Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

February 12, 2015

Introducing the Shabcast

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I’m very excited to link you all to the debut of the amazing Jack Graham, he of the brilliant Shabogan Grafitti, as he debuts the first installment of his sporadic podcast, which he’s going to be calling the Shabcast, apparently.

The first installment consists of an appallingly long interview with me (seriously, this thing is as long as a Hobbit film) on all manner of topics, including the end of TARDIS Eruditorum, the start of A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones, the middle of The Last War in Albion, along with a wealth of other strange topics.

You can get it from the Pex Lives folks here (who also had me on last month for The Ribos Operation, and had Jane on this month for Paradise Towers, if for some reason three hours of me and Jack nattering on won’t cover your commute and you need another four hours of podcast). It was a blast to record, and should make a lovely capstone for this week straight of new content. Saturday Waffling will go up tomorrow, of course, and then things will calm down. A bit.

Thanks to Jack for having me, and I wish him the best of luck with the Shabcast as he moves on to actual respectable guests.…

February 11, 2015

Comics Reviews (February 11, 2015)

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From worst to best of what I paid money for.

The Amazing Spider-Man #14

Ultimately, this event went wrong for me on the simplest of grounds: it turns out that when half your cast is wearing an identical full-body costume, the story gets kinda hard to follow in spots. In any case, this felt muddy and half-formed, and I’m more interested in the epilogue than I was in the actual conclusion, simply because I expect it’ll be nice to get to character beats and not tableaus of Spiders. That said, the use of Peter Porker was brilliant.

Thor #5

The degree to which I like the new Thor as a character continues to run hard into the degree to which I find the “keeping her identity secret” plot irritating. This is an interesting issue, but consists of setup and moving pieces around the board in a book that’s overdue for some payoff. My patience with it is wearing thin.

Guardians of the Galaxy #24

I was less than enamored with Black Vortex when it was announced, as it’s a crossover affecting three books I buy that flatly requires picking up issues of four books I don’t, plus the two bumper books, and the premise – dark versions of characters – bores the shit out of me, not least because it’s just a conceptual rehash AXIS, which I also didn’t buy. For all of this, I’ve actually rather enjoyed the first two parts of it, though I’m still kind of waiting for the bottom to fall out.

Captain Marvel #12

A solid installment of a book I should probably drop. I feel like everything interesting about this take on Captain Marvel can also be done in Bitch Planet, and more interestingly, leaving this a kind of hollow riff on Marvel’s sci-fi tropes. That said, I really did enjoy this one pretty well. Carol’s move with the shields was cheeky sci-fi fun.

All-New X-Men #36

Hallelujah, the misbegotten Ultimate Universe crossover is over. Clearly this proved a tricky arc for the book, since it’s now going to get released out of order to get its Black Vortex crossover working. And it seems unfortunate that the last few months of Bendis’s run have to get consumed with a dumb crossover. But in any case, this was pretty good, and the Jean Grey/Miles Morales moment was sweet.

X-Men #24

After a first issue that left me very cold, G Willow Wilson’s X-Men story finds its gear here, hitting a wonderful tone of being both weird and somewhat silly. It’s clearly a filler story running out the clock until Secret Wars, but at least it’s looking like fun filler, as opposed to mildly disastrous filler. The art is still crap though.

Darth Vader #1

A fun intro to what Gillen plans to do with this book, but a relatively insubstantial first issue. Gillen seems to mainly be playing Vader straight, although there’s a certain camp glory to a few of his quips, most obviously “I have only killed two.…

February 10, 2015

A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 1.01: Winter is Coming

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State of Play

The choir goes off. There is a cold open running seven minutes set beyond the Wall. The first shot is three men of the Night’s Watch atop horses waiting for a gate to open.

The board is laid out thusly:

Direwolves of Winterfell: Eddard Stark, Catelyn Stark, Jon Snow, Sansa Stark, Arya Stark, Robb Stark, Bran Stark

Stags of King’s Landing: Robert Baratheon, Joffrey Baratheon

Lions of King’s Landing: Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Sandor Clegane, and Tyrion Lannister

Dragons of Pentos: Daenerys Targaryen, Viserys Targaryen

Fleurs-de-lis of Pentos: Jorah Mormont

Kraken of Winterfell: Theon Greyjoy

The Wall is unmanned.

The episode is in seven parts. The first runs nine minutes and is set in Winterfell. Its transition is via image, opening with the sole survivor of the White Walker attack in the cold open being captured. It features the death of Will, the deserter from the Night’s Watch, who is beheaded by Lord Eddard Stark.

The second runs two minutes and is set in Kings Landing. The transition is via hard cut from the Starks finding the direwolves and an establishing shot of King’s Landing as the funeral bells toll for John Arryn.

The third runs thirteen minutes and is set in Winterfell. The transition is via dialogue, with Jaime and Cersei talking about the death of John Arryn cutting to a raven flying towards Winterfell bearing the news. At the halfway mark, Tyrion is being introduced.

The fourth runs six minutes and is set in Pentos. The transition via dialogue, with Robert saying that not all Targaryens are gone to Daenerys Targaryen looking out her window.

The fifth runs ten minutes and is set in Winterfell. The transition is via theme, from Daenerys’s arranged marriage to Sansa’s.

The sixth runs even minutes and is set in Pentos. The transition is via dialogue, with Maester Luwin referring to Aerys Targaryen and a cut to an establishing shot of Daenerys’s wedding to Drogo.

The last runs three minutes and is set in Winterfell. The transition is via theme, from Daenerys’s rape by Drogo to Tyrion and the Hound talking about sex. The last shot is Bran falling from a window, shouting “Mornington Crescent.”

Analysis

It is a Great Game, in the Sherlockian tradition. A literary game of foreshadowing and prophecy. It is legendary in its baroqueness. The books are one of those legendarily delayed numbers, in the Valve Time tradition. The reason is straightforward: an author with an almost Tolkienesque graphomania whose obsessive level of detail has left him with too many plot threads to possibly resolve them. The television show does not foreground its obsessions quite as much, but they are there, in the form of a frighteningly detail-oriented production. It is thus a game of labyrinths, one to reward the obsessive. Victory is impossible, even, at this point, for George R.R. Martin. All the same, the objective is straightforward: you win by successfully describing the rules.

The first episode exemplifies this. It is an hourlong demonstration of what a game of Thrones can look like.

…

February 9, 2015

A Mild Curiosity in a Junkyard (Silence in the Library/The Forest of the Dead)

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Credits

The end.

It’s June 7^th, 2008. Rihanna is at number one with “Take a Bow,” having taken the slot the previous week. The Ting Tings, Coldplay, Usher, Madonna, and Justin Timberlake also chart. In news, Manchester United triumph in the first ever all-English European Cup final, defeating Chelsea on penalties. Construction begins in London on the Olympic Stadium, and Barack Obama finally puts the long fight for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination to rest when he defeats Hillary Clinton to, by that point, absolutely nobody’s surprise.

On television, meanwhile, the Doctor is in a library, shouting at shadows. Seething, he tells them to look him up. They do so, and begin to read.

Like anything, it emerged from a number of influences, and its history can in one sense be traced back indefinitely. It does not have a clear and definitive moment of creation – a pristine and bespoke origin story. It is, however, generally agreed to have a creator: Sydney Newman. Newman was a Canadian television producer who caught the eye of Associated British Corporation, a weekend ITV franchise in the North and Midlands of England. Moving there in 1958, he quickly made a reputation for himself, birthing the reasonably successful sci-fi anthology Out of this World, a fairly straightforward knockoff of the American Twilight Zone, and The Avengers, at first a fairly generic crime show, but eventually an international hit. At the beginning of 1963, he was poached by the BBC to become Head of Drama.

Shortly before Newman’s arrival, the BBC commissioned a study to see how science fiction might could work on television. Mainstream critics like Kingsley Amis were drawing attention to the genre, the earliest days of the New Wave, spearheaded by writers like J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, were playing out, and the BBC, committed to making various types of programming in the interest of the public, wanted to try it. The general conclusion was that sci-fi is a literary, adult genre that can’t really be done well for families because of the need for special effects. Time travel was suggested as a potentially strong subject for allowing a variety of low-cost dramas, and the report arrives six months before Newman. Three months after Newman started on the job, a Saturday evening timeslot between a sports program, Grandstand, and a pop music program, Juke Box Jury opened up. The slot called for an all-ages program, appealing to teenagers waiting for Juke Box Jury, adults holding over from Grandstand, and the existing children’s audience for that timeslot. Newman decided the sci-fi program would be perfect, and set to work designing it with C.E. Weber, a staff writer, and Donald Wilson, head of the Script department.

Curiously, the program’s development began with the sorts of characters who should be in it. The idea was a 30-something male protagonist and a younger female one, an older mentor figure, and an aesthetic that combined Victoriana with high-tech shininess.

…

February 7, 2015

Saturday Waffling (February 6th, 2015)

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We’ve got a full week of content for the blog this week. Monday will be the last TARDIS Eruditorum. Tuesday will kick off A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones. Wednesday afternoon/evening will have comics reviews. Thursday will be Last War in Albion. And Friday is up in the air, but will be an audio post of some sort. Then on Saturday I’ll announce the schedule for the blog going forward.

The blog going forward is going to be funded by Patreon. Right now that’s at $279 per blog post. As long as it stays over $200, you can expect a blog post a week. If it gets to $400, that will increase to two, though I’ll still only charge people once a week. Just $1 a week lets you vote on the bonus posts.

I also have been posting regularly on Tumblr for a bit now, including lots of random short posts on topics of potential interest to readers. I have anonymous asks turned on there, so feel free to follow me and to pepper me with questions.

But today, let’s just do a nice sort of… I think the kids call it an “AMA” in the comments here. Could take a bit for me to actually get to answering questions, as I’m kind of busy putting the finishing touches on Monday’s post, but I’ll tackle things when I can. So. Fire away.

To tackle the one I expect…

Logopolis is almost done – I’m going to do my last work on the manuscript on Tuesday, probably, then send it both to the copy-editor to triple check that all the “turn to page X” lines are correct and to James so he can finish off the cover art. Once it’s ready, I’ll get copies en route to everybody who bought them at the Kickstarter, order a batch to start sending copies to people who get signed copies, and then announce the book here for general order. It’ll be print only at first, though I don’t rule out an eventual ebook. I’ll start on the Volume 6 manuscript after that.

…

February 6, 2015

You Were Expecting Someone Else Final: The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who

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There are several regards in which the IDW run of Doctor Who comics is an oddity. First and foremost, it is the only substantive body of Doctor Who material to receive no distribution in the UK. Panini, the Italian sticker company that bought Marvel UK’s operations in the mid-90s and, with it, Doctor Who Magazine, had the UK license for Doctor Who comics, and was disinclined to let an American upstart in. And so IDW ended up creating Doctor Who comics almost entirely for the American market.

Unrelatedly, IDW also ended up creating what was mostly a line of fairly crappy comics. They opened with a Tenth Doctor/Martha miniseries by longtime vanguard of mediocrity Gary Russell, continued with the damp and misguided squib of The Forgotten, and stopped off at their one UK-distributed series, and eventually did their Doctor Who/Star Trek crossover (distributed in the UK because they put Star Trek first in the title, meaning it was technically a Star Trek comic and thus not precluded by Panini’s license), skewered masterfully by Josh Marsfelder here, stopping off with various other mostly uninteresting comics along the way.

Of course, as we’ve seen over the years, Doctor Who comics are hardly the area of the series’ life where it has most regularly crowned itself in glory. There are moments of genuine charm, most often in the Doctor Who Magazine comics, and especially in those edited by Clayton Hickman. And there are moments that are interesting as objects of nostalgia – the weird alternate history of the John and Gillian period, the Frank Bellamy imitations of the Pertwee era, early career mediocrities from Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and Grant Morrison, the surreal John Ridgway dreamscapes of the Davison and Colin Baker years, and the criminally under-appreciated Steve Moore run. But for the most part Doctor Who comics have been historical curiosities. The IDW run is mostly the same, although, truth be told, most of it isn’t even that curious.

But on Christmas Eve 2013, the day before the end of the Matt Smith era, IDW released a one-shot that served as their farewell to the license before it passed on to Titan Comics. It’s been the norm for a few years for one of the Wednesdays around Christmas to get a heavily reduced slate of new release comics, quietly shipped to comic shops a week in advance, with all of the books being fairly high profile, major books. So in 2013, there were a total of eight new releases, with one of them being this – a $7.99 double-length issue to close out the run. Picked for the high profile assignment, in a notable departure from IDW’s usual somewhat uninspiring creators, was Paul Cornell, making what was, by 2013, a rare return to Doctor Who. The premise is a comics classic, and an homage to the “Earth Prime” days of the DC Multiverse – the Doctor falls through universes as he does sometimes, and finds himself in the real world, where his adventures are regularly chronicled in a TV show on the BBC.

…

February 5, 2015

None More Goth (The Last War in Albion Part 82: Bauhaus, Enid Blyton)

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Comics Reviews will return on February 11th.

This is the tenth of fifteen parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Nine, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta for Warrior (in effect, Books One and Two of the DC Comics collection). An omnibus of all fifteen parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in a collected edition, along with the eventual completion of the story. UK-based readers can buy it here.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: A smaller but nevertheless significant collaborator on V for Vendetta was David J, who was also the bassist in Northampton band Bauhaus, whose first single was an ode to 1930s horror films entitled “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”

“None more goth.” -Kieron Gillen, probably every morning when he looks in the mirror

Figure 630: Peter Murphy in The Hunger. David J’s bass is visible on the
left.

The result was a minor hit that stuck around in the independent charts for two years and, perhaps more significantly, marked the birth of goth music. Sticking with the period aesthetic from which they got their name and first single, Bauhaus quickly forged a distinctive visual style that drew from German Expressionism coupled with periodic trips to antique stores to, as J puts it, pick over “piles of moth-eaten Victorian velvet (in both the ladies and gentleman’s departments.”) This was coupled, in their live shows, by lighting design produced by Graham Bentley, who used stark industrial lighting and strobes to flood the stage with light, highlighting their monochromatic wardrobe. All of this served to highlight, in Moore’s words, “the rivetting stage presence of Peter Murphy as he writhes against his live backdrop of searing white light and contorted shadows” – a stage presence that would go on to become one of the defining images of goth culture when director Tony Scott used the song and Murphy’s performance for the opening credits of his classic 1983 vampire film The Hunger, with Murphy gyrating against and tearing at a wire mesh, a libidinous monster playing homage to the cinematic tradition Scott’s film succeeds.

Figure 631: Moore’s text was eventually used as the cover
for Bauhaus’s live album This Is For When

Moore, indeed, was one of the band’s early boosters, giving them one of their first pieces of national press in February of 1980 when he gave them a half-page writeup in Sounds, some eight months before their first full album, when they were still riding high on the back of two singles and a Peel session. Entitled “Phantoms of the Teenage Opera,” the piece concludes by proclaiming the band to have “a sound as clean as a razor, and a vision that doesn’t need dressing up in angry rhetoric or android accessories to make a point. Their music may have the shadow of the tall steel over it, but that’s a heartbeat you hear throbbing in the background, not a ring modulator.

…

February 3, 2015

The Wasp Factory

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This is a bonus post written for my backers on Patreon. If you would like to weigh in on what the next bonus post will be, please consider backing – nominations are currently open. Plus, for just $1 a week, you can keep this blog alive and kicking.

And so, somewhat unexpectedly, my fifth ever long(ish) form blogging project starts up a week before my fourth. The fourth even has a title and everything. Whereas this one… doesn’t, because I hadn’t been planning on starting it until mid-April at the earliest. And perhaps more to the point, this is very much an exploratory project. To date, the Iain (M) Banks novels I’ve read are this, Player of Games, and Use of Weapons. So I’m still very much drawing a critical bead on him. I’m not even entirely sure I can articulate why I want to write a ten-plus post blog series on the Culture novels yet.

Nevertheless, it begins here, with Banks’s first published novel, in his literary, M-free identity, The Wasp Factory. It is worth noting that Banks’s early career features a mildly complicated chronology. The Wasp Factory came out in 1984. His first science fiction novel, Consider Phlebas, came out in 1987. But drafts of Phlebas and the next two Culture novels, Player of Games and Use of Weapons, all pre-date The Wasp Factory.

Which is to say that the broad shape of Banks’s career is misleading. He has said that he always considered himself a science fiction writer first, and that he tried his hand at literary fiction when science fiction wasn’t quite working out for him. And more to the point, he’s said that he inwardly thought of The Wasp Factory as a science fiction novel. As Banks explained in a 2008 interview, the isolated setting of a small island near a remote Scottish village allowed him to treat a realist setting in a manner not unlike an alien planet, and the, shall we say, eccentricities of the protagonist, Frank, meant that they was not entirely unlike writing about someone from an alien culture.

But in the context of his later work, or at least, in the context of the bits of it I’ve read, there’s another theme that emerges – one that I’m willing to hazard a pretty strong guess is going to prove to be one of Banks’s major topics across his career, which is the idea of people as technology. The big twist in The Wasp Factory is that Frank, who goes through the book thinking that their genitals were bitten off in a dog attack when they was young, is in fact a woman who has been being given male hormones by their father throughout their life as part of what their father drunkenly describes as an “experiment.”

A digression here, because although I don’t actually find the trans issues most interesting about this book, I know what is expected of me as a blogger. First of all, let me say that I wish to hell there were some thorough trans perspectives on The Wasp Factory.…

February 2, 2015

Outside the Government Final: The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot

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Given that The Day of the Doctor was massively successful and immediately catapulted to the top of the “best Doctor Who stories ever” list, it is perhaps no small thing that it was not actually the most beloved piece of the fiftieth anniversary. That honor, of course, goes to the spectacle of Steven Moffat visibly wishing he was sitting in the chair from Terror of the Autons during the botched satellite link-up with One Direction during the BBC Three “afterparty.” But second to the single most sublime moment of television that Steven Moffat has ever provided the world was Peter Davison’s The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot.

It is worth stating, up front, that this is a genuinely sweet and delightful piece of television. It is routinely hilarious, from the brilliant use of the Shada clip to cover Tom Baker’s lack of involvement to the Peter Jackson/Ian McKellen cameo to Sylvester McCoy’s beautiful delivery of “I’d like to go home now” to Steven Moffat playing with action figures in his office to… I mean, this paragraph could go on for quite a bit, couldn’t it? This is a joyous thing chock full of charming moments.

In some ways, actually, that’s the headline. Colin Baker has said in at least one interview that he genuinely was hurt not to be included in Day of the Doctor, especially given that Tom Baker was. This is an old wound, of course – the same one that flared twenty years earlier over the disparity of emphasis in The Dark Dimension. But it’s honestly difficult to imagine that Davison and McCoy didn’t have similar emotions. Of course they were all jealous of Baker and McGann for getting involvement. Wouldn’t anyone be?

And yet this exists, full of warmth and humor and good feelings. On, to be clear, all sides. Moffat is there to send himself up as a disdainful and cantankerous man who has it in for any part of the series he didn’t create. Because, of course, he’d have loved to do The Thirteen Doctors as much as Colin Baker would have loved to be in it. Nobody didn’t want to see all of the classic series Doctors. And perhaps more to the point, in skewering himself so thoroughly, Moffat is tacitly making it clear that he understands Davison, Baker, and McCoy’s disappointments, and, more to the point, is sympathizing with them.

One might, of course, fairly ask why he didn’t just give them parts in the special then. But the reason for that is straightforward: the special still had to, at the end of the day, work as an episode of television and as a narrative. And the available options for trying to craft a narrative featuring all of the Doctors were all, in their own ways, unappealing. Seventy-five minutes is not nearly enough to handle eight leads with their own plot threads – an ensemble of that size needs far more room to breathe. And a chain of cameo appearances would quickly grow dull.

…

January 31, 2015

Saturday Waffling (January 31st. 2015)

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In a similar vein to the question a few weeks ago about Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire, the bonus post for January voted on by Patreon backers (actually going up on Tuesday) is going to be on Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, and will serve as a prelude to a gradual series of posts covering the Culture novels. So, Banks. How familiar are you with him? What are favorites of yours? Least favorites? General thoughts?…

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