I’d say the 1990s was the time of the geek takeover of culture: Tarantino (who loves comics and referencing older films), the 1997 Star Wars rereleases (which did more to generate good will than the prequels did a couple years later), and then the Matrix films as confirmation geek stuff can also be hip, even philosophical. And Buffy didn’t hurt either.
One of the most respectable geeks for decades now has been Alan Moore, who says the following geekily-enthusiastic words in an interview about his upcoming new installment in the comic book adventures of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:
[I]n this final book, in the text story in the back, we are tying together [bits of fiction] from all over everywhere. We’ve got references to The Story of O, we’ve got references to every piece of lunar fiction ever written, from Lucian onwards, right up to things like 2001, all the pulp stories about races to the moon, and H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and Georges Melies.
That desire to “collect them all” is familiar to any systematizing geek — and in this case a reminder that certain ideas, like getting to the Moon (and battling its monkey inhabitants) or finding life on Mars (and singing about it, if you’re David Bowie), unite geeks into a sort of tradition, even across centuries. And speaking of 2001: more on Arthur C. Clarke in tomorrow’s blasphemous 666th ToddSeavey.com blog entry, which is also my Book Selection of the Month.
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