GalacticMu

Part the First can be located here.

Here’s where things get hairy.

When we left off, we had four free-agents drifting without a ship, but those agents are not the important part. The important part is what ships already have full crews.

Or: what happened to fandom?

Let’s go back in time again, zipping past 2004 now at the speed of light until we reach the eons before mankind had discovered the internets. In these times, isolated nerds roamed the earth. It was a time of great feral darkness; nerds were found hiding in any number and variety of fluorescent-lit rooms, rarely interacting with each other and rarer still, with the outside world. There we might have stayed if it had not been for some grand idea to hook our nerd-communicators together so that we could secretly correspond without the prying eyes of jocks and step-mothers.

In those early days, news that someone else watched Dark Shadows was met with a gasp of camaraderie. In dimly lit Denny’ses, bootleg copies of Duke Nukem were passed hand to hand on one or more 5¼ floppies. And though still a feeble time for nerd-kind, it was still an era of relative idyll. But the wormhole would soon open.

Forward to the year 2008. Nerds range freely, in daylight, amongst the citizens. The culture is saturated with nerdiness to the extent that they are no longer distinguishable as two individual concepts. Everything is nerdy, because being nerdy is now a synonym for enthusiasm. Certainly there are exceptions - you can still never be too thin or two spray-tanned or too the star of a fake MTV reality program - but it is safe to say that the world will never be the same.

And now, nerdiness has become that which it once reviled. It has become mean. It has become high-brow. It has become jock-y.

Subspace observed to BattleGate, one evening, that a blog called Jock Scifi* regularly confused being intelligent with being critical. Jock Scifi was home to some hardcore geeks and nerds, and yet, none of them seemed capable of simply enjoying anything without defensive commentary or disliking something without a deranged, bloody feeding frenzy - a thick mist of better-than-thou hung low over the fields. While I agreed that almost nothing should be safe from criticism, Jock Scifi took sport in criticism. The opposite also held true: loud names in scifi were treated like holy prophets. People who disagreed were set upon by wolves. Suddenly, it was a risky world to have an opinion in: there is at least one science fiction blog that if I talk smack about here, well, I might as well sign off on my nascent writing career. Where was once an amoeba of nerdiness now stands a complicated lifeform packed with organs of lesser and greater importance.

What if we tried to be nerdy without trying to be cool? It was a hypothetical question since none of us are cool, but we are a dramatic bunch.

And with a faint popping sound, GalacticMu was born.

*Names have been changed for wussing out purposes.