE GAP

Photo: NikoReto

REMIND YOURSELF IT’S NEVER GOING AWAY

When we fall short of what we aspire to do, we hardly ever look at the aspiration. We always blame ourselves. A huge leap forward is just remembering that we have made up what we want to do and so when we fall short, you need to examine the expectation as closely as reality.

Even as I write this, I hear the voice in my head that says: you’re going to be a lazy failure sitting on the couch forever. But I promise you, as someone who did nothing but sit on the couch for several months, it’s really hard to do.

Even when I was so sick that I couldn’t do anything but sit on the couch, it was still extremely hard to do. The version of yourself that plays on a loop when you don’t drink enough water or watch one more episode isn’t going to happen.

CHAOS HAPPENS AND SUCCESS IS ONLY A PROBABILITY

We think accomplishing everything we want to protect us against failure. We can keep the chaos at bay if we are perfect.

The perfect version wouldn’t have been taken in by charlatans. And would have picked the right job. And the right partner. And wouldn’t have said that boneheaded thing to your sister-in-law.

We don’t live in a deterministic universe; we live in a probabilistic one governed by chaos. Things just randomly go wrong, and the things we plan have only a chance of coming true. That means we waste a lot of time, take a lot of chances that don’t pay off, and even the things we are successful at are often random too.

TRY FOR THE MINIMUM EFFECTIVE DOSE

Often when we make changes, we want to do all of the things. I’m a big fan of the geographic cure, when you quit your job, break your lease, and move across the country and start in a completely new industry. But that’s just me.

The minimum effective dose is a medical term, but it can be applied to just about anything. It means making small changes that add up overtime. It’s prosaic and not at all sexy, but it makes for a smaller gap which is what we’re going for.

MEASURE YOURSELF AGAINST THE PAST, NOT YOUR FUTURE

This is Sullivan‘s main advice for handling the fact that we are always aspirational beings. The answer is not to let go of anything that you want and just sit like a slug. The answer is to want things and to attempt to improve, but to measure not against an imagined perfect future, but against your very imperfect and probably less skilled past self.

That way you are always looking at realistic progress that you have made, which is motivating, and you’re measuring accurately instead of always feeling like a failure.

And if this sounds like a cop-out, in his research, the people who do this get much farther in life because they are more motivated and more realistic and they just have a much better time than people who always move the goal posts.

TASTE YOUR FOOD; SMELL SOME FLOWERS

Oh yes, mindfulness, that old chestnut. And yet it makes every list for a reason.

I am absolutely not telling you to sit down and meditate every day. In my 20s, I went on a month-long retreat where I meditated for 16 hours a day on top of years long daily practice. And I am back to tell you it also did not help. You are still you.

Only you get really hypersensitized so that every twitch of fabric feels like sandpaper, and every rustle of noise sounds like gunfire. And then you have to go back to your life and everything is loud and bright and busy and crazy and it takes a while for all your senses to shut back down. And for you to stop asking: what was the point of that?

I went from that to a long period of time where I did not want anything to do with any kind of mindfulness. But all of the folk wisdom about missing your life isn’t wrong. If you don’t spend at least sometime in the present moment smelling the flowers, you will go for years without truly enjoying anything.

My favorite resource on mindfulness now is a book called Positive Intelligence, which is extremely misnamed because it has nothing to do with positivity or intelligence.

It preaches popcorn moments of mindfulness.

Rather trying to beat yourself up maintaining your focused attention on anything, you just try and notice your senses in brief moments. Taste a few bites of every meal; stop and look at something beautiful; smell your shampoo, actually hear the music you’re listening to. If you pay attention to the best moments of your day you’ll enjoy more of it.

ALL THESE MAKE YOU A LITTLE MORE SATISFIED AND A LITTLE LESS MEAN TO YOURSELF

Maybe examine the picture in your head as carefully as you examine your actual performance. Maybe cut yourself slack when you run up against chaos  or you run up against the probability of success and you didn’t get the thing you want. Maybe when you do try something, measure against what you’ve already tried.

Life is not a string of perfect productivity.  It’s a mess. Even when it goes perfectly, it still doesn’t really change that.

Enjoy the strawberries. Drink enough water.

The post 4 Ways to Make Perfect Days Less Depressing first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Sometimes it’s all in the genre…

Obligatory Forward

Three thousand years have passed since the dawn of the current age. Yet we have not exited the Renaissance, and the entire world got to the Renaissance at the exact same time. In another three thousand years, historians will know when the unraveling began, where the excesses of the moment grew too much and the Great Balancer of the world, lion, the Fates, (the synonym for some kind of God figure that’s never going to be expressly mentioned), will place his fulcrum and tip everything the other way. All to be unwound, unlearned, unknown. Like a seesaw, but epic.

But we do not know yet where that fulcrum will go, and whether the boy, for it is always a boy, fated to move the very lever of time itself, will succeed. Because it’s always fated and never just something some woman somewhere just gets done.

The “Random” Beginning

On this day, a boy named Patrick, who in the way of his clan, took as a surname the occupation of his grandfather’s grandfather‘s grandfather‘s grandfather, Smith, is graduating from the school of the protectors.

Gone, long gone, are the days of justice by combat, where wrongs were righted by the might of one sword arm, and punishment was doled out to only those who could buy the strength of that arm.

Since that time, a league of protectors arose in many a country.  First, they arose as the arm of kings on a small island in the northern ocean whose fingers circled the globe. They swiftly followed across the pond where Patrick’s ancestors were so hopeful for their descendants. Where the protectors started mainly as a force to corral runaway slaves, but we don’t talk about that.

Not to be confused with soldiers traveling to other lands to, um, also protect. For the ocean island, the soldiers wore scarlet and the protectors wore blue, making for an entirely different creature. Soldiers wore scarlet because that dye was the cheapest they could find and nobody else who wanted it, while the police wore blue because they had slightly better funding with huge collars to prevent garroting. An ocean away, the protectors and soldiers both wore blue because the protectors grew mighty in force after a great Civil War and they had a lot of leftover fabric.

Even when the kings were toppled and the slaves freed (mostly), the swords remained. And now, when those swords gave way to projectile weapons, they yet patrol the streets. Some say their protection is not worth the cost of their violence, and some say they are not the embodiment of justice but its opposite and shadow. And some say without protectors, neither justice nor injustice is possible, but only the might of a sword arm. This is but one question that may change the placement of the fulcrum that this 1000-page tome won’t weigh in on, because this is a fake world.

The reasons for their founding and for their colors have been lost to time, and even those now wearing their uniforms forget their antecedents. Including Patrick, son of son of son of son of a son of son of a random Smith, who is donning this uniform for the first time before a looking glass. He affixes his hat upon his golden curls and admires his bronze skin of ambiguous origins, or perhaps just a mysterious substance known as Spray Tan. He winks at himself in the glass with his piercing blue eyes, because they are always blue. And always pierce.

Then he marches out with the indistinguishable masses in identical uniforms and mostly identical origins, though the state would press hard for the fairer sex to join the ranks.(The fairer sex were rather more likely to find injustice than justice at their joining and so did so in far fewer numbers.) He has no inkling and no forewarning of the part he will play in the battle for the balance of the world.

His childhood best friend waves to Patrick as they enter the auditorium and says, “Yo, Smitty.”

The best friend, whose name we will not learn for another three episodes, is a descendent of the slaves who built this land, but that history will not show on his face, filled as it is with a perpetual smile and perpetual jokes solely dedicated to supporting his friend, except for one future episode during sweeps (where two female recruits will also randomly kiss each other) when he will lose his temper and be weirdly regretful for another two months.

The fulcrum of the world, the linchpin of the final battle, the key to whether all of humanity gets a future or not, looks back at his best friend and says, “What’s up?”

“Is Mona coming?” the best friend asks.

Mona is fair of face and the third childhood best friend, improbably still in touch well into their twenties, who, when they were six, married Patrick in a Central Park ceremony with an illegally plucked daisy bouquet. And is still in his life to ensure Smith is tempted away from his mission repeatedly, and potentially brings about the destruction of humanity.

They will rekindle and then torch a relationship that really ran its course in high school. But they will not figure that out for two more years until the on-again-off-again relationship with a forensic scientist is far more interesting because she is far fairer of face. And taller. And Mona will die in a fiery explosion, ensuring Patrick can Feel Things, and be set properly forth on his quest. For now, she is a source of simple pain to Patrick Smith, for they are indeed off again.

He answers, “She’s not coming.”

He is shushed by an usher as he walks into the artificially flickering bright lights of the auditorium, a technology that will be lost to time no matter where the fulcrum is placed, and greets his destiny, this ceremony being the first in an inevitable series of events leading to the final confrontation with the destroyer of worlds.

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