Eruditorum Press

Ideas may be bulletproof, but nobody’s tried plasma rifles

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 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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The Sentinels Lied About All Them Space Wars (The Last War in Albion Part 29: Alan Moore’s First Future Shocks)

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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 first few short stories for 2000 AD focused mainly on robots, but gave him his first opportunity to work with Dave Gibbons…
You’re saying the Sentinels lied about all them space wars? Well what have they been doin’ all these years? – Alan Moore, Top Ten #12
Figure 218: Dave Gibbons manages to work the
Saturnian Singing Orchids into the page with
entertaining frequency. (“The Dating Game,”
written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons,
2000 AD #176, 1980. Click to enlarge.)
These strips culminate in “The Wild Frontier,” a story that demonstrates straightforwardly how Gibbons’s art style lends itself to Moore’s style of comedy. Moore describes the strip as “one of those stupid things you do when you hear that Dave Gibbons will be drawing a job.” “The Wild Frontier” is a two-page bit of larking about on the premise of a space-western, complete with jokes about “the octobanndits led by that cephalopod sidewinder… Billy the Squid!” and the Clone Ranger, a vast stampede of identical masked men with their catchphrase of “Hiyoo, Chromium! Hawaay!”  All of this is depicted by Gibbons in comically ludicrous detail that not only emphasizes the ridiculousness of the concept but wallows in its glorious excess, encouraging readers to dwell on panels to catch all of the sight gags Gibbons has managed to cram in. But even as early as “The Dating Game” Gibbons was showing his propensity for detail, making sure to put the bouquet of Saturnian Singing Orchids that the computer gives Myron in as many panels as possible (and allowing Moore to create more deliciously awful plant rhymes such as “Who cares if the greenfly bite? / I’ve got you to hold me tight. / You’re my man, I don’t mean maybe… / You’re my fertilizer baby.”) and, of course, depicting the sublime lunacy of Myron’s homicidal toothbrush.
Figure 219: Alan Moore has admitted that
he designed Snazz’s visual appearance in
part because it was unnerving and slightly
headache-inducing to look at.
Unfortunately, for all that Moore was clearly better at them than other writers, there simply weren’t a ton of slots for short stories at this period in the magazine’s history. Tharg’s Future Shocks hadn’t appeared since Prog 135 in late 1979, and wouldn’t make a return until March of 1981, at which point Moore began getting published in 2000 AD with considerably more regularity. If his earliest 1980 shorts were merely competent, his 1981 work must be recognized as an extraordinary run of stories.
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Another Look For My Recorder (Planet of the Dead)

137

Roughly speaking, the tagline for Planet of the Dead was
“David Tennant and Michelle Ryan went to Dubai and stood
sexily in front of a London double decker bus we smashed.
It’s April 11th, 2009. Lady Gaga is at number one with “Poker Face,” with Flo Rida and Ke$ha, Beyonce, and Taylor Swift also charting. This feels like yesterday, as is fitting for an era of Doctor Who that is already colliding with the series’ onrushing present. Since the banalities of The Next Doctor, Israel announced a ceasefire in the Gaza War, quickly followed by Hamas doing the same. The President of Guinea-Bissau was assassinated, and the Icelandic economic crash happened. And, a few weeks ago there was a G-20 summit on the subject of the financial crisis in London. Protests during this summit resulted in Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper vendor who suffered a fatal heart attack after a severe police beating administered despite no evidence of wrongdoing. Meanwhile, at the summit a large financial stimulus was agreed upon, and the Queen scolded Silvio Berlusconi. 
While on TV is the much-maligned Planet of the Dead. It seems strange that such a slender and basically toothless little story has attracted such condemnation as one of the worst of the Davies era. Certainly, in the cold, harsh light of the Capaldi era it is difficult to argue seriously that this is the era’s nadir. It is a piece of fluff, certainly, but a basically well-structured bit of fluff that gets its desired jobs done. There’s one big critique, which is the decision to film in Dubai, a location with, to say the least, problematic laws and policies not least of which is the active criminalization of homosexuality. Certainly there’s something to sigh somewhat wearily about in that decision, although, on the other hand, it’s not as though one couldn’t imagine any number of great outraged critiques about the moral obscenities involved in filming in a country that’s formulated a massive surveillance state with cameras on every street corner, or one whose actively imperialistic tendencies are the ruin of hosts of developing economies. Which is to say that while the political regime of Dubai is undoubtedly a nasty piece of work, it’s also low-hanging fruit that encourages a myopic view about how bad foreign places are.
But that’s not the usual critique anyway. The usual critique is just some variation on the idea that the story is “dumb.” This seems positively bizarre, save for the context of its original presentation, as an Easter special and as the only island of Doctor Who between Christmas and the end of the year. What would have survived perfectly fine in the giddy second or third episode slot of The Fires of Pompeii, Tooth and Claw, or The Shakespeare Code instead ended up having to serve as exactly the sort of big, tentpole event it was never designed to be. The episode’s officially sanctioned description was as the last time Tennant’s Doctor got to have fun, but that sits in almost conscious opposition to the notion of “the only Doctor Who you get in an eleven month period.”
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Createspace

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Consider this an entry into the “blogger details treatment by a company on their blog” genre – the one that’s usually done in order to gin up outrage at some customer service nightmare. Except for the bit about the customer service nightmare, because instead we have the opposite – a case where the company takes care of a problem really well and mildly saves my ass, and I decide to say nice things about them.

So, I use Createspace for my print books. It’s a print on demand service, which is key because it means I don’t have to worry about inventory. It’s got its disadvantages – it basically means I have no distribution to bricks and mortar bookstores or retailers that aren’t Amazon (you can technically buy my books in bricks and mortar stores, but I get functionally zero royalty when you do and so I don’t really advertise the option). And it’s owned by Amazon, a company that anyone involved in writing (or any other creative pursuit) ought have, at the very least, reservations about.

They can also be a pain in the ass – James and I have a variety of entertaining war stories about beating their submission requirements into, well, submission. We still speak of the Week of the Evil Bar Code Sticker in hushed and haunted tones.

Nevertheless, they make pretty books and are on the whole easy to work with. Your books get automatically sent to most Amazon stores, they print very fast, and they pay quickly. (This last point is key – I get my print royalties the month after the book sells, whereas digital royalties pay two months after. I like print royalties.)

But more to the point, they’re helpful. As evidenced when I managed to screw up to the tune of several hundred dollars last week and they bailed me out. Long story short, I was ordering books for Kickstarter rewards, shipping direct from CreateSpace because it’s largely cheaper, and, a couple hundred dollars of orders into it, realized I had read the list of titles wrong and had been ordering the first Tom Baker book instead of the Hartnell book.

Unfortunately, when I say that Createspace prints very fast, I mean that they print very fast. As in, orders from ten minutes before I realized the problem were already in production and couldn’t be cancelled. Which meant that there was a massive error I couldn’t do anything about. Which is, in turn, where Createspace’s customer service stepped in and saved my ass by managing to, while not cancelling the orders, change their shipping so that all the books would send to me, thus giving me my necessary stock of Tom Baker books to fulfill orders and letting me get on with other orders. This was no small task, and involved a day of calls back and forth to Createspace, but getting it done saved me from a several hundred dollar screwup that I really couldn’t have afforded that week.

So, yes.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 27 (The Eyeless)

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It is not as though there are not writers from the Wilderness Years who carried on writing tie-in material for the new series. Several have, from both the Virgin and BBC Books eras. And, of course, there are the handful of Wilderness Years contributors who have contributed the odd television story or two like Mark Gatiss, Paul Cornell, and Russell T Davies. Nevertheless, to anyone who’s been with the series for the long haul so to speak, the return of Lance Parkin seems significant. Parkin was a middle-to-late comer to the Virgin line, but ended up writing one of the novels that dealt most heavily with the Virgin line’s Gallifreyan mythology, and also ended up wrapping up the line with their one Eighth Doctor novel. And then for BBC Books he wrote a bevy of major books, including the single biggest piece of “let’s play with Gallifreyan mythology” ever, The Infinity Doctors, and, once again, the final book of the line, The Gallifrey Chronicles. 
It’s not that Parkin is the defining author of the Wilderness Years or anything so much as that he’s one who is deeply associated not just with them, but with playing with their implications. His novels repeatedly play games with continuity and mythology, and, more broadly, with the importance and centrality of the tie-in media, carefully laying out the rules for his “it’s all true, and that’s the game” vision of what Doctor Who allows. He is not the defining writer of the Wilderness Years so much as the writer most defined by them and their possibilities – the one whose work is most bound up in the Wilderness Years.
Interestingly, he’s also the piece of the Wilderness Years that bled into the new series. As we observed at the time, the final novel of the Eighth Doctor Adventures, The Gallifrey Chronicles, came out around the same time as Boom Town aired, which is to say, well after the new series had established itself as a massive cultural object. Lance Parkin’s end to the Wilderness Years, in other words, is not actually a part of them, but a postscript – a letter from a point where the future was ensured, even if that is not quite the point from which it was written.
On a more basic level, of course, Parkin’s books tend to be games of structure. In several of them, he adopts a seemingly impossible premise just to demonstrate how it can be accomplished – a sort of Doctor Who novel as Mort Weisinger-era Superman comic, only with fewer malevolent toads. His books are ruthlessly high concept, though with the focus often as much on exploring the nature of the concept as on delivering it as such. This, at least, provides something of a contrast with the New Series Adventures, which are carefully and consciously positioned as secondary to the new series itself. The New Series Adventures are not there to rock the fundamental premises of Doctor Who. That’s not to say that they are unambitious, but they are expressly and by design not where major issues about the nature of the series get worked out.
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Saturday Waffling (January 25th, 2014)

21

Right – finally placed the physical book orders for the Kickstarter. Which means there are something like three hundred books on their way to me, and many more whizzing about the globe to various other places. It’s very exciting, except for the part where all that great Kickstarter money I had suddenly stopped being quite so much Kickstarter money because I spent nearly $4000 on copies of my own books. Whoops.

Which transitions us to this weekend’s topic, which is “future of the blog.” Due to reasons having mainly to do with the peculiar academic politics of the school at which I was teaching, my classes for this semester were abruptly taken away a week before Christmas. (Short form – some upper division classes taught by senior faculty were underenrolled and got cancelled, and so mine got taken away to give to them because I’m an adjunct and thus can have all my classes cut without warning or notice and there’s not even a problem.) This is not a massive crisis, but it means that finances grow a little tighter, especially with the whole big thing with the Wonder Woman money, and, long and short of it, I need to do some thinking about how to increase the amount of money my writing makes me in the short-to-medium term.

Right now I’m considering two plans, which I’d like to lay out in their broad strokes and let people chime in on what they think is the better idea.

Plan One: Kick More Starts

In this plan, I’d run, probably in March, a Kickstarter for The Last War in Albion, likely with a target of about $3000. This would fund it through the start of coverage of Watchmen, which will begin with Chapter Twelve. (Or possibly thirteen – Swamp Thing might need more than one chapter because frankly, I don’t want them to be much longer than ten parts) I’d collect that into a first volume as a book, and then decide whether book two (The Battle of Watchmen) needs a Kickstarter to fund it as well. (In all likelihood the answer would be yes, and my goal would be to raise a couple of thousand dollars via Kickstarter roughly every calendar year.)

This is, broadly speaking, the “big projects” model, in which I would maintain a bunch of high profile projects. It has its obvious plusses and minuses, but is certainly a sound and plausible model for a writer to support himself over time.

Plan Two: Patreon

Recently coming to prominence, however, is another crowdfunding platform called Patreon. The model of Patreon is based not on fundraising for big projects, but on small payments for content created on a regular basis. It’s designed more for webcomics artists, musicians, and, oh hey, bloggers. Basically, people would be able to set a recurring charge up where, whenever I make new content, they pay some small amount – $.50, $1, $5, whatever. You can set a monthly cap, and so there’s all the safeguards you’d expect.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 75 (Hamlet)

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It’s a time-honored strategy. A skilled actor defined by one major role does some “challenging” work on a serious project to show that they’re flexible in anticipation of moving to a more serious and major level of their career. In the UK, the practice often involves a run in theater. For David Tennant, who had extensive theater experience anyway, it was the natural move – use the gap year opened in the production to do some high profile bit of theater.
Meanwhile, the Royal Shakespeare Company was in a position that could only be described as “in dire need of a hit.” The decision to terminate its relationship with the Barbican Centre in 2002 had left it with a vastly diminished presence in London, which, as it turned out, was not necessarily a great thing for a theater company, especially given that its Stratford-upon-Avon facilities were, at the same time, undergoing a lengthy renovation. The result was several years where the Company hemorrhaged money.
The two were natural partners, in other words. Tennant allowed them to have a high-profile production with a celebrity actor that would amount to a license to print money, and Tennant had a nice, high profile “respectable” role to use as he attempted to transform his post-Doctor Who career into, ideally, something American. And so we got the 2008 production of Hamlet in which Tennant pairs with Patrick Stewart, mostly running in Stratford. Adding respectability to the affair (on Tennant’s end) was him being a good RSC citizen and taking up a production of Love’s Labour Lost alongside Hamlet that, for a variety of reasons, was not treated as nearly as big a deal. 
For all that this makes perfect sense on paper, it was in some ways an awkward marriage. The RSC was in many ways unprepared to handle the sheer popularity that it had, and found itself trying to avoid looking too much like a populist circus, grumpily banning audience members from asking for anything other than RSC memorabilia to be signed and generally acting as though they were a bit annoyed that a bunch of sci-fi fans were giving them piles of money for what rapidly became the summer’s hottest theater ticket. And things got decidedly awkward towards the end of 2008/beginning of 2009 when Tennant suffered a back injury requiring surgery and ruling him out of the bulk of the London run of the play. 
But that this was such a controversy as to get repeated news coverage, and that a theater ticket in Stratford would be the hottest ticket of the summer speaks volumes about just how popular Doctor Who was at the end of 2008/beginning of 2009. Not only is Stratford a hundred miles and a two-hour train ride outside of London, it’s simply not a very big town – its population of 25,000 is smaller than that of Newtown, Connecticut, meaning that anyone wanting to see the production had to travel to a town with little else to do but tour a few museums and churches specifically for it.
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The Comedian Is Dead (The Last War in Albion Part 28: Alan Moore’s Earliest 2000 AD Work)

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This is the fourth 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: 2000 AD built its reputation on the back of popular series like Judge Dredd, Ro-Busters, Rogue Trooper, and ABC Warriors. In his time working on the magazine, Alan Moore wrote for these properties only occasionally…

“Jeez, y’know, that felt good. There don’t seem to be so many laughs around these days.”
“Well, what do you expect? The Comedian is dead.” – Alan Moore, Watchmen #1

Moore’s Rogue Trooper work is altogether more somber affair. The first, “Pray for War,” tells of Gunnar having to kill another soldier who calls himself “Pray for War” because, as he says,“war is the best thing that ever happened to me” and “combat is what makes me happy,” ending with Rogue reassuring Gunnar that “you only killed part of him – the ugly part. The war killed any humanity left in him long ago.” The second, “First of the Few,” involves Rogue finding one of the abandoned prototypes of the Genetic Infrantrymen, who he allows the mercy of death, actively declining to lead his consciousness into his gun or helmet. Both are straightforward anti-war stories; “First of the Few” describes the hellish world of Nu Earth, “the ultimate monument to war. The land is scorched bare and the air is a poisonous soup,” Moore writes with obvious relish, crafting a dour and pleasureless war story that subverts the genre. 

Figure 210: Hammerstein’s somber reflections over the grave
of a Martian animal (2000 AD Annual ’85, 1984)
Moore is even more somber in his ABC Warriors story, “Red Planet Blues,” which has Hammerstein investigating a problem on Mars. The problem turns out to be that the planet still has life on it, and the solution of the humans that hire Hammerstein is to simply burn the weeds in which the lifeforms live. Hammerstein reflects at the end that “we burned the whole undergrowth and we only found one dead Martian animal. I figure even that was a fluke.” Nevertheless, Hammerstein opts to bury the animal, admitting that he’s “getting old” and “getting soft.” The story ends as a haunting dirge about the nature of colonial genocide, as Hammerstein warns the dead alien that “the humans are coming, and soon all your tribe will lie as still as you. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s their planet now.” 
Figure 211: A classic twist ending page from
the first installment of Tharg’s Future Shocks
(From “King of the World,” in 2000 AD #25,
written by Steve Moore, art by Blasquez, 1977)
But while Moore dabbled with these characters, the bulk of his 2000 AD work was either on the three strips he created – Skizz, D.R.
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