Feral Historian
Published 5 Sept 2025There’s a long-running argument over whether Heinlein’s book describes military service as the exclusive path to citizenship, or if “federal service” is a much broader basket of enfranchisement. While a close read of the book makes it unquestionably clear which is correct, it misses the greater point. Heinlein was writing about the role of civic virtue in the stability of a republic, his citizenship-through-service framing is the literary conceit for discussing that larger question.
For a more detailed examination of the nature of Federal Service, I recommend James Gifford’s essay on the subject: https://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ft…
00:00 Intro
00:45 What is Federal Service?
02:18 An Exploration of Enfranchisement
03:13 Expanded Universe
05:38 But Why?
06:59 Starside R&D
09:07 “Unreasonable Facsimile”
10:54 Filtering Civic Virtue
(more…)
January 29, 2026
Starship Troopers: Service Isn’t The Point
January 22, 2026
D’Joan, C’Mell, and the Rediscovery of Man
Feral Historian
Published 29 Aug 2025Cordwainer Smith, through short stories and novellas, tells a sprawling history spanning thousands of years and an entire galaxy. In this one, I’m looking at a single narrative thread of that world, the gulf between man and animal and the partnerships that make humanity whole again after a long span of cultural stagnation and loss of vitality.
00:00 Intro
02:19 Partners and Divisions
05:15 Heading Down to Clown Town
15:53 Mans’ Other Friend
19:22 NorstriliaThe first month’s ad revenue from this video will be donated to 2 animal rescues. https://pauseforpawsaz.com/ and https://sites.google.com/site/catalli…
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January 14, 2026
January 9, 2026
QotD: “My goal is to get paid for having fun”
My critics consider me a pulp hack, but I’ve proven I can do the deep, dark, and serious better than they can. I’ve demonstrated that I can hop into whatever genre I feel like and do well there. But mostly I just like to have fun and entertain my fans.
True multi genre authors are rare. I’ve done really well in a bunch of different genres because I’m good at recognizing what people enjoy about those, and then giving them what they want, with my own spin on it. I can tweak it, but I shouldn’t break it.
“What if your childhood heroes are really losers and here’s a new girl boss? OOOOH SO EDGY.” That kind of shit bores me.
Far too many authors are pretentious shit heads who climb up their own ass thinking they need to “subvert” expectations, but they’re really not brilliant enough to pull that off. They’re just crapping on the stuff that made people like those genres to begin with. They’re not nearly as clever as they think they are.
Me? I’m happy to be a pulp hack. If I’m writing epic fantasy, I’m going to do the big, deep, thematic, emotional, stuff (and Saga of the Forgotten Warrior rocks) and if I’m doing progression fantasy then it’s going to be fun and adventure and scrappy nobodies trying to make it in the world and becoming heroes along the way. American Paladin is a dark and gritty vigilante story (with monsters in it). And Monster Hunter is urban fantasy soaked in testosterone and gun oil (that’s next for 2026). I’ve done sci-fi. I’ve done horror. I’ve done comedy. I’ve done thrillers. Hell, I’ve done stuff like Hard Magic where good luck pinning down what the hell genre that is … alternate history, hard boiled, pulp noir, super heroes? Hell if I know.
My goal is to get paid for having fun. 😀
Larry Correia, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-10-08.
January 7, 2026
Red Star: The Dawn of Soviet Sci-Fi
Feral Historian
Published 15 Aug 2025Soviet science fiction is a long winding road and it starts with Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star. Let’s start down that road.
00:00 Intro
03:15 Introducing Martian Socialism
06:35 Tektology
10:03 Crafting Communism
15:08 Mars Has Problems
19:06 Old Man of the Mountain
20:32 The Engineer Menni
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December 30, 2025
Childhood’s End (Youtube Copyright Edit)
Feral Historian
Published 30 Jul 2024The 2015 adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End has a lot going on. But Youtube won’t let me use clips from it, so here’s a stills-only recut covering the major points. A far superior cut is available at my Patreon page, along with a few other exclusives in what will surely be a growing collection of Youtube no-nos.
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December 14, 2025
A Fire Upon The Deep and the Identity Gradient
Feral Historian
Published 8 Aug 2025Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep would take a two-hour video to completely dissect. This is not that video. Instead, I’m looking just at the recurring ideas of collective identity and distributed consciousness. And all without a single mention of Skroderiders.
This one has been sitting around for about a year, due to lack of b-roll to cover the numerous jumpcuts due to my rambling and the rather persistent flies on that particular day. It’s a little rough, but let’s just roll with it.
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December 12, 2025
Starships and Walls : Which Shall We Build?
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
🔹 Ko-Fi | ko-fi.com/feralhistorian
December 10, 2025
Fantasy or Sci-Fi? I Pick …
Jill Bearup
Published 28 Jul 2025Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, what have you done this time?
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…)
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!)
MERCH LINKS: https://www.redbubble.com/people/OSPY…
OUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProduction…
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
