Eruditorum Press

Read the comments; they can’t be crazier than we are

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:

Q&A

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Sometimes I get random questions through certain means. Here are several of them, and answers. (Sorry for the late post – Blogger error.)

What are your most valuable Doctor Who related possessions in terms of (a) monetary value, and (b) sentimental value?

No idea on A. I know at one point it was a copy of So Vile a Sin, but I’ve not checked the secondary market on that in ages, and I don’t collect for monetary value anyway, so it’s not even something I’d know off-hand.

Sentimentally, my sister gave me a framed picture of herself beside the Earl’s Court Police Box with an inscription reading “come along, Pond.”

Woody Allen?

I think the opening of Dylan Farrow’s piece, in which she asks “What’s your favorite Woody Allen movie?” before transitioning into her story, is a piece of brilliant, brutal writing that makes me have no desire to answer the question.

As always, I believe the victim. And while there are moments of sublime genius in his career, there’s nothing in it that makes me the slightest bit troubled in just believing the victim and deciding I have no interest in him.

Have you read the Sirens of Titan? After reading it I’d say it was a huge influence on both Steven Moffat and Douglas Adams.

For like three years I picked up Sirens of Titan at any book sale I went to. Because I kept forgetting I owned it – I would just scoop up Vonnegut books (many of which I never finished, but oh well), and kept forgetting that was one I already owned, until I had like five copies. Which was ridiculous, and I promptly proceeded to find excuses to give the book to people, usually by telling exactly this story.

And then I overshot and gave away my fifth copy, and haven’t owned it since, and so have never actually read it.

When you write a Pop Between Realities entry on a television series, how much of said series do you typically watch to prepare?

It depends, really. The sort of standard approach is first episode or two and 1-3 later episodes, plus considerable use of secondary sources to make sure there’s no big changes I’m missing. For The Thick of It it was, I think, the first three episodes plus one from each subsequent season.

How do you feel about the truism that every good story has the main character go through some kind of change?

I think that almost any sentence beginning “every good story” is false. Waiting for Godot, for obvious reasons, strikes me as an obvious example of falsehood. Though even there, there’s a clear character arc, even if the movement is consciously infinitesimal in size.

Which is to say, as good a piece of universalizing advice as exists.

What would a potential narrative collapse in football look like?

Oh, thank you. I’ve been waiting for an excuse to link this.

Dresden Codak? (This is not so much a question as an assignment.…

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Outside the Government: Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Two

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[previously] It should, of course, be remembered that the character who makes this proposal, Denise Riley, is the same one who we’re told is going to succeed the Prime Minister following Bridget’s calm overthrow of him in the story’s conclusion. Which is to say that the problem really pointedly is not Frobisher but the system he represents. Ultimately, a woman who unquestioningly consented in ordering the covert and extrajudicial assassination of four British citizens helps make a person who actively advocated for culling the poor the next Prime Minister in the name of a man who helped orchestrate both plans. This is what passes for political victory – the replacement of the absolutely and unfathomably bad with the slightly differently absolutely and unfathomably bad.
In this regard, Children of Earth is something that Doctor Who, under Davies, only occasionally got to be: very, very angry. Davies lashed out occasionally – his embittered Iraq satire in Aliens of London/World War III and his delightfully bleak turn in Midnight stand out – but for the most part, under Davies, Doctor Who is a series about hope. Torchwood has always been allowed to be at least somewhat more cynical, but it’s not until Children of Earth that we see Davies pen something for within Doctor Who that is just unabashedly bitter and pessimistic. 
This is not uncharacteristic for Davies as such. A trawl through his earlier work reveals him to be a hopeless romantic, but he is also someone who has said more than once that his ideal vision of love is unrequited love, which speaks volumes as to the nature of his romanticism. For him, the romantic and optimistic is a howl in the dark – the one piece of meaning or hope that can be found in a desperately bleak world. In Doctor Who, at least, this is framed in terms of the fantastic nature of the show – the romance comes, often, not from the world but from a radical escape from it brought on by interaction with a completely barmy time traveller. 
So Children of Earth, in positioning itself in a somewhat aggressively normal environment, consciously steps away from the saving wonder of the fantastic. There’s only one alien and they don’t even bother with names or descriptions. We don’t even ever properly see them – they’re forever cloaked in fog. The aliens are little more than representatives of the unknown and unknowable – forces of nature to which people have to respond. 
Instead we get Gwen’s episode five monologue about why the Doctor doesn’t show up, with the suggestion that it is a judgment of humanity. This is clearly at least partially metaphoric – after all, it’s not as though the Doctor checks in to see how humanity is doing with an alien invasion before deciding if he’ll intervene. The point is rather much like that of Turn Left. Indeed, that story we suggested that the message “without the Doctor, Britain would become fascist” was a bit stretched.
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Saturday Waffling: February 8th, 2014

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First off, some news and a request. Next weekend, at the Gallifrey One convention in Los Angeles, Paul Cornell is doing a reading of This Point of Singularity, aka my essay on The Three Doctors. It’ll be on Friday night at 11:30, and is on the schedule and everything. If you happen to be going to the convention, I would be really, outrageously, ecstatically happy if you could snag me a recording of this event. It doesn’t have to be super-nice – anything where the audio is intelligible will suit me fine. It’s just, you know, author who was a vivid part of my childhood reading one of my essays at the largest Doctor Who convention in the country and all. And I kind of want to hear it. So yes, if you can help, please let me know in comments. Very appreciative and whatnot. 

Which brings us to our discussion topic for the week: conventions. What are your fondest convention memories?
For my part, I’m going to go with Dragon Con 2012 and the Monday morning Sylvester McCoy panel getting cancelled at the last moment and replaced with Sylvester McCoy and Patricia Quinn doing live commentary for the first two episodes of Dragonfire, making them pleasant for the first time in history. 
Though the gender-swapped Link and Navi cosplay at the same con in which Link was leading her shirtless Navi around on a leash with “no you listen” scrawled on his chest is actually something of a contender as well.
Though, you know. I’m going to have that topped without even going to the convention in question in a week.
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I Must Protect This Bag of Meat (The Last War in Albion Part 30: Plagiarism and Abelard Snazz)

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This is the fifth of ten parts of Chapter Five of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD from 1980 to 1983. An ebook omnibus of all ten 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

Most of the comics discussed in this chapter are collected in The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks.

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s work for 2000 AD quickly led to a spate of extremely good stories, including “The Last Rumble of the Platinum Horde” (a title Moore inadvertently nicked from Norman Spinrad
“Robots couldn’t really give a fuck if you live or die. Seriously. I mean, what are you thinking? ‘Ooh, I must protect the bag of meat at all costs because I couldn’t possibly plug in the charger all on my own.’ Shut the fuck up.” – Warren Ellis


Figure 225: The Golden Horde, also known as the Ulus of
Jochi, spanned a large portion of both Europe and Asia in the
13th century.

The story ends with Cornelius attempting to ride off on the horse of the last Khan of the Golden Horde, which is said to have “waddled forward a few steps, puked, and died.” And that’s basically that. That this apparently inadvertent coincidence of titles should take place around a Jerry Cornelius story written by someone other than Michael Moorcock, given that one of the most superficially obvious conflagrations in the War centers on Grant Morrison’s Gideon Stargrave character and the degree to which it and his larger work are or are not rip-offs of Moorcock’s work. Essentially no plot elements coincide between Spinrad and Moore’s stories. And yet there is a thematic kinship between them. Both are ruminations on the nature of violence that hinge on an over the top display of violence that is revealed to be fundamentally hollow. The end effect is to highlight the impressive diversity of potential in storytelling. Two writers with relatively similar ideas – a rumination on the banality of violence featuring the iconography of the Mongol hordes – ended up in profoundly different places. Even the similarity of title is wholly understandable – there really was a 13th century Mongol Khanate known as the Golden Horde, and it’s hardly surprising that two separate writers working with Mongol iconography riffed on the same famous and poetic name from history.

Figure 226: In more ways than one, this is not the original
Snazz story. (From 2000 AD #209, 1981)

This was, however, not always the case for Moore’s Future Shocks. Two months before “The Last Rumble of the Platinum Horde” Moore penned “The Return of the Two-Storey Brain,” his second story featuring Abelard Snazz. Unlike “The Last Rumble of the Platinum Horde,” which Moore was content to have reprinted in the Shocking Futures collection with a self-deprecating note in the introduction, Moore asked for “The Return of the Two-Storey Brain” not to be reprinted alongside the other five Abelard Snazz tales in the Twisted Times collection because, as he puts it, “some while after the sequel was published, I reread a story by the incandescent R.A.

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Outside the Government: Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day One

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The Last War in Albion will run tomorrow – scheduling snafu meant I failed to get it imaged up in time. Though frankly, this is not as dissimilar as TARDIS Eruditorum sometimes is.
It’s July 6th, 2009. Cascada is at number one with “Evacuate the Dancefloor.” Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga, La Roux, and Michael Jackson also chart, the latter with two songs, this being mainly due to him being dead. In news, since Planet of the Dead there’s been swine flu and protests in Iran over the almost certainly fraudulent reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. While during the five days of this story, a coup d’etat takes place in Honduras, an earthquake takes place in China, and Al Franken is finally sworn in as a US Senator, wrapping up the 2008 elections that took place some eight months earlier. 

While on television, airing on five consecutive nights, is Torchwood: Children of Earth – the zenith of that series’ popularity, which means that it did about as well as poorly rated episodes of Doctor Who did. Nevertheless, it is something of a cultural milestone – Torchwood’s one stab at a big event. While its ratings weren’t quite as impressive as Doctor Who’s, all five episodes placed in the top twenty, and everything after the first got AI figures in the 90s. This is, in other words, hugely successful television.
To start, at least, the important thing to realize about Children of Earth is that it is very long. It’s nearly an hour longer than The War Games and five minutes longer than The Daleks’ Masterplan. Only if you are one of those very strange people who wants to count Trial of a Time Lord as a single story, or if you want to argue that Torchwood doesn’t count as Doctor Who, do you have an easy way to argue that Children of Earth is not the single longest televised story in Doctor Who’s history to date. 
This is all the more extraordinary given that it comes in an era where the narrative velocity has increased dramatically. The War Games and The Daleks’ Masterplan came from a highly serialized era of the show’s history in which things simply happened more slowly. Children of Earth, on the other hand, is medially dense piece of work that makes a habit of communicating information through all sorts of means – dialogue, acting, camera angles, sound design, et cetera. All of which is to say that there’s nothing quite like it in Doctor Who. The fact that it is intensely serialized, done as a straight shot, five episodes in five days single story gives it a narrative heft. It goes out of its way to demand to be treated as a single thing – even above and beyond most miniseries. Even the episode titles – the very simple “Day One” through “Day Five” – seem designed primarily to efface themselves, existing as parts of a whole.
This is not to say that it is not clearly constructed on an episode-by-episode basis.
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Guest Post: Torchwood and Cardiff

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Steffan Alun writes on the subject of Torchwood and Cardiff…

It’s October 22nd, 2006.  I’ve been back in university for a few weeks, and I’ve just come back from a choir trip.  Some music is in the charts, but I don’t have to listen to it, because I’ve finally acquired a DAB radio, allowing me to listen to Radio 4 despite Aberystwyth’s unacceptable inability to find it on FM.

On television, meanwhile, Torchwood debuts, and I am extremely interested in the portrayal of Cardiff in this show.  Most of my old school friends went to Cardiff for uni, but the city is still reasonably unfamiliar to me.  I spend most of my visits in their rented accommodation, talking about Doctor Who.

Fast-foward to the present day, and I now spend most of my time on public transport thinking about comedy.  I am a standup comedian, a job which takes me all over the UK.  I’ve performed hundreds of gigs, but nearly a quarter of them have been in Cardiff.  It is, by now, a city I know incredibly well.  Thanks to the particular eccentricities of standup comedy, I can even tell you how high the ceilings are in over thirty venues.

Let’s quickly cover the history of Cardiff and Doctor Who so far.  Russell T Davies (like me, he’s from Swansea – in fact, we grew up on the same street, decades apart) has revived the show and made it a BBC superbrand.  That’s their word, not mine, but I quite like it.  Superbrand.  It’s fun to say.  The show is filmed in Cardiff, as part of the offer made to get Julie Gardner on board.  Julie Gardner is also from a part of Wales.  My parents never thought to tell me where she grew up, so let’s Occam’s Razor the question of where she’s from and assume that she, like Russell T Davies and Steffan H Alun, grew up on Lôn Cae Banc.  Anyway, the first new series of Doctor Who features two episodes set in Cardiff, one of which was filmed in Swansea.  Following so far?  Good.

What we have in Everything Changes, the first episode of Torchwood, is something that starts off looking like tedious Joseph Campbell nonsense, but ends up as a wonderful subversion.  A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder … until the reality of the supernatural turns out to be so horrific that a woman whose job it is to research the supernatural takes her own life.  “The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man?”  No, the hero joins a team who research alien powers without the slightest intention to share these powers with anyone else.

I’m telling you this for two reasons.  You only need to know one of those reasons – specifically, that while Gwen slowly learns about Torchwood, the audience is slowly learning about Cardiff.  Most of the audience is familiar with the idea for Torchwood – I’d be amazed if many of the 2.8m viewers hadn’t seen any of the first two series of Doctor Who, and even more so if “secret organisation fighting aliens” was new to them.…

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Pete Seeger (1919-2014)

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When I realized that my Wonder Woman book needed to be called something other than Paradise Dungeons, the title that sprang to mind first was A Golden Thread, which on the one hand refers sensibly to Wonder Woman’s lasso and to the sort of historical approach I take to her, tracing a single strand of feminist utopian culture through decades of history, and on the other refers to a Pete Seeger song, “Had I a Golden Thread,” about utopianism in general. I spent weeks seeing if I could come up with other good titles, but it was a mug’s game. The book was obviously called that, and I use two verses of it as an inscription before the first chapter.

I saw Pete Seeger play once, in 2000. He was 82, and already the elder statesman of folk music. He was playing a festival he basically ran, the Clearwater festival, which was an environmentalist benefit for the Hudson River valley. I wasn’t there for him. I mean, I’d heard of him – he was Pete Seeger, after all. He’d written “If I Had a Hammer” and “Little Boxes.” But I was eighteen and eighteen-year-olds don’t think “you know, Pete Seeger’s 82 years old and the number of occasions I’ll have to see him live are dwindling rapidly,” they think “oh, awesome, these two bands I love are at the same festival, and there’s some other cool stuff I’ve heard of too.”
Seeger didn’t play a full set – just a couple of appearances across the festival. He did a number on a Phil Ochs tribute panel (“Draft Dodger’s Rag,” of course), and a little half hour set where he sat under a tree and noodled around on his banjo being charming. I remember one song he did – a fairly standard bit of hippie protest folk – where, before the final verse, he paused and explained that he noted some children in the audience, and that this final verse actually contained a word that the children had probably been told not to say in the house. He then pointed out that they were not in the house, and plowed on cheerily, because Pete Seeger had the moral authority to overrule your parents and everyone knew it.
Later in the set, it started to rain just a bit. Only a few drops – nothing major. But a couple people had umbrellas and popped them open, at which point Seeger stopped playing and calmly explained that he would not be continuing until the people who were under the tree and thus still dry passed their umbrellas to the people not under the tree so that everybody could be dry.
It remains the only time I am aware of in which an artist has actually created, however momentarily, a socialist utopia.
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 76 (The Thick of It)

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We’ve talked about comedy a few times before, and The Thick of It, in many ways, extends from those discussions. It is of course ridiculous to talk about British comedy as a monolithic entity, but if one were to try to one could be substantially more wrong than suggesting that the heart of British comedy is exposing the absurd foolishness of structures of authority. The most straightforward, standard issue joke in a piece of British comedy is, in essence, that the inmates are running the asylum – that how the world works is, in fact, determined by idiots who are immune to reason. Far from the comforting fiction that there’s actually some nefarious asshole running the show and screwing everyone, British comedy at its best suggests that the reason everything is completely fucked is that the world is run by blithering fools who aren’t malicious so much as they are wholly and entirely incompetent.
The previous classic of British political comedy was, of course, Yes (Prime) Minister, a sitcom in which the functioning of government is revealed to be inept because of the backbiting between elected officials and the civil service, and the bureaucratic nonsense each side engages in to establish power over the other. Principles and the actual issue of what would be best for the country are wholly extraneous concerns, and it is really the cold war between two groups who are ostensibly on the same side that drives government. 
In that regard, at least, The Thick of It is a simpler program – a reversion to the more classical British comedy trope of everyone being an idiot. Yes Minister is ultimately a story about systemic breaks in the structures of power – about the idea that the divide between elected representatives and permanent government employees created fundamentally perverse incentives that rendered government dysfunctional. The Thick of It, on the other hand, is largely about a bunch of incompetent buffoons who cause trouble because they’re fundamentally bad at what they do. 
There are, of course, stylistic things to note. The Thick of It is shot in a handheld style with lots of authentic-seeming conversation that puts it as a British cousin to the American mumblecore movement (added to by the partially improvised nature of the final performance). It’s of the style of modern British comedy that goes with long, extended discomfort as a mood, and that doesn’t bother with the unnaturalist structures of comic timing. There are handfuls of scenes that are done as straight-up, typically structured humor, but for the most part it’s a sitcom that isn’t hugely concerned with selecting the moments when the audience is or is not going to laugh. 
But under the hood, in its attitudes, there’s something classical about The Thick of It that puts it firmly in the BlackAdder/Jeeves and Wooster/Monty Python’s Flying Circus/The Goon Show tradition of being about stupid people in charge of things. And yet in its own way this paints a bleaker picture of politics than Yes Minister ever could.
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Saturday Waffling (February 1st, 2014)

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Hello all. Just got back from taking the quite lovely wife out to a birthday dinner, and am rather exhausted, so going to keep this brief. And. Um. I suppose I should come up with a conversation topic.

No. Screw it. I’m tired. You tell me what we’re going to talk about. Then talk about it. Excellent. This is a fine plan.

Good night. Or morning. Bugger.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 32.5: Star Cops

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Iain Coleman offered me a guest post on Star Cops ever so slightly too late to make it in for the holiday run of them I did, so I held it for later. Since running one this week massages my schedule such that all the Children of Earth entries fall into the same writing week, here it is.

It is 6 July 1987. The Pet Shop Boys are at number one with “It’s a Sin”, having knocked The Firm’s “Star Trekkin’” off the top spot a week earlier. The European Community has passed the Single European Act, a key step towards the European Union as we know it today, and a court in Lyon has sentenced the city’s former Gestapo leader Klaus Barbie to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity. And at 8:30 pm on BBC 2, the first episode of Star Cops is broadcast.

Star Cops was created by Chris Boucher, who wrote five of the nine broadcast episodes. By this time, Boucher was an old hand at TV SF, having written three well-received Doctor Who serials before moving to Blake’s 7, where he was script editor on all four seasons as well as writing that show’s best episodes. After killing off Blake and his crew he had moved on to script editing established BBC police dramas Juliet Bravo and Bergerac.

As a cop show set in outer space, Star Cops combined both major strands of Boucher’s career. With its blending of genres, it was intended to appeal to a cross-over audience. Unfortunately, it never achieved high ratings and met with limited critical acclaim. Its initial nine-episode run was never repeated, and there was no second series.

To understand what went wrong, we have to understand spaceflight in the 1980s, and the toxic influence of Cold War military thinking upon the US space programme.

Space has been militarised for as long as there has been space travel. The early successes of space flight were as much public demonstrations of intercontinental ballistic missile capability as they were forays into extraterrestrial exploration. The R-7 Semyorka rocket that launched Sputnik 1 and kicked off the Space Age was the world’s first ICBM, and by putting a beeping ball into space the Soviet Union was demonstrating that it could put a hydrogen bomb over Manhattan. More advanced missiles were similarly pressed into service to launch larger spacecraft, manned and unmanned, over the following decade.

And not all these payloads were as innocent as Sputnik. Low Earth orbit became the ultimate observation post for military reconnaissance, with spy satellites capturing the movements of military forces on the Earth below, and eventually the US would launch a constellation of signalling spacecraft to allow its troops to pinpoint their positions anywhere on the globe. (You have a deliberately degraded civilian version on your phone.)

But in the 1980s this militarisation became suddenly threatening, with the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Immediately nicknamed “Star Wars”, this merrily gung-ho idea was to station armed spacecraft in orbit that would be able to destroy Soviet ICBMs in flight, whether with interceptor missiles or with powerful X-ray lasers, the latter being advocated by Dr Strangelove himself, Edward Teller.…

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