Eruditorum Press

Beneath the stones, the beach; beneath the beach, Cthulhu

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:

Saturday Waffling (January 18th, 2014)

10

I’m out of town for the weekend for my annual bit of intellectual masochism at MIT Mystery Hunt, and so am writing this several days in advance. For those who are unaware of this bizarre practice, it’s something in the range of 48-72 hours of tricky puzzles solved in pursuit of finding “the coin” and winning the spectacularly awful booby prize of your team having to write the next year’s Hunt. 

The puzzles generally do not bother with things like “instructions” or “any meaningful sign of what you’re supposed to do,” and instead you have to simply figure it out by discerning a pattern of some sort in whatever the puzzle is.
Here’s an example from two years ago that ought be in the wheelhouse of some of you. The answer to a given puzzle is always a word or phrase. I’d offer a prize to anyone getting it right, but given that the solution is linked in the upper right-hand corner, I can only offer my congratulations for your extreme skill at tasks with functionally no utility whatsoever.
Back Monday with some actual Doctor Who writing. Scandalous.
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Outside the Government: Enemy of the Bane

, 15

It’s December 1st, 2008. Take That are at number one with “Greatest Day,” and are unseated a week later by Leona Lewis’s “Run.” Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Akon, and Kings of Leon also chart. In news, Barack Obama announces more of his cabinet, three people die in the course of shopping for Black Friday, Russia and the Ukraine get into a tiff about natural gas supplies, and the legendarily wretched Lapland New Forest, a Christmas-themed park so awful that its management was jailed, both opened and closed in Hampshire.
Rather less wretched, and on television, is Enemy of the Bane, a story designed to work on two levels simultaneously. On one level it’s the structural trick Davies has been using literally since the dawn of his television career – the villain from one part of the season is shown at the eleventh hour to be working with another major villain. This time it’s a return of the titular Bane mixed with Kaagh from The Last Sontaran. And the story’s topic is clear enough – it’s a story about adoption again, and about the legitimacy of Sarah Jane’s status as Luke’s mother. And, like most of The Sarah Jane Adventures, it gets the notes right and provides a fairly touching story about what a “real mother” is, deciding that motherhood is about actions, not biology. All very nice.
But as part of the “big epic finale,” this was always slated to be a Doctor Who crossover. The plan was to have Martha, since of course there was still a show she’d not appeared in yet. Unfortunately (for Davies, at least), Freema Agyeman got poached by Chris Chibnall when he jumped over to do Law and Order UK, leaving a hole in the story that Davies and company eventually filled by inviting Nicholas Courtney to reprise the role of Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, more conventionally known as the Brigadier.
For a project of this sort, then, there can be no other way to meaningfully approach this story. Never mind that the Brigadier is a relatively minor character in this story – a guest appearance with only a handful of significant interventions who spends most of his time standing in the background of scenes. This is the final appearance of the Brigadier. The Sarah Jane Adventures has an elegiac tone at the best of times due to its strange dual nature as a late career revival for Lis Sladen and the last work she ever did. Adding the last appearance of Nicholas Courtney to it feels borderline funereal.
And it’s easy to read the episode in this context. The trouble with endings is that they often come at a point when things are right to pass. From Verity Lambert’s departure from Doctor Who on, we have seen few endings in which things are cut down in their prime. Even when the endings have come through tragedy, it has often been a case of an undignified end that still comes near the right moment.
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The Tek-Judges of Anubis (The Last War in Albion Part 27: Judge Dredd, Ro-Busters)

, 4

This is the third 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: After successfully launching Battle Picture Weekly and the controversial Action for IPC, Pat Mills and John Wagner were given the task of launching a sci-fi comic, which they called 2000 AD. The comic’s flagship was the iconic Judge Dredd, featuring hard-edged futuristic cop Judge Dredd patrolling the mad streets of Mega City One.

“The Tek-Judges of Anubis have eaten a poison-weed and they shall die soon.” – Grant Morrison and Mark Millar, Judge Dredd: Book of the Dead

Figure 200: Judge Dredd is largely unreceptive
to requests for leniency or mercy. (Written by
Malcolm Shaw, art by Mike McMahon, 2000
AD #6, 1977, click to enlarge)
But the heart of the strip’s appeal came in its combination of the anti-authority leanings of Kid Rule OK or Look Out For Lefty with the noble bad guy protagonist of Hellman of Hammer Force. Judge Dredd takes for granted that its audience would recognize that its protagonist was deeply unsympathetic. The standard set-up of a Judge Dredd story involves Dredd going to great lengths to bust some “creep” whose crime seems relatively minor. Even if there is a proper villain, it’s not uncommon for a Judge Dredd strip to end with some minor accomplice getting arrested by Dredd, who inevitably rejects any pleas for mercy. An early story, for instance, ends with Dredd arresting a man for receiving an illegal but presumably life-saving organ transplant, proclaiming him to be one of “the real villains” in the illegal transplant ring he’s busting. 
The strip, in other words, is an aggressive satire of what would become known as the broken windows theory of policing, in which focusing on small crimes against the social order – vandalism being the textbook example – was believed to reduce crime in general. In practice, of course, broken window policing became an excuse for police forces to focus on petty crime committed by poorer people, and was little more than an excuse for neoliberal crypto-fascists like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to arrest more racial minorities. Dredd predates both Thatcher’s Britain, which came into power in 1979, and the broken windows theory, first codified in 1982, but this only added to its power. It meant that when Thatcherism rose to power the artistic resistance to it was already worked out and ready.
Figure 201: Like Figure 97, this Brian Bolland
cover of 2000 AD #11 caught a young Alan
Moore’s eye.
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Outside the Government: The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith

, 29

It’s November 17th, 2008. The X-Factor finalists remain at number one, but are unseated by Beyonce for the second week of this story. Killers, Girls Aloud, Britney Spears, and Leona Lewis also chart. In news, the financial crisis rumbles on with another bailout of AIG, an IMF bailout of Iceland, and a request for a bailout for the US auto industry. President-elect Obama announces a Treasury team including Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, and Gordon Brown reveals plans to increase the income tax. 
While on television, it’s The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith. Not surprisingly for a Gareth Roberts script, there’s a lot to like here. For one thing, he manages to make the frequently frustrating “morality of changing history” plot work. This is a tricky thing to do well – as we’ve previously observed, the “changing history is wrong” plot runs into significant trouble due to the fact that all morality surrounding it is necessarily invented wholesale for the plot, as the actual nature of changing history is unknown to us. The result is that it usually turns into either a story about the experienced time traveller and the newbie one and how the newbie one needs to stop rocking the boat and accept the rules (yuck) or one about arrogance and hubris.
The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith fits firmly into the latter category. Indeed, so firm is its fit that it proceeds through the arrogance plot with a calm meticulousness. The story really is one about temptation, with Sarah Jane not so much making a foolish decision to change the past but rather making a series of small decisions, each time edging a little bit closer to the big one, but never without a rationalization and a sensible justification. It’s a quite nuanced portrayal of how a good person can make a supremely, stunningly bad decision – another case of The Sarah Jane Adventures being made with a sort of meticulous care and precision.
It also manages to avoid any sort of ontological ethics of time travel. Sarah Jane saving her parents is a bad idea because the Trickster has set up a trap that destroys the world if she does that. Absent the Trickster, she probably could have gotten away with it and had it be fine. The problem isn’t that Sarah Jane does something that “violates the Laws of Time” or some similar nonsense. It’s that she does something risky when she knows it’s probably a trap, and it blows up in her face. That keeps the time travel ethics in the realm of the concrete.
Yes, there are complaints. The time travel actually doesn’t quite make sense – the initial setup of infant Sarah Jane being abandoned by her parents is a result of Sarah Jane’s actions in the story, which ties it up in a neat loop of the sort that time travel stories often go for. But if the ending situation is what always happened, where does the alternate timeline in which the Trickster reigns supreme come from?
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An Unearthly Book Launch

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Slightly later than initially predicted, the revised and expanded version of the first TARDIS Eruditorum book, covering the William Hartnell era, is available for purchase.

If you bought a copy of the book via the Kickstarter, the wheels are already turning. If you have an unsigned copy, I will be shipping it directly from the print on demand company to you. If you have a signed copy, it’ll be a bit slower, as I have to ship to me and then to you. Details are in a Kickstarter update I sent out last night.

If you have not already bought a copy, you can do so here.

US Kindle, US Print
UK Kindle, UK Print
Smashwords (For ereaders other than Kindle)

All editions and formats give me the same royalty, so feel free to pick whatever format is most convenient or likeable for you. It should be showing up in the Barnes and Noble and Apple stores shortly.

If you already have the first edition, here’s the case for why you might want the second. For one thing, it actually has essays on every single Hartnell story now, instead of missing The Massacre. Plus, it’s no longer riddled with typos, and the already quite good cover art has been replaced by another faux-period masterpiece by James Taylor, who describes his process here, meaning this volume matches the other ones. Or, actually, it doesn’t match them at all, but fails to match them in complex and aesthetically pleasing ways.

Plus there’s new content. Lots of new content. The essay on Galaxy Four has, as you might expect, been totally rewritten to address the fact that some of it exists now. Plus there are eleven brand-new essays exclusive to this volume, in fact. You’ll get:

  • Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: It Happened Here – Serving as an introduction to the early 1960s in Britain and the lingering post-War British culture, this one looks at the landmark cult film It Happened Here.
  • Time Can Be Rewritten: The Masters of Luxor – A look at the Anthony Coburn script that was scrapped in favor of a potboiler by Terry Nation featuring some shrieky robot mutant things called Daleks.
  • Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Dan Dare – An overview of the pulp sci-fi comics that inspired Terry Nation and defined a large portion of British science fiction prior to Doctor Who.
  • You Were Expecting Someone Else: Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks – the first-ever Doctor Who novelization, by David Whitaker. 
  • You Were Expecting Someone Else: The Polystyle Strips – learn about Dr. Who’s other grandchildren
Plus an all-new section called Coda: Before the Beginning, looking at stories set before An Unearthly Child. This section contains two essays from the first edition alongside looks at Marc Platt’s Auld Mortality, Nigel Robinson’s Hunters of Earth, Rob Shearman’s Deadline, the unaired pilot episode of Doctor Who, and Mark Gatiss’s An Adventure in Space and Time.
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Outside the Government: Mark of the Berserker

, 13

It’s November 3rd, 2008. The X Factor finalists are at number one with “Hero,” which lasts the entirety of this story. Beyonce, Kanye West, Girls Aloud, Britney Spears, and Pink also chart. In news, the US Treasury Department starts spending money bailing out banks, Viswanathan Anand retains the World Chess Championship, and Lewsi Hamilton wins the Forumula One Championship. Barack Obama is elected President, while Lindsay Roy is elected MP for Glenrothes. And €750 million of cocaine is seized off the coast of Ireland, or, for comparison, fourteen times the annual net income of HMV.
On television, as opposed to drugs, it’s The Sarah Jane Adventures again. Although The Sarah Jane Adventures has been consistently between watchable and rather good, it has not previously punched dramatically above its own weight. It has been a perfectly serviceable children’s show, generally protected by the absurd ethos that things made for kids don’t have to be as good as things made for adults. But it has never served up an episode of such quality that it can be called a classic of some sort. It is not a show that has a Midnight, a Human Nature/Family of Blood, a The Girl in the Fireplace, a Dalek, or even, for that matter, a Small Worlds or an Out of Time. It has been a show of remarkable consistency, both for good and for ill. With The Mark of the Berserker, however, that changes. The Mark of the Berserker is a phenomenal hour of television – a story that, on its own merits, ranks among the best of the Russell T Davies era. 
We have noted before that fear makes for powerful children’s television. It’s just as true for children as for adults that stories and art are where we grapple with demons we cannot face in reality. But even the best children’s television that we’ve had cause to look at makes the larger world scary. It has traded on statues and children’s games, or on monsters and shadows. But here we get something more material – a story based around the horror of an absent or abusive parent. 
That is, after all, what The Mark of the Berserker is about. It’s about introducing Clyde’s family, namely his single mother, and then introducing his absent father as a figure of fear and horror. And it really doesn’t shy away from that. Indeed, it repeatedly goes further than one might expect. Clyde’s father becomes genuinely scary as he realizes that he has the power to force people to do whatever he wants, and the increasing starkness of his abuse is unnerving in a way a Weeping Angel can never possibly be. It’s not just the ordering Clyde to forget Luke and Rani, nor even to forget how his father left him, but the moment when Paul orders Clyde to forget his mother entirely. Equally horrifying are the little side bits – Paul making Rani’s father do pushups forever is disturbing despite, on the surface, fitting perfectly into a harmless children’s program.
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Saturday Waffling

40

Well, I imagine come Sunday this will become the “let’s discuss the Sherlock finale” thread. But since we need something until then, and about a dozen people have brought it up to me already, I suppose we may as well chat about the big Alan Moore interview that dropped on Thursday, complete with screeching broadsides against Grant Morrison and several other people.

Here it is, if you’ve not read it. If you have… thoughts?

I’d offer a comment, but it’s already reached 80,000 words in length and I’ve only gotten up to talking about Alan Moore’s short stories for 2000 AD, so I think I’ll go to bed and finish it off in 2017 or so.…

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Outside the Government: Secrets of the Stars

, 34

It’s October 20th, 2008. Pink is at number one with “So What,” a situation that lasts a week before Girls Aloud take over with “The Promise.” with Snow Patrol, Leon Jackson, Geraldine, Katy Perry, Kanye West, and the Saturdays also charting. In news, Colin Powell offers Barack Obama his endorsement for the Presidency, the New York City Council decides to allow Michael Bloomberg a third term, and Ted Stevens is found guilty of seven counts of fraud, a conviction that basically costs him his Senate seat before being overturned. That being the most American-centric news roundup I think this blog has ever done, we should also note that the episode of The Russell Brand Show in which Brand and Jonathan Ross place obscene prank phone calls to Andrew Sachs aired two days before this story. 
This story being Secrets of the Stars. Let’s start with the obvious point, which is that even by the standards of Doctor Who’s long history of ignoring anything that might inadvertently be mistaken as scientific reason or plausibility, this episode does not make a bit of sense. It hinges on the idea that astrology is real, not because of our universe (where it can’t be, as we’re reassured repeatedly), but because it’s the science of that popular repository of magical stuff that needs a quasi-scientific explanation, the universe before ours. Where it is apparently thus the science of Abaddon. And the Beast. And probably some other stuff. 
It is worth pausing a moment in order to attempt to wrap our heads around that, if only so that we may savor the strange feeling of our heads failing to gain any traction whatsoever and slowly sliding off to form gibbering, uncomprehending piles of head at the base of this plot point. Astrology’s central tenet is that the positions of astronomical bodies has causal effects on phenomena in the real world. This is already a dodgy proposition, given that astrology is based not so much on the positions of astronomical bodies in any absolute space but on their positions in relation to the observation point of Earth. The central concept of astrology, used prominently in Secrets of the Stars, is the zodiac – a chain of constellations that conveniently line up so that the sun moves through them over the course of a year. But when we say “the sun moves through them” what we mean is that from the vantage point of the Earth as it travels around the sun, the sun appears in the sky in positions corresponding to those constellations.
It is also worth remembering something we’ve discussed previously, which is that a constellation is not an astronomical phenomenon but a perceptual one. Constellations are not formations of stars in real space, but coincidences in which stars from wildly different places line up into a geometrical configuration that was aesthetically pleasing to some ancient astronomers. The constellation of Taurus, for instance, is comprised of stars ranging from thirty light years away to hundreds of light years way, with no influence on each other or interactions other than happening to appear in about the same place if you look from Earth.
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A Loud Smack Where The Spine Parted Company With The Skull (The Last War in Albion Part 26: Action and 2000 AD)

, 10

This is the first 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: Shortly after getting his first work in Doctor Who Weekly, Alan Moore sold the first of several short stories he would write for IPC’s 2000 AD, an iconic sci-fi magazine created by Pat Mills and John Wagner, who got their start at IPC creating Battle Picture Weekly in 1975. 

“The client’s head, contained inside the sack, came free with a loud smack where the spine parted company with the skull.” – Warren Ellis, Dead Pig Collector

Figure 190: The first issue of Pat Mills’s
controversial classic Action.
Battle Picture Weekly was an unambiguous success, much to the chagrin of Le Grand and the old guard (although this may have had as much to do with Pat Mills’s impressive pay package, which exceeded that of John Sanders, who hired him as it did with any actual creative differences). Appropriately, Mills and Wagner quickly found more work within IPC. Wagner was tapped to lead an only semi-successful revamp of Valiant, an old adventure magazine that was, despite Wagner’s efforts, merged into Battle in 1976. Mills, on the other hand, was tasked with creating another book that would go even further in the direction pioneered by Warlord and Battle Picture Weekly, to be called Action, and debuting in February of 1976.

British comics were by and large a working class medium, as Alan Moore has observed, but Action was unusual in targeting the working class population directly and fully indulging the working class, anti-authority attitudes of The Bootneck Boy. Its famed centerpiece was Hook Jaw, which was ostensibly a Jaws knockoff. Featuring a giant shark named, fittingly enough, Hook Jaw, the strip inverted the Jaws formula – where Spielberg reveled in keeping the shark off-screen for as long as possible and building up suspense, Hook Jaw puts the giant shark in the first panel, and proceeds to revel gratuitously in its violence. But for all the strip’s glorious violence, Mills was insistent that it be an “ecological” story in which Hook Jaw is the protagonist, who would take bloody vengeance against evil and corrupt humans on behalf of the untamed nature he represents. This was central to Action’s appeal and logic – it was not merely a comic about reveling against gratuitous violence, but one about reveling in gratuitous violence against authority figures. 
Figure 191: Hook Jaw was deliberately given the center
position in Action so that it could get color pages and use
ostentatious quantities of red ink.
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Outside the Government: The Day of the Clown

, 14

It’s October 6th, 2008. Pink is at number one with “So What,” a state of affairs that continues through both weeks of this story. Kings of Leon, Rihanna, Kaiser Chiefs, Ne-Yo, Katy Perry, and the Pussycat Dolls also chart. In news, following the failure to pass the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (more popularly known as TARP) the day that The Last Sontaran aired, the US House and Senate try again and get it passed this time. Steve Fossett’s body is found, and OJ Simpson is convicted of armed robbery. And on the day the last episode of this airs, Paul Krugman wins the Nobel Prize in Economics, for a variety of reasons, most of which, let’s be honest, come down to his repeated criticism of George W. Bush.
“This,” in the preceding sentence, refers to The Day of the Clown. It is, in many ways, a slender thing. Much of it is based on the simple though largely true fact that clowns are creepy. In many ways this marks a slight bridge too far for some of the underlying tricks of the series. The “Sarah Jane faces something that scares even her” trick is a good one, and, admirably, one the show has not overused thus far – Sarah Jane’s past has only really come into play once before, with Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane. Nevertheless, the idea that Odd Bob is particularly terrifying to her because of a clown doll that seemed to move one stormy night and that she can’t quite get over this is not, perhaps, the most effective job that Doctor Who et al have ever done in making a threat scary. (On the other hand, it makes the Fourth Doctor’s proposed Pierrot the Clown costume a relieving near-miss for her.)
And yet in many ways this might be for the best, because the real underlying threat in this story is one of the most thoroughly unnerving that Doctor Who (broadly construed) has ever tackled. The villain may be a clown framed wholly in terms of fairy tales like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, but the underlying explanation – that he’s a creature who feeds of fear and thus abducts children because there’s no fear greater than the mother of a stolen child – is absolutely chilling. I mean, the whole specifying the mother thing is horrible – does anyone really believe, to go back one story, that Chrissie would be more afraid than Alan if an evil clown had ever kidnapped Maria? But the basic idea of doing child abduction on a children’s show is terribly bold.
In that regard the clown, as a sort of generically creepy object, is a useful buffer. It puts the supposed horror at a slight remove, hiding it in an ostensibly greater fear. There’s an odd accuracy to this – the threat of child abduction is, in practice, largely a threat of concern to adults. To a child any child abductor might as well be an evil clown.
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