Next I must apologize to the non-geek contingent of our readership. The essay which follows might not be your cup of tea Klingon blood wine. It hinges too much on a presumed knowledge of obscure science fictiony things that only those with a truly Jonah Goldbergian depth of geek arcana can fully appreciate. Then again, I might be underestimating the level to which the fantastical subdivision of pop culture has permeated the mainstream. You might grok this if you know at least two Vulcans other than Spock, who Tim Drake is (as opposed to Dick Grayson), what the Kzinti are, and where the word ‘grok’ came from. If not, you’re excused without penalty.

A day or two ago I happened across the online announcement of a wonderful new technological device that made me think, “That’s it. We’re finally in the future.” And then, almost as if the words were spoken aloud, I heard the voice of my friend (and excellent Science Fiction author) Chris Roberson in my head, scolding me with his oft-repeated, always cranky, litany: “It’s not the future until we have jetpacks and flying cars. They promised us jetpacks and flying cars! Where are they?” And I realized there’s no escaping this question, either from Chris or any of a myriad other sources. The future isn’t allowed to be here until we have our jetpacks and flying cars. And that’s just the minimum. Space stations, moon cities and personal household robots are also to be desired for a fully functioning future.

I pondered this dilemma. On the one hand we have this wonderful new device (the exact nature of the device isn’t important, but for the record it’s a full tabletop sized flat computer screen you can play Dungeons & Dragons on, just like they did in the Legion of Superheroes — which is definitely in the future, so far in fact that jetpacks and flying cars are already outmoded, having been replaced by Flight Rings), and we’re blessed (and/or cursed) with so many other technological wonders hardly even imagined by those who designed our future so long ago, but we don’t have the jetpacks and the flying cars. They’re our duel required tickets to the future, without which we simply aren’t allowed to enter. Lacking those, we’re confined to an eternal and frustrating now, no matter how exciting and interesting our now might become.

I pondered, and then despaired when a terrible realization hit me. We are in the future, Chris. We got our jetpacks and flying cars. We’ve had them for years. Whoever the ‘they’ are that promised us those things, they kept their promise. They delivered. Look at this:

The Moller M400 flying car. Coming soon to an abandoned warehouse near you.

It’s the Moller M400 Skycar. They built it and it works, designed to sell for something in the neighborhood of $90k when and if it ever goes on sale (I’ll predict right now that it won’t). They also have the M200G Volantor — a saucer shaped vehicle that flies ten feet above the earth at 50 mph.

These were debuted a few years ago, and they weren’t the first personal flying cars, and saucers, and jetpacks. Not by a long shot. They’ve been building them almost for as long as you and I have been alive.

So what’s the problem then. Where are they? Why haven’t we got one in every garage in the good old US of A? That’s the depressing part, my friend. We don’t have them, not because there isn’t (or wasn’t) any entrepreneur willing to make them available. We don’t have them because we rejected them. We collectively said, and continue to say, “No thanks.”

And why is that?

Because they’re not safe.

Dr. Paul Moller at the controls of the M200 X prototype of his flying car.

Sure, they’re safer than the first airplanes were in their infancy, even safer than modern airplanes are now, when not operated by a highly-trained pilot. They may even be safer than the first ground-confined motor cars. But airplanes and motor cars were invented and introduced to the public in a more adventurous age. Here’s the thing: we want more safety now than we did then. We expect it. Hell, we demand it. If cars and airplanes were introduced for the first time today I’ve no doubt that a vast hue and cry would go up about how dangerous they are. They’d never get government approval. They’d never be able to jump through all of the regulatory hoops any new product has to overcome today. The problem with jetpacks and flying cars is that they aren’t already 100% safe to all potential users. They don’t get, and never will get, the time to develop and perfect that we’ve given our airplanes and ground cars. We have our jetpacks and flying cars and we simply aren’t going to use them.

Which brings me to my next point. We are indeed in the future, but we’ve chosen a far different future than the one we originally imagined for ourselves.

In his Known Space series of novels and stories, the vastly talented and industrious science fiction author Larry Niven created a race of aliens called the Pierson’s Puppeteers. They’re an odd race that looks something like a set of two hand puppets (from which their name is derived) mounted on a distorted three-legged deer’s body. But their given name also does a sinister sort of double duty, since the Puppeteers are a race of manipulators. They manipulate and fiddle with the other races of Known Space, including humans, working behind the scenes, to direct our destinies. Why do they do this? Because they are a species of genetic and cultural cowards. More than anything else they are motivated by the desire, by the all-encompassing need, to be safe.

There are no sharp corners on the Puppeteer homeworld. There’s no possibility of a stray splinter or of tripping over a badly placed paving stone. All is designed to keep everyone safe from even the smallest possibility of harm. They build indestructible space ships and then refuse to make use of them, because space travel is far too dangerous. And they manipulate mankind and other races, causing us to fight devastating wars with each other, in order to weed out our more aggressive individuals — to keep themselves safer by gelding us barbaric types.

An old time jetpack, never fully developed and now relegated to the occasional performance at county fairs.

I’m afraid that’s who we’ve chosen to become, Chris, old buddy. We had our chance at a jetpack future but turned them down. We chose instead to be safe. We chose to become the Pierson’s Puppeteers. Look at the evidence, so much of which exists I couldn’t possibly begin to scratch the surface in listing all of the ways we’ve changed ourselves in my lifetime:

In my childhood I rode my bike everywhere, with my parent’s blessing, even 200 miles away to visit a married sister on the other side of the state. And the thought of wearing a helmet never occurred to me or my parents. Now a child even on a tricycle in his own yard damn well better be wearing a helmet, or his parents are guilty of child abuse. Manufacturers are sued nigh unto extinction every time one of their products is even tangentially involved in an accident, because their product isn’t safe enough. The greatest cost in manufacturing a ladder is to offset the cost of the inevitable lawsuits brought by those who hurt themselves using it. How dare ladders not be made 100% safe, no matter how it’s used or misused? The notion, that was alive and well in my youth, that life is risky and certain bad things are just going to happen from time to time, is a dead notion today. Now life must be safe, and anything that makes it unsafe must be done away with, or at least severely punished.

In the recent past it was a given that a man has a right to risk his own life and even be a damned fool about it if he so chose. That is a dying concept today. Now, every time something tragic happens as a result of adventurers doing adventurous things, such as a death or injury during a mountain climb, there follows the reflexive cry to outlaw said activity “for their own good.” Safety must be imposed on the foolish and daring for their own good.

Need any more examples? I’ve got a million of them. Space travel? Some still yearn for the adventure and romance of it, but we are a minority. Most think it’s a waste of resources that could be better used to make us more safe here at home. That’s why we got to the moon and stopped. That’s why Luna City doesn’t exist today. We could have had it if we wanted it bad enough. We have the technology. We just didn’t have the will.

We’ve shown ourselves all too often willing to trade freedom for safety. Regulate us, in case we make dangerous choices. Tax us so we don’t spend our wealth in foolish pursuits. Confine us in the group, the herd, just like Niven’s Puppeteers, ostracizing all adventurous individuals as dangerous and insane. MAKE US SAFE!

Oh how I could go on, Chris, listing so many ways in which the desire for safety has eclipsed all else, and infected every American endeavor. Even the current Global Warming hysteria. Granted, it’s a vast scam, perpetrated by hucksters who want power and money to flow into their clutches, aided and abetted by activist scientists who know very well where their grants come from, but the scam couldn’t work if it wasn’t fueled by a culture that more and more responds to the promise of increased safety as the acme of human existence.

In the future we don't get to hunt dinosaurs with jetpacks and bazookas.

So here we are, buddy, living in the future we selected. We had our chance at the jetpacks and flying cars. Turns out we had plenty of chances to embrace them. But we decided instead to become the Puppeteers of Larry Niven’s gifted (and unfortunately prescient) imagination. We can still watch Race Bannon and Johnny Quest hunt dinosaurs with jetpacks and bazookas in old cartoon shows, and still pretend we want to do the same, as long as we realize it’s only pretend, as long as we watch the adventures in the safety of our home.

But let me close with one cautionary note. In all of Niven’s stories set in Known Space there was ever only one interesting Puppeteer character, the one who was insane enough to have a sense of adventure and daring. We haven’t quite wiped out the human need for adventure, daring and a desire to face danger. Far from it. Some may argue that we can’t ever fully exorcise that from the human condition, and I pray that’s true. But I have no doubt that we’re on the terrible path to “safety above all else.” I have no doubt that too many of us, including the majority who seek political power over us, subscribe to the safety gospel (probably because safety and under-control are synonymous — freedom being such a messy thing). But the distinguished Mr. Niven has shown us, maybe unintentionally, one thing, if we’re prepared to see it: we can’t be both safe and interesting.

I vote for interesting.

(Curtain. Possible is alone on stage when Mr. Patronus enters.)

Possible: Who are you?

Patronus: My name is Mr. Pratronus. I’m sorry to suddenly intrude like this, but I’ve been assigned as your STO.

Possible: Stow?

Patronus: STO. Your Survival Training Officer. Your birth time is approaching and I’ve been sent in to train you in a few techniques that might increase your chances of surviving the next few days.

Possible: Survive what? My birth? My understanding is that medical technology has advanced far enough that childbirth has become — well, if not quite routine, at least considerably less dangerous. Why would I need eleventh hour special training just to undergo an event where a wealth of state-of-the-art material and a number of trained medical professionals are dedicated to seeing it through without incident?

Patronus: Unfortunately I’m not here to address a failing of medical technology or training. Medicine is as advanced now as it ever was in all of human history. That much is true. Instead I’m here to address a certain condition of philosophy and law. We’re a bit worried because some of your parents’ recent behaviors have raised a number of red flags. For example, this late into the gestation process they haven’t begun to discuss potential names for you. That’s one of the bigger danger signs that will get our attention every time.

Possible: But I already have a name. I’m Possible.

Patronus: I’m sorry but that’s not your name. Not really. It’s more of a title. A description of status. It’s the name every pre-born child, until his parents choose an actual name.

Possible: So I’m in danger, but of what? You said it had something to do with philosophy? I have to confess, I’m a bit confused.

Patronus: According to the culture in which you’re about to be born, assuming our efforts to insure your birth are successful, you aren’t yet a human being. You aren’t a person.

Possible: Are you kidding me? If I’m not a person, what am I?

Patronus: By definition of law, aided by a truly insidious twisting of language, you’re currently nothing more than a bit of extraneous and non-viable biological material.

Possible: Nonsense. I already have every evidence of personhood. I have thoughts and feelings. I have hopes and dreams. I’ve experienced joys and sorrows.

Patronus: None of which matters, according to the law.

Possible: I don’t believe that. Who could possibly believe that I’m not yet a real person?

Patronus: Well, that’s one of the truly frustrating aspects of this struggle, because no one does believe that — not your mother, or father, or the legal and medical people who’re determined to define away your humanity. Even the powerful social-political organizations created to bring about your destruction, without legal or social consequences, don’t actually believe you’re nothing more than a lump of waste tissue. But that’s what they need to claim. That’s the fiction they need to perpetuate in order to justify their overall agenda in general, and the all-too specific actions they may be contemplating where you’re concerned. Oddly enough, the more tenuous the agreed-upon fiction, the more desperate and vicious its proponents become in not allowing any reasonable examination of it.

Possible: That may describe those with an agenda to perpetuate. Some people just turn out bad and broken. But I can’t believe people as a whole could be so cynical. How could a wise and educated society possibly vote for such an obvious sham?

Patronus: I’ll let you know, should people as a whole ever get the chance to vote on it. This is a condition almost entirely imposed by the courts. On those rare occasions when people do insist on voting on some aspect of it, the results are routinely overturned by judicial fiat.

Possible: And the people just accept that?

Patronus: Not all of them do. Some are working hard to restore a better world, starting with a more rational and obvious definition of life and when it begins.

Possible: Some, but not all?

Patronus: I’m not sure what to tell you. Perhaps many stubbornly confuse language with reality. Define someone as a non-human and that person has indeed become a non-human, in fact, as well as convenience of labeling. I know that seems insane, but that’s the world you may be about to join.

Possible: And maybe the one I’m not about to join. You’ve mentioned danger and destruction. You’re scaring me, Mr. Patronus. I think it’s about time you told me exactly what you’re here to do. What do you hope to train me to survive?

Patronus: During your birth the medical people in attendance might be there to make sure you survive it, or they may be sure to make sure you don’t.

Possible: Oh please. Get serious.

Patronus: I assure you, Possible, I am deadly serious.

Possible: You expect me to believe that a doctor and an executioner happen to be the same profession?

Patronus: Under a very special set of circumstances and with the consent, or at the insistence, of your mother — yes.

Possible: And I have no say in the matter? Despite the Hippocratic oath, or all of the myriad protections of life written into the law?

Patronus: All of which only protect human life, which is why the tortured redefinition is so vital.

Possible: And there’s nothing I can do? My fate’s entirely in their hands?

Patronus: Almost, but not entirely. I’ve been sent in to teach you a few physical techniques to help you survive the ordeal. For example, there’s some twisting and turning maneuvers you can use if they send in some clamps and other devices in an attempt to dismember you while you’re still inside the birth canal. Most of all I want to teach you how not to resist the birth. Even if your mother has decided to kill you, the physical birth process is a mechanism of the ages, designed to deliver you whole and alive, with her instinctive physical cooperation, if not her desire. That’s one of the few things working in our favor.

Possible: Why? It seems it would just be easier for them to destroy me after I’m outside of my mother’s body.

Patronus: True, but that’s where this madhouse gets truly bizarre. As long as any part of you is still inside your mother, they are legally free — in fact obligated — to do all they can to dismember and kill you. But, if by some stroke of fortune, you’re able to get completely outside of your mother, then by a miracle of advanced rhetoric, you instantly cease being a lump of disposable tissue and become a person in full, with all of the rights and protections therein. At that moment, those same medical professionals that were trying to kill you will then have to switch roles and immediately do everything within their powers to preserve you. That’s why I want to train you to do whatever you can to get out as soon as possible — to strive towards the light, no matter what they attempt to do to you along the way.

Possible: Crawling desperately towards the very people trying so hard to kill me seems counter-intuitive, Mr. Patronus.

Patronus: Welcome to Cloud Cuckoo Land, where up is sometimes down, wrong is sometimes right, and what’s true today can’t be relied upon to be true tomorrow.

Possible: Let’s say I do pass whole and alive through this gauntlet. What then?

Patronus: Then they have to protect and preserve you, or they’d be in all sorts of legal trouble.

Possible: And I assume that will include taking me away from my mother.

Patronus: Uh… no. You’ll go on to live with her and be raised by her, unless she decides to do something else with you.

Possible: But, assuming your dire warning is true, she will have just tried to have me killed, and the only reason I would still be alive by that time is that they somehow blundered in their attempts to bring about my horrible death.

Patronus: Yes, but the law presumes that at the instant you become a person, she will no longer want you dead, but will be magically transformed, in that same impossible instant, into a loving and nurturing woman, who only has your best interests in mind.

Possible: That’s insane.

Patronus: You’ll get no argument from me. So, shall we begin your training? We’ll start with some of the things you already know how to do — twisting, rolling, kicking and turning, to deflect or avoid the grip of their instruments.

Possible: No, I don’t think so. I don’t mean to call you a liar to your face, but I don’t believe you. I can’t. No civilized society would allow such a barbaric practice such as you describe.

Patronus: I suppose not. I’m not enough of a philosopher to debate what does and doesn’t constitute a civilization. As I said, I’m basically a self-defense instructor. But I assure you, these are the dangers you’re facing.

Possible: And I repeat that I can’t bring myself to believe that. Even if it were all true, why would I want to survive to enter such a charnel house world? I don’t think I’m interested in your training, Mr. Patronus.

Patronus: Suit yourself.

Possible: You seem easily resigned to my decision.

Patronus: Only because I’ve been doing this for awhile. Too long. A significant minority of my assigned charges make the same decision you just did. Convincing a rational but innocent human being that they’re about to enter such a vastly irrational world is difficult to the point of near impossibility. You don’t yet have the experience to find me credible. As saddened as I am by your choice, I’m not surprised by it.

Possible: I can’t choose otherwise and still be the person I am. I have to believe in a good and rational world. The one you describe defies credulity.

Patronus: I’ll leave now. I have too many other appointments to keep. I hope you turn out to be one of the lucky ones, despite the warning signs. I hope your mother already loves and wants you, or at least allows you to live long enough to give you away to someone who can love and care for you. But if that doesn’t turn out to be the case, if they do try to destroy you when the time comes, then fight. Fight with all of your heart and soul and abilities. Even without my training, you’ve a chance to defy their instruments of cold steel, and confound their sinister designs. I’ll be honest and tell you that chance is slight, but it’s happened before. Good bye, Possible, and good luck.

(Mr. Patronus exits. Curtain.)

I’m not certain I have anything of worth to say about “Watchmen,” prior to actually seeing it tomorrow, when the rest of the world also gets its chance, but since I was very politely asked (as a comics books industry insider, albeit one who doesn’t rate an invitation to one of the six thousand, or so, advance screenings) to post something on Watchmen Eve, and since, as a professional writer, waiting until I actually had something of worth to share would be career suicide, I’ll venture a few predictions about the movie and how it will alter the American entertainment world in its wake.

1. It will be quite successful, financially, and will not, as many have predicted, suffer a sudden drop-off once the hardest of the hard core geek contingent all see it on opening weekend. This is just a gut feeling. I have no evidence or inside information to support it.

2. This success will inspire those who currently run Hollywood to do other “Watchmen”-like projects, only to be dismayed when they discover there aren’t any similar properties available.

3. “Watchmen’s” success will not then inspire those same those-who-currently-run-Hollywood to take the next most obvious step towards producing original “dark” superhero projects, not based on previous material. I suspect I know just enough about how Hollywood works right now to know that the twin fetishes of “Does this already have a built-in following?” and “I’m not going to consider any superhero movie, without seeing the graphic novel in my cold meaty hand first,” still pertain.

4. Therefore, adding to the silly lesson learned from the success of the “The Dark Knight,” about two dozen dark (oh, how I am growing to loathe that word) versions of previously not-dark (light?) superhero properties will go into production. Basically Hollywood is about to embark on the “grim and gritty” era of superhero movies that the actual funnybook business is just beginning to crawl out of. Get ready for “Dark Superman Returns Yet Again,” “Dark Captain America,” “Dark Fantastic Four III,” and so on.

5. Serious discussions about “Watchmen Two” will begin inside two weeks, but nothing will ever come of it, other than causing a huge and impassioned ruckus inside the funnybook business.

6. Despite all of the above, “Watchmen” will further strengthen the comics-make-viable-movies Renaissance we are currently enjoying.

7. About twenty minutes into the film, about half of the audience will realize this isn’t a superhero movie, even though it was marketed as such. They will be shocked to discover that it is in fact something quite the opposite in superhero drag. This will be a glorious revelation to the kids who were brought by their parents, thinking this was the superhero film they were promised, and a horrifying revelation to those parents (at least those who don’t simply drop their kids off to fend for themselves). A small degree of public outrage, and at least one lawsuit, will ensue.

8. At least one self-appointed victims group will express its indignation that the presence of Gunga Diners in the city scenes are an intentional slight against (East) Indians, and probably the Muslim world to boot.

9. Alan Moore, who wanted nothing to do with the film, will never see it.

10. The character Rorschach will enter the greater public consciousness as an icon of the left’s view of extreme right wingers — which, of course, includes all conservatives.