Enthusiastic Amateur

Star Wars is more than just three good films and three bad ones. It’s more than locking S-Foils in attack positions, more than that soaring, thunderous John Williams score and even more than the foresight to retain the merchandising rights. Star Wars is a feeling. When you think about Star Wars you probably feel something before you can even articulate it, a seed deep inside that was planted there when you were young and first saw it, and delighted at the lasers and strange space knights. It’s the feeling that the prequels never managed to get, that was missing from the otherwise excellent Knights of the Old Republic and the countless novels and comics now swept away by the great tide of new opportunities brought in by Disney and their cavernous pockets. This is a longing for ‘our’ Star Wars, for practical effects and a return to the romanticism of those old space serials from which so much of the fantasy and adventure was cribbed. We want more of the same but ...

" If I might for a moment trumpet! How much better is this amiable miniature than the real thing! Here is a homeopathic remedy for the imaginative strategist. Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster- and no smashed nor sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated country sides, no petty cruelties, none of that awful universal boredom and embitterment, that tiresome delay or stoppage or embarrassment of every gracious, bold, sweet, and charming thing, that we who are old enough to remember a modern war know to be the reality of belligerence ." -H.G. Wells, 'Little Wars' I think sometimes on the words of H.G Wells and know, without ever having the understanding that can only come in the face of experience, that a war over feet of carpet waged between tiny men and surly, treacherous dice, is infinitely preferable to trenches, mud and blood and all the things that meant war when I was a child. I playe...