Eruditorum Press

Sneakily taking the hinges off the doors of perception

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.

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Outside the Government: The Day of the Clown

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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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Coming Imminently

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I had, in fact, expected to be doing a book launch post today, but it’s slightly delayed due to idiosyncrasy. So instead, we’ll just shamelessly tease.

And while we’re teasing, I began what I’m, for now, calling Secret Project. Actually, no, I like Warren Ellis’s method lately of just assigning codenames to projects he can’t talk about yet. So we’ll call this project Butterscotch. Here’s a paragraph of Butterscotch with roughly 80% of the words removed. Butterscotch will be finished and unveiled in 2014.
Shortly commissioned science television. Amis attention days spearheaded Michael BBC, types interest try conclusion literary, really families special suggested subject variety report six months starts evening program Juke calls appealing adults existing timeslot. program staff department.

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Outside the Government: The Last Sontaran

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It’s September 29th, 2008. Kings of Leon are at number one with “Sex on Fire,” with Rihanna’s “Disturbia,” Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” and songs by Pussycat Dolls, Sugababes, and Faith Hill also charting. In the last three months the world has gone barking mad. Over the course of September what has come to be called the global financial crisis or the great recession broke out properly, with John McCain essentially torpedoing his already dubious Presidential campaign with a vacillating and erratic response. At this particular moment in time the world is an unusually scary place – a sense of unease hanging over everything in a way that has only occasionally gripped it in the past history of the program. 
It is, in other words, a complex and downright interesting time into which The Sarah Jane Adventures launches its second season, and its first story, The Last Sonataran, is fittingly busy. It’s reintroducing the cast, as a second season opener should do, while simultaneously showcasing a Big Name Monster (as any monster inherited from Doctor Who is) and dealing with writing out the central character of the first season (along with two supporting characters). This is accompanied by a familiar problem of stories with a lot to do, which is that any notion of thematic unity drops out. At the end of the day, there isn’t a clear reason why the Sontarans have anything to do with Maria moving to America. There’s no way you’re going to make a solid connection there. So instead you have a big, flashy episode with lots of discrete parts that at least don’t clash.
So instead of a thematic unity we get a unity based around anticipation. The role of the Sontarans, or, rather of the Sontaran, since this is a return to the idea that they have characters instead of being a race of interchangeable monsters, is in many ways to allow the story to work from shorthand. It’s a big Doctor Who monster that doesn’t need any additional introduction or explanation. Accordingly, the story has time to focus on the added weight of writing Maria Jackson out while still getting to have a big first episode with a suitably major villain to kick off the season. And that lets the story take an easy shape – a remote radio telescope, a monster, and lots of corridors to run through. There’s little to set up here, and the expectations come almost automatically.
And the biggest expectation, which comes in almost from the start, is that the Sontaran is going to have to to be whacked in the probic vent. The weakness was stressed so heavily in The Sontaran Stratagem, and, more to the point, it’s a very children’s television weakness in the first place. Though not originally designed in that milieu, to a modern audience it’s self-evidently a piece of video game logic. The probic vent is a classic example of the little weak spot you target on the heavily armored enemy to damage them.
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Saturday Waffling (January 4th, 2014)

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Normal blog service will be restored Monday as TARDIS Eruditorum starts in on the second season of The Sarah Jane Adventures.

I have the cover art for the print version of the Hartnell Second Edition, and am engaging in final checks there. Sometime next week, probably? I should probably wait until I have a day I can spend dealing with the logistics of fulfilling all the Kickstarter pledges. Then it’s on to starting revisions on Volume Five: Tom Baker and the Williams Era, the Logopolis book, Volume Six: Peter Davison and Colin Baker, and a Secret Project, which should form my 2014 output.

While we wait for Monday, then, Sherlock. How did people like The Empty Hearse? And, for later in the weekend, how did people like The Sign of Three?…

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Outside the Government 15: Newtons Sleep

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Unnoun unwrites an unpost about Faction Paradox.

Newtons Sleep is the only Faction Paradox book published by Random Static. It’s available to download as a free e-book, but please donate to help them out!
It’s 1666 A.D. A spittle’s-worth of dark humour has responded to the drawing power of matter and impacted with a young man’s head; the struggle between the holy houses of Christ and their eternal Adversary has erupted among the living
It’s January 12th 2008 C.E. A small printing company has just released a book as part of a bizarre sci-fi series supposedly about a Time Traveling Voodoo cult. The bizarre sci-fi series is the true successor to the legacy of that cultural giant Doctor Who.
It’s 1807. 1802 actually, but close enough for our purposes. Major hit songs of the year include Ludwig van Beethoven’s Mass in C, the ballet Hélène and Paris, the operas Joseph and La Vestale, and Thomas Moore’s publication of Irish Melodies. Again, actually it’s 1802. So replace those with Beethoven’s Second Symphony, the opera Urania, and Franz Kommer’s Concerto for 2 Clarinets in E flat major, Op. 35. Sorry. I don’t have many sources other than Wikipedia. Phil was kinda lucky with that one. 1807 was pretty good for music. 1802 sucked. While in non-musical news, Napoleon makes an attack on Russia, Aaron Burr is acquitted of conspiracy, the England/Argentina soccer rivalry has pre-season friendly as Britain mounts a disastrous attack on Buenos Aires, and Robert Fulton launches his first American steamboat. And I tried looking up other stuff in 1802 and couldn’t find any in the five minutes it took to write this bit. Sorry.
While in London, William Blake abandons his masterpiece actually he’s just sent a letter to his friend Thomas Butt. Heh. Butt.
Meanwhile, in the time between this story and the last, (or, at least, the last one we’ve so far covered,) there’s been a bit of a scuffle primarily in the Middle East, one in which the United States and United Kingdomand royal sympathies – so often clothed as though of a part with gentle living and good government – conceal the actions of those true and monstrous traitors who have suckled their love of slavery from the teat of theShe-Wolf. All Earthly affairs thus lightly conceal the true conflict that shapes the cosmos, and all occurrences are as portents of the divine, or of the damned.
It’s November 15th 2013. A 30-something Faction Paradox fan has just been asked to help a friend she’s never met in person with an emergency by writing a guest post for his blog that she’s grown obsessed with.
It is March 26th 2005. Despite what anyone else will tell you, a terrible calamity has occurred. The impossible dream of a thousand alchemists has been snatched away, smothered in the crib. An imposter has laid claim to the mantle of Material Social Progress forcing the true heir to the throne into hiding Yet as the divine recedes, it seems also terribly closer.
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Call Vala From her Close Recess (The Last War in Albion Part 25: Alan Moore’s Future Shocks, Battle Picture Weekly)

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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: Realizing that he’ll be hard-pressed to make it as a writer-artist, Alan Moore turned his focus in 1980 towards scripting comics for other writers, first getting work on Marvel UK’s Doctor Who Weekly and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Monthly writing short back-up strips featuring secondary characters from those franchises. But Moore was quick to augment that with other work, most notably for IPC Media’s 2000 AD…
“Sound clarions of war. Call Vala from her close recess in all her dark deceit.” – William Blake, The Four Zoas

And yet it also suggests that Moore is not best served by writing in such narrow genres as “Star Wars tie-ins” or “Doctor Who stories that don’t feature Doctor Who.” It is both telling and compelling, then, that a far larger body of Alan Moore’s early work comes in the form of bespoke short stories for 2000 AD published under the header of Tharg’s Future Shocks. It is not that this format allowed unfettered creativity by any measure. But it was a structure that allowed Moore to stretch his creative wings, as well as to work with a compelling variety of artists.
Figure 182: So thoroughly collected is
Alan Moore’s work that even his Star Wars
strips have found a home.
The dawn of Moore’s work for 2000 AD marks a subtle but significant change to the nature of the War’s narrative. Prior to this point in the narrative the material under discussion has been only sporadically collected. Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation have been put up for free on the Internet with Moore’s consent, Maxwell the Magic Cat has a long-out-of-print reprint series, and Moore’s Star Wars material has  found a home in an omnibus published by Dark Horse Comics (although with Disney recently acquiring both Star Wars and Marvel Comics there’s a question mark over how long that will remain in print. But from this point on the overwhelming majority of the texts that constitute the War are readily available in print, and thus form a coherent and reasonably well-known body of texts, all of which were published in the same general period. 
As it happens, the period in question coincides almost perfectly with the portion of Alan Moore’s career in which he wrote for IPC’s 2000 AD, a period which lasted from July of 1980 through April of 1986. Within this roughly six-year period, however, there are two distinct phases.
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 78 (The Time Traveller’s Wife)

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Alison J Campbell’s piece on LOST was so well received, she was inspired to write something else. How could I possibly say no? Technically this one should go somewhere in the Moffat era, but I’m still on vacation, so think of it as a message from the future, a New Year’s present – for the moment.

Aviary Box by Joseph Cornell. Trust me on this.
The problem with time-travel stories isn’t in the contradictory nature of their construction — neither in the apparent paradox of information that doesn’t seem to have a causal origination, nor in the notion that time can be rewritten. The main problem with time-travel stories is that they’re too often taken literally. Time travel stories are inherently metaphorical, because our most basic conceptions of time itself are ensconced in metaphor. Without the metaphor of Time as a Dimension of Space, wherein everything we know experientially about moving through the three dimensions gets applied to Time, we would never have the concept of time-travel, let alone time-travel stories. (We also conceive of Time as a Moving Object, particularly a River; and third as a Resource, something that can be apportioned and managed as other resources are.) 
The second and much less trivial mistake is that time-travel stories aren’t logical constructions, but are laid on the foundation of dramatic concerns. It’s in this respect that Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife really shines (unlike its botched movie adaptation) and most likely why it’s been so thoroughly pilfered by Doctor Who. 
Indeed, it bears many features of a Doctor Who story. First and foremost, it plays with the notion of smashing different genres together. One the one hand, we’ve got the stalwart SF trope of time-travel, presented in science terms – Henry DeTamble is a Chrono-Displaced Person, his Chrono-Impairment deriving from some redundant “clock genes” that create an electromagmetic pulse in his brain, not unlike an epilectic seizure, which sends him careening backwards in forwards in time, without apparent rhyme or reason, and certainly without any control. In this respect he’s not unlike the good Doctor himself, at least in the early days of the show, when he could barely navigate the TARDIS.
On the other hand we’ve got a romance, detailing his relationship with Clare Abshire, who isn’t a time-traveler. We get first dates, hot sex, a wedding, and triangles for them both. Henry is the leading candidate for Reformed Rake, the bad-boy turned good by the influence of the right woman; for much of the story, Henry and Clare are Star-Crossed Lovers, kept apart by Henry’s fatalistic displacement; at the same time, they are truly Fated To Be Together. There are, in fact, a lot of novel ways that Romance tropes can be exploited through the mechanism of time-travel.
Upon closer scrutiny, however, it becomes apparent that TTTW is neither a SF story, nor a Romance, nor really a weird cross-breed of the two. On the one hand, it’s rather slim in its use of SF tropes – the genetic explanation is dodgy as all hell, and aside from the cornucopia of pharmaceuticals that Henry takes in a vain attempt to master his condition, there aren’t any scientific concerns to speak of at all, at all.
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 74: Merlin

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Jack Graham, of Shabogan Grafitti, asked me a month or so ago if I’d seen Merlin. I said I hadn’t, but it was on the list to cover before Season Two of Sarah Jane Adventures. He then proceeded to tell me how appalling it was, and I decided that I’d rather read him writing about Merlin than actually watch it. 


The Dragon, the Villain and the Closet
Whoah… where am I?  I was just rummaging around in the back of the wardrobe and suddenly here I am, surrounded by fractal paisley.  
Ah, I remember.  I was supposed to come to this land of hallucinogenic monochrome and talk about… get this… Merlin.  
Yes, Merlin, the extremely popular series – made by BBC Wales and Freemantle – which ran from 2008 to 2012.  I recently watched it all the way through, for reasons that defy rational explication.
Okay, first the background.  I’ll do this stuff in bullet points, so to speak, because it doesn’t really interest me.
BBC Wales.  Julie Gardner (among others).  Family show based on Arthurian legends.  Various attempts prior to this (one involving Chris Chibnall).  Tone based on Russell T. Davies’ mega-successful reinvention of Doctor Who, and on Smallville (i.e. the adventures of a famous hero when still a teenager).  Openly and obviously a post-Who-revival show… not least because the two leads (Colin Morgan as Merlin and Bradley James as Arthur) look like they’re agents of the Remote, remembered into existence by people thinking about David Tennant.  Morgan was created by someone who concentrated on Tennant’s lean and dark geekiness while James was constructed by someone more impressed by his cheekbones and pout.  
Basic set-up.  It’s the Middle Ages (sort of).  In Camelot (which, in this version, is a kingdom rather than just a castle), magic is banned – and by magic we also mean Druidism and anything falling under the rather vague category of ‘the old religion’.  Uther Pendragon, the king, has persecuted the sorcerers out of Camelot, and burns any he finds still within his borders.  This doesn’t stop him trusting various random strangers who turn up wearing long magician-robes and long magician-beards, carrying magicky-looking staffs covered in runes and zodiacal symbols… because he’s a doofus.  (He’s also played by Anthony Stewart Head, an actor whose immense popularity I find utterly baffling.  Honestly, he’s not even talented enough to do coffee commercials.)  Merlin is a young sorcerer.  Naturally, he goes to live in Camelot, right by the king’s castle.  Because that’s what I’d do if I was magic: head straight for the nearest genocidal tyrant who likes burning magic people alive.   It later transpires that his mother sent him to Camelot for his safety.  Let’s say that again: they lived outside Camelot, and when she discovered her son was magic, she sent him into Camelot… for his safety.  (This gives you some idea of the writing.)  Merlin promptly gets a job as the (only) personal servant to young, arrogant Prince Arthur. 
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Rippling, Dribbling Blobs of Pure Holographic Meta-Material (The Last War in Albion Part 24: Alan Moore’s Star Wars Comics)

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This is the sixth of seven parts of Chapter Four of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work onDoctor Who and Star Wars from 1980-81. An ebook omnibus of all seven parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. The ebook contains a coupon code you can use to get my recent book A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman for $3 off on Smashwords (the code’s at the end of the introduction). It’s a deal so good you make a penny off of it. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help support it. I should perhaps also note that all of these books are currently on sale as part of Eruditorum Press’s annual post-holiday sale.

The stories discussed in this installment and the next are currently in print as part of Dark Horse’s Star Wars Omnibus: Wild Space Volume 1.
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Despite his distaste for Star Wars as a franchise, Alan Moore, after departing Doctor Who Monthly in solidarity with Steve Moore, settled in to write several stories for Marvel UK’s variously titled magazine of Star Wars comics.
“Perhaps someone else would call these rippling, dribbling blobs of pure holographic meta-material angels or extraterrestrials.” – Grant Morrison, Supergods, 2011
But the cleverness of “Rust Never Sleeps” is not primarily in the fact that it is a by-the-books horror story. Rather, it is in the fact that it is not a horror story at all, even though its basic plot structure is straightforwardly lifted from one. The structure is really just a platform for the real point, which is an exploration of the basic idea of a robot god. Tellingly, C-3PO drops out of the narrative at the end. Once the Stormtroopers arrive at the end of the third page, his role is superfluous. He begs Brother Fivelines not to confront them and bemoans how Fivelines didn’t listen to him while he’s vaporized, but that’s his final line. The remaining page and a half of the story consist only of the droid god’s rising up to defeat the Stormtroopers. C-3PO doesn’t even get a full appearance after it – he appears cut-off on the side of one panel on the last page, but the story has nothing to do with him. Instead it focuses on an extended narration ruminating on the nature of the god of the droids. 

Figure 176: The wrath of a meek and subservient god. (Alan Moore
and Alan Davis, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Monthly #155,
1982)
This narration is interesting in a large part because it gives the sense of recreating Moore’s own process in hatching the story, starting from the premise of the droids having a god, and then speculating that “surely it would be as meek and subservient as the droids themselves. It would not be a god of wrath.
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