Eruditorum Press

Post-Geek

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:

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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Venison with Mushroom Jus, Oven Roasted Potatoes, and Salad with Walnuts, Pears, and Goat Cheese

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I can make a really good rabbit dish too, if you’re wondering.

Some people have been oddly requesting that bits of my food writing make it to the blog one of these days. So here you go – a totally out of left field post to satisfy the two or three people who have requested that.

Background – Jill did a lot of the work with packaging the Kickstarter rewards, and so as a reward after the last day of it, I promised her a wine dinner. “Wine dinner,” in this case, means a game we play sometimes whereby she picks a bottle of wine and I go to the grocery store and cobble together a meal to pair with it. In this case we were already out, so we didn’t grab anything from my existing wine cellar. Instead we went to a liquor store and asked for a weird bottle, and they helpfully provided a bottle of Southern Right 2010 Pinotage. (A sort of odd South African cousin of Pinot Noir.)

There are tricks to this sort of thing. I use a pair of books Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg called What To Drink With What You Eat and The Flavor Bible. I’ve got both on Kindle, and can pull them up for quick reference on my phone. Both do what they say on the tin. The former has an index of foods and an index of wine varietals and recommended pairings for each. The latter is an index of foods with complimentary flavors and ingredients.

Among the recommended items for Pinotage was “game meats,” with venison recommended in particular. The Woman had been requesting I make venison for a while anyway, so I decided now was the time.

The Flavor Bible recommended a bunch of things for venison, but a couple jumped out at me: mushrooms, apples, pears, stocks, rosemary, and juniper berries. I also knew that venison was typically recommended with a marinade. I figured I’d go for something fairly simple: this seemed the time for a basic meat and potatoes dish, probably with a salad.

In terms of the salad, another pairing for Pinotage was goat cheese, so I figured there I’d go with something classic: a lettuce, fruit, nut, and cheese salad with a vinaigrette. It’s a really basic salad, and works almost every time. Since pears had been recommended for venison, I went with those, the goat cheese, and walnuts, and a cider vinaigrette. Simple and straight forward. Which was the watchword here – this didn’t seem a dish that was going to call for anything fancy or overly heavy. My usual logic is that when you have an unusual ingredient you’re trying to spotlight, you provide a pretty simple, basic platform for it.

For potatoes I thought a straightforward oven-roasted recipe. I usually do those with just salt and pepper, but I decided some rosemary would work nicely this time. It’s a longstanding preparation for me – I sometimes do it on the grill, other times in the oven, but it’s one of my go-to sides for meat.…

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A Woman (The End of Time, Part One)

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Wilf reacts to the news that Claire Bloom is playing the Rani.
It’s December 25th, 2009. Rage Against the Machine are at number one with “Killing in the Name,” a feat of countercultural rebellion cooked up by people who got tired of the crown of the Christmas #1 being dominated year after year by The X Factor and who thus decided to try to send a different single to number one. Also in the charts are Lady Gaga, Robbie Williams, Rihanna, Journey, Cheryl Cole, the Black Eyed Peas, and X Factor winner Joe McElderry.
In news, since The Gift made its bow, the Treaty of Lisbon has come into force, Terry Wogan has presented his final breakfast show, and polling in advance of the 2010 general election has shown the Conservatives with various degrees of leads. Also, David Tennant has been all over every talk show imaginable doing a farewell tour as the Doctor, as Christmas marks the first episode of his two-part departure, The End of Time. After all the festivities have died down, long after the episode has aired, it is possible to go and download the podcast commentary from the BBC and to watch the episode again, immediately, with DVD-style commentary. You still can, though it’s harder to do these days. 
The commentary consists of Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner, at 8:30 in the morning on December 11th, 2009 doing a straight shot of recording commentary for this and The End of Time Part 2 while simultaneously answering phones and checking e-mails as part of their new normal workday in Los Angeles, where they were in effect sent by the BBC after finishing Doctor Who with the mandate “make us some high profile co-productions, starting with Torchwood.” 
As with most commentaries featuring Davies and Gardner, it is in many ways an extended pat on the back for itself. They are quick to highlight how “marvelous” things are. But equally, they’re not wrong. Their first example, Bernard Cribbins, really is marvelous. But there is a subtler dynamic beneath the surface: Gardner and Davies both praise Cribbins enthusiastically, but then Davies digresses to point out that the street he’s walking down is one they’ve used in every other Christmas special. Gardner sits quietly, and then calmly declares that she wants to go back to talking about Bernard Cribbins, obviously finding the obsessive detail spotting involved in Davies’s fannish observation (which is firmly in the same tradition as any number of other fannish practices – “spot the recycled location/set/prop” is a positively august fan tradition) rather spectacularly less than interesting. It’s not quite a prickly moment, but it’s only one step away from it. And then a moment later the two of them are geeking out ecstatically over the nature of Bernard Cribbins’s acting skill and precisely what it is that he’s so good at. 
In under a minute of commentary the entire sweep of the Gardner/Davies partnership becomes clear. And this is a significant thing.
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Saturday Waffling (March 15th, 2014)

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Absolutely scrambling at deadlines right now, although I just about sort of kind of maybe but not really have them under something resembling control. Sorry, thus, for a recklessly short Waffling – I’m just absolutely buried.

Let’s just do Q&A, shall we? Depending on the level of response I may or may not get to everything promptly, but I’ll at least answer what schedule permits.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 29 (The Tennant Doctor Who Magazine Comics)

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It’s strange, I’ve been writing about the Tennant era for nine months now, and yet reading the compiled Tenth Doctor comics from Doctor Who Magazine the thing that jumps out most immediately is the amount of time enveloped in them. It helps that there’s a change in editors and a late change of direction as a result, but even without that there’s a sense of size and history here that is perhaps lost when looking at the story-to-story changes of the Tennant years.
Actually, let’s start with that change in editors. The majority of the Tenth Doctor’s comics are edited by Clayton Hickman. No account of of Doctor Who is ever going to allege that Hickman is one of the great and most important figures in the history of the series, which is true in a sort of blandly factual sense, but obscures the fact that on the occasions where Clayton Hickman does enter the margins of the story he inevitably acquits himself marvelously. Whether as the talking head who obligingly filled in context so that some washed up 70s actress or another appears to actually make sense in Doctor Who Confidential, as Gareth Roberts’s funnier writing partner on audio, television, and ideally, a bizarre and inscrutable DVD extra for The Masque of Mandragora, as the cover designer for the classic series DVDs, as the terribly sweet seeming judge for Companion Academy, or just as that nice man on Twitter who keeps mistakenly saying good things about my blog, Clayton Hickman is very possibly the figure in Doctor Who it is least possible to say mean things about without feeling like a complete and utter bastard.
But one thing that becomes clear reading the commentary at the end Panini Press collections of Tenth Doctor comics is that there is nowhere in his contributions to Doctor Who that Hickman is more in his element than editing the comics for Doctor Who Magazine. None of this is meant as a knock against the last run of Tenth Doctor comics, edited by Tom Spilsbury. The final run, an ongoing story with a comics-exclusive companion, is a satisfying homage to the way comics were before the arrival of Doctor Who as a global megabrand, and the final Donna story, “The Time of My Life,” is both clever and terribly moving. But nowhere in the Panini books does one get the sense of Tom Spilsbury as an editor who lived and breathed the details of the comic. (Although it’s certainly possible he’s actually just less prone to talking about himself.) 
(It’s also worth briefly acknowledging the second line of comics in Doctor Who Adventures – over five hundred pages of short done-in-ones that tended to pick up with the Doctor and Rose already in some sort of danger, and to romp madly through absurd premises. Good fun, but not something I’m going to cover in detail.)
Hickman, on the other hand, is clearly the sort of nightmarish editor a good writer dreams of: one who is going to challenge detail after detail, who has no tolerance whatsoever for crap, and who is going to make damn sure anything that goes out under his editorial name is going to be brilliant.
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Fantasies in the Here and Now (The Last War in Albion Part 35: Skizz and E.T.)

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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 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 wrote numerous short stories for 2000 A.D., but the holy grail of comics assignments in early 80s Britain was an ongoing series. In March of 1983, he finally got a crack at one…

“Best bet is to set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.” – Neil Gaiman


Moore finished his time doing shorts for IPC the way he began it – by trying to learn new storytelling techniques. In this regard his comments about “doing an apprenticeship in public” and using short stories to learn “to do all the things that you will have to do in a bigger work but in a much more constrained space” are very much on target through and through. He used his time at IPC to learn his trade and craft. That not all of his experiments came off is, in many ways, proof of this fact. But notably, many of the experiments that did come off demonstrate techniques he would later make considerable use of, up to and including his confidence in purely visual storytelling that he was clearly trying to build in his last few strips. The effect is not entirely unlike the old story about Michelangelo creating the David by taking a block of marble and removing everything that wasn’t the David. The figure that is Alan Moore visibly emerges into the narrative, and comes ever more into focus over the course of these dozens of short stories.
Figure 261: 2000 AD‘s humorous conceit that its
comics were produced by robots under the command
of the alien Tharg the Mighty did not always result
in the most dignified of public portrayals of its
employees. (From 2000 AD #322)
Indeed, it’s clear that by the time he was done with his Future Shocks that he had, in practice, emerged. He visibly stopped doing Future Shocks in order to focus on his new and much higher-paying gig doing Swamp Thing at DC Comics. There is no serious way to describe Alan Moore in the autumn of 1983 as a tentative journeyman. Indeed, as we noted, even within the period working on Future Shocks for 2000 AD there is a clear dividing line in March of 1983, when Moore began writing his first ongoing for 2000 AD, Skizz.
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