Eruditorum Press

Single vision and Newtons sleep debt

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:

How Puzzles Work

18

So, Mystery Hunt is over. I typically post a wrap-up about it somewhere – I used to do it on LiveJournal, where there was once an active Mystery Hunt community, but that’s semi-dead, and I’ve not really found what you could call an obvious replacement. So I’ll do it here, for a somewhat odder audience.

And anyway, I don’t have a huge amount to complain about – this was a well-run Hunt that I have very few issues with. So instead I figure I’ll point at a couple of puzzles I did a large amount of work on and enjoyed and try to give a sense for the general audience of what’s fun or interesting about these sorts of puzzles. Links are to puzzles. If you for some reason want to solve, you should probably do so without reading my comments, but my comments do not explain the solutions (which are linked in the upper-right hand corner)

Some basic overview – there are basically three things you do in a puzzle: the a-ha, the legwork, and the extraction. The a-ha is the moment when you figure out what the hell is going on in the puzzle. The legwork is when you solve all the clues, fill in all the boxes, identify all the pictures, and otherwise use your understanding to fill stuff in. And the extraction is when you figure out how what you’ve filled in turns into a short phrase or word.

To use the last puzzle I solved this year – one I solved only because one of my readers who also Hunts made a comment about a Simpsons/Doctor Who puzzle, which let me know that the half of the puzzle that was making no sense was Simpsons references – here’s how the basic steps work.

Here’s the puzzle.

The two a-has are realizing that every clue both references a Doctor and a Simpsons couch gag. This is lovely, if you solve a lot of puzzles. The couch gags can be tied to episodes, and the Doctors provide a set of numbers. What we’re probably going to do is what’s called indexing into the answer. So for that first clue, “My dad made us all dress up to look like the Beatles Sgt. Pepper album. He even got the rest of the town to be there, though that one old man with a wooden cane looked a bit out of place,” we have the couch gag from the episode “Bart after Dark,” and the First Doctor. So we take the first letter of BART AFTER DARK and get B out of that clue. And we similarly get letters for every other clue – so the one that mashes up the 8th Doctor with “The Great Money Caper” takes the T, because T is the 8th letter.

All that’s just legwork – identifying Doctor references and looking up couch gags.

Often a puzzle like this also requires sorting the answers somehow. (The usual name of this type of puzzle is an ISIS puzzle – Identify, Sort, Index, Solve.…

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So You’re My Replacements (The Next Doctor)

115

What do you mean they’ve cast him? He’s, like, five years
old!
It’s Christmas, 2008. X Factor winner Alexandra Burke is at number one with a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” narrowly beating Jeff Buckley’s version, which charted in an attempt to thwart The X Factor from taking the Christmas number one. The remainder of the charts are basically unchanged since earlier in the month, save for Geraldine’s “Once Upon a Christmas Song” and a different choice of Beyonce singles. In news, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich is arrested for trying to sell Barack Obama’s former Senate seat, 1400 people lose their jobs in Ireland due to a crisis caused by pork contaminated with dioxin, and Woolworths announces that it will be closing all of its stores. 
On television, meanwhile, it’s the fourth new series Doctor Who Christmas Special, The Next Doctor. It is difficult to list anything that’s especially awful about The Next Doctor. David Morrissey is a fine actor, and while he is shamelessly hamming here, it is a skilled execution of the style that is inappropriate neither for the part nor the occasion. Indeed, it is almost preferable to call his performance charcuterie – a distinction without any difference in meaning, but with considerable difference in implication. The plot moves along with reasonable efficiency. There are funny bits, there are moments of quality drama, and the whole thing is good fun. 
Why, then, does it feel so hollow? Even this is, perhaps, unfair. It’s hard to argue seriously that this is the nadir of the Davies era. Most people hate Planet of the Dead more, it seems. But for my money, and we’re getting ahead of ourselves slightly here, Planet of the Dead never purported to be anything other than a frothy romp written by Gareth Roberts. The Next Doctor, on the other hand, presented itself as altogether more significant.
The key step in this came on October 29th, two days after Secrets of the Stars wrapped, as David Tennant announced his departure from Doctor Who. This did not exactly surprise anybody – ever since the announcement that 2009 would consist of a run of specials instead of a full season of Doctor Who, the consensus speculation was that Tennant was leaving. Davies already played with this once with the regeneration cliffhanger of The Stolen Earth, and with the knowledge that Moffat was taking over the default assumption was that Tennant was leaving. But that was only true among the tiny portion of the audience who actually followed Doctor Who news closely. For the wider public, it was not until the 29th that the speculation over who the next Doctor would be properly ramped up.
Davies, of course, anticipated this fully, and designed The Next Doctor to played ludicrously with that speculation. And he succeeded wildly, with David Morrissey being the bookmaker’s favorite for the part. Almost anyone paying close attention assumed the truth – that Morrissey was being employed in a story distantly derived from Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman’s Colin Baker audio The One Doctor – but the general mood was nevertheless one highlighting this episode as significant and major.
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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

9

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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