Eruditorum Press

Christmas and Easter nihilists

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:

Avery the Pirate (The Curse of the Black Spot)

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I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE, AND I BRING YOU
It’s May 7th, 2011. LMFAO is at number one with “Party Rock Anthem,” with Katy Perry, Jennifer Lopez, Bruno Mars, and domestic abuser Chris Brown also charting. In news, Osama bin Laden has been killed, as has the Liberal Democrat proposal for the alternative vote. While on television, it’s The Curse of the Black Spot. 
Let’s start by raining on people’s parade, shall we? This is not a prequel to The Smugglers. Really, it’s not. The Smugglers specifies Avery’s ship as being the Black Albatross. The prequel to Curse of the Black Spot, meanwhile, sets it on the correct historical ship for Henry Avery (more properly Henry Every, it appears) to have been on, the Fancy. More broadly, Curse of the Black Spot depicts all of Avery’s treasure being thrown into the sea, which would make it difficult for it to then be found in Cornwall. And since Curse of the Black Spot is universally recognized as a Doctor Who story that contains no plot holes or errors whatsoever and is indeed a beloved story that is universally praised in much the same way that Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks is, these are clearly conclusive proof that it is not in fact a prequel to The Smugglers.
In addition to embodying narrative consistency, The Curse of the Black Spot marks the moment where Doctor Who makes a direct response to Downton Abbey, in this case by casting its lead actor. The analogy is not entirely straightforward, to be certain. Downton Abbey is set, at least at this point in its history, at an Edwardian manor. Curse of the Black Spot is set on a 17th century pirate ship. 
And yet both texts ultimately focus on the intersection of noble duty and money within the context of British identity. When Hugh Bonneville is playing Robert, Earl of Grantham, he plays the noble patrician whose paternal sense of duty is presented as the last beautiful glimmer of a fading light. Here, as Henry Avery, he inverts it straightforwardly: he is the noble man gone wrong – an officer and a gentleman who has turned pirate. 
What this is not, at least, is a commentary on the particular era or history that Downton Abbey explores. This is obvious, really – it’s not as though Stephen Thompson was writing the part for Bonneville. He was given the brief “pirates” and picked a specific historical figure because he was intrigued by the broad strokes of his biography. Short of the specific casting decision that took place, there’s not really a way to spin that as a commentary on Downton Abbey. But after the decision, when it became Doctor Who casting the star of the new biggest show on television, the connection became inevitable.
So what we have is in effect a visibly authorless text. Nobody consciously made The Curse of the Black Spot as a response to Downton Abbey, and yet the aggregate of individual decisions made it impossible for Curse of the Black Spot o be anything other than a commentary on Downton Abbey.
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Street Corner, Two in the Morning, Getting a Taxi Home (The Wedding of River Song)

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In this image, Clara is disguised as an empty room. 

It’s October 1st, 2011. Dappy is at number one with “No Regrets,” while Maroon Five, One Direction, and several bands without numbers in their names also chart. It is also the hottest October day in history, and the day in which New York City police arrested seven hundred people during Occupy Wall Street. And it’s the day Doctor Who’s sixth season wraps with The Wedding of River Song.

The obligatory introduction out of the way, let’s start where we left off. This is, after all, an episode about answering questions. So let’s just give the answer. “By adding another twist to the A Good Man Goes to War/Let’s Kill Hitler subversion of the epic and having River heal the Doctor.” That, at least, is what the plan seems to be. We’ve already discussed the nightmare that production on Season Six turned into back with Let’s Kill Hitler, and so we don’t need to go into it here, but suffice it to say that the distinction between Moffat’s first draft and the shooting script is in this case largely theoretical. As a result, like Let’s Kill Hitler, this is an episode of television in dire need of fine tuning. To quote that post, “it’s not so much that the episode does the wrong things as it is that the episode doesn’t quite put the emphasis on the right beats.”

But in this case there’s something more. Almost all of the major storyline of the season is resolved at its center, with the revelation of who River Song is. All that’s really left for The Wedding of River Song to do is to square away how the Doctor cheats death. But this is not actually a particularly interesting question, simply because there are so many ways to do it. On top of that, the out of order nature of the season means that the whole thing is necessarily a bit of a shaggy dog story. The big climax of this arc already happened in the season premiere. All that’s left to do is to pull back the curtain and reveal how the trick was accomplished, which is by definition the least interesting part.
So yes, ultimately the entire mystery of the season is “the Doctor gets away by hiding in a shapeshifting robot.” This is not a particularly effective plot beat, and the fact that it’s placed so close to the end of the episode makes it bear more weight than it can possibly support, but again, as we’ve seen, with these two episodes in particular it’s important to try to discern intent, not so much in order to argue that the episodes are secret works of genius, but rather as a sort of archeological process to uncover what would have happened if Moffat had actually had the chance to revise any of this. 
Clearly the actual key beat of the story – the actual climax upon which everything hinges – is the scene atop the pyramid.
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Saturday Waffling (June 7th, 2014)

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Hello everyone. I’m out of town for the weekend and checking the blog minimally, so will keep this brief.

So, many of us have seen the 50th Anniversary poll from Doctor Who Magazine. For those who haven’t, TheSmilingStallionInn gave the top and bottom 40 in a comment over here.

I cannot imagine that this is not enough to fuel a solid weekend’s discussion. So. Thoughts?…

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Silky, Luminous Cobwebs (The Last War in Albion Part 47: Captain Britain in The Daredevils, Psychedelia and Marvel Comics)

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This is the seventh of ten parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections. 

Previously in The Last War in Albion: After killing and resurrecting Captain Britain, Moore did a series of stories engaging with various points regarding the character’s past.
“These strands… you’re made of them too… everything’s made of them… silky, luminous cobwebs…” – Alan Moore, Swamp Thing #34
Figure 347: Wardog and Zeitgeist, of the
Special Executive, made their first
appearance in an early Moore strip for
Doctor Who Monthly (From “Black Sun
Rising,” written by Alan Moore, art by
David Lloyd, in Doctor Who Monthly
#57, 1981)
This, however, is just an extreme case of a tendency that Moore displays throughout his Captain Britain run. It is not that he doesn’t introduce new characters. But all of them are clear extensions of characters that predated his run. The Fury is a solid enough villain, but he’s also created to explain where the superheroes of the alternate earth went. Captain UK, one of those superheroes, was mentioned in passing by Dave Thorpe back in Marvel Super-Heroes #379, and her husband, Miracleman, is a barely veiled Marvelman. Vixen herself may be an original character, but Vixen’s gang appeared all the way back in Captain Britain #3. Even the Special Executive are borrowed from Moore’s earlier Doctor Who work. Moore’s Captain Britain is populated entirely out of the existing comic book world of Captain Britain. In this regard, Moore manages to largely sidestep the question of what Britain is. Britain isn’t even depicted in this comic – certainly it takes several steps backwards from the overt political content of the Thorpe era. The Britain of which Braddock is Captain is, in other words, firmly a comic book realm and not a real one. As Moore puts it, “he’s pure Marvel! He’s there in the Marvel Universe with a billion other super characters all around him. You can’t get that same realism.”
In many ways, then, Alan Davis’s account of things is correct in the broad strokes, but incomplete. Moore ramps down the politics and up the cosmic weirdness, yes, but only as part of ramping up the general superheroishness of the strip. In this regard he is closer to Thorpe’s approach than he lets on: where Thorpe attempted to ramp up both politics and his “peculiarly British surrealty,” Moore opts only for the latter. It is tempting to accuse this approach of being apolitical – a dangerous accusation when dealing with an intrinsically nationalist symbol like Captain Britain.
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The Week In Comic Books (May 5th, 2014)

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No idea if this will become a regular feature. It very well may not. Certainly there are numerous potential issues such as “I don’t have time for this sort of thing” and “I don’t always manage to get my comics on a Wednesday making the Thursday position of this a bit dodgy.” But hey, let’s see what we can do. Here’s what I picked up at the shop today, with some arbitrary letter grades tacked onto the end. All titles are links to where you can grab the issues at Comixology if you’re interested in reading.

Avengers World #7

Think I’m dropping this, actually, which makes it a bit of a sad note to lead on. I started pulling it because it was nominally tied to the rest of the Jonathan Hickman Avengers arc, but Hickman seems to not be writing the book anymore, and I’d be a liar if I said I had any idea what was going on in it. It’s been the thing I leave for last every week it’s come out, and I’m just not feeling it. This time we’re introducing a team of Chinese superheroes, it seems, which has been done before. And one of them is modeled on Su Wukong, because God forbid anyone ever draw on another part of Chinese mythology. Boring. C-

Cyclops #2

Greg Rucka is a favorite, with a knack for character-driven stories, nice pacing, good dialogue, and books that are generally a good time whether they’re experimental or straightforward. This time it’s a father/son roadtrip through space, with the father apparently hiding a few secrets. Good. Fun. Enjoyable. As of issue #2 it’s still got plenty of cards it’s keeping to its chest, so it’s tough to comment too much, but this seems set to be a fun ride. B+

Iron Man #27

I’ve said elsewhere that Kieron Gillen’s run on Iron Man feels like some squandered potential to me, and this fits the bill. I love bits of it: the left-wing journalist, the Silk Road reference. But I consistently feel like the book would be better if it went more towards its Warren Ellis instincts and less towards its mainstream superhero instincts. The last page reveal is flaccid. It reads well enough, but there’s no spark here. I find myself glad Gillen is off the book soon, not so much because I’m eager to see what someone else does with it as because I’m eager to see him doing something else. B-

Loki: Agent of Asgard #5

First of all, let’s back up and say that Al Ewing is absolutely killing on this book. Given a ludicrous challenge of following Gillen’s absolutely iconic run on the character, he’s been keeping most of what Gillen did well while making the book his own. There’s a lot of nice buildup and payoff here, and I’m eager to see the consequences of the climax play out. Really hoping the book doesn’t lose momentum taking two months off to do a big crossover.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else: The Writer’s Tale

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On 1 Mar 2014, at 21:01, Philip Sandifer wrote:
Ben –
So, cards on the table, I have no idea what I’m doing. Honestly, this just seemed like a neat idea. “I know Ben Cook’s a fan, I wonder if he’d like to help with the Writer’s Tale entry so it can mirror the structure of The Writer’s Tale.” But from there I’m not sure where to go. I have a vague set of themes and ideas I’d love to wander by, and stuff I’m mostly unconcerned about (if I ever ask “what’s Russell like?”, please just spike the whole project), but it’s all in the Maybe, as the book would put it.
Why don’t I start with my experience of the book? I paid money for it during my last semester in grad school, which was not a point in my life when I had a lot of money to pay for a hardcover. But I kept hearing good things about it… I’m not even sure where from, since I wasn’t hugely active in fandom. But it sounded fascinating, and I remember just losing an entire workday to it. I absolutely inhaled the book, and it was the exact book I needed then. I was over the immediate shock of my wife leaving me and my father’s stroke, but I was living alone and trying to finish up a PhD. And I remember an overwhelming sense of just… getting it. Of reading this weird and confessional document where Russell (it’s so weird to go with a first name there, incidentally, but it seems appropriate for this book) is at times visibly laying out more than he’s comfortable with. And of, over and over again, either thinking “yes, that is exactly what working long hours on a creative project in solitude feels like” or “yes, that’s an excellent explanation of why that is or isn’t a good idea,” both of which are thoughts that came fairly naturally to someone in the final stages of a dissertation for a PhD in English.
And I’ve never really talked about the book with anyone. To the point where I’m not sure if my romance with it is normal or not. I mean, it’s obviously a well-loved and successful book, but I’ve always wondered why other people love it, since my love for it is so intimately tied to when I read it. And people who spend a year holed up in their apartment alone more nights than not and working feverishly on a book that only a half-dozen people are ever going to read aren’t normal. So I’ve always been afraid that other people are really enamored with the behind-the-scenes gossip or the writing advice, which is good, but was never the heart and soul of the book I loved.
What about you, though? You must have realized you were working on something absolutely golden well before the end of it. What was that like? Especially as a massive fan. I mean, you’d obviously been close to production before because you were on DWM, but you were seeing pages before Julie Gardner or anybody.
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Some Hastily Sketched Thoughts On Amazon and Hatchette

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First, some context for those unaware of this particular issue – Amazon and Hatchette Book Group are having themselves a bit of a spat over ebook pricing, and Amazon is retaliating against Hatchette’s failure to agree to their terms by refusing to take pre-orders on Hatchette books, raising prices on them, and lowering their on-hand stock of physical books so that they take 2-3 weeks to ship. This has been widely criticized as being a massively dick move. Which isn’t inaccurate. But…

Thus far in my career I have not done a lot of work with traditional publishers. This is not because of any principled opposition to them, but mostly because thus far in my career I’ve consistently looked at manuscripts I’ve had and thought “I can make a couple grand off this right now or I can spend months or years trying to find a publisher with whom I may or may not make much of anything.” That may well change in the future, particularly as I slowly maneuver towards trying fiction, where self-publishing is much trickier.

For writers who have thrown their lot in with traditional publishers, this is a very scary time for understandable reasons. Greg Rucka – a writer I absolutely love – has a book out in July. Second part of a series, first one was a very fun little thing, very exciting, and you can’t pre-order it on Amazon right now because they’re fighting with his publisher. This is going to gut his first week sales, which will have knock-on effects for the entire book’s sales, and I can’t imagine he’s not terrified about the implications of that, because lord knows I would be. J.K. Rowling’s pseudonym’s second book is caught up in it too, which must make that the book with the most mangled promotional campaign ever. These are real and horrifying prospects. 
It’s also the consequence of the entire system under creative labor takes place in 2014, and complaining about it as an isolated case is absolutely ridiculous. 
Why is Amazon in the position they’re in? The answer is simple: because twenty years ago they risked a lot of money on a bet about what bookselling would look like in 2014, and they were right. Then they made another in 2007, and they were right again. That’s literally it. They guessed that people would buy books online, and they guessed that they’d be happy to read them on digital readers instead of buying dead trees that they’d have to store somewhere. 
And I honestly don’t want to diminish Amazon’s contributions here. They got online retail right where a lot of companies didn’t. As for ebooks, who remembers the Rocket eBook, which, for several hundred dollars, could hold ten books on a machine the size of a hardcover, which was actually find, because I don’t think there were actually ten books available for it? Amazon got the ebook to be a usable format, in no small part by actually getting skittish publishers who were nervous about piracy onboard selling the damn things, but also by actually making a good reader in the first place.
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Short Out The Time Differential (A Christmas Carol)

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In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as a carrot.
It’s December 25th, 2010. This year it’s The X-Factor setting the Christmas #1 again with “When We Collide,” with Take That, The Black Eyed Peas, and Rihanna also charting, the latter twice. In news, since we said goodbye to Sarah Jane Smith researchers at CERN captured antimatter for a sixth of a second, the Eurozone bailed Ireland out, Wikileaks released a quarter-million American diplomatic cables, and a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia, setting off a wave of protests that would eventually jump to several other countries and become known as the Arab Spring. 
While on television, Steven Moffat has his first Christmas special. In some ways, at least, A Christmas Carol seems designed to confound expectations. In hindsight this seems like Moffat starting the 2011 run of Doctor Who as he meant to go on, although at the time it just seemed surprising. Russell T Davies had often made Christmas specials slightly offset from their seasons, typically through the use of guest companions, but the stories tended to be about the larger emotional arc of Doctor Who. The Christmas Invasion, of course, wasn’t offset at all, instead being in every sense the first episode of Season Two. The Runaway Bride is largely about dealing with Rose’s departure. Voyage of the Damned is less enmeshed in its immediate context, but then, it doesn’t really have any context beyond “Kylie.” And The Next Doctor is firmly about the denouement of the Tennant years.
A Christmas Carol, on the other hand, has nothing whatsoever to do with anything going on around it save for its trick for moving Amy and Rory to supporting roles. Actually, that’s not quite true. Little details flit about and haunt the narrative – the emphasis on the word “silence” in the story’s bespoke pop song, for instance, and the way in which the ending reads in light of the whole “Doctor’s death” plotline. But these details don’t even connect to anything – they just add a slightly unsettling pall to the entire affair for the sorts of obsessives who might notice them. For the most part, this is what it appears to be: an almost entirely bespoke Christmas special that unabashedly and unsubtly pulls its entire structure from the single most recognizable Christmas story in all of literature and, for that matter, television/film.
This gets at the other significant shift since the Davies era. Davies did Christmas specials in which Christmas was essentially a bit of decoration. The extent to which Christmas matters to a given story varies a bit, but the truth is that any of the Davies-era Christmas specials could have been done as non-Christmas episodes with only a minimum of changes. This story, however, is inconceivable in any context other than Christmas. It’s not just a story set at Christmas, it’s a story that’s very much about Christmas, and, more broadly, about Christmas stories. 
In terms of the overall health of the show, it’s a masterstroke.
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Saturday Waffling (May 31st, 2014)

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So, the Last War in Albion Kickstarter wraps today. If you’ve not contributed, please think about doing so.

All of which said, thank you. I say this often enough, but it really does bear repeating. I have a phenomenally cool job. The reason I can do this job, though, is that all of you are repeatedly willing to support me, whether by buying books or backing my periodic Kickstarters. (And I already have one in mind for 2015 that I think I can guarantee everyone will be very excited about.) You’re an incredibly generous, lovely bunch of readers, and I’m proud as hell to have earned the respect and love from people as fantastic as you.

I won’t lie, this Kickstarter was a bit scary for me. I’ve had the sense that Last War in Albion was starting to go well, but I didn’t really know if it was a project that was going to make it. It needed to find a way to start earning money, and I really wasn’t sure how much it could earn. And while it’s clearly not as popular as my Doctor Who stuff (which is unsurprising, given the relative size of television’s audience versus comics’ audience – in the US, Doctor Who at its lowest-rated episodes are seen by more people than buy the highest-selling comics several times over), it’s also clearly a project that has legs, which is heartening given that I absolutely adore writing it.

So here I am, about ninety minutes into what is technically Saturday morning, having wrapped up writing up A Christmas Carol (my buffer on Eruditorum is not what it used to be) and about to grill some burgers in a midnight drizzle before sitting down with them, a bottle of wine, and… actually, it would be spoiling things to tell you what the next episode I’m going to watch, wouldn’t it? Everything I get to write about for the next month excites me. Sometimes it terrifies me (the Swamp Thing chapter is 11.5k already and is not even vaguely in the neighborhood of almost done. I think that chapter is going to end up being longer than the Flood book), but it thrills me. I’m astonishingly blessed to get to do all of this work. Astonishingly.

So thank you. No clever discussion topic or anything like that. Just thank you. Thank you so much.

-Phil…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 30 (The Coming of the Terraphiles)

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The Last War in Albion Kickstarter ends tomorrow. 
In November of 2009, it was announced that Michael Moorcock would be writing a Doctor Who novel. This was something of a big deal. Moorcock, after all, is a proper writer, as opposed to one who came up through Doctor Who itself. He was a contemporary of J.G. Ballard, one of the most influential figures in the British side of the 60s new wave of science fiction, and the writer of countless series in various flavors of fantasy, most famously Elric of Melniboné, his angst-ridden answer to Conan the Barbarian, and most acclaimedly Jerry Cornelius, his polymorphously perverse secret agent. He’s one of those sci-fi/fantasy authors to have successfully gained a non-trivial measure of respect from the literary establishment, due largely to the sheer number of writers he was a major influence on – a venerable old man of the genre, and a celebrity writer of the sort that the Doctor Who novels had simply never seen anything like before. 
In other words, he potential audience for a Michael Moorcock-penned Doctor Who novel is by any measure quite large, incorporating as it does both Doctor Who fans and Michael Moorcock fans, both of which exist in significant quantities, and, more to the point, with non-trivial overlap. And yet the question of exactly what one would want from such a cultural intersection is, at the very least, complex. Michael Moorcock and Doctor Who are both massive cultural touchstones, not just in popularity but in sheer size. Fans being fans, there’s a certain desire for nods and in-jokes, something Moorcock and Who have both courted over time, Moorcock by regularly crossing over his own series, Doctor Who through several periods where it was kept afloat by die-hard fans alone. But balancing this is tricky – what expectations do you fulfill? What ones do you let down gently?
Still, a poll of the potential audience for The Coming of the Terraphiles would almost certainly not have settled on a book based heavily on Moorcock’s Multiverse, with very little Doctor Who lore, that’s substantially a P.G. Wodehouse pastiche full of clueless socialites. This is, however, what Moorcock delivered, to mixed reviews. 
It is clearly a Moorcock book, for better or for worse – indeed, it’s on the whole more Moorcock than Doctor Who. It is, as mentioned, a book about the multiverse, with Moorcock’s standard themes of law and chaos in full view. The entire premise – fans of Earth (the eponymous Terraphiles) playing a poorly reconstructed set of Earth games – is visibly a few doors down from Dancers at the End of Time. There’s a Jerry Cornelius analogue – an interstellar pirate named Captain Cornelius – who is presumably yet another incarnation of the Eternal Champion and who flits intriguingly at the edges of the narrative. Various other things appear that certainly seem like they belong to Moorcock’s mythos and are suggested as such in various reviews also appear, but to be honest, I’m not enough of a Moorcock buff to catch them all, so they are left as an exercise for the reader. 
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