When I started writing my most recent book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture, I wanted to make an argument about aesthetics. Namely, I wanted to argue that when it comes to art, geeks tend to like works of realist fantasy, which puts the lie to the widespread belief that realism and fantasy are opposites. (They’re not: realism is a mode, or way of making art, while fantasy is a genre; any genre can be done in any mode.)

As I worked on the book, however, I realized that people were just as interested, if not more interested, in the history of geek culture. Whenever I told people what I was doing, they said that they hoped the book would explain why geeky stuff is everywhere these days—why it’s taken over the culture. Why are all the movies at the Cineplex superhero movies? Why is everyone talking about Game of Thrones? Why is it now considered OK, or mostly OK, for adults to read Harry Potter novels and comic books? So I knew I needed to write about that, too.

As it turned out, this wasn’t a problem, because the two topics are intimately intertwined. Indeed, you can’t understand the history of geek culture without also grasping its aesthetics.

First, it’s important to understand who geeks are. There’s a lot more about this in my book, but for now, geeks are techie people who favor the STEM disciplines—science, technology, engineering, math. As such, they enjoy applying those disciplines to purely imaginary subjects. Dragons aren’t real, but what would they look like if they were? How might they behave? How could you actually build a spaceship that travels faster than light? Is it possible to teleport people? If we met aliens, would we be able to understand them? Would they look anything like us? Would they have their own cultures? What would they eat?

That’s why, for geeks, it’s not enough to make just an artwork: one must make a world. Geeks don’t want just aliens, but species with cultures, languages, customs—the elaborate extensive background work commonly known as world-building. Which, as it happens, has its roots in philosophic and scientific practice, where it originated as a type of thought experiment: “Imagine a region of space where time runs backwards…” “Imagine that life developed on a planet without any light…”

Geeks have always been around, though for a long time they asked these questions on the margins of the culture. But whenever they came across a work of fantasy that they liked, they went to work on it: pushing its boundaries, and weaving an ever-greater illusion that the artwork wasn’t an artwork, but a window onto another world. As it happens, this is the spirit of realism—the desire to make an artwork look less like an artwork, artificial and contrived, and more like the thing it represents. It’s the same impulse or ambition that led George Lucas to make a more realist version of the cheesy Flash Gordon serials he’d loved as a child.

For example, the original Star Trek TV series featured Klingons that mostly looked like what they were—actors done up in shoe polish and fake eyebrows and (for the males at least) goatees.

After the success of Star Wars—which was largely due to its realism—the Klingons got redesigned to appear more appropriately alien. The ones that showed up in 1979 in Star Trek: The Motion Picture not only looked more like genuine aliens, but also spoke their own language (not unlike Greedo and the Jawas).

Over time, that language got fleshed out into an actual language that today some number of geeks have learned how to speak.

And a wealth of backstory, of world-building, got invented for the Klingons, to the point where they seem as real as any other culture.

So geeks are committed to realist fantasy (and I have much more about this, and many other examples, in the book). But this still leaves the question, why has the 21st Century seen geek culture become so prominent? Why did geeks go from being an underground, marginalized community to one that’s so mainstream?

The simplest answer is that the past fifty years or so have seen the United States (and several other countries) become post-industrial societies, shifting from economies rooted in manufacturing and agriculture to ones more dependent on their service sectors and information technology (IT). In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, few people worked with computers. Even in the 1980s and 1990s, computers remained specialized tools. But how times have changed. Today, computers are everywhere, and IT has spread to every corner of our lives. As the saying goes, we all carry in our pockets computers more powerful than the ones NASA used to send the astronauts to the moon. To some extent, we’ve all become geeks, whether we like it or not. (How much time do you spend using a computer and being online in 2019, compared with how much time you spent twenty years ago?)

This shift has made geeks more affluent and prominent—witness the rise in celebrity of people like Steve Jobs, Carly Fiorina, and Elon Musk. As such, it’s hardly surprising that our perception of geeks have shifted. Back in the 1980s, geeks were commonly portrayed as freaks, dweebs, outcasts—pale, pimply introverts cooped up inside computer labs, oblivious to how they smelled, or how they came across to others. Consider the part in WarGames where Lightman takes Jennifer to a nearby college computer lab to consult with uber-nerds Malvin and Jim. As they arrive, Lightman warns Jennifer to hang back, lest she make the duo “nervous.” Moments later, Jim is awkwardly ogling her as though he’s never before seen a girl.

By way of contrast, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) was founded in 2008 on the conceit that the smartest guy in the world, Tony Stark, is not only unapologetically brilliant but unapologetically rich, as well as a ladies’ man—”a genius, billionaire, playboy philanthropist.” Mobbed by adoring fans wherever he goes, Tony Stark is anything but a pimply dweeb who’s never seen a lady—he’s a rock star.

Since then, the MCU has introduced many other rock star nerds, like Bruce Banner, Rocket Raccoon, and Shuri.

Indeed, the last gasp of the stereotype of the geek as loser nerd was probably the TV show The Big Bang Theory, which premiered in 2007, one year before the MCU. That show—which was always more popular with non-geeks than with geeks—was conservative and reactionary, a last-ditch attempt to put the geeks back in their old place. But in May 2019, The Big Bang Theory went off the air a few weeks after the release of Avengers: Endgame, which went on to become the highest-grossing movie of all time.

So geeks got cool. They also got better organized, thanks once again to the rise of IT. Back in the late 1980s and early ’90s, if I wanted to buy X-Men comics, I needed to go to the brick and mortar shop in my hometown. And when I read them, I did so in secret, because I had only one friend who shared my interests and obsessions. That changed for me when I went to college, where I lived in the geek dorm. That institution, which collected geeks from across the state, taught me I wasn’t as alone—or as weird—as I’d previously thought. There were at least a few hundred other Pennsylvanians just like me.

The internet is that geek dorm times a thousand. Over the past two decades, as we’ve reorganized our lives around the World Wide Web, then Web 2.0, it’s become easier for people from all walks of life to coalesce around their interests, whatever they happen to be craft brewing, queer rights, experimental hip hop, making and watching ASMR videos, exploring the ruins of abandoned malls, or something else entirely. In the same way, the internet enabled geeks—who were early adopters, and tend to be internet savvy—to seek out and find one another. To my mind, there is no better record of this phenomenon than the growth in attendance at the San Diego Comic-Con, which ramped up steadily between 1987–1999, then exploded between ’99 and 2006, until the convention center reached critical capacity and ticket sales needed to be capped.

The growth of geek culture, coupled with its greater visibility, made it an increasingly lucrative demographic. There are now more geeks than ever before, and they’re less scattered, less underground. As a result, corporations and advertisers can find geeks more easily, and target them more effectively. Which they’re eager to do, because geeks are not only a growth demographic, but one that’s willing to spend lots of money year in and year out on the things that they like, as well as to freely share their enthusiasms on social media, in online videos, podcasts, and blog posts (such as this one). One of the first businesspersons to figure out that geeks had become a real market was George Lucas, and in my previous blog posts, “The Death and Rebirth of Star Wars” Part 1 and Part 2, I tell how that man eventually realized, in the late 1980s, that he could and should start making Star Wars products tailored specifically toward geeks.

Although even Lucas—who is himself a lifelong geek—ran into problems. By 1991 he understood that there was a reliable market for geekier Star Wars novels, comics, video games, technical guides, action figures, and more. But the later half of that decade saw him fumble when he released the Star Wars Special Editions, then the Prequel Trilogy, films that sorely offended geeky sensibilities. Lucas didn’t understand that glaring CGI additions …

… and kiddie-centric characters like Jar Jar Binks …

… would infuriate geeks, who had grown more discriminating after having delighting in things like Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire trilogy, and Dark Horse comics like Dark Empire. (Again, see those previous blog posts for more on ’90s Star Wars products.)

Of course, it’s important to understand that, while geeks are more prominent and affluent in 2019 than ever before, they are hardly the whole show. Indeed, they’re still a minority demographic. And while geeks value realism, as well as technocracy, obviously not everybody else out there shares those values. Which leads to tensions.

But at the same time, a lot of the people making fantasy franchises today still don’t seem to understand who geeks are or what they want, or even what percentage of their customer bases are geeks. (Hint: it isn’t the same amount across every property.)

Quite frankly, those people would benefit from buying and reading my book! I’m also available as a consultant, should they wish to hire me. (I work for gagh.)