Dear friends,
Yes, we do need the movies. And the books. So we never forget.
During this week, that marks eighty years since atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I read the articles in this month’s Atlantic Magazine reminding us of this seminal moment. The article by Tom Nichols, “Damn You All to Hell,” was particularly enlightening. (The line is from the first Planet of the Apes movie.) He describes teaching an undergraduate class in the late 2000s about the fall of the Soviet Union. None understood why anyone was afraid, as if to say, “What was the big deal?” And the reason became clear to him – growing up, they had not watched the movies. Those are movies such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, On the Beach, and Failsafe, and Dr. Strangelove. For those of us old enough who did, we felt viscerally the fear, realizing that poor decisions by unthinking leaders could end in tragedy for humanity. Nichols asks, is it possible to have a meaningful discussion about nuclear weapons without being a little afraid?
Nichols’ argument is the same thinking that led me to include, in Journey to 2125, the risk of wide-scale nuclear war as one of the greatest challenges facing humankind this century. And like the books and movies on that topic, I hope to make the question visceral and real, with characters you can relate to directly.
E.O. Wilson once said, “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” We need to think carefully about how our technology is controlled, is released, and for the worst tech, is eliminated, to make it through these next hundred years.
I’m proud that Journey to 2125 just won the 2025 National Indie Excellence Award for Best Visionary Fiction. The audiobook for Journey to 2125 is now released on Spotify (with ten professional voice actors), and soon on Audible. Find it on Amazon and wherever you find books. I hope you will come along on this journey with me, Max, and his grandson and family.
Gary


We all have many journeys. Gary’s began in a small Midwest town, where he could play unfettered in the woods, finding an early love for nature and learning self-reliance. The space program and the night skies hooked him on astronomy. After finishing college, the wide world beckoned, and his fascination with science drew him to California to participate in the booming tech industry. Now he still stares upward, wondering what it all is about.