Standing the Watch: A Fourth of July Reflection from Eight Thousand Miles Away. - 4 Jul 2026

There are some years when Independence Day feels like fireworks, family, hot dogs, and waving flags.

And then there are years like this one.

Today, I'm not celebrating.

That doesn't mean I've stopped loving my country. Quite the opposite. It means I love it enough to be worried about it.

Living in Thailand, more than eight thousand miles away from the United States (Hint, world size 8 for you Traveller RPG fans), creates a strange kind of homesickness. America isn't outside my window anymore. It's on my computer screen. It arrives in headlines, court rulings, speeches, editorials, arguments, and endless commentary from every direction. Every day seems to bring another story that leaves me wondering whether the institutions I grew up believing were permanent are, in fact, far more fragile than anyone imagined.

It is an odd feeling to watch events unfold from the other side of the planet and realize there is very little you can actually do.

You vote.

You support the people you believe are trying to do the right thing.

You encourage friends.

You hope.

And sometimes hope feels terribly small.

I suppose that's one reason I write Space Opera.

That probably sounds strange.

Surely Space Opera is escapism?

Absolutely.

And thank goodness for that.

But I've begun to realize it isn't only escapism.

It is practice.

Every day I sit down at my computer and create another member of a starship crew.

An engineer.

A nurse.

A shuttle pilot.

A young ensign fresh out of the Academy.

A chief petty officer with twenty years of experience.

A scientist who would rather solve a mystery than fire a weapon.

A security officer who prays every mission ends without anyone drawing a phaser.

Hundreds of them.

Literally hundreds.

Most readers of novels never think about these people.

Most viewers never learn their names.

They're "Crewman Number Three."

"The guy at the science station."

"The woman in engineering."

But I know them.

I spend hours deciding where they were born.

Who mentored them.

What mistakes they made.

What values they carry.

Who they report to.

What dreams they haven't given up on.

Then I place them aboard a starship and ask one question:

What kind of future are they willing to build together?

As a professional Game Master running Traveller, Star Trek Adventures, and Captain's Log campaigns, I spend an extraordinary amount of time inhabiting optimistic futures.

Not perfect futures.

No one has ever accused the my setting, The Aurin Cluster, and  the Terran Second Empire of being perfect.

The Federation certainly isn't.

Every government in science fiction has bureaucracy, corruption, political disagreement, and people making terrible decisions.

The difference is this:

The heroes keep trying anyway.

They don't win because history bends automatically toward justice.

They win because ordinary people decide that quitting would guarantee defeat.

That's the lesson that keeps appearing throughout science fiction.

The Empire is enormous.

The odds are impossible.

The enemy has more ships.

More soldiers.

More money.

More influence.

More everything.

Yet somehow a handful of stubborn people refuse to surrender.

Sometimes they lose.

Sometimes they lose badly.

Sometimes victory costs so much that historians argue whether it was victory at all.

Pyrrhic victories aren't glorious.

They are simply moments where someone decides that preserving tomorrow matters more than surviving today.

History is full of those moments.

I've been thinking a great deal about my grandfather today.

He fought in Italy, all the way up the boot. Then the campaign ended. the war, he thought, was nearly over. he came home to a jubilant young wife. She became pregnant. They looked forward to a bright future, and his likely imminent discharge.  But then his orders came to go to Burma.  I try to imagine leaving a pregnant wife, perhaps facing death, dismemberment, in a war that he did not start. But his skills were needed to build the railroa from Yangon to China. to supply the Chinese with munitions.

Then he fought in Burma. He told me the rains were so heavy and the roads were so bad, the jeeps tried to travel through mud soup. People of his unit were captured and mutilated. Bridge on the River Kwai became his favorite film, Ironically, because it TOLD HIS STORY, or at least a Story LIKE his story, that he was unwilling to tell by himself. He loved Von Ryan's Express.

Two completely different campaigns.

Two different continents.

Different enemies.

Different climates.

Different hardships.

The by growing in the womb of his wife was to be my eldest uncle. Mt grandfather probably never imagined that decades later his grandson, by a daughter not yet born, would be living in Southeast Asia, in Thailand, only a few hundred miles from where he struggled, and retired from the Navy, that grandson would be writing stories about starships.

He simply did his duty.

One day after another.

One miserable march after another.

Swimming through mud-choked rivers. Building bridges.

Bridges that would help a completely different country.

One difficult decision after another.

Not because he knew how history would end.

Because someone had to keep going.

I've been thinking about my uncles.

One served in Korea. One day his tent had a tree drop hundreds of pounds of snow on it.

He laughed later, it was his mistake. But his buddies dug him out, he did not suffocate.

Another found himself connected to the conflict in Kosovo.  He saw as planes that were purported to be invisible came back all shot up, the pilots happy to be back alive.

Different generations.

Different wars.

The same quiet willingness to stand where history happened.

Then I think about myself.

I spent a year in the Persian Gulf.

It was probably the hardest year of my life.

Not because I was charging beaches or storming fortifications.

Military service is often much quieter than Hollywood likes to imagine.

Long watches.

Heat.

Fatigue.

Missing birthdays.

Missing holidays.

Sleeping 4 hours every 3 days, as we transited the Persian Gulf's Strait of Hormuz. Keeping the sealanes open, for the world.

Doing the same job correctly for the thousandth time because mistakes could cost lives.

At the time I was simply trying to get through tomorrow.  I slept on the deck of the ship next to the gun I was assigned to for that day, when it was my turn to get 4 hours' sleep, every 72 hours.

Now that young sailor that I was is almost sixty-one.

Looking backward is a strange experience.

You realize that endurance often matters more than heroics.

You simply keep showing up. That is how I got through it.

KNOWING that my grandfather and uncles had seen and done worse.

Perhaps that's why Space Opera resonates with me so deeply.

The bridge crew isn't heroic because they're fearless.

They're heroic because they report for duty despite being afraid.

The engineer repairs the engines one more time.

The doctor walks into another emergency ward.

The navigator plots another course into the unknown.

The captain gives another speech about impossible odds.

Not because they believe everything will work.

Because someone has to.

One of the greatest gifts science fiction has ever given us is permission to imagine that humanity becomes better than it is today.

Not perfect.

Better.

That simple word carries tremendous weight.

Better.

More compassionate.

More curious.

More humble.

More willing to cooperate than dominate.

More interested in exploration than conquest.

It is astonishing how radical optimism has become.

People sometimes ask why I spend so much time designing supporting characters for my campaigns.

Why create hundreds of officers?

Hundreds of enlisted crew?

Why worry about the life support technician nobody may ever meet?

Because civilizations aren't built by legendary heroes.

They're built by ordinary people doing ordinary jobs extraordinarily well.

The captain doesn't keep the ship alive.

The crew does.

The same is true for nations.

Sometimes I wonder whether writing these campaigns is less about entertainment than it is about preserving an idea.

That humanity deserves a future worth reaching.

That diversity is a strength.

That humility matters.

That honor still exists.

That sacrifice has meaning.

That hope is not childish.

Hope is work.

People occasionally dismiss Space Opera as unrealistic.

Maybe.

But I would argue that every civilization began with someone imagining something that did not yet exist.

Every constitution.

Every republic.

Every scientific breakthrough.

Every voyage across an ocean.

Every step onto another world.

Someone first imagined it.

The future has always belonged to dreamers willing to become builders.

This Fourth of July I find myself wondering whether the last 250 years have reached an ending of one chapter.

Perhaps they have.

History doesn't move in straight lines.

It never has.

There are advances.

There are retreats.

There are disappointments.

There are astonishing recoveries.

Every generation thinks it lives at the end of history.

None of them do.

History simply hands the next watch to someone else.

Maybe that's our job now.

To stand the watch.

To keep the lights on.

To refuse despair.

To leave something worth inheriting.

Not because success is guaranteed.

Because the next generation deserves the chance to discover whether we were right.

Tomorrow I'll probably create another ensign.

Another chief petty officer.

Another scientist.

Another shuttle mechanic.

Another doctor.

Another ordinary person aboard another imaginary starship.

Together they'll voyage into dangerous frontiers, face impossible choices, and somehow keep believing that tomorrow can be better than today.

Maybe that's escapism.

Or maybe it's rehearsal.

Because every better future first has to exist in someone's imagination before it can exist anywhere else.

So today, instead of celebrating the past, I'm choosing to build the future.

One character at a time.

One adventure at a time.

One starship at a time.

Hope, after all, is not something we discover.

It's something we create.

- fin