The Man Who Wrote Protostar Is Dead.
In 2011, I wrote a Star Trek-Esque semi-utopian space opera set in 2483 under the belief that things were getting better. I was wrong, and I want to talk about it.
Hello, friends,
Last week, we talked about some quick updates to some newsworthy situations. Sadly, the only real big update I have to any of those is that Joe Biden came out and talked. And it was bad.
We’re not going to focus directly on that, this week. Or any one thing, really. We’re going to talk about my experience writing a book, my mindset when I wrote it, and why, as the article’s title implies, that man is dead.
In 2011, Protostar: Memoirs of The Messenger was my first attempt at National Novel Writing Month, a writing exercise in November (with a now-rather-disgraced charity involved) that centers around the idea of writing a novel within a month.
Let’s dig in a bit.
What is National Novel Writing Month?
Now, to be technical, the goal is to hit a 50,000 word count within one month, which is by no means a completed novel in the conventional measurement. Depending on genre conventions and how tightly you want to stick to them, you could be less than halfway there. You do this by writing an average 1,667 words (or one The Progressive Cafe article) per day, which is actually a fairly unreasonable word count for many people to maintain just by virtue of them having day jobs.
On the upside, under my interpretation of the rules, any words written count. If you work with an outline, your outlining words count to the 50K number. If you write a political blog, those words count to the 50K. If you write social media posts, those can count, too.
It’s a fun little challenge for an up and coming writer with a lot of time on their hands, like maybe an undergraduate student - but it’s just a game you play with yourself, so if it sounds interesting, I encourage it with the proviso that you absolutely do not take it too seriously. Too many times I’ve seen people self-flagellating over not hitting their NaNo goals, and, just, no. This is NOT the thing to beat yourself up over.
2011 remains my only “win” out of every attempt I’ve tried to do NaNo, but I’ll concede that I was much less effective a writer than I am now, and I also had a great deal of time on my hands as this was before my father fell ill and while I was working as a Teaching Assistant and didn’t have all the homework of a full-blown teacher.
I “pansted” most of the book. I had a few things sketched out in advance, but I basically just kinda made stuff up as I went along. This meant that there were areas lacking depth, areas lacking continuity, some sloppy worldbuilding here and there, and ultimately I feel like I could have done better had I not been so hellbent on reaching the goal.
Of course, this was at a time when Arrogant Jesse didn’t use editors, so I started off by trying to post the story as a serial. When that was utterly unsuccessful, I spent a couple years - well…My dad got sick at the end of 2012, but eventually I got the book into something resembling what’s now just my second-drafted shape and I released it on November 13, 2014.
It is, to this day, my best selling book by probably a factor of 10, which is weird since it isn’t in my top three of books I’ve written according to me.
So What Does This Have To Do With Anything?
The Jesse Pohlman who wrote this book lived at a time when the Arab Spring was going on. Yeah, sure, the economy had collapsed around 2008, but things were getting better and I could definitely see the world just making progress faster and faster. Wifi, smartphones, Youtube - these were all great tools that were just making the future look fucking awesome.
I was discovering cool technologies like Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors and Alcubierre Drives. Anything seemed possible! Pretty soon we’d start colonizing space, getting electric cars together, desalinating water, and the likes. Science was glorious and would save us from all our problems - after all, the world was slowly but surely getting together on this climate change issue. A little late, but better late than never, right?
In the political world, well, at the time the book was written, things really looked pretty up. Like, it wasn’t exactly perfect, of course! But this was before ubiquitous cell phone cameras brought to light the issues of police abuse and racism that the Black Lives Matter movement brought forth in the wake of the Treyvon Martin shooting that hadn’t happened yet. I mean, yeah, sure, I knew names like Rodney King and Amadou Diallo, and I knew racism was still a structural force, but I was hoping that such hatreds were on their way out. They were, after all, going to be so hard to hide that they’d disappear almost entirely! I mean, after all, the country had woken up and elected that Barack Obama guy, and he wasn’t all that bad even if he wasn’t perfect.
How fucking naive I was.
How stupidly, childishly naive I was.
But, still, I figured we were just dealing with a little blip in things. Things got bad, but by the time Protostar’s publication rolled around in 2014, I was still optimistic enough to think that whatever our society’s failings, we’d get through it in the long term even if it wouldn’t be the short term.
I figured that Humanity was still bound for what Stellaris players might know as “Prosperous Unification.” We would, within centuries, have a government that represented our entire world. We’d have an interstellar empire. Sure, we’d need some magic-level tech to do it, but we’d have it. It was certainly possible that most conflicts would be solved!
Then, 2015-2016 happened, and my best hope for a leader got defeated in the primary by someone I knew couldn’t win.
And 2017-2019 happened.
Then 2020.
And it hasn’t stopped, yet. Not really, not for any real length of time, not for anything that satisfies my now far more radical, far more suspicious mind.
But Didn’t Things Get Better After Biden Got Elected?
For a while, maybe, sure.
CoVID was still a menace after Biden first got elected, but at least we were acquiring the tools to make it survivable, if not still crippling to many. I know my body went through some changes around CoVID times, and I’m not quite sure if it was because I was attending to long-ignored medical issues and just haven’t gotten through all of them, yet, or because the new issues that have popped up are CoVID related and not related to treatments.
But it was improving. Right?
Sure, Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal was horrific, and maybe he should have changed the deal the Taliban made with Trump and insisted on a different peacekeeping structure because it was obvious that Kabul wasn’t going to fight to preserve its own government very hard - but, hey, to his absolute credit, Joe Biden ended the Foreverwar.
Then February 2022’s Russian invasion of Ukraine rolled around and, well, things only started to get worse from there.
It occurs to me, as I write this, that you probably know most of what I’m going to say from this point out, if I were to just sit here and recant recent history at you, so I’ll give you two highlights:
Trump’s still at play in the political world. He is basically a felon after his Contempt of Court charges went through, but that’s not going to dissuade anyone from voting for him. He will probably - hopefully! - lose his NY ‘hush money’ (More like ‘falsification of business records in order to interfere with an election’) trial, but that probably won’t convince many people who support him to back off. In fact, if anything, he’s taken over the entire Republican apparatus and is now, for lack of a better term, the Republican candidate for Monarchy as his lawyers argue at the Supreme Court that he would be immune from prosecution for Presidential acts, even if he ordered his political rivals assassinated.
October 7th, 2023 led to Israel going down the path of what has become, to my eyes, a genocide against the Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank. Joe Biden is happily supporting Israel down that path, sending weapons and money without any conditions on their use and promising to protect Israel from the International Criminal Court should they hand down any warrants for any Israeli officials for crimes.
It’s true that one is still a lesser evil than the other, but why are we constantly faced with having to vote for evil?
I was planning this big “Here’s all the reasons to vote for Joe Biden” article. I was going to talk about the approximately $150,000,000,000 in student debt he’s forgiven; I was going to talk about the marginal but necessary improvements in climate stuff; I was going to talk about the genuinely strong labor reforms, like the banning of most non-competes.
But I just can’t. I can’t write a fluff article about someone who has the audacity to shame protests against the genocide he’s enabling when they caused mild property damage and disorder. I’d say more, but the “White moderates” topic of the Letter by Dr. Martin Luther King from a Birmingham Jail sums up how I feel about Biden. And if you don’t like that opinion from someone with my skin tone, since I’ve gotten some pushback in that fashion on Twitter: Here’s Imani Gandi, a Black Woman, saying it.
In fact, I personally believe he should resign in disgrace.
Does that mean you shouldn’t vote for him in 2024? Far from it - you pretty much don’t have a choice BUT to vote for him.
It’s infinitely easier to organize under Biden than it would be under Trump, and Trump wants to deport 15 million people as well as do all sorts of far worse things than Biden, and he’s happy to see any opposition to him killed because he - again - would be a King, not a President.
We cannot resist if we are dead.
Jesse, Is It Really That Bad?
The Jesse who wrote Protostar: Memoirs Of The Messenger is pretty much dead. I mean this literally in the sense that probably all of the cells in my body at that time have died and been replaced, but also in the sense that my optimism is dead. I have, at least for a while, given in to Doomerism.
I’m sitting here encouraging you to vote for a corporate authoritarian so that we don’t end up with a Nazi. To paraphrase what someone I told to vote for Biden said: I’m saying you have to vote for the ‘kinder, gentler genocide’ if for no other reason than it is the best play to save as many lives as we can. ‘Genocide Joe’ as he’s been nicknamed, is bad. But we can’t change the authoritarian system if we’re imprisoned in a concentration camp, expelled from the country, or are outright dead.
After sitting on this post for a few days, I want to leave it off with this: Lyndon Baines Johnson chose not to run for re-election in 1968 when massive waves of student protests against the Vietnam war made clear he was unlikely to win. His would-be successor and Vice President, Herbert Humphrey, lost badly to Richard Fucking Nixon.
Would Vice President Kamala Harris stand a better chance against Donald Trump in 2024? I think yes. I think she could make some relatively minor adjustments and carry on Biden’s not-as-awful-as-you-think legacy while at the same time making accommodations to meet the student protestors’ demands, all without compromising much about her core personality. She was one of my more favored 2020 candidates, after all, and she could do a good job as President.
But…Who’s to say? It’s not like I’ve never been right before about these things - oh, wait. I posted that link earlier in this article. Here it is again. Maybe I’m right, and maybe I’m not. Only time will tell.
Thank you for reading The Progressive Cafe. If this article has helped you, please consider signing up for our mailing list. This article is by Jesse Pohlman, a former hyperlocal journalist and sci-fi/fantasy author from Long Island, New York, whose website you can check out here.
I own that book