Last week I saw Project Hail Mary. It’s so good. A big sweeping adventure with strong E.T. vibes. Ryan Gosling is excellent. Go see it.

Then this week there was an internet kerfuffle about some comments the author of the book the film is based on, Andy Weir, made. He went on a podcast called The Critical Drinker, which I’ve never listened to, but whose schtick seems to be doing movie reviews where the blame for failed reboots or additions to franchises gets placed squarely on studios “going woke”.

Weir and the host started talking about Star Trek, the raft of new shows being added to the Trek universe, and the recent cancellation of Starfleet Academy. Weir pronounced the show “shit”. This might have all been the opinions of just one guy, but the context here mattered a lot. When you go on a pod that’s engaging in culture war clout-chasing, people are going to assume that’s what you mean.

The cancellation of Starfleet Academy had already been “celebrated” in some quarters because the show (an uneven but promising addition to the canon that followed young Starfleet cadets through training) featured a diverse cast and range of storylines, including the first openly gay Klingon, a deaf cadet and one who uses a wheelchair. (The criticism of the last was particularly gross, centring around the medical marvels of the Star Trek future where we would “fix” everybody in a kind of eugenics fever dream that doesn’t take account of the fact that Geordie LaForge was blind? IDK, I don’t even care about Star Trek, all of this just annoys me.)

Even William Shatner weighed in on the backlash, referencing his 1968 kiss, considered to be the first on-screen interracial kiss in American television.

“During the first airing of my Star Trek series where a kiss was objectionable; many southern stations pulled the episode & condemned the show," Shatner wrote. “Using today’s vernacular, it would absolutely be called 'woke DEI crap' because it went against 'norms' of society for its time. Not a lot seems to have changed.”

Ironically, Karim Diané (the actor who played the gay Klingon) talks about writing to George Takei (who played the original Sulu):

Diané said. “I decided to send George an email and just tell him about the character. The show wasn’t out yet, but I told him, “By the way, my Klingon Jay-Den is gay.””

“Ten minutes later, he and [his husband] Brad wrote back this lovely, lovely email, expressing that they had tried in the ’60s to get a queer character on the show.

“But [Star Trek creator Gene] Roddenberry had feared that, because they had already featured that interracial kiss between Uhura and Kirk, a gay character back then would have risked the series’ total cancellation.”

Anyway, back to Andy Weir. So he hates the new Star Treks and says so on a right-wing-coded pod. People who love him for The Martian are disappointed. And then an old interview from 2018 comes to light in which Weir had this to say:

For those of you who haven’t read or seen Hail Mary, this is a staggering quote. The story is so clearly about climate change, international co-operation, welcoming literal aliens, that you begin to wonder if Weir has even read his own book.

All of this reminded me a lot of a talk I gave several years ago called I still believe in heroes. At the time I was talking about the increased politicisation of our internet infrastructure, and I did it in the context of the political push/pull surrounding the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I said, “there’s no such thing as apolitical entertainment. As soon as you’re deciding that the pop culture we enjoy shouldn’t reflect the world around us, you’re making a political decision.” The point I was making was that, “we’re seeing exactly the same arguments play out as the private companies who have built and now control all of our social infrastructure continue to try to make the argument that they are platforms, not publishers. That it’s not for them to decide the merits of an argument someone wants to make or amplify using the tools that they’ve built. That they have no role in deciding what kind of shops they want to host, what kind of sites they want to protect.”

I still believe this idea of "neutrality” is so dangerous. People like Weir want to maintain that he’s somehow above the fray, not injecting politics into his work and not wanting anyone to be distracted by his beliefs. But then he chooses to go on a defiantly non-neutral platform to shit on a more liberal piece of media. The core of it though is that Weir seems to think his views are neutral. I loved this essay (on Substack, sorry, the irony) from Foz Meadows:

I was thinking about all of this when John Lithgow crossed my feed this week doing promo for the new HBO Harry Potter series. Some context: I was a dedicated Harry Potter fan. I have written Harry Potter fanfic. I own Harry Potter lego. Since JKR has revealed herself to be not only a transphobe but committed to funding legal battles to oppress trans people, I want nothing to do with her or the books, or any other project that puts money in her pocket. This isn’t a case where you can separate the art from the artist. Engaging with the art directly funds oppression. End of.

So it’s disappointing to see A-List actors sign on for a new audio book series and the new HBO show. Lithgow, who plays Dumbledore, gave an interview in which he just sort of shrugged, claimed her views came to light later (no) and said he needed job security (estimated net worth $50m).

This is the thing that Weir's "I just want to watch Romulans shoot each other" and Lithgow's "the reasons to do it were much stronger" have in common. Neither of them has to live with a well-funded legal campaign against their rights coming for them every single day. Weir retreats into apoliticism. Lithgow retreats into separation — the work from the author and the show from the creator and the job from its consequences. Both are retreats that are only available to people for whom the politics are theoretical. Which makes the claim of neutrality not just intellectually wrong, but something a little colder than that. The neutral space always exists at someone else's expense.

Anyway, while you’re working today, you can watch Rocky sleep:

more good stuff

• sticking with Hail Mary for a moment. There’s a gorgeous moment in the film where the soundtrack swells and you realise the vocals are in Te Reo Māori. This is the story of how a song by the Turakina Māori Girls Choir in 1976 made it into the film.

• big week for space nerds like me, with the launch of Artemis II to loop around the Moon. The first gorgeous photos are coming back from the Orion crew module.

  

• we’ve talked here about how the stans need to get off X because it’s a racist hate machine, and how the right uses X to boost hate against successful women, so it came as no surprise to see that engine kick into gear again last week to trash Chappell Roan. Kat Tenbarge has written another definitive piece on this:

finally, in my lego city

Forward this email to someone who needs to go see Rocky fist a bump.