From the Editor’s Desk: Early Influences ⭐

One of my earliest memories of personal technology is in some ways quite clear and in others a bit fuzzy, as memories usually are, I guess. I was in a Sears department store with my mother and I wandered over to a display of what I sort of remember to be Commodore 64 computers, but given the probable timing was more likely Commodore VIC-20s. Commodore used to supply stacks of one-sheet product overviews for its computers and accessories, so I carefully collected each of those even though it would be many years before I would have or could spend that much money. But I all I could think about then was what I could do with that computer.

I was obsessed with this. And one of my clearest memories of this obsession is the Star Wars game I thought I would make, somehow, on this underpowered pre-PC computer. What I imagined was a sequence in which the little spaceship the user was piloting (an X-Wing) was skirting down the side of a humongous, dreadnought-like enemy ship—a Star Destroyer, of course—while battling small enemy ships (TIE Fighters) and laser-firing turrets on the big ship.

It’s obvious to me now that I was obsessed with this because I was obsessed with Star Wars, and that the sequence I imagined was inspired by The Empire Strikes Back, the 1980 sequel to Star Wars that featured what were then state of the art special effects. It’s amusing to consider that computers powerful enough to play such a game wouldn’t exist for another 15-ish years (Star Wars: X-Wing came out in 1993). And that I was never going to make this thing anyway: Over 45 years later, I’m still struggling to create a fully working text editor.

But the power of Star Wars and the impact that it had on people of my generation are both undeniable and underrated. This was the first movie that I saw multiple times in the cinema. I owned the soundtrack on a double-LP album that I had to play on my dad’s stereo. I collected the Marvel comics and, as a budding young artist, I created multiple comic book versions of these movies of my own over time. And I was fascinated by every attempt to recreate the magic of Star Wars, from overt copies like Battlestar Galactica to more literary science fiction endeavors.

I was about to turn 12 when I started the 6th grade in the fall of 1978, one year after Star Wars changed everything. And while I was never an honor roll student, I loved reading and I joined an accelerated English class that met in the mornings before school started. Over the course of that school year, I read The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Beowulf, and outside the class, I also read The Sword of Shannara, itself an overt rip-off of The Lord of the Rings. That book was the subject of my first long-form writing project, a critical takedown of all the ways its author had stolen from Tolkien. (And it will come up again in my 2025 year-end books recap, coincidentally.)

Those books and Star Wars didn’t just open my eyes to...