Eruditorum Press

We’re not cancelled; these are just our Wilderness Years

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:

The Alchemists of the Middle Ages Made Transmutation Their Main Aim in Life (The Beast Below)

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In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as the BBC logo.
It’s April 10th, 2010. Scouting for Girls are at number one with “This Ain’t a Love Song,” with Plan B, Delirious, Tinie Tempah, and Inna also charting, as well as most of the crowd from last week. Including Bieber, yes. In news, the miners in Shanxi were rescued, and the next day a cole mine in West Virginia explodes, killing twenty-five. Wikileaks releases the “Collateral Murder” video, showing the killing of civilians by the US military in Iraq, which was leaked to them by Chelsea Manning. Riots continue in Kyrgyzstan, and Gordon Brown asked permission to dissolve parliament, triggering the election that will, in a month’s time, remove him from power.
On television, meanwhile, the Moffat era carries on with its second story. A story seemingly destined to always seem a bit out of place, The Beast Below was not quite what anybody expected and, perhaps more to the point, is not quite like anything that has come since. The knowledge that the production got away from the new team and that this story was thus made under very trying circumstances makes it easy to write the strangeness off as an artifact of a production team that was still learning what they were doing, much as Aliens of London/World War Three is often read in part as the result of the Davies/Gardner team finding themselves overwhelmed by the scope of what they were doing.
This is, of course, complete tosh. What’s bizarre about The Beast Below is that it’s unlike almost everything else Moffat has ever written for Doctor Who. This is in many ways an artifact not of the production circumstances on Series Five, but of the production circumstances on Series Six and Seven. Because the split season structure of Series Six and Seven, everything Moffat wrote after Series Five was either a season opener, a season finale, or a standalone special. With Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone existing to further the ongoing River Song plot, The Beast Below is therefore the only Moffat-penned story from his era to largely serve as a blank slate that Moffat can do as he pleases with. This is markedly unlike the Davies era, where every season provided Davies at least one opportunity to do something unusual and more personal: The Long Game, Love and Monsters, Gridlock, and Midnight being the obvious examples. (And notably, all of those stories feel at least a little strange in their respective seasons, much as this one does.) But The Beast Below is really the only instance in the Moffat era where we just get to see what Moffat is inclined to write when left to his own devices. Indeed, it’s one of the only times at all – Moffat’s Davies-era scripts may not have been rewritten, but they were generally prepared to specific briefs. Here, for the first and last time, Moffat just gets to come up with an idea and write it. 
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Saturday Waffling (March 29, 2014)

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Hello faithful readers. I’m off traveling on a family engagement and forgot to queue one of these before I left, so am quickly banging this out on an iPad. So I’ll be brief this week.

The engagement involves an unusually large amount of me cooking, and that venison post really did go over surprisingly well, and so let’s go with that. Two questions. What’s the best meal you’ve ever had, and are there any foods or food topics you’d really like to see me get around to covering some week, since apparently food posts are weirdly popular.

Have a good weekend, all.…

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I’m At An Impressionable Age (The Last War in Albion Part 37: Boys from the Blackstuff, Skizz, D.R. & Quinch, O.C. and Stiggs)

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This is the third of six parts of Chapter Six of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Skizz and D.R. & Quinch  for 2000 AD. An ebook omnibus of all six parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords  for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation. The Last War in Albion now also has an imageblog on Tumblr. 

The stories discussed in this chapter are available in the collections Skizz and The Complete D.R. & Quinch.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore finally got a regular strip in 2000 AD with Skizz, in which he combined the basic premise of the still forthcoming E.T. with the atmosphere of Alan Bleasdale’s then-popular television series Boys From the Blackstuff.

“I could still walk away from this. I could say I was kidnapped. I could say I was forced to do things. I’m at an impressionable age. And I haven’t killed anyone. Not yet.” – Grant Morrison, Kill Your Boyfriend

As with The Black Stuff, the point of Boys from the Blackstuff was the depiction of the difficulty of working class existence at that particular moment of British history. It is not a show about diagnosing the underlying causes of unemployment – there are no thorough and informative debates over monetarism, or close-readings of Friedrich Hayek. It simply attempts to show the experience of living at the bottom of society when times are getting harder. Its iconic episode was its fourth, “Yosser’s Story,” which focused on Yosser Hughes, the character responsible for getting drawn into the scam back in The Black Stuff.
Figure 274: The final image of “Yosser’s Story” is a freeze
frame on Yosser’s grotesquely contorted anguish at his own
survival.
In “Yosser’s Story” he is reduced to a broken shell of a man, and, over the course of the hour-long episode, broken down further as his children are taken away and he continues to fail to find employment. The character becomes steadily unhinged and erratic, unable or unwilling to grasp that his increasing desperation is making his situation worse at every turn. The episode culminates with Yosser attempting suicide by jumping into a lake, only to be hauled out by the police, the final shot being his face as he screams in horror at realizing he’s survived.
Figure 275: Desperate Dan (From The
Dandy #1258, 1966)
“Yosser’s Story” works by combining this brutally bleak story with the superlative acting of Bernard Hill, who sells the anguish of a simple man who never had much trying to make sense of having it all taken away from him. Hill’s performance makes Yosser at once pathetic and eminently quotable, especially with Bleasdale’s deft use of the catchphrases “Gizza job,” (that is, “give us a job”) and “I can do that,” often spoken in rapid succession as he fruitlessly hounds someone for employment.
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Video Blogs On The Eleventh Hour

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So, a while ago someone asked if I was going to do a video blog on The Eleventh Hour, and I declined, mainly because video blogs are time consuming and I didn’t have loads of it.

This turns out to have been a wonderful idea, as two separate people have proceeded to do video blogs on their own initiative, and both of them are way better than anything I would have done anyway.

First off is Alison Jane Campbell, who noticed that Jack Graham had tied her in guest posts and thus decided to get ahead again with this number, which I was planning on posting today.

Except then, yesterday, Bennett indulged in a wonderfully cheeky “video comment” on The Eleventh Hour, which was also brilliant, and so I figured I’d go ahead and throw it in too.

Seriously, both of them are utterly fantastic and say all sorts of great things that I will be shamelessly referencing in Moffat-era posts to come, and I can’t thank them enough.

And while we’re posting videos, this has been going around and seems a charming transition into Friday’s post.

Thank you to everyone who spared me from doing real work this week.

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Some New Man (The Eleventh Hour)

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In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as a hospital roof.
It’s April 3rd, 2010. Lady Gaga and Beyonce are at number one with “Telephone,” while Rihanna, Cheryl Cole, and Boyzone also chart. I regret to inform my readership that we have also entered the dark days of the world: Justin Bieber is at number three. While we’ve been away Togo withdrew from the Africa Cup of Nations after an attack on their national football team, the Winter Olympics took place, and an 8.8 magnitude earthquake hit Chile. While in last week, Pope Benedict XVI referred to the sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church as “petty gossip,” rescuers reached 153 trapped miners in Shanxi, China, the ROKS Cheonan was sunk by North Korea, and, on April 3rd itself, the iPad was first released.
Of the exact same age as the iPad, then, is the Matt Smith era, which kicks off with The Eleventh Hour. What jumps out the most about The Eleventh Hour with nearly four years of hindsight is how confident it is. This is the one of Moffat’s scripts for his own era that hardly anybody seems to have a bad word for. Even the fiercest critics of the Moffat era tend to make some comment about the squandered promise of this episode. This is one of the rare episodes of Doctor Who that seems to basically please everybody.
Its major challenge is that this was, in practice, a bare minimum. Moffat, Wegner, and Willis have essentially nothing to rest on save for their own talent. This was a moment where every critic was sharpening the knife. The resulting episode had to be absolutely critic-proof. It could get people to tune in based on the accumulated good will the series had from the Russell T Davies era, but equally, more than any other moment in the series’ history, this was a point where everybody had a ready-made excuse to stop watching. Even a whiff of “not as good as it used to be” would be devastating to the series right now, and so this has to be the episode of Doctor Who that anybody who is ever going to like an episode of Doctor Who will like. 
The easy way to do this, by which I mean the way that would have gotten the series cancelled, would have been to do something that could more or less be described as Doctor Who by numbers – a story that was functionally indistinguishable from the Russell T Davies season openers.  Admittedly, those expecting a decisive break from the Russell T Davies era are ultimately frustrated by The Eleventh Hour, which is still grounded in the structure of the Davies era. Indeed, the entirety of Series Five is, on a superficial level, structured like a Davies series. The first three episodes almost perfectly track those of Series One – a present day alien invasion story introducing the new Doctor and companion, a kind of weird future story, and a celebrity historical.
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 77: Snapshots of 2010

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No Future


Near future prediction is always a rough game. The 1984 film 2010, an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey sequel, managed a double error that almost perfectly defines the way in which the classic science fiction vision of the future fizzled. It’s first important to note the sort of endearing hubris of the film in the first place. In 1968, when 2001 came out, the future was thirty-three years off. But in 1984 the future was only twenty-six years off. There was still the resplendent belief in the onrushing scientific utopia that the culture had promised – a utopia wrapped up as a historical inevitable consequence of the then-present. Hence 2010’s amusing double error – the belief that humanity would be on the verge of going to Jupiter and the belief that the Cold War would be rumbling on.
Instead the American space program spent 2010 winding down, each of the three surviving Shuttles making their penultimate flights. The Cold War is dead and gone. Indeed, the entire apparatus of the future is long since gone, and has in fact quietly disappeared into the rear view mirror. Time memorably spend the tail end of 2009 declaring the aughts to have been the “worst decade ever,” and while this should be taken as Comic Book Guy style hyperbole with periods after every word, the case was compelling enough. A decade long war on terror culminated in a massive financial crash and the growing realization that electing a black dude President of the United States was not actually going to fix everything. 
Even the replacement future hastily drafted in after the original draft withered on the vine was floundering. It’s not that the Internet was underperforming as such, but on the other hand, its transformative promise was somewhat less than advertised. What had started as revolutionary technology was now just Facebook. 

The future had never really been built past the change of the millennium, and without that to anchor it there was just a vast, featureless present. Even technological advancement had become oddly fixed and predictable. The future came in regularly scheduled product launches headlined by Steve Jobs, incremental, predictable, and mostly leaked to rumor sites a few weeks in advance. It was not even a hugely pessimistic historical moment. Rather it was one captured by a grim banality. Nothing changes. Humanity sits past the ghost point, all the ideas and storming progress of the twentieth century ground to a point. For a hundred years now we had assumed we were building to something – that there was some sort of stable endpoint that all the churn and upheaval pointed towards. Whether that endpoint was utopia or armageddon was up in the air, but the broad idea that history was going somewhere wasn’t. Instead, however, the wheels simply fell off, and the tow truck never came. We sat, abandoned on history’s roadside, left thinking, “is this all there was?” And, seeing no sign of civilization, we tweeted about it.
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Saturday Waffling (March 22nd, 2014)

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Hello all.

Let’s get the unfortunate announcement out of the way first. There are some projects I’m trying to have wrapped and ready to go at the same time that TARDIS Eruditorum wraps, and looking at deadlines and progress, I’m behind. And so after nearly a year of five posts a week and three years of three TARDIS Eruditorums a week, I am finally giving in to temptation and cutting TARDIS Eruditorum to a twice-weekly blog. New entries will be on Mondays and Wednesdays, with Last War in Albion moving to Fridays. I’ll continue to provide bonus content, sometimes substantive, sometimes fluffy, on either Tuesday or Thursday of a given week for a total of four posts a week, plus waffling.

I suspect I care about this more than any of you actually do, but I’m nevertheless very sorry and disappointed that this step is necessary.

I do have some cool stuff to announce soon. In fact, let’s see what we can successfully tease.

  • The Last War in Albion Kickstarter is, as mentioned, coming. Most of the component parts are there – I just need to fulfill my promise to do a transparency post about my writing income in 2013 and to wait for James’s schedule to clear up so he can provide me some art for it.
  • The Last War Kickstarter will also include access to the backers-only blog where the occasionally mentioned Secret Project will be serialized as it’s written. Right now I’ve got one chapter written, and another about 1/3 done.
  • I’ve begun the earliest of early talks around the idea of Eruditorum Press expanding into publishing work by people other than me. More news on that in a few months but it’s something I’m terribly excited about, and the two people I’ve got tentative agreements with are absolutely great writers it would be a thrill to work with.
  • Related to this, I am thinking seriously about expanding my work a bit to involve some freelance editing work. This is at least vaguely related to the former. It would manifestly not be copyediting and proofreading, which I’m actually crap at (it’s a thing where ADD [diagnosed, mind you, not colloquial] really screws you up), but would be about fine-tuning ideas, refining the shape of a project, or figuring out how to beat an unruly draft into a smooth final form. In fact, anyone interested in that, please drop me an e-mail. Snowspinner. Gmail.
Finally, our discussion topic, which has to be, given the absolutely awful news of his death, Steve Moore. I’ve covered Moore’s work a few times on the blog – his Doctor Who comics got coverage in TARDIS Eruditorum here, and various bits of his work are all over the early bits of Chapter Four of Last War in Albion, particularly these two entries.
But his career is long and varied. He didn’t just create Abslom Daak and Kroton the Cyberman, he also was the subject of Alan Moore’s fascinating Unearthing, the author of the seminal Trigrams of Han, the writer of the first Tharg’s Future Shock, and did an absolute ton of other stuff.
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Guest Post: Steven Moffat – A Case For The Prosecution

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Personally, as I’ve said, I quite like the Moffat era. I dare say I love it. But I recognize that this is a controversial opinion, and it seems fair, before we go in, to give the opposition a chance to state the case against. So here’s Jack Graham doing what he does best: being loud, angry, and leftist about Doctor Who. We’ll be back on Monday with a Pop Between Realities to kick off the Moffat era, and then The Eleventh Hour on Wednesday. Also, to clarify, the illustration on this one was my pick, meant as a cheekily representative example of anti-Moffat criticism, and not Jack’s at all.

I’m here to up the anti, so to speak.  As such, I’m a sacrificial lamb.  Firstly, I’m going to annoy you all by delaying the arrival of the proper posts about the Moffat/Smith era.  And Phil specifically asked me for a polemic, so what follows will be an angry screed.  There really isn’t space here to do more than gesticulate irritably at the issues (since I’ve tried to have some mercy on you regarding word count).  I’ve had to leave out lots of points, cut loads of stuff about the wider political context (I promise you – it was all in the first draft, and it was brilliant) and, of necessity, simplify.  So this post is going to sit here seething, vulnerable and alone, a hostage to fortune, as Phil winds up his phenomenal Eruditorum project with a series of (doubtless) nuanced and subtle redemptive readings of the era I’m about to intemperately trash.  At least nobody can say I balked at making myself a sitting target.  
(I must acknowledge Phil’s own ‘Definitive Moffat and Feminism Post’, which I used as a springboard, and the generous assistance of Richard Pilbeam and Jonathan Barlow, from whom I have cribbed shamelessly.  All errors are, of course, mine alone.)
Phil’s recent, devastating piece on ‘The End of Time – Part 2’ describes what I find most worrying about the late RTD era.  But for Phil, ‘The Eleventh Hour’ was probably like the cavalry turning up.  For me, ‘The Eleventh Hour’ was like the cavalry turning up and immediately opening fire on me.  
It’s interesting to note that whereas RTD usually drafted in celebrities – Chris Morris style – to satirise themselves without knowing it (which they always fell for), Moffat drafts Patrick Moore in to be flattered.  RTD got Sharon Osbourne and Anne Widdecombe to endorse Harold Saxon (i.e. the Anti-Christ).  Moffat gets Sir Patrick to play himself as a charming, twinkly-eyed expert.  Aside from lauding a well-known reactionary and sexist, Moore’s guest appearance is emblematic of a wider complacency.  Amy’s village is a retreat from anything like the Powell Estate.  This is maundering ‘long shadows on village greens’ territory. The episode celebrates cutesy, ostensibly lovable, eccentric Britishness.  
There’s a near-immediate attempt to problematize such things in ‘The Beast Below’… but the actual result is instructive.  Starship UK is all of Britain, divided into counties that are now housed within tower blocks. 
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A Scary Culture (The Last War in Albion Part 36: Skizz, E.T., and Margaret Thatcher)

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This is the first of six parts of Chapter Six of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Skizz and D.R. & Quinch  for 2000 AD. An ebook omnibus of all six parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords  for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation. The Last War in Albion now also has animageblog on Tumblr. 

The stories discussed in this chapter are available in the collections Skizz and The Complete D.R. & Quinch.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore finally got a regular strip in 2000 AD with Skizz, conceived of as a clone of E.T. Unfortunately, Moore had to write it before E.T. actually came out in the UK, thus leaving him with the unenviable task of ripping off something he hadn’t seen. 

“England was a scary place. No wonder it produced a scary culture.” – Warren Ellis, Planetary #7
“A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” tells the story of a winged man who crashes to ground in the courtyard of Pelayo and Elisenda. But the story focuses resolutely on Pelayo and Elisenda’s experience and not on the nature of the winged man in their courtyard. Its memorable first paragraph carefully holds the titular detail back until the end so that it becomes just one of a host of details about their lives. “On the third day of rain,” Márquez writes, “they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench.” Only at the end of the paragraph about this rainstorm does the narration turn to the fact that there was “ a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.” The story never moves beyond this approach: the nature of the old man is not explored. Instead the story tells of how Elisenda thinks to charge for admission to see the old man, who is proclaimed over the objections of the local priest to be an angel. But over time the old man becomes commonplace – his status as the town’s star attraction is usurped by a “woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents,” and who had none of the old man’s reticence about being a carnival attraction. The old man, meanwhile, only musters up a few odd miracles “like the blind man who didn’t recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn’t get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers.” In time he convalesces and flies away without explanation, and the story ends, never having stopped to consider much of anything beyond the question of what it is like for a poor family to have an old man with wings literally crash into their lives. 
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A Split in the Skin of the World (The End of Time, Part Two)

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The lengths people will go to in order to get License to Kill
written out of canon…
A bombed out husk of imagined Londons, all the dead and abandoned futures piled up alongside each other. All the things that could have been, united by their shared experience of a moment where it became obvious that they actually never could be. Futures that have run out, been spent, boiled away to ruins, our cultural memento moris, reminding us all of the looming and inevitable death that is nostalgia. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. I don’t want to go.”
It is tempting to end on a more positive note. It is not as though I don’t enjoy The End of Time, or the Davies era. I quite love both. Really, I do.
But the Davies era has long since ended. We have parted the ways, and faced doomsday. We have seen the journey end and long since seen the next Doctor. We’ve praised it, buried it, critiqued it, and disinterred it several times to do it all again. And now we have The End of Time, an ending so absolute that it does not so much cut off the Davies era as it cuts off the abstract possibility of anything. With the Davies era refusing so spectacularly to die, few other options seem to exist but cutting off the very possibility of time’s advancement. End everything and you might just manage to kill it off too. 
If, in fact, there’s even any time left to have. By this point the contours of the last Davies episode are self-evident. It is going too far to suggest that all of Davies’s season finales (and this clearly counts) are the same, but there is a structure to them: a whirling mass of conceptual quotes, flipping channels endlessly until it resolves by declaring the permanence of Doctor Who as a narrative fixture. A regeneration story is going to be no different. A shell game – where in the narrative is the trap that kills the Doctor? Inevitably, the point will not be what kills the Doctor but the fact of his ongoing narrative role: a story that never ends. The justification for this lack of resolution will, as always, be populism. Doctor Who is loved, so it is not cancelled.
Underneath all of this, very low in the mix, is a very different sort of story. In every season after the first, the most interesting moment in terms of Davies’s own scripts has been the inevitable spiky and difficult story – the one where Davies stops trying to be quite so populist and throws something a bit ugly and unnerving on the screen. (And the only reason this can’t be said of the first season is that practically every Davies episode that season does it.) Love and Monsters, Gridlock, and Midnight are all cases where one can see a very different sort of Davies: an angry one clearly considerably more skeptical and cynical about the world.
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