The Nerds Have Taken Over

‘Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.’
- Bill Gates

Not that long ago, in a galaxy known as the Milky Way, on a planet called Earth by its inhabitants, I read the words ‘Save A Non-Geek Today’ in a computer magazine’s Editor’s note and was amused by the seemingly farfetched concept. Little did I know that those words foretold of the tech revolution that has silently swept over the world and converted the masses into geeks without them even realising it.

A short decade ago people who spent hours playing video games, reading fantasy, sci-fi and comic books were thought to be weird and had chairs thrown at them wherever they went by their intellectually inferior peers. These people went under ‘derogatory’ labels such as nerd and geek and were generally frowned upon for their silliness and were told that they should grow up.

What people don’t know, though, is that you can’t keep a nerd down for long because he will go back to his secret lair (because we all have one of those) and hatch a plan, so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel, to take over the world! Which is exactly what happened, the nerds took over the Hollywood machine and with it the world. The message being sent out to the masses was (and I guess still is), ‘Don’t fuck with us! We know how to build guns that shoot lasers.’

There was a time when you had only a handful of television shows and movies to pick from if you had a craving for super heroes, space or medieval settings, especially if you were an adult and wanted something fantastic yet mature. Movie studios were reluctant to touch such material because they feared that they couldn’t sell it to a wide enough audience. Steven Erikson, Canadian writer of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series of fantasy novels, spent nearly a decade trying to sell his script for Gardens of the Moon and nobody wanted it because it was too ambitious! He’d walk out of studio meetings with his friend, and co-writer, Ian C. Esslemont with words such as: ‘Try something . . . simpler. Something like everything else out there. Something less . . . ambitious.’ Studios didn’t want to invest in material that audiences might find to be too complicated, which makes sense to a large extent but in the process they were grossly underestimating the intellectual capacity of audiences. People wanted something that would challenge them, hence the success of ventures such as The Matrix. People wanted to go to the cinema and be sold a fantastic story that is intelligent enough to actually buy into. People wanted, as Erikson puts it, ‘sophisticated shit’.

This, my furry friends, is where we are at, the space-age of television, cinema and literature in general. Admittedly it’s not the high-tech world envisioned by great minds like Isaac Asimov, in which the human race has conquered the stars, but strides have been made. The nerds are in charge of a large slice of the Hollywood pie and, like the gay community, we (me not so much actually, which is an outright travesty!) have the buying power to sustain that hold. Since the release of movies like The Lord of the Rings, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, 300, Sin City and others beside sci-fi and fantasy have had a ubiquitous presence in the box-office. This year has been great! Seeing releases like Thor, Priest and the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean and there are still upcoming titles like The Green Lantern and Captain America.

The masses love these movies and don’t even notice that they’re buying into the worlds of the kids they made fun of in school. Nerds have taken over almost every aspect of people’s lives. Just take a look around you at the wide-eyed uninitiated masses toting laptops, Blackberries, PSPs, DSs and hanging out on Facebook and Twitter – slavish devotees of the wonder that is technology with the nerds at the head of the revolution.

My First Proper Article!!!

Pulling a Rabbit Out of My Hat

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”

- Nelson Mandela (quoting from Marianne Williamson’s Return to Love)

With Nelson Mandela Day having just passed I’ve decided to take advice from Boston Legal’s Denny Crane and pull a rabbit out of my hat in order to wow the jury, by which I mean you, dear Reader of a writer fascinated by the dust bunnies under his bed. My aims for this piece are rather ambitious, given that I don’t want it to be overlong. They are as follows: introducing myself (only in my second post, forgive the rudeness) and my column (Lost in the Cosmos), doing something good for change instead of whining, promoting the awesomeness of fantasy and science fiction while I’m at it and, lastly, having a great time doing it. That ladies and gentlemen is my rabbit, which I will now proceed to pull out of my woolly hat.

My name is Nyameko Charles Siboto and I am a bookworm.

When I tell people this they assume that I just read any book that comes my way and in this they are mistaken. I consider myself well-read but I’m actually not when you take into account how much reading material exists in the multiverse! Then again, no one is well-read under those conditions. I am a fan of mythology, horror, superhero graphic novels, fantasy and science fiction. It is in these genres that I am well-read and that I revel. I’m especially a fan of fantasy as I believe that the genre is steeped in great beauty, especially the works of Professor J.R.R. Tolkien. I study Literature at the University of Johannesburg and I work there as a tutor, a job that I love immensely (don’t tell my colleagues). People say that I’m an agreeable fellow for the most part but I have days during which I am full of nonsense and annoy people by repeatedly poking them. My dream is to own a beautiful house with a magical garden outside and inside it is filled with books, comfortable armchairs, roaring fireplaces and the pantries (many of these) are filled to bursting with scrumptious food. That is to say, I want to live like a hobbit.

Peter Kreeft, one of the beautiful minds of our time in my opinion, said something along the lines of living life like poetry in one of his talks. I’m sure I don’t know what he means but it’s one of those statements that haunt my thoughts and it refuses to be exorcised. I suspect that it has something to do with my fascination with great beauty, whether it is aesthetic (the beauty of a Helen of Troy) or spiritual (the beauty of a Mother Teresa) and I endeavour to make my life beautiful in all that I do.

That is Charles, to some extent, and it is my hope that we may get to know one another better as we explore the stars and a medieval past that never was together in this column. I would like to be the Virgil and Beatrice to your Dante as I lead you on this epic journey.

Take my hand and hold on tight, we are about to find ourselves Lost in the Cosmos.

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years,
how would men believe and adore, and persevere for
many generations the remembrance of the city of God!”

- Emerson

This quote says almost everything that I would like to achieve with this column. Lost in the Cosmos wants to show that fantasy and sci-fi are very much like religion and science, their goal is to speculate on the mysteries of the universe and to ask the great questions that have ever haunted human beings from the first time they emerged from their caves and looked upon the tall trees of the great forests, the vast oceans, the majestic sun, the moon and the fiery stars and stood there in fear and trembling, faced with the sense of the numinous. Fantasy and sci-fi show us that the universe, the little portion that we know of it, is howling with holy wildness and that we are part of something substantially bigger than we ordinarily think.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, we come to it; a rabbit being pulled from a woolly hat!

We as South Africans have the bad tendency to whine about everything that goes wrong in this great country of ours instead of going out and doing something good to change the situation. I beg you to go out and to make the remainder of this year a Nelson Mandela one, in honour of the great man and also simply to do something for someone else. To paraphrase Emerson, to leave the world having made one life breathe easier is to have succeeded as a human being. So no matter how small your contribution, it does make a difference. I am going out to Cotlands to play with the children and read to them on my off days to do my little bit for change… and to prostitute fantasy and sci-fi to the younger generation, nerdy whore that I am. :)

My June/July Reading List

Thus he [Fingolfin] came alone to Angband’s gates, and he sounded his horn, and smote once more upon the brazen doors, and challenged Morgoth to come forth to single combat. And Morgoth came.
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

Great masters of old,
You'd be amazed by twenty-first century machinery
'though you invented time travel
That modern science has yet to match
I find myself spirited away by words
That are ages old
- Charles Siboto, A Life Lived

The critics say that epics have died out
With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods,
I’ll not believe it.
- Elizabeth Barret Browning, Aurora Leigh

Dear reader of a writer who spends more time reading than he does writing (and even more time haunting bookshops than he does reading),

I must warn you from the outset that there be dragons here and an assortment of other beasties hell-bent on devouring you and, alas, there are not many heroes to slay these monsters. The world has forgotten the old tales and brave kings of men are no more. All those royal houses have fallen into ruin. But fear not because I have in my possession a machine that will allow us to transcend time and space, so that, my comrade in ancient lore, we may go where we will and forget about my evil couch and its arachnid minions that are pursuing me without relent for the time being.

Winter’s icy tentacles have reached our southern shores and the masses visiting us from all over the world are taking shelter in our country’s soccer stadia to view the world’s largest soccer spectacle. This is all good and well but we will not have too much time to poke fun at them because the remainder of June and the whole of July will be a very busy period for us, what with so many worlds to visit.

Let’s start off by revisiting Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian - an old friend in a new hardcover jacket. This is a tale that brings Dracula, that old villain, into the one place that bookworms feel safest. Yes, you guessed it, our beloved and dusty libraries. It turns out that, like us, Vlad enjoys collecting books and building an extensive library of human (and not-so-human) thought when he is not busy impaling or ‘necking’ people. So the next time you’re reading on the fourth floor of the library and think you’re alone bear this information in mind. I would recommend a garlic clove or two in your pocket, as unfashionable as it may be.

Make sure you are holding on tight, my dear companion, because our next stop is Middle-earth and Eärendil, most renowned of mariners, has agreed to let us sail with him on his great ship, Vingilot. You must remember that the world has changed after the Fourth Age and only by sailing in one of Cirdan’s ships can one reach the distant past. It’s impossible to grow weary of Professor Tolkien’s Middle-earth and its people throughout the ages. The stories that enthral me the most though are those of the elder days; stories of the Elves and their hopeless war against Morgoth and the stories of the tall Men of Númenor and their downfall. I have managed to get my grubby hands on Professor Tolkien’s The Book of Lost Tales 1 and 2 and The Lays of Beleriand to supplement my copy of The Silmarillion so there is quite a bit more of the elder days to be explored. Also, John Howe’s cover illustration of Fingolfin’s challenge to Morgoth for The Lays of Beleriand is just breathtaking. If ever a movie of The Silmarillion was made this would be the scene I would most look forward to. No other Elven-king of old was more valiant than Fingolfin and reading this scene always brings tears to my eyes.

To keep us entertained as we hop from one world to the next I’ve picked up two books of short stories: Stephen King’s Just After Sunset (which I find is safest read just after sunrise) and Legends II (edited by Robert Silverberg), an anthology of fantasy stories by some of the biggest names in the genre. I’ve already read a few of the stories and some of them are very good. Let it not be said that I take you on long adventures without some form of entertainment when we’re on the ‘road’, as it were. I can see by the look on your face that you’re thinking that I’ve not taken your stomach into account but there’s no need to fret because the Elves from Middle-earth were kind enough to give us some lembas for the journey that lies ahead.

Goodness! How time does fly when one is on a flying ship. We have reached our final destination it seems: Robert Jordan’s world of The Wheel of Time, and this, I am ashamed to admit, is my first visit. As is usual with me, I am very excited to start exploring a new world, so I will linger here and see the sights.

When we get back home another new writer will be awaiting me, a certain Mr Greg Isles who was recommended to me by my dear friend, Lady Leigh of the Meadows. My first expedition into this man’s mind is titled Blood Memory, which I think just sounds wonderfully delicious. Hey, come now, don’t you dare judge me on what I find delicious or don’t! Now go away, I have things to do.

Until next time,
Have a wonderful winter season :)