They say at some point that Nolan’s sci-fi books never sold as well as his travel books- I wonder if, when he started writing, he figured he’d just tell us yokels about how cool and badass his people are, and that we’d just eat it up- only to realize that a bunch of unbeatable space-fascists who murder everybody and can’t be hurt at all is not necessarily what our sensibilities would define as interesting storytelling. I mean, what other kind of stories would a society like the Vilturmites tell?

So, I imagine he’d realize he needs to introduce some threats, and since there’s no indication that Nolan was a particularly inventive writer, he was forced to mine the depths of his memory to introduce some stakes to the story. Then when that didn’t work either, he started writing travel books.

It’s been a while since I read those parts, but I think all of the “weaknesses” he writes about are stuff he eventually overcame, right? He beat Spacer Racer, he’s alive so he obviously made it out of the encounter with the Ragnarrs. I could see him writing that stuff and not even considering that it could be used against them until after the fact.