Eruditorum Press

The trap at the end of the clickbait

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:

The Annual “I Hope You’re Enjoying The E-Reader You Got For Christmas” Sale

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December’s royalty charts are always really funny – there’s a visible spike in print books in the first half of the month, which makes sense, but it suddenly levels out in the last week with a spike in ebooks. My assumption has always been that loads of people get e-readers of various sorts for Christmas and proceed to buy books.
So on the assumption that this just happened to you, or just that you might want to get yourself or someone a little something extra, Eruditorum Press is pleased to announce its new Boxing Day tradition, the “I Hope You’re Enjoying the E-Reader You Got For Christmas” sale.
The sale is conducted at Smashwords, where you can download the books in any e-Reader format you want. Here’s what we’ve got.
A Golden Thread – An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman: Normally $7.99. Use the coupon code EP73F to get it for $4.99.
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 1: William Hartnell (First Edition): Normally $4.99, and going out of print in favor of the imminently-releasing second edition within a week or two. Get it for only 99 cents with the coupon code VQ35B.
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 2: Patrick Troughton: Normally $4.99. Use the coupon code TC52N to get it for $1.99.
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 3: Jon Pertwee: Normally $4.99. Use the coupon code CJ43N to get it for $2.99.
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 4: Tom Baker and the Hinchcliffe Years: Normally $4.99. Use the coupon code MM64Z to get it for $3.99.
The Last War in Albion Chapters 1-2: Grant Morrison’s Early Work: Normally $1.99. Use the coupon code QT27K to get it for free.
The Last War in Albion Chapter 3: Alan Moore’s Sounds Work and Maxwell the Magic Cat: Normally $2.99. Use the coupon code ZM94P to get it for $0.99.
The Last War in Albion Chapter 4: Alan Moore’s Star Wars and Doctor Who: Normally $2.99. Use the coupon code TY77E to get it for $0.99.
All of the coupon codes are valid through January 1st – just apply them at checkout to reduce the price.
Thanks for an amazing year. There’s plenty of good stuff planned for 2014, and I look forward to showing it to you.

Thea Gilmore will play you out.

If you say the Elvis Costello/Chieftans version is better, I will poison you first.

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 49.5: Farscape

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Logan Locksley helps fill in a needed gap.

The year is 1996. It’s a leap year. As usual for a year on Earth, all sorts of things are happening. Independence Day, Twister, and Mission: Impossible are among the highest grossing films of the year. Musical hits include Breakfast At Tiffany’s by Deep Blue Something, Virtual Insanity by Jamiroquai, and Amish Paradise by Weird Al Yankovic. In other news, a chess computer called Deep Blue defeats world champion Garry Kasparov for the first time, the Nintendo 64 console is released, and France performs the last atomic bomb test.

On May 27, the Doctor Who TV movie starring Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor airs in the UK. The film fails to result in a new American co-produced series for several reasons, but mostly because it isn’t a very good movie. It kind of sucks, to be honest.
Hey there. I am, quite obviously, not Phil Sandifer. I’m not nearly as eloquent or erudite (am I using that word right? [Other than applying it to me, yes. – Phil]) as Mr. Sandifer, but I heard he was looking for someone to write a guest post and I jumped at the chance. He has graciously accepted me as a guest writer, and here I am. My name is Logan Locksley, and I’m here to talk about Farscape.
When were we? 1996. After the dismal Eighth Doctor TV movie, some other things happen, and 1996 comes to an end. Let’s fast-forward.
The year is 1999. Once again, all kinds of stuff happens. But we’re only concerned with one minor event. On November 29, a strange but endearing science fiction series called Farscape airs its first episode in the UK. Noted for its emotional poignancy, complex stories, and irreverent humor (as well as the use of puppets from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop), Farscape generates a relatively small but fiercely loyal fanbase.
Again, let’s fast-forward.
It is now 2002. In September, the Sci-Fi Channel opts to withdraw its funding of Farscape’s fifth season, cancelling the series just before Season 4 begins airing. Fans are angry and disappointed, and the cancellation receives considerable notice by news media. Mere hours after star Ben Browder and producer Brian Henson announce the cancellation during an online chat with fans, a campaign to “Save Farscape” has begun.
On March 10, 2003 “Bad Timing” airs in the UK. Farscape’s final episode ends on a truly bizarre, totally Farscapean cliffhanger, leaving many fans more than a little angry and confused. The fan campaign continues.
Fast forward to 2004. Thanks in large part to the massive “Save Farscape” fan campaign, several financial backers have given their support to Brian Henson. On October 17 and 18, a two-part miniseries called Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars airs in the US. The Peacekeeper Wars resolves the cliffhanger ending of “Bad Timing” and wraps up several unresolved plot threads.
For obvious reasons, 2004 is remembered as a noteworthy year for ‘Scapers. (Star Trek has Trekkies, Farscape has ‘Scapers.)
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 73: Final Crisis

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Andrew Hickey writes on Final Crisis. His book on fifty years of Doctor Who, Fifty Stories for Fifty Years, is available from Amazon, Amazon UK, and, for print editions, Lulu. You’ll also probably enjoy the interview he just did with me for Mindless Ones.

Narrative Collapse
“There was a cosmic war. And the powers of evil won. And I know how this sounds, but they’re here among us now. I was kinda hoping you might be able to help me put some kind of team together.”
Grant Morrison, at the time Final Crisis was being released, said (in a now-deleted blog post, so I can’t quote it directly) that Final Crisis was clearly tapping into the same zeitgeist as Doctor Who, because of the number of superficial similarities between his story and The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End. He may even have believed it. But Final Crisis rather conclusively missed the zeitgeist at least as far as its intended audience were concerned.
Both Final Crisis and The Stolen Earth were inspired by the comic-book tradition of the crossover, where you get characters from many different series, all of which ostensibly take place in the same fictional universe, to come together to face a threat too big for any one of them. In fact both were inspired specifically by one such crossover, the crossover by which all other crossovers in comics are judged, 1985’s Crisis On Infinite Earths, by Marv Wolfman, George Perez, Len Wein, Jerry Ordway and others.
That story was designed to clear up a DC multiverse which, according to geeks, had become “too complicated”, because of a plethora of different universes containing different versions of DC’s characters. The fact that this could be comprehended in seconds by any eight-year-old child reading the comics – “Oh, Old Superman and Flash With A Hat are from Earth-2, and Proper Superman and Proper Flash are from Earth-1, OK” – didn’t stop it from being an incessant source of worry for any reader who thought that Marvel’s self-consistent universe (a result of all Marvel’s main characters being the creation of three men – Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and, especially, Jack Kirby) was something that their main rivals should emulate.
And so, over the course of a year, came a comic which, however misguided its aim, was truly huge in scope. Its story involved a threat that destroyed a literally infinite number of earths, and saw the remaining five earths merged into one, and the whole of their history rewritten, so that where there had been an infinite multiverse there had now only ever been one universe. It also saw the deaths of beloved characters like Supergirl and The Flash (both of them got better). 
It was a war in time, sparked initially by the actions of the oldest race of beings in the universe, the immortal godlike beings who claim the authority to police the universe, and who live at the centre of it. But it soon turned into a war between an absolute evil and a corrupted, broken, good, that ended with the whole of history being rewritte, and only a handful remembering that it had ever been different.
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Saturday Waffling (December 21, 2013)

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I’ve just gotten the last set of edits back on the Hartnell book – I’ll get ebook versions out by Christmas, with print following in January some time. (James got me the ebook cover already, but since it was Christmas time I then gave him an extra lump of coal and told him he could spend an hour or two with his family. Don’t worry – I’ve still not let him see sunlight.)

Roughly the next two weeks of TARDIS Eruditorum are going to be guest posts because I thought I’d experiment with taking a few days off. Frankly, given the lineup of writers I have filling in, you’re not going to miss me at all and will in fact be slightly disappointed when I return in 2014 with The Last Sontaran. The Last War in Albion will continue as usual.
Next week’s posting schedule is going to be further exotic. Eruditorum will be running on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday to make room for a Wednesday French Toasting to discuss Time of the Doctor. Saturday will be given over to Last War in Albion. And Thursday will be a slightly belated Christmas present to everyone.
Speaking of Christmas, and of the holidays in general, what are everyone’s plans for Yule, Christmas, New Year’s, and any other holidays you may celebrate in the next week or two?
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These Two Strands Together (The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End)

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Detonate… the disco bomb!
It’s June 28th, 2008. Coldplay are at number one with “Viva la Vida,” which lasts a week before Ne-Yo’s “Closer” unseats it. Sara Bareilles, Rihanna, Busta Rhymes with Linkin Park, and Jordin Sparks with violent abuser Chris Bown also chart. In news, Bill Gates finishes his full time work at Microsoft, the US Supreme Court rules that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms and that the Exxon Valdez damages were excessive, and Spain wins Euro 2008, beginning their rather long winning streak of major international tournaments. 
While on television, the biggest thing is, in fact, Doctor Who. So let’s start with Journey’s End, as it is in many ways the centerpiece of the Russell T Davies era. There are two narratives of the Davies era – in one the show peaks with Rose’s departure in Doomsday. This is the view offered by Tat Wood in About Time. But Doomsday, for all its supposed cultural cache, pulled in 8.2 million viewers and was the 8th most watched program on television that week. Impressive, but beaten out by Rise of the Cybermen, which got 9.2 million and finished 6th. Doomsday was only the fifth most watched episode of its season. Journey’s End, meanwhile, pulled in a mind-wrenching 10.6 million viewers – the most a non-Christmas Special episode of Doctor Who had pulled in since Rose, which can hardly be called a normal episode. It’s the only time in the new series that a season finale bested the premiere in ratings. And it pulled off something that Doctor Who had never done in its entire history: it was the number one program on television that week. “Ah,” a certain line of argument goes, “but ratings don’t indicate how much people liked it.” This is true. For that we need to turn to the episode’s unfathomably high 91% AI score. 
From empirical data, at least, this is the zenith of Doctor Who’s cultural capital. It’s also part of a larger cultural narrative of the transition from Davies to Moffat, a cultural event that includes Tennant’s Hamlet performance being the hot theater ticket of the year, the massive success of The Next Doctor, the Matt Smith announcement, and, finally, the massive event that was The End of Time. Doctor Who may have exited its imperial phase after Doomsday, but its moment of greatest success – the moment where it was the biggest it had ever been – was this.
What jumps out, then, is the self-confidence of it. There’s always been an “everything plus the kitchen sink” feel to Davies’s finales as they each scramble to be bigger than the last one, but the sheer and sweeping scope of this one is still impressive. A three-show crossover with five companions listed in the opening credits that also features Luke, K-9, Mr. Smith, Gwen, Ianto, Jackie, Mickey, Wilf, Sylvia, Francine, as well as loads of Daleks and Davros.
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One is All (The Last War in Albion Part 23: Joseph Campbell, 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. 

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.
“God is one and all. God is all. One is all. One perfect moment” – Alan Moore, Promethea #23
Figure 170: John Dee’s black scrying mirror, in which
Edward Kelley received his vision of Babalon.
Within Campbell, however, this event is paralleled by another immediately after, which Campbell calls Woman as the Temptress. After encountering the Goddess there comes a point where women “become the symbols no longer of victory but of defeat,” for “no longer can the hero rest in innocence with the goddess of the flesh; for she is become the queen of sin.” This evokes the virgin/whore complex at the heart of many depictions of the sacred feminine, and captured chillingly in the revelation given to Edward Kelley while scrying in the seventh aethyr that drove him to abandon magic:  

I am the daughter of Fortitude, and ravished every hour from my youth. For behold I am Understanding and science dwelleth in me; and the heavens oppress me. They cover and desire me with infinite appetite; for none that are earthly have embraced me, for I am shadowed with the Circle of the Stars and covered with the morning clouds. My feet are swifter than the winds, and my hands are sweeter than the morning dew. My garments are from the beginning, and my dwelling place is in myself. The Lion knoweth not where I walk, neither do the beast of the fields understand me. I am deflowered, yet a virgin; I sanctify and am not sanctified. Happy is he that embraceth me: for in the night season I am sweet, and in the day full of pleasure. My company is a harmony of many symbols and my lips sweeter than health itself. I am a harlot for such as ravish me, and a virgin with such as know me not. For lo, I am loved of many, and I am a lover to many; and as many as come unto me as they should do, have entertainment.

Figure 171: Dion Fortune was a
Welsh occultist and contemporary
of Aleister Crowley’s.
After this encounter with the sacred feminine, predictably, comes the (in Campbell’s eyes at least) more important encounter with the masculine divine, Atonement with the Father.
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You Were Expecting Someone Else 26 (I, Davros)

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A commissioned essay for David Allen.
For all that the new series takes pains to avoid making declarations about “canon” that might clash with the classic series or the spinoff material, things got surprisingly close with Journey’s End, which, in an earlier draft, contained a flashback sequence that gave a capsule origin story of Davros. All fairly standard stuff – a shot of the one time he was ever on the surface of Skaro, him swearing to ensure the survival of his people, Davros horribly injured and screaming, and then a nice monologue about how “I became a victim myself. Perhaps it was necessary. To inspire me… Can you imagine? I had one idea! An idea that has never stopped. Rolling out across the centuries. I have slept, and woken, and died, and every time I open my eyes there they are. My Daleks. Outlasting eternity. And all from one man.”
It’s a lovely little monologue – the “outlasting eternity” line is a cute little throwback to the Doctor’s description of humanity in The Ark in Space, only inverting that into an act of singular, mad vision as opposed to a collective indomitability. It fits nicely with the larger metaphoric space of Journey’s End, and the decision to frame the Daleks as an idea – that is, as a narrative concept – is wonderful. It also, apparently dragged during the read-through and required a bunch of FX shots, and so got cut before filming. It’s always something. 
Had this sequence not been deleted, however, the result would have been a rare moment of contradicting what had come before, as back in 2006 Big Finish released a quartet of audios called I, Davros that offered a different and contradictory origin for him. Actually, the contradiction isn’t that jarring – the big one hinges on whether or not Davros has only seen the surface of Skaro once or not. The real difference is that Big Finish did four hours and forty minutes of audio about Davros’s origins whereas Russell T Davies wrote and cut about a sixty second flashback. They’re very different things.
But they both speak to an underlying concern about Davros, which is the need to approach him from the opposite direction. In practice Davros is a back formation of the Daleks. Terry Nation considered the question of what the Daleks’ origin might be and created Davros in their image. His physical appearance is derived straightforwardly from Ray Cusick’s iconic design of the Daleks. His basic concept and iconography as a Joseph Mengele figure comes from the Daleks’ existing Nazi Germany imagery. Everything about him comes from the Daleks, designed as a retconned origin for them. 
And so any attempt to provide an origin for Davros that leads to the Daleks is necessarily something of an odd process. It can never be an entirely satisfying narrative simply because the narrative is self-evidently false. It has the same problems as telling the true and complete story of the Doctor leaving Gallifrey – the reality of the narrative is that it was designed to function without that story, and thus that the addition to the story is fundamentally inessential.
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Tis the Season and Whatnot

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Excerpts from a project I don’t actually have time for, but wish I did.

You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch


The webcomic XKCD once slyly pointed out that radio airplay of Christmas songs amounts to an extended nostalgia project for baby boomers, with the top twenty songs clustered neatly around the 1950s and 1960s. “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch” is not among those top twenty, but is clearly part of the same trend, coming from the 1966 How The Grinch Stole Christmas television special.

It is difficult to account for its status in the Christmas canon on any grounds other than sheer nostalgia. Its only connection to Christmas is appearing in a holiday special. The lyrics don’t mention the holiday at all, instead just insulting the Grinch for six verses

Indeed, lyrically, the song seems almost anti-Christmas. It is a character piece meant to establish the main character of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, when the entire point of the character is that he’s missing the holiday spirit entirely. But his overall character arc over the course of the special isn’t contained in the song.

More to the point, the overall point of the special is in many ways a split decision. Yes, the Grinch makes nice at the end, but the point of the special isn’t the eventual reconciliation, it’s the giddy thrill of the Grinch trying to steal Christmas. The special asks us to revel in perversity with the thin justification that order is restored eventually.

And this carries through to the song. On the one hand, the song is a description of the villainous Grinch and his awful ways. But as much as the song condemns the Grinch, its pleasure is clearly in the perverse excesses of its invective. One central joke of the song is the way in which the final line steadily increases in size, from “you’re a bad banana with a greasy black peel,” which fits the actual musical phrase, up to “I wouldn’t touch you with with a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole,” which humorously crams too many syllables into one note, all the way up to “your soul is an appalling dump heap overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable rubbish imaginable, mangled up in tangled up knots,” a description in which there are simply too many adjectives. (“Mangled up in,” in particular, exists only to sustain the phrase a little bit longer.)

This excess is, of course, quintessentially Seussian. But what is striking is not just the excess but the way in which it is overtly contrary to the supposed sense of the season. But the story of the redeemed curmudgeon has obvious history in Christmas – most obviously with Ebeneezer Scrooge. And while these stories are ostensibly about their main character’s redemption, they also show an important carnivalesque inversion of the usual order of things. Their presence deflates the gaudy artifice of Christmas.

The truth is, nobody in their right minds doesn’t want to punch the Whos in the face around the third “Dahoo Dores,” cloying little snots that they are.…

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Unpeople Undoing Unthings Untogether (Turn Left)

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What do you mean they cast the guy who mistook me for
a masseuse and wouldn’t go home? I’d have come back to the
series if they’d told me. 
It’s June 21st, 2008. Mint Royale are “Singin’ in the Rain” at number one, with Gabriella Cilmi, domestic abuser Chris Brown, and a will.i.am/Cheryl Cole duet also charting. In news, same sex marriage starts in California, while the UK ratifies the Treaty of Lisbon. And AIG ousts its CEO due to losses suffered in the subprime mortgage crisis, which is probably reasonable given that three months later the company went spectacularly bankrupt.
Given that context, Turn Left marks one of those uncanny moments where Doctor Who gets ahead of cultural trends. It’s also a funny little thing. In some ways it marks the point where the “Doctor Lite” episode becomes obsolete, as it finally plays out the most obvious Doctor Lite concept imaginable – what if the Doctor never existed. Or, in this case, what if he died two seasons ago. What results is one of the most bizarre mishmashes of concepts in the entire Davies era, or, in many ways, of any era.
There’s a fair case that it was not Davies’s best ever idea to decide that in the absence of the Doctor the UK would descend into fascism complete with labor camps for unwanted foreigners. The It Happened Here vibe of this is certainly interesting in its own right, and Davies will of course revisit all of these ideas with considerable aplomb in 2009, but there’s something off about it here. It’s not that a nuclear explosion eradicating London wouldn’t plausibly lead to exactly the sort of scenario we see here. Rather, it’s… well… Donna.
Because the real point of Turn Left – the dramatic arc that actually drives it – is Donna becoming a hero from a different direction than the one she actually took. Which means that Catherine Tate is back to playing a Catherine Tate Show character for most of the story. But there’s a subtle twist to her performance – one that Tate herself is more than equipped to handle. In The Runaway Bride Donna is a comedy character who, by the end of the story, becomes a reasonably well-realized character, albeit ultimately still a one-off. But here she’s Donna Noble, who has been the primary companion and co-lead in nine of the last ten episodes. Yes, she’s regressed to a pre-Doctor state, but that characterization can’t be undone by fiat. At this point, looking at her, we still see Donna Noble, not Catherine Tate.
This leads to a certain degree of perversity, particularly in the labor camps scene, as Donna chases after the truck demanding to know where it’s going when it’s perfectly clear to everybody else what’s going on. There’s a joke here that’s suddenly turned nasty; Donna Noble, who missed all the alien attacks prior to The Runaway Bride, now misses the establishment of concentration camps in Britain because she’s so comically thick.
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