Buck Rogers

Post-apocalyptic hero

First appearance: Syndicated newspaper strip, 1929.

Buck Rogers is present-day pilot who gets Rip Van Winkle'd into the 25th Century, where he finds a post-apocalyptic Earth where the last few civilised hidden cities wage war against barbaric enemies. Later stories have Buck venturing into exotic locations, including outer space.

I found scans of the original Buck Rogers comics online and I tried to read them, but I reached the limit of what even I'm prepared to do for space hero research. The art hasn't aged as well as Flash Gordon's, and they're also pretty racist. (Flash Gordon's villain was a Chinese-coded alien, but Buck Rogers was literally fighting evil Chinese people.)

The 1939 movie serial is somewhat better, and replaces the evil Chinese people with “super-racketeers” of indeterminate race, led by a dictator called Killer Kane. Most of the plot involves Buck Rogers and Killer Kane's agents travelling to Saturn to secure the support of its inhabitants in their struggle.

But of course the best-known version of Buck Rogers is the 1979-81 TV series, whose pilot episode replaces the “super-racketeers” with an encroaching space empire represented by Princess Ardala (Killer Kane is demoted to her sidekick). It's cheap-looking and the world-building barely makes sense, but it's a lot of fun, thanks mostly to the performances of Gil Gerard as Buck Rogers and Erin Gray as Wilma Deering.

Frustratingly, Princess Ardala comes close to being an interesting villain—a spoiled space princess trying to conquer a planet because Daddy has give it to her to play with, whose interactions with the hero give her the beginnings of a moral awakening—but the series doesn't give her enough screen time, and focuses so much on her being in love with Buck Rogers that she doesn't feel like a fully realised character in her own right. There's one nice scene in which she stares silently into a mirror and you can see her torn between her future as Evil Space Empress and her potentially redeeming love for Buck...but it's not enough.

Flash Gordon

The last great planetary romance

First appearance: Syndicated newspaper strip, 1934.

The Buck Rogers newspaper strip inspired various imitators, the most successful of which was Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon. The premise is similar: a person from the real world gets transported into a fantastic science fiction setting, in Flash's case via rocket ship rather than a time skip.

Flash Gordon is perhaps the last great example of the “planetary romance” genre, in which someone is transported to an exotic alien planet and has swashbuckling science fantasy adventures. Most of his adventures are confined to the medieval-with-rocket-ships planet Mongo, and Flash is as likely to fight monsters with a sword as with a ray gun.

The three movie serials (1936, 1938, 1940) adapt the comics fairly closely, and the 1980 movie is a lovely modernised pastiche of the 1930s serials' aesthetic. The current ongoing daily/Sunday strip by Dan Schkade is a great modern follow-up to the original comics.

The Lensmen

Space heroes as an institution

First appearance: Astounding Stories, 1937

Heroic adventure stories, in space or not, generally feature a superhumanly competent and morally upstanding individual hero. But what if the superiority of this individual wasn't just a literary conceit, but was recognised in-universe? Turns out it gets kind of fascist.

Beginning with Galactic Patrol (serialised 1937-8, published as a novel in 1950), E. E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensman series is based on the idea that some individuals are simply so brilliant and morally upstanding that they should be entrusted with psychic powers, fantastic weaponry, and nearly unlimited authority in deploying these things against organised space crime. And deploy them they do, not hesitating to use ridiculously over-the-top lethal force against space pirates, drug smugglers, and other villains.

But it turns out that all the space criminals are (sometimes unknowing) underlings of the utterly evil alien Eddorians, who may in fact be responsible for basically all bad stuff in the universe. (Could social problems ever be a cause of crime? No, it must be the influence of evil outsiders.) Opposing the Eddorians are the Arisians, benevolent aliens of incredible psychic power, who have been subtly influencing life throughout the galaxy to selectively breed the upstanding individuals who make up the Lensmen.

Anyway, our main hero, Kimball Kinnison, teams up with Lensmen from various weird alien species to defeat a series of evil organisations, each of which turns out to be a front for an even bigger, eviller organisation, until eventually they're in a galaxies-spanning war against the Eddorians themselves!

Setting aside the problematic moral assumptions, the books are a lot of fun. The ridiculously over-the-top pulp prose style, in particular, is something I'm trying to emulate in Foolish Earth Creatures. I mean look at this nonsense:

If you're thinking the Lensmen sound a lot like the Jedi, or that the breeding program to produce a psychic superman sounds like what's happening in Dune, or that the cosmic war between good and evil aliens sounds like what Babylon 5 was deconstructing, you'd be correct. The Lensman series casts a long shadow over the entire space opera genre.

Dan Dare

Post-war British space hero

First appearance: Eagle, 1950.

The post-war British answer to Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, Dan Dare had adventures on exotic planets not because he was transported there accidentally, but because he's a space pilot so it's kind of his job. The planetary romance genre that was still visible in Flash Gordon has almost entirely vanished, and Dare's adventures are closer to straightforward science fiction, with technology that at least makes an effort at seeming plausible. Dan Dare almost never uses a sword.

Dan Dare is the most self-consciously moral of these stories, and its sense of morality is very different from that of the Lensman books, with an emphasis on not using violence unless absolutely necessary, and doing the right thing even though it's difficult. Kim Kinnison occasionally takes an enemy prisoner rather than killing them because it's a good strategic move, but Dan Dare will do it because it's the right thing to do.

Jeff Hawke

Space hero as diplomat

First appearance: Daily Express, 1954.

The success of Dan Dare triggered a wave of space hero characters in British comics, perhaps the most interesting of which is Jeff Hawke. He started out as a by-the-numbers Flash Gordon/Dan Dare knock-off, but gradually developed into more of a diplomat than an action hero, and starred in complicated, humourous, and sometimes satirical adventures involving some delightfully weird aliens. In fact a lot of the time Hawke's main role is to be the “straight man” to the weird bickering aliens who are the real stars.

The world of Jeff Hawke has Earth as newcomers in a galactic society of weird alien races. Several stories focus on the space police, but unlike the Lensmen they're bumbling, bureaucratic, and often incompetent.

One Jeff Hawke story does that joke (later done by The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy) where we see alien invaders approaching Earth but when they arrive they turn out to be tiny. But whereas Hitchhikers uses that as the punchline, the Jeff Hawke story keeps going for several more weeks as the tiny aliens continue their increasingly absurd plan to conquer the planet with their tiny ray guns.

Luke Skywalker

The Space Hero's Journey

First appearance: Star Wars, 1977.

The above examples are all from onging comic or book series that don't allow their heroes much room for character development. Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers get transported to their fantastic worlds, and Kim Kinnison starts by graduating from Lensman School, but pretty quickly they're doing space hero things and they don't change much as people after that.

George Lucas was inspired by these stories when he created Star Wars, but he took that kind of character and gave them a coming-of-age story that fairly closely follows the mythic structure of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey.

(The universality of the Hero's Journey is sometimes exaggerated, and there's debate about how useful a tool it is both for writing and story analysis—but if it's applicable to anything, it's Star Wars.)

The mythic properties of the story structure are accompanied by mystical elements of world-building. The Jedi have psychic powers not that different from those of the Lensmen, but whereas the Lensmen treat them scientifically, for the Jedi they're a mystical or religious art. The story's morality, similarly, is not just a struggle against worldly evil as represented by the Empire, but a supernatural battle between good and evil as represented by the two sides of the Force.

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There are more characters I could mention but I think I've spent enough time on this. Hopefully I'll be able to work on the game some more in July and will have something more to write in the next diary.

How will you, the player measure up to these heroes of 20th century science fiction? Don't miss July's developer diary!

#FoolishEarthCreatures #DevDiary #BuckRogers #FlashGordon #Lensman #DanDare #JeffHawke #StarWars

But that means I don't have anything to show in this diary, so instead here is a fluffy listicle of some of my favourite space villains who inspired the game, and my personal crazy fan theories about each of them. (These are in chronological order of first appearance.)

Ming the Merciless

First appearance: Flash Gordon Sunday newspaper strip, 1934.

Ming is a cruel and scheming politician who gained usurped the rightful emperor of Mongo and who now rules the planet with an iron fist.

Ming started out as a “yellow peril” stereotype with his fu manchu mustache and orientalist palaces, but this aspect of his character was downplayed almost immediately. As Alex Raymond's art style evolved, Ming's skin changed from bright yellow to a more natural colour, and as the strip moved into the late 30s Ming and his minions looked and acted less like orientalist fantasy villains and more like real-life Nazis.

(When Raymond eventually left the Flash Gordon strip in 1944 it was to enlist in the U.S. Marines, which he insisted on doing despite having already done enough military service to be exempt from the draft.)

Interestingly, the idea of Ming wanting to conquer the Earth is actually not in the original comics, but first appears in the 1936 movie serial. Ming's goals in the early comics are to forcibly marry Dale Arden and to retain control of his empire in the face of rebellious vassals and a population that hates him. Later versions of Flash Gordon have given Ming more far-reaching ambitions, and have tended to downplay his orientalist origins even further by e.g. making him a grey-skinned alien.

My fan theory: Ming wants to marry Dale Arden not because he lusts after her (although he does), but because she exists outside the Mongothic social structure and thus solves a political problem. If he marries a noble it'll affect the balance of power between his vassals, and if he marries a commoner he'll lose everyone's respect, but Dale is from another planet, so he can present her as some kind of exotic alien princess. This is also why (in the original 1930s comic) he loses interest in Dale once Princess Aura has given him a grandson, instead shifting his focus to kidnapping the baby in order to raise him as his ideal heir.

The Mekon

First appearance: Eagle comic, 1950.

The first Dan Dare story introduces the Treens, reptilian aliens who have done away with emotions and devote themselves to remorseless scientific logic. Whereas Flash met Ming almost immediately, it is several months before Dan meets the Mekon, a diminutive creature with a swollen head and atrophied body, whom the Treens had specifically engineered to be their super-intelligent ruler.

Unlike Ming and his quarrelling vassals, the Mekon has absolute authority over his Treens—at least until the end of the first story, when he is deposed and flees into space. After that he pops up in roughly every second story, with a small band of fanatically loyal Treens and a new plan to conquer the Earth.

(Once the Mekon is removed, most of the Treens seem content to return to their ordered, scientific lives and live in peace with Earth people. I like to imagine Treen science lab directors being quietly relieved to be able to focus on their obscure research areas now that this disruptive business of conquering the universe is out of the way.)

The Mekon remains mostly unchanged across all the later versions of Dan Dare, although the 2007 Garth Ennis/Gary Erskine version does redesign his flying chair to finally give it a back rest. Possibly if his chair had been more ergonomically designed from the start, he wouldn't have been so unpleasant.

My fan theory: We know that the Mekon is the last in a long line of similar Mekons, so why does this Mekon have designs on conquering the universe when previous ones seemed content to keep Treen society running? Perhaps this Mekon is defective somehow, dominated by unusually powerful emotions that he can't admit to himself and doesn't have the ability to process. Perhaps a “normal” Mekon would look at him in disgust...and perhaps, deep down, he knows that...

Davros

First appearance: Doctor Who, “Genesis of the Daleks”, 1975.

Doctor Who has lots of great villains, but the one that's most relevant to this list is Davros, creator of the Daleks.

Like the Mekon (who partially inspired him), Davros is super-intelligent but physically frail, and is confined to a mobile life support unit. That life support module was also the design basis of the Daleks, whom he intended to be the ultimate life-form according to his genocidal ideology—so he resembles an intermediate step between Daleks and ordinary humanoids.

Davros is an unusual villain in that he's super-intelligent but still treats the hero as an intellectual equal, or at least close enough to one to engage them in philosophical conversations. (Ming and the Mekon might monologue at their respective heroes, but there's never a chance that they'll listen to what the hero says and change their mind.) “Genesis of the Daleks” is in part a sort of intellectual duel between the hero and villain, one in which the villain listens to what the hero says, is confronted with the philosophical ramifications of their plans, realises that they're utterly evil—and decides to do it anyway.

My fan theory: Even when Davros is seemingly in charge of things, he only exists because the Daleks keep resurrecting him and keeping him alive—and they only do that because they need his non-Dalek intelligence to deal with some problem—which is usually the Doctor—so in a sense Davros only continues to exist because the Doctor does. (Actually I'm not sure this is a fan theory, it might be canon, but I'm not enough of a Doctor Who nerd to be sure.)

The Borg Queen

First appearance: Star Trek: First Contact, 1996.

The Borg, like the Daleks, were introduced without an overall leader, and in fact their lack of individual identity seemed to make such a concept meaningless. The Star Trek story “The Best of Both Worlds” gave them a temporary spokesperson in the form of an assimilated Picard (who called himself “Locutus of Borg”), which implied that the Borg might do a similar thing when dealing with other species they wanted to assimilate. The fact that the Borg didn't have individuals in the normal sense was one of the things that made them alien and scary. They were a sort of twisted mirror image of the Federation, an interplanetary culture based not on diversity but on a complete negation of diversity.

So the introduction of an individual ruler of the Borg, in the form of the Borg Queen, would seem to contradict one of the things that makes the Borg work—but she's such a great villain that I think they get away with it.

Like the previous villains in this list, the Queen is intelligent and articulate, but unlike them hers is an alien intelligence because it's bent towards utterly inhuman goals. Conquering the universe and enslaving or exterminating everyone is evil, but it's understandable; assimilating everyone into a hive mind is a science fiction concept that requires an imaginative leap; and an individual intelligence devoted to a hive-mind goal is a further conceptual leap. And the visual design, with its seamless integration of flesh and technology, is great.

My fan theory: The Borg Queen isn't an individual with a continuous identity, but something the Borg collective can sort of extrude when it needs an administrative or diplomatic focal point, whenever and wherever is required. So the question of whether the Borg Queen who dies at the end of First Contact is “the same” as the one who later appears in Voyager is meaningless.

Bonus fan theory: Assimilated Picard is called “Locutus of Borg” because that's the kind of pretentious Latinate name the Borg would get from rummaging around in Picard's subconscious. If they'd assimilated Riker he'd have called himself something straightforward like “Speaker for the Borg”.

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OK that's all for now. I'm hoping that next month I'll have time to make progress on the game so I'll be able to give you a normal developer diary at the end of May.

Will Vorak, the Master Brain join this canon of space villains, or will our hero fail to make progress once again? Find out in next month's developer diary...

#FoolishEarthCreatures #DevDiary #FlashGordon #DanDare #DoctorWho #StarTrek