The Warlord of Barsoom marks a very special milestone.

A couple days ago, Postcards From Barsoom hit the twenty-thousand-subscriber milestone. I wanted to do something on the day, but I was wrapped up finishing the Starship Troopers essay, and after that I made the mistake of catching a head cold that pretty much nuked my last couple days for anything productive.

When I started sending these Martian missives I never expected that they’d prove so popular. Twenty thousand isn’t a huge number in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a much larger audience than I’ve ever had before. My essays now routinely break the five-figure view mark, meaning that everything I write is going straight into the heads of tens of thousands of people … and, I like to flatter myself (and you), not tens of thousands of random people, but tens of thousands of highly intelligent, thoughtful, and often successful people … the kinds of people who have a greater-than-average influence on the world.

The responsibility of that weighs on me with increasing heaviness. There are consequences to ideas. Every time you say something, it has some influence on the people who hear it. On a densely connected medium such as the Internet, every thought is a sort of wave that pulses out into the collective consciousness; the more connected one is, and the more that wave resonates with connected receivers, the greater its amplitude. This doesn’t only have an effect on the people who directly read something, either. There are second-order effects: someone reads something, and this influences their thoughts, which in turn influences their own words and actions, which has an effect on the people connected to them. And then by extension there are third-order effects beyond that, cascading throughout the noosphere.

Nice to know the Substack thing is working out well for somebody, at least. My own experience over there has been a good bit less salutary, alas: just under 300 suhbscribers, nearly all of the non-paid variety, thereby rendering the financial remuneration far less than what I was assured it would be when the nice Substack lady e-mailed me to inveigle me to start posting on the account I’d set up right after Substack came online and then let lie fallow afterwards, having no clue what I was gonna do with the damned thing. Then again, I’m what you might call an “acquired taste,” I freely admit it.

In this regard, at any rate, John Carter and I have a lot in common:

I didn’t start Postcards From Barsoom with any kind of plan in mind; to be honest, I still don’t have anything that could recognizably be called a ‘plan’. There’s no niche I’m trying to carve out, no one over-riding message I’m trying to communicate. I write about whatever I find interesting enough to capture my attention, I try to be honest without pretending I’m always right, and I try to find creative angles on the subject matter, to say things that haven’t been said before, or at least to say them in a somewhat novel fashion. It’s a constant dance between poetry and science, perched on the razor edge between rigour and ridiculousness. Striking that balance while also being aware of the responsibility that a large audience entails is trickier still. Nothing crushes playfulness faster than the gravity of seriousness.

Preach it, brother-man.