What will become of the Republican Party?

I'm curious to see what becomes of the Republican Party after this election season.

All this talk of the party being "destroyed" is hyperbole and nonsense. It will change, but I'm not sure how or how much. (I suspect very little and mainly in terms of primaries/caucus rules. In other words, the bare minimum. I mean, how much did they change after Romney lost in 2012, even after the party leaders all loudly and boldly proclaimed that they HAD to change to compete in today's America? Almost not at all.

So what does history tell us about it?

The Democratic Party split during and after the Civil Rights Movement era, with many of its longtime supporters becoming Republicans because that party was willing to accept and even endorse their extreme views (the "Southern Strategy" of Nixon realized in full during Reagan years). So those people had a place to go when the Democratic Party no longer suited them.

But who will leave the GOP if it splits this fall--the Trump crowd or the Establishment crowd-- and where will they go?

The GOP was ideally situated to take in all those disaffected conservative former Dems in the 1960s-80s. But there's no obvious destination like that available for either half of the current GOP. Will one side or the other form a third party? Or will they both keep trying to control the party and put it into perpetual civil war, like the northern vs southern Dems prior to the actual Civil War?

I'm betting on the latter, because (as these endorsements of Trump and Cruz by Establishment Republicans is showing us) the alternative is to willingly forfeit power to the other party, and that is the one thing they will never ever do. Even at the cost of their own integrity.

Space: 1999 How the First Season Could've Been Epic

One of the frustrating things about watching TV series that aired before, say, 1990 is that there was rarely much effort made by the show runners (or whatever they were called back then) or the writers to create much of a narrative thread that could link the episodes.

Sometimes there was a thematic linkage, such as the whole "fleeing the Cylon tyranny/searching for Earth" thread that ran through Battlestar Galactica (1978-79) or the "strange cosmic British beings are lording it over us but we're protected by the Mysterious Unknown Force" thread of the first season of Space: 1999.

But upon rewatching the first season of Space: 1999 in broadcast order (and I'm currently seven episodes in), the frustration is even greater, because the possibilities of what they could have done with the show are so obvious. It's a wonderful show (in the first season) but they could have made it so much better...but they largely ignored every opportunity and instead made each episode a stand-alone story that mostly ignored everything that had come before. Lessons learned in one episode are entirely forgotten a couple of episodes later, and threads that could have been picked up on and woven into more complex patterns are dropped entirely.

Case in point: Three episodes that together could have formed a truly fascinating storyline if they'd 1) been aired in the proper order, story development-wise, and 2) been slightly re-written to reflect lessons learned and opportunities presented in previous episodes.

As the episodes aired originally, we had 102: Force of Life, in which one of the Alpha techs, Anton Zoref, is possessed by a being of light and compelled to try to break into the main reactor to siphon its energy. He has a loving girlfriend who tries to save him but fails. Then there was 104: War Games, in which aliens play out a dream in Commander Koenig's mind of the utter destruction that would result if the Alphans blindly attacked ships approaching the base, falling prey to their own baser instincts. And then came 107: Alpha Child, in which an Alphan woman gives birth to the first child born on the Moon, after the father (not Zoref) has died, and Koenig recklessly orders Alan Carter and his Eagle squadron to open fire on ships that have taken no directly hostile actions. The child ages extremely rapidly.

Now just rearrange those three episodes and slightly change the stories and you have something terrific: a "You Alphans need to grow up" story trilogy.

First, we would do the 102: Force of Life story. It goes pretty much as it aired--but in the final scene, we show Zoref's girlfriend discovering she is pregnant.  Next, several episodes later, we do the "Alpha Child" story, and the reason the child grows up so quickly ties into the energy being that possessed his late father, Anton Zoref. (The aliens who come to get him are connected to this story as well; I won't develop it further here, but I think the possibilities are obvious.)  And finally we'd have the "War Games" story, where those aliens have seen what happened with the previous story (reckless Koenig ordering futile military actions) and as a direct result of that, they do the "War Games" shtick that we saw in the original episode--and Koenig learns the lesson.

I'm sure there are more story points from season 1 that could also be drawn together, resulting in a truly epic first season of Space: 1999. But that's enough for now.

Leave your own thoughts about this in the comments, and be sure to check out my own stories below.

--Van


Van Allen Plexico is an award-winning SF/adventure novelist and non-fiction writer and podcaster, as well as an associate professor of Political Science and History.

You can read Van's own interstellar saga of politics, religion and cosmic warfare in "The Shattering" from White Rocket Books, available here. The third volume of the Legion trilogy recently won Novel of the Yearin the 2015 Pulp Factory Awards.He's on Facebook as Van Allen Plexico. 
Follow him on Twitter:  @vanallenplexico
The White Rocket Podcast and White Rocket TV can be accessed athttp://www.whiterocketbooks.com

How Star Trek Might Have Ripped Off Space: 1999...?

Much was made, back in the day, of how the 1979 film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, had borrowed heavily from original Trek episodes.  "The Doomsday Machine" and "The Changeling" were usually the ones specifically referenced, along with a few others.

But it occurs to me now that ST:TMP has  a whole lot in common with a first-season Space: 1999 episode: "Ring Around the Moon."


Here is a summary that covers both stories pretty evenly:

A giant computer brain travels across the universe, seeking knowledge, on a mission that is no longer relevant.

It attacks human ships and destroys them.

It teleports a key female crew member away and returns her as an automaton in order to gather more information from the humans' computer, potentially at the cost of her human life.

It uses force field projections/tractor beams to push away and pull in a human ship.

It is finally defeated by revealing to it the truth of its mission, even though it doesn't want to believe the truth and tries at first to resist receiving that knowledge.













As an addendum, I'd point out another episode in that first season of 1999 dealt with the massive danger when a Voyager spacecraft from Earth returns, thinking it is doing good but actually causing great destruction. Sounds familiar, eh?

A direct ripoff? Probably not. But a strong argument can be made that the '79 Trek film borrowed at least as much, by accident if not on purpose, from good old Commander Koenig and Space: 1999.

-- 

Van Allen Plexico is an award-winning SF/adventure novelist and non-fiction writer and podcaster, as well as an associate professor of Political Science and History.

You can read Van's own interstellar saga of politics, religion and cosmic warfare in "The Shattering" from White Rocket Books, available here. The third volume of the Legion trilogy recently won Novel of the Yearin the 2015 Pulp Factory Awards.

He's on Facebook as Van Allen Plexico. 
Follow him on Twitter:  @vanallenplexico
The White Rocket Podcast and White Rocket TV can be accessed at http://www.whiterocketbooks.com

Link to the Pulp Factory Awards Ballot

   
Voting for the 2016 Pulp Factory Awards (for material published in 2015) is now underway through March 15. Awards will be given out in Chicago at the Windy City Pulp Con on April 22.
To vote for this year's winners, click on this link:
http://bit.ly/2016PFAwardBallot

The categories are:

BEST PULP NOVEL

BEST PULP COVER

BEST PULP SHORT STORY

BEST PULP INTERIOR ILLUSTRATIONS

BEST PULP ANTHOLOGY


After March 15th, the committee will tally all of the electronic votes and the winners will be announced at the Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention from April 22 – April 24th, 2016.
Questions and concerns should be directed to PulpAwards@gmail.com. This will insure a more prompt response than reaching out to individual committee members.

Thank you for your interest, and looking forward to your votes!