Independence Day Remembered

(Sometimes my friend and I will start random facebook threads.  The goal is to start with as insane a premise as possible, then just randomly escalate from there, as the Spirit moves us.  Here's one we did yesterday, preserved for posterity).

David Harris recently claimed that sci-fi lit has been ruined ever since the Independence Day conflict of the mid-90s. Balderdash! American letters had been stagnant under the paralyzing burden of Post-Modernism for too long. But when the Mothership came, Godot finally arrived! The Decontruction was literalized! More than just Earf was liberated that day. To paraphrase Adorno, after Roswell, it is impossible to write Post-Modernism.

• David Harris: But nothing is getting published! With the... erm... cessation of operations of most publishing houses (in LA, NYC, Chicago, Houston, London, Paris, etc.), who will publish the books? We've still got the small, independent publishers, but they can't output much volume.
  There are still those e-book readers based on the recovered technology, but I just don't trust those yet.
• David Harris: So far, all I see is a lot of bad poetry about the Mothership Debris Ring making beautiful sunsets and crap.
• David Harris: And on sci-fi: When Alien Invasion novels went from the science fiction shelves to the historical fiction shelves at Barnes and Nobel, I kinda lost interest.
• Jacob Bender: (I like all 3 of these, but I wish I could triple-like your 1st one--"with the...erm...cessation of operations of most publishing houses in LA, NYC, Chicago, Houston, London, Paris, etc...)
• Jacob Bender: Look, none of us could've foreseen the shifting of American publishing to Albuquerque, and their admittedly sentimentalist, hippie chapbooks. But I think you should give the e-readers a chance, they aren't susceptible to viruses on Windows 95 anymore.
• Jacob Bender: Although I also think there is a fundamental misreading of President Whitmore's famed St. Crispin's Day speech--the patriotic-editions of the text keep missing how nihilistic it really is! It should've surprised no one when he crowned himself President-for-life--"interim govt." my eye!
• Jacob Bender: Also, what are worried about outputing volume for? It's not like there's a huge market for books ever since the customer base...well...shrunk substantially.
• David Harris: What bothers me most about the interim government is the naming of the American ships since the Conflict. The USS Marilyn Whitmore? The USS Russell Casse? Come on! Stop naming ships after people to score a few political points. We need to name them good, classical names, like USS Enterprise, or USS Millennium Falcon. That is what bothers me the most about the interim government. That and the cessation of civil liberties, I guess.
• Jacob Bender: Well, they only renamed the USS Steven Hiller the Marilyn Whitmore after Captain Hiller defected to the Democratic Republic of Iraq, remember. Pres. Whitmore pulled a total historical white-washing (pun intended) and erased Capt. Hiller from all the photos, like Lennin did to Trotsky. Welcome to Earf, indeed; maybe the real monsters weren't from space after all! Seriously though, Iraq under Pres. Hiller looks better and better each year--religious tolerance, freedom of speech, stable democracy--only downside is you have to live in, well, the desolate deserts of Iraq! It's the same problem with immigrating to Deseret.
• David Harris: You know what's worse than Albuquerque becoming the new publishing center of the world? Provo, Deseret becoming the new film industry center of the world. *shudders*
• John Sheppard: I'd like to say 'I get' what's being discussed, but unfortunately I think I'm only meeting half-way. What I thought was one thing seems to be another. I like the comments though.
• Jacob Bender: Wait David, you don't like Provo, Deseret films? But what about all those Will Smith movies?
• David Harris: Confession: I did like the new Spider Man, the one with Donald Glover in the titular role. But having Kirby Heybourne play Young Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars Prequels was a but much, even if the plot was amazing. It's a shame Lucas was in LA during the conflict. It would have been interesting to see what he would have done with it.
• David Harris: But speaking of superhero movies... It's hard to have a good superhero movie after the Conflict. Where was Spider Man? Where was Superman? Couldn't Professor X have stopped it, or at least given us warning that it was about to happen and to evacuate? That's the problem with super hero movies after a disaster like that.
• Jacob Bender: A George Lucas version would've been fascinating, you're right. But then, it's not like it was hard to write an excellent Star Wars prequel, any monkey could've done it. Really, you'd have to TRY to make it awful--say, cast Darth Vader as a 5-year-old, or give Yoda a fight scene, or have a clone army. Of course this is all strictly academic, Lucas being long gone in the ashes of old LA, Rest His Soul.
• Mary Miller Williams: I just really appreciate this. Thank you. I understand none of it. But I don't need to. like looking at contemporary art, It just feels good knowing someone somewhere understands it, bore it, and loves it, and that makes it beautiful.