1: Introducing…

Summary

In the inaugural episode of Geek Unified Theory, host Jeffrey Harlan introduces the podcast, discussing its origins, purpose, and future content. Jeffrey shares his personal background, detailing his lifelong passion for geek culture, including his early exposure to sci-fi and fantasy, his comic book collection, and his journey as an author of speculative fiction. He explains the transition of Geek Unified Theory from a blog started during the pandemic to its current podcast format. Jeffrey also highlights his experience with podcasting and his involvement in the Star Trek fan community. The episode concludes with a segment called "This Week in Geek," covering notable events and anniversaries in geek history for the first week of January 2025.

Timestamps

00:00 - Opening Titles and Introduction
01:40 - Main Feature
17:47 - This Week in Geek: 1-5 January 2025
24:13 - Conclusion and Closing Credits

Links Mentioned in the Episode

• Jeffrey’s web site: https://JeffreyHarlan.com
• Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of “Geek”: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/geek
• Geek Unified Theory web site: https://geekunifiedtheory.com
• Trekipedia: https://trekipedia.com
• Bluesky @jeffreyharlan.com: https://bsky.app/profile/jeffreyharlan.com
• Instagram @Harlander77: https://instagram.com/Harlander77
• Mastodon @Harlander: https://writing.exchange/@Harlander
• National Clean Up Your Computer Month: https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/clean-up-your-computer-month
• National Hobby Month: https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/hobby-month
• Public Domain Day: https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/public-domain-day
• https://copyrightlately.com/public-domain-2025
• National Science Fiction Day: https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/science-fiction-day
• J.R.R. Tolkien Day: https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/jrr-tolkien-day
• National Trivia Day: https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/trivia-day
• Perihelion Day: https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/perihelion-day
• Golden Globe Awards:

Follow us on social media

• BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/geekunifiedtheory.com
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/geekunifiedtheory
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/geekunifiedtheory

Recorded and mastered by Jeffrey Harlan. Music by Ovani Sound (https://ovanisound.com) and Hyperreal Records (https://hyperrealrecords.bandcamp.com). Used under license. Geek Unified Theory is a production of Confluent Press Audio. Copyright 2025 Jeffrey Harlan, dbaConfluent Press. All rights reserved.

Episode Transcript

(00:00): In a world where fandoms collide, where epic stories shape our lives and where passion for all things geeky connects us across time and space: Welcome to the Geek Unified Theory.Hosted by the one and only Jeffrey Harlan, your guide through the worlds of heroes, villains, and everything in between. Grab your controller, pick up your favorite graphic novel, and settle in for the ride. It's time for the Geek Unified Theory.

Hey geeks. Welcome to Geek Unified Theory,episode one. I'm your host, Jeffrey Harlan. In this episode, we'll discuss the podcast itself. What's the history behind it? What will the show cover? We'll also talk about me, your host. Who am I? What's my background?

This episode is brought to you by my book Donner und Blitzkrieg: Book One of the Minutemen. As the Korean War drew to a close, Steven and Percy discovered they had superpowers. Becoming the world's first superheroes, Nucleus and Strongman, the pair found themselves at the forefront of a wave of superhumans. When Donner, the superpowered son of Nazi war criminals, attacks, the two heroes find themselves thrust into a leadership role, and failure could mean the rise of a new Reich. Donner und Blitzkrieg is available through my website, JeffreyHarlan.com, and can be found at retailers around the world.

(01:41): In today's episode, we're going to talk about the history of Geek Unified Theory.We're also going to talk a little bit about me, your host.

To start off with, what is a geek? According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a geek is “an enthusiast or expert, especially in a technological field or activity. … Geek became synonymous with nerd in the 1950s and has similarly seen increasing use with positive connotations highlighting membership in a specialized group … rather than social awkwardness.”

Originally, Geek Unified Theory started as a blog in 2020 during the pandemic lockdown. It was something that I wanted to do to kind of join in with some of those other sites out there that were doing news and article features on basically just geek culture, geek history. It lasted for about a year and then it kind of fell by the wayside as the pandemic lockdown ended, and it was lower priority because I had other things that were taking time away from it that I was dedicating to it.

I was working on trying to save up money, rebuild my credit, and buy a house, and then I was moving and finding a new job, so everything just kind of fell by the wayside. I merged all the content with my author site, JeffreyHarlan.com, and the site GeekUnifiedTheory.com expired. The domain registration expired and then… I didn't forget about it, but it became a lower priority. I was focusing more on my novels and other things, but now I'm resurrecting it as a podcast. I've taken all the old content— I've renewed the registration on the domain name. The website is back, the content from the old website is back. It's all still there. I had a backup of it, and like I said, it's at GeekUnifiedTheory.com. Primarily, this podcast is going to be a solo endeavor. It's just going to be me talking about things with geek history, geek culture, fandom, comic books, movies, TV shows, novels, books, things like that, things that we are passionate about as geeks.

I'm here to entertain and inform you. I'm also planning to have interviews down the line with other people that bring something that I can't. I'm also going to talk about some specific shows like Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Robotech, Transformers, all those kinds of things that we are just really into.

Now, I’m sure you're asking: “Who is Jeffrey Harlan?” I'm what you might call a prenatal geek. I grew up with sci-fi and fantasy since birth. My mom and my dad were both science fiction fans, and so I've just been surrounded by that my entire life. They took me to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture in the theater when I was two years old, and then I spent the next several months trying to do a Vulcan neck pinch—with, shall we say, limited success—on my brother. Beyond Star Trek, I also watched Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, Blake’s 7… just all kinds of different shows. This was early 80s— late 70s, early 80s. I watched all kinds of stuff. That's just what we did as a family. We would watch TV shows like that and have a good time watching them.

I'm also a huge comic book geek. I started collecting in the late 80s when I was about 10, 11. I started with Transformers comic books. I was really into Transformers, and then I branched out from there into other comic books like X-Men, Spider-Man, Superman. When they had the Death of Superman storyline in 93, and then that spun off with the other Supermen that appeared in the aftermath. I became a huge fan of Tom Grummett and Karl Kesel’s work on Superboy, and that was one of the first series that I was going out of my way to make sure that I got every issue, and I just really enjoyed reading those comics and seeing those adventures and having all that entertainment. It was a lot of fun.

Now, I'm an author of speculative fiction, a member of the Science Fiction [& Fantasy] Writers Association. I started my writing career writing fan fiction in the 1990s. I'm a Star Trek fan, so I wrote Star Trek fanfic in the 1990s, and that helped me build confidence as a writer and it helped me improve my technique and my craft.

What I really wanted to do, though, was write comic books. So in the late nineties, I really started developing my ideas, but it wasn't until 2012 that I published my first issue of The Protectorate. It was a comic book that I had been percolating in my brain and working on at different stages ever since I was in middle school, really, and I produced four issues of The Protectorate as an independent comic book over the course of about five years, I believe. It proved to be much more difficult to produce a comic book than I had anticipated, so it took a very long time, especially since I was also working and going to school at that time as well.

So I had a lot of things going on on my plate, but I still managed to put out four issues. The fifth issue that would've wrapped up the storyline remains unfinished, but the story that I had come up with as the backstory for the world of The Protectorate was that there were decades of superheroes in the history of this world, and that became my novel Donner und Blitzkrieg. I read a lot of other prose superhero fiction like the novelizations of The Death and Return of Superman, Knightfall… I'm a huge fan of the series Wearing the Cape, and that one kind of inspired me to take the backstory that I'd developed and turn that into a novel, so that became my novel Donner und Blitzkrieg. I discovered while writing that novel that I really enjoyed writing superheroes as prose fiction more so than I enjoyed writing the comic book scripts and then drawing those comics.

For one thing, it was a lot faster. I could put a lot more stories out in less time, and since I published that, I've also published two more novels. I completed the story from The Protectorate as the first novel of that series, Invasion, that takes those first four issues, plus the story from the incomplete fifth issue, and puts it together as a novel. My third book, that came out in 2024, is Crusaders, the sequel to Donner und Blitzkrieg.

Another thing is that I run a website called Trekipedia; trekipedia.com. I've run that since 1998 and that thing, it started out as a repository for my fan fiction. I'd write fanfic, I'd post it on Usenet, and then I'd archive it on my website. At the time, I called it FedNet, the Federation Network, but eventually I changed the name because as I'm building up all these stories, I'm developing my own alternate universe because I'm taking things in a totally different direction than they did on the shows, and so I started creating an encyclopedia on the site, detailing some of the differences between the TV Star Trek universe and my fan fiction Star Trek universe.

Eventually, I stopped writing the fan fiction in the early 2000s and I decided, well, I'm just going to keep doing that encyclopedia. I was enjoying that, and I kept updating those articles. Around 2005, that's when Memory Alpha got started and, wikis being wikis, that thing just exploded, and there's just a massive amount of content on that because you've got hundreds if not thousands of people updating it. With Trekipedia, it's just me. But I decided I've got a degree in history and I have a very specific take on how to do an encyclopedia. Because of that, I'm trying to approach this from a much more professional historian perspective, and so I'm very detailed with my footnotes and attribution of everything that I put on the site, and I discovered a couple of years ago that some of the writers' rooms for the recent Star Trek series, they were going to Memory Alpha. They were checking that site for fact-checking on their scripts, but then they were fact-checking Memory Alpha with Trekipedia because I guess I've established that it's a trustworthy site, and that's kind of a feather in my cap, and I feel pretty good about that.

I also used to do a Star Trek podcast back in… it was about 2015, 2016, so about 10 years ago I did a couple of podcasts. I was co-host for two podcasts on the Trek FM Network: Standard Orbit for the original Star Trek series and Warp Five for Star Trek Enterprise. I did those with my friends, Norm Lao, Will Nguyen, and Ken Tripp, and I learned a lot about producing a podcast, doing those shows. I did that for about a year. I eventually had to stop because again, I was very busy with a lot of other things going on. I was going back to school again and I had just gotten married and a lot of other things were going on, so I had a lot of stuff and I just couldn't dedicate the time that I needed to produce the podcast, but I learned a lot in that year that I did work on the shows, and a lot of that credit goes to Christopher Jones, the guy who started the whole thing over at Trek FM. He had very demanding standards for the podcast shows on the Trek FM network, and I want to apply those same standards to my own podcast.

So that's a lot of what I am bringing to the table here. I've got a lot of background and experience and knowledge with both geek culture and history, a lot of the different shows and media that we like to consume and also some experience making a podcast— running a podcast on a topic like Star Trek, which again ties directly into what I want to do with this show.

I have a wide online presence. I post on social media quite a bit, actually. I'm on BlueSky @jeffreyharlan.com. Rather than doing the whole blue check mark thing like X—formerly Twitter—BlueSky has a verification that your username is your website and it can only become your website if you add some code onto your website so that they can verify that the website belongs to you. It's a rather clever way of doing things. And so my BlueSky handle for myself is jeffreyharlan.com.

Instagram, I am @Harlander77. Now, the name Harlander comes from when I was in the military. Because my last name is Harlan, one of the guys that I worked with said Harlander, and then he realized that sounded like Highlander, and he's like, “Harlander: there can be only one!” every time he saw me. It caught on and people started calling me Harlander. So that’s now my handle on several social media sites. So Instagram: @Harlander77, Mastodon: @Harlander, and again, my website is jeffreyharlan.com.

(17:48): This Week in Geek.

A feature I had on the original website was a weekly blog post called This Week in Geek. I would detail things that had happened in Geek History and I would also highlight a few things that were coming up in the future. I'm resurrecting that as a segment on the podcast, but since I'm going to be releasing every two weeks, I will be doing two weeks of This Week in Geek, but I'm still keeping the name because it sounds… I like the rhyming.

So for the week of January 1^st through 5^th, 2025: January is National Clean Up Your Computer Month in the US. Our computers build up a lot of dust and debris inside the cases. You want to clean that stuff up because it can cause a lot of problems like overheating and eventual breakdown of the parts. So clean out the inside of your computers, clean up keyboards. There's a lot of junk that builds up in there.January is also National Hobby Month. As Geeks, we have a lot of hobbies like model making, collecting, all kinds of stuff like that.

January 1^st is the anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley in 1818. It's long considered one of the first, if not the first science fiction novels. The Prophet of Dune,which would later be adapted as the first [edit: second] part of the first Dune novel, was serialized beginning in January of 1965 in Analog Magazine.

Also on January 1^st, Ender’s Game was published in 1985, and January 1st is Public Domain Day. There's a lot of notable works that enter the public domain every year on January 1^st. For 2025—and this is US public domain laws, because copyright laws vary from country to country, so in one country something may be coming into public domain, but in other countries it may not, so make sure to check your local laws—in the US, January 1^st, 2025, some notable works that are entering the public domain include Popeye and Buck Rogers. The comic strip version of Buck Rogers; in the novel, which is already in the public domain, he was Anthony Rogers, but the comics introduced the name Buck Rogers.

January 2^nd is National Science Fiction Day. It's an unofficial holiday created to coincide with Isaac Asimov's birthday in 1920. January 3^rd, likewise is J.R.R. Tolkien Day, which celebrates his birthday in 1892. January 3^rd is also the anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in 1993. January 4^th is National Trivia Day in the US and as geeks, what do we love more than trivia? So go ahead, bust out your copy of Star Trek Trivial Pursuit, and see if you can convince your friends to play against you again. All of them, against you at once… and beat them all, collectively, as a team, against you. Not that I have any experience in that. Moving on.

January 4^th is also Perihelion Day. This is the day that the Earth is at its closest point in its orbit to the sun, because the Earth's orbit is elliptical. It also shifts over time. So every 58 years, Perihelion Day actually moves to a different day.

January 5^th will be the Golden Globe Awards, and there are a lot of science fiction fantasy movies and television shows that are being honored or nominated at the awards this year. Dune Part Two is up for two awards, including Best Picture for Drama and Best Original Score by Hans Zimmer. Wicked is up for four awards, including Best Picture for Musical or Comedy, Cinematic and Box Office Achievement, Best Actress for Cynthia Ervo, and Best Supporting Actress for Ariana Grande. Inside Out 2 is up for two awards, including Best Picture for Animated, and Cinematic and Box Office Achievement. Moana 2 is up for Best Picture for Animated. The Wild Robot is up for three awards, including Best Picture Animated, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song. Alien: Romulus; Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice;and Deadpool and Wolverine are all up for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement. The Penguin limited series is up for Best TV (Limited), Best Actress for Kristen Meti, and Best Actor for Colin Farrell. House of the Dragon is up for Best Actress for Emmett D’Arcy, and Agatha All Along is up for Best Actress for Catherine Hahn. So best of luck to all of them, and that'll be streaming live on Paramount+ and airing live on CBS.

(24:14): Thanks for listening. Be sure to like and subscribe, and join us next time when we'll explore how geek culture became a global phenomenon.

Visit us at our website, GeekUnifiedTheory.com, on social media at facebook.com/geekunifiedtheory, Instagram @geekunifiedtheory, and BlueSky @geekunifiedtheory.com.

Recorded and mastered by Jeffrey Harlan. Music by Ovani Sound and Hyperreal Records. Used under License. Geek Unified Theory is a production of Confluent Press Audio. Copyright 2025 Jeffrey Harlan, dba Confluent Press. All rights reserved.