Feral Historian
Published 25 Jul 2025While faster than light travel may be impossible, proclaiming absolutes based on the understanding of a particular time has a spotty record. But even if we are limited to sublight travel by the fundamental nature of the universe, we as a civilization have several macro-level choices to make, one of the most significant being which foundational concept do we want to build a future on: Ships? Or walls?
00:00 Intro
01:50 The Athenian Sailor
05:25 Frontiers
06:00 Assuming it’s Impossible
07:26 Picard Without Starfleet?
09:40 Culture over Economics
15:28 Founders of Worlds🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
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December 12, 2025
Starships and Walls : Which Shall We Build?
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December 10, 2025
Fantasy or Sci-Fi? I Pick …
Jill Bearup
Published 28 Jul 2025Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, what have you done this time?
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December 5, 2025
Star Wars and Aliens: A Look at Interstellar Communications
Feral Historian
Published 2 Feb 2024I’ve said before that Star Wars originally appears to not have real-time interstellar communications. Many have disputed that, with several good points. Here I finally explain my reasoning with a solution that fits everything we observe in the film without requiring convoluted excuses for why they have to fly an Astromech droid around. Think of this as off-week bonus content.
00:00 Intro
00:53 Taking It Seriously
02:10 Dantooine
03:43 They Tell Two Ships …
06:56 Is the Falcon Really that Fast?
07:50 Delegation🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
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December 3, 2025
The clankers aren’t going away
In the National Post, Colby Cosh says that we should think of the clankers as they exist right now in the same way we consider verifiably insane people:
The market-liberal economist/pundit Noah Smith has written a fun “stranger in a strange land” essay about his unusual fondness for the emerging species of “generative” artificial-intelligence bots. Smith points out that 100 years of science fiction has prepared us all to have convenient, convincingly intelligent, multilingual automaton life assistants; they are an accepted part of the background of almost all imagined futures, with exceptions like Frank Herbert’s Dune universe (wherein even basic mathematical computing is outlawed on religious principle).
Now these creatures have appeared in our midst overnight, and Smith feels delight, but he acknowledges that the public reaction is mostly dominated by hostility and suspicion. The rule that technological advancements are in general good, even if they have some bad initial effects, seems to apply only in retrospect: we laugh at the Luddites of old, little suspecting that we might just be the same people at a different cusp of progress.
The caveat about “bad initial effects” is extremely important (as is remembering that the Luddites really were personally endangered by progress). Technological leaps creating social fracture and mass violence are a real feature of history going back to the Neolithic Revolution. The printing press set off an orgy of religious wars, aviation created strategic bombing and the carnage of the First World War (along with its 19th-century nationalist and imperialist preludes) couldn’t have happened without railways and the telegraph. Twentieth-century fascism and communism can both be understood as mass-media phenomena, as consequences of asymmetrical human adoption of mass media. I’m sure some of you are keeping one eye on the horrible AI-driven mini-arms-race happening in Ukraine, as the interceptor drones and the attack drones of both sides in the war co-evolve at warp speed, and, like me, you wonder about the implications for the entire political order of the world.
Those news stories are a reminder that Darwin never sleeps, and that you don’t get to take a nap break from history — but also that our species survived these crises and has (so far!) prevailed, escaping the old Malthusian prison to arrive at a period of relative plenty and peace even for the worst-off. In any event, technological leaps are one-way doors: the only way out is through.
Consumer artificial intelligences really are marvels, but you’ve heard me emphasize that they are to be regarded for the moment as insane, and to be trusted only as far as you would trust a genuinely insane human being. We don’t yet know whether, or to what degree, this feature of generative AIs can be corrected.
Full disclosure, while I’ve used Elon Musk’s Grok a few times to generate images to accompany stories here on the blog, I do not use clankers to generate text and I can’t imagine doing so in the immediate future. One of the better signs that we’ll be able to adapt to clankers being omnipresent (as tech bros seem to be all of one mind that they need to add AI to everything they can, accelerating the enshittification of so much technology) was this little anecdote reposted on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:
Update, 4 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
November 13, 2025
I, Robot: The Ellison Script
Feral Historian
Published 4 Jul 2025Harlan Ellison’s screenplay adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot is arguably the best sci-fi movie never made. Let’s take a look at the script itself, why the film was never made, and how it might have altered science fiction cinema in the wake of Star Wars.
00:00 Intro
01:59 Robbie
04:32 A Little Detour
06:18 A Lifetime and a Galaxy
12:12 Liar
14:06 A New Theory
16:29 The Rapid Rise of the Federation
21:01 Obstacles and Ellison
(more…)
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October 31, 2025
Halloween Special: Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 31 Oct 2019Some monsters are undead creatures of the night. Some monsters are cosmic horror nightmare gods. Some monsters are existential personifications of dread and decay. But perhaps the greatest monster of all… is man.
Have a very spooky Halloween! And don’t forget the explicit moral of Jekyll and Hyde — that the greatest danger you’ll ever face comes from wealthy middle-aged white men who get away with their crimes because society refuses to believe they would ever do such horrible things. … Hm. Are we SURE this was written in 1886 …?
(Topic originally requested by patron Kyakan!)
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October 19, 2025
Forever War: Becoming the Enemy
Feral Historian
Published 8 Mar 2024The Forever War is a great piece of post-Vietnam social critique, not least in its depiction of a society that deserves to lose the war that its chosen to fight. Here I talk about the story through that lens, meandering toward a point in the usual Feral Historian manner.
Also I wanted to get this one out because I’m going to make some Forever War comparisons in an upcoming video.
Most of the B-Roll is from the Forever War comic adaptation, both the original black and white version and the later color release. Also threw in some clips from Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars just to mix up the visuals a bit because there’s already too much of me sitting on a rock.
00:00 Intro
00:53 The Draft
03:25 It’s so Army …
06:54 No Civilization
09:35 War’s Over. My Bad
13:14 Parting Thoughts
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October 13, 2025
October 5, 2025
QotD: Why go to the Moon or Mars?
This, by the way, is the thing people don’t get about space. Every time humanity takes some tiny step along the path to becoming a multiplanetary species (by which I mean “every time SpaceX does something cool”), someone comes along and complains that it seems kind of pointless. The Moon is very far away, Mars is even farther, and we have this whole big planet right here that’s already full of “uninhabitable” regions like the Sahara or the Antarctic or, uh, the entire American West. Starting there seems easier, since they already have things important elements such as “air” and “water” and “a biosphere”. Play your cards right and you won’t even need a passport, let alone a spaceship. A friend of mine even coined the slogan: “Terraform Terra first”.
But this misses the point. Yes, space colonization appeals because it’s part of the wizardly dream of innovation, of building new and exciting things, and thus has an aesthetic draw that goes beyond practical arguments. Yes, long-term we probably shouldn’t put all our civilizational eggs at the bottom of one gravity well. And yes, many humans have a Promethean (Faustian? Icarusian?) drive to expand, to explore, to see what’s beyond the horizon. All of which is a pull to space.
Now pause for a moment and think about what would actually happen if you decided to set up your terran terraforming in, say, the Owyhee Desert of southwestern Idaho. There’s a river in parts of it. It rains occasionally, and snows in the winter. Whatever techniques you were planning to generate power and conserve water on Mars would certainly work in Idaho — more efficiently, for solar, since we’re closer to the source, and with more margin of error if you can add water to the system. Plus the desert is full of exciting minerals you can mine to sell or even to extract water from! And the second you tried, the Bureau of Land Management (which owns most of the Owyhee, and indeed most of the American West) and the Environmental Protection Agency (which has opinions about mining) and the ranchers (who would also like to use that water, thank you) will come down on you like a ton of bricks.
That’s the push to space.
The dream of space colonization is partly about all the ways it would be cool to live on Mars or the Moon. But it’s also, implicitly or explicitly, a claim that it’s easier to solve enormous technical challenges (air! water! food! solar radiation!) than it is to solve societal challenges on Earth. Terraforming is hard; eunomiforming is harder.1
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Powers of the Earth, by Travis J.I. Corcoran”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-04-29.
- Though to his credit Corcoran has a diverse portfolio: in addition to the space colonization dreams, he’s tackling the “terraform Terra” angle with an active homestead (he’s written some guides) and the “improve society somewhat” approach through more direct political engagement than I’ve ever done.
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September 29, 2025
The Galactic Empire and a (Revised) Generic Model of “Fascism”
Feral Historian
Published 29 Sept 2023While we can classify significantly different regimes as “communist” based on their key similarities, we don’t have the same taxonomy for “fascism” as a political category. The term is either used so broadly it becomes meaningless, or defined so narrowly that it’s only relevant to Mussolini’s Italian Fascism.
But we can identify three key factors that, when all are present together, result in a system we can define as “fascist” in a sense that’s both historically based and general enough to be useful for analysis. In addition to laying out a simple model defining fascism, this video also dives into some history of Fascism and National Socialism, mixed with the kind of sci-fi analysis you’ve come to expect here.
00:00 Intro
00:35 Palp, Dolf, and Communists
04:05 Old Republic vs Weimar Republic
04:55 Party and State
08:57 Three-Point “Fascist Minimum”
09:24 “Third Way” Economics
15:12 Totalitarianism
19:19 Unifying Myth
22:53 Umberto Eco
24:46 Franco
26:25 Closing Miscellany🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
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September 24, 2025
Zardoz: A Technocratic Parody
Feral Historian
Published 30 Jun 2023After another viewing, I now think of Zardoz as an unintentional parody of the technocratic mindset that was congealing in the 1970s. It’s a strange film, a sometimes tedious film, but it’s worth a look if only because there’s nothing else quite like Zardoz.
I keep saying “Immortals” when I mean “Eternals” and I had to recut this one a bit due to some semi-random copyright issues so I apologize for any perceptible jank.
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September 17, 2025
Dark Forest Deterrence: Bureaucrats are Destroying the Universe
Feral Historian
Published 2 Sept 2022A quick look at a minor and neglected detail of Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem series. I trust that everyone has done the reading.
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September 10, 2025
Space Nazis! Evil Empires and Historical Memory
Feral Historian
Published 30 Jun 2022A brief look at the echo of Nazi Germany and its impact on American sci-fi, with a focus on Star Wars because it’s endured for nearly half a century.
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August 13, 2025
The Dispossessed: State Happens
Feral Historian
Published 21 Mar 2025Ursula K. le Guin’s The Dispossessed is one of the most in-depth examinations of how a large anarchist society might function, addressing both the problems it solves and those it creates for itself. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in the communist-leaning variants of anarchism in particular.
00:00 Intro
01:58 Anarres is not an Island
04:45 Shevek goes to Urras
07:00 Abolition of Property
08:30 Social Pressures and Pravic
12:30 Necessity and Ossification
14:45 Necessity of Conflict
15:45 Shevek’s Wild RideThis video is in part a companion to this one — Cloak of Anarchy : Gradations of Stat… from a few weeks ago. The original cut of that one had a brief mention of a couple details from The Dispossessed, but it really needed its own video.
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August 3, 2025
The Running Man: Prescient Subversive Shlock
Feral Historian
Published 1 Aug 2025Most of the satire in this film is so on the nose that commentary is redundant, but there are a few subtleties that are often missed in the bombastic spectacle of it all. More than that, many of the film’s best elements come from the ways it deviates from the book it’s based on.
(more…)
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