Eruditorum Press

Our business actually is to reason and compare

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:

Tact and Finesse (The Unicorn and the Wasp)

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It’s May 17th, 2008. Madonna and Justin Timberlake have been at number one for substantially more than “Four Minutes.” Usher, Coldplay, and Kylie Minogue also chart. In news, attempts to provide relief aid for victims of Cyclone Nargis drag on, largely due to reticence on the part of the government of Myanmar. California’s Supreme Court declares that a ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. And, on the same day as this story airs, Portsmouth FC defeat Cardiff City in the final of the FA Cup.
Also on television is The Unicorn and the Wasp. There is a simplicity to this story. It is, of course, a Gareth Roberts script, which means it is a giddy, often very funny celebration. Roberts is not the writer you hire for critical and ambivalent takes on a subject, and so what we get here is wall-to-wall glee about how wonderful Agatha Christie was.
There are of course unsettling problems with this. Christie was a reactionary bigot of the worst sort-  a fact that requires a complete whitewashing so that we can all revel in the Downtonesque  glamour of the period setting without having to feel problematic in the least. It’s on the one hand difficult to be too upset about this – the point of the story, after all, is to be a big, frothy Agatha Christie pastiche in which the final twist is that the killer is an alien. Deconstructing the Agatha Christie style is a valid move too, but it’s a fundamentally different move.
Instead the point is to be absolutely, giddily bonkers. This is a story that’s supposed to be funny and inventive. And it is. The Agatha Christie title jokes fly fast and furious, well beyond what’s even remotely required. (I remember, about a year after this aired, solving a puzzlehunt with an Agatha Christie themed puzzle in it based on titles, and laughing out loud solving it as I realized just how many of the titles were what I had previously taken as perfectly ordinary lines from this episode.)
So Agatha Christie becomes not a historical figure but a genre, which is, of course, how Doctor Who generally prefers its history anyway. Then, added to this, is a cheekily recursive joke in which the Agatha Christie genre gets Agatha Christie thrust into it as a character. Roberts, being Roberts, was always going to write this as a giddy celebration of fannish love, and so we get the double recursion whereby it’s an Agatha Christie mystery starring Agatha Christie in which the reason the story feels like it’s straight out of an Agatha Christie mystery is, in fact, because the characters have been reading Agatha Christie. It’s gobsmackingly meta. 
And so we get a story that, like any Agatha Christie story, is full of revelations. This is the standard structure of an Agatha Christie story – every character has some secret that causes them to act suspiciously. Typically the character who is the least obviously suspicious ends up being the murderer.
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Saturday Waffling (December 7th, 2013)

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So. Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman.

I’ll confess up front that I haven’t seen her in anything. The only one of the Fast and the Furious films I saw was the first one, which was a perfectly serviceable mindless action movie of the sort Vin Diesel is very good at appearing in. My only memory of it is the bit where the car drives under a semi. I assume the subsequent movies are memorable in exactly the same ways.

Which is to point out what everybody with a brain and a keyboard already has, which is that there’s nothing in her resume that inspires confidence. This is not in and of itself a problem – Lynda Carter had a thin resume as well, and she was phenomenal in the part. Everybody has a big break.

And I’m not one of the people who’s intrinsically down on the movie because it’s a Zack Snyder film. I like Snyder, and think he’s largely misunderstood. I liked Man of Steel. The problem is that everything I liked about Man of Steel is also a reason why it’s a terrible cornerstone to try to build a big DC Universe franchise out of. I liked Man of Steel for being a cynical take on Superman that was the first well thought out response to Grant Morrison’s stuff to date. And I still think it was that.

And it’s the director of Sucker Punch doing Wonder Woman. And I think Sucker Punch is a flooringly brutal, angry feminist film that was criminally misunderstood. It’s one of my favorite movies of the last decade. And while I don’t imagine the director of Sucker Punch is going to make a straightforward and iconic Wonder Woman movie, there are many ways in which the prospect of a Wonder Woman movie from him just sounds phenomenally exciting. I want to see his take on Wonder Woman.

The thing is, that’s not what this is going to be. Wonder Woman seems to be in the movie as part of a commitment to establishing a DC Cinematic Universe to rival Marvel’s. And Snyder’s the wrong guy to do that. He does angry deconstructions, where what you need here are the iconic, straightforward takes on characters carefully and well-executed. Man of Steel was, for me, a great Superman movie, but it’s an awful start to an ongoing Superman franchise. And I can’t help but fear Wonder Woman will end up in a similar position here. And given that she, unlike Batman and Superman, doesn’t have a history of coming back again and again in film, that’s worrisome, because as many have pointed out, this is probably the only chance we’ll get for ten or twenty year.s

But all of that has little to do with Gal Gadot, who is taking on a role with a lot of expectations. I hope she nails it. And while I have no reason to think she will, I also have no reason to think she won’t.

Thoughts?…

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All The Years I’ve Been Taking Care Of You (The Doctor’s Daughter)

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Shooty daughter thing
It’s May 10th, 2008. Madonna and Justin Timberlake are at number one. Pendulum, Flo Rida, and Usher also chart. In news, the Federal Reserve notes that banks are increasing standards on loans as the subprime mortgage crisis gathers steam. Bertie Ahern, Taoiseach of Ireland, resigns after nearly eleven years as head of government, and Dmitry Medvedev becomes President of Russia. Barack Obama thumps Hillary Clinton in the North Carolina Primary, leading Tim Russert to declare that it is clear who is going to win, and turning Clinton’s campaign into a strange sort of zombie, which, to be fair, anyone who was looking at the numbers realized was true months ago. 
Commemorating her stubbornness, Doctor Who airs The Doctor’s Daughter. The definition of insanity, or, at least, the one trotted out for rhetorical purposes, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. In Davies’s defense, he does not actually repeat the exact same stretch of episodes four through seven as he did in Season Three; he goes to Gareth Roberts instead of Chris Chibnall. Nevertheless, it’s tough to see why Davies decided to go with a Helen Raynor monster two-parter followed by a Stephen Greenhorn script for the second season in a row. And unsurprisingly, it works about as well as it did the first time, which is to say not really at all. 
The Doctor’s Daughter is interesting in part because it’s the most sci-fi story the new series has done in some time. This is a story that hinges on an entirely sci-fi riddle based purely on the interplay of imaginary concepts. One has to not only follow the good old “science concepts become mythology through generations of oral folklore” premise from stuff like The Face of Evil, one has to get the secondary realization that all of this has happened in a week. These are not hugely difficult and advanced concepts, to be sure – I doubt a significant portion of the audience was confused – but it’s still focused on sci-fi concepts in a way the new series rarely is. Certainly it’s difficult to think of another Davies-era story that works like this.
In many ways it’s a throwback to the classic series, although it’s tough to pin down a specific bit of the series. The aesthetics of the story are all very Saward-era – lots of military people shooting lots of stuff and the Doctor thrown in the middle of it. But under the hood this is the sort of thing you’d find in the Williams era – a morality play framed around the interplay of sci-fi concepts – something like Underworld or The Pirate Planet. In terms of those concepts, it feels most like Christopher Bidmead, albeit not in his “let’s play with mathematics” phase of Logopolis and Castrovalva, but rather in terms of the stuff he oversaw like Full Circle, or his later Frontios. But even this is part of an older tradition going back to stuff like The Web Planet and The Space Museum where the story is structured around answering the question “what are the rules of this world?”
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A Map of Causality (The Last War in Albion Part 21: Alan Moore’s Doctor Who Comics)

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This is the third 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. 

“Increasingly observers describe the War as a shape rather than a secquence of events, a map of causality.” – Lawrence Miles, The Book of the War

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore was given his first straight writing job – backup comics for Doctor Who Weekly – on the recommendation of his friend Steve Moore. His first two stories were four-parters constructed of two-page chapters, but even in this early work hallmarks of Moore’s iconic style…
Figure 157: Sinister smiling figures stepping noiselessly
forward in Doctor Who Weekly #41 (Alan Moore and David
Lloyd, 1981)
What’s immediately interesting about Moore’s early Doctor Who work is that his second story is no less metered in its narrative, but that it has an entirely different tone. Where Black Legacy sticks mostly to iambic tone, Business as Usual goes for dactyls and trochees, as with the line, “NO one RAISED an EYEbrow when BLUNT inVESTed his CAPital in FOUNDing his OWN PLASTics COMPany. IT was JUST SOUND BUSiness.” Again, the meter is not strict, but it repeatedly puts the emphasis at the beginnings of phrases, favoring three-syllable feet with words like “capital” and “company.” These longer feet give the work a very different feel, as does the triple stressed syllable in “just sound business,” which draws considerable attention to that specific and seemingly mundane phrase, quietly exposing the underlying deception, namely that, far from being ordinary sound business, Blunt’s decision is in fact part and parcel of an alien invasion. Black Legacy feels clipped, and like it’s working in a more classical, epic sense, where Business as Usual sounds mundane and conversational. It’s slightly too wordy, resembling the obfuscatory language of stereotypical corporate jargon. Business as Usual also features, in places, highly alliterative phrasing such as “the sinister, smiling figure steps noiselessly forward. Behind, in the shadows, something stirs.” In twenty-three syllables Moore manages to get nine that feature an s sound. The effect fits perfectly into the milieu of sales and corporate branding that the larger story utilizes, highlighting its satirical bite. 
But for all the cleverness of these two stories and all that Moore learned from the two-page chapter structure, it is, in the end, a limitation. Business as Usual suffers badly from having to recap its basic premise every other page.
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The Mighty Warrior Sheltering Behind His Gun (The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky)

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How are you holding up? Because I’m a potato.
And one more time in case you missed it, the first Tom baker volume of TARDIS Eruditorum is now out. It’s nice, rectangular, and easy to wrap.
It’s April 26th, 2008. Madonna and Justin Timberlake are at number one with “4 Minutes,” which exceeds its titular expectations by some margin and stays at number one for both weeks of this story. Mariah Carey, September, Usher, Wiley, and Sam Sparro also chart. In news, a bit of a spat breaks out between Jimmy Carter and the Bush administration over whether anyone ever advised him not to meet with Hamas. Wesley Snipes goes to prison for tax evasion, Grand Theft Auto IV comes out, and Boris Johnson unseats Ken Livingstone to become Mayor of London. 
While on television we have The Sontaran Stratagem and The Poison Sky. Perhaps the first question to ask is why this is even a thing. Once the series had brought back the big three villains at the sensible rate of one a year, the issue of returning monsters necessarily became a bit silly. On the one hand, a returning monster is always good for a day or two of press coverage, which is why we have new look Silurians, Ice Warriors, and Zygons now. On the other, after the Master we’re essentially out of villains whose return would play a substantively mythic role within Doctor Who. (There is sort of one exception, but we’ll get to him.) Instead the return of monster become what it was under John Nathan-Turner – an exercise that exists entirely for the purposes of promotion. This is not a bad thing – Doctor Who’s job is to bring ratings, and free publicity of the sort a returning monster gets fuels that. But it means that returning monsters stop being understandable in terms of their legacy. Rise of the Cybermen demanded to be read in light of The Tenth Planet just as Dalek actively invoked The Power of the Daleks and Last of the Time Lord reveled in the icongraphy of the Pertwee era.
But if we try to compare the Sontarans of The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky with the classic series we find ourselves altogether more frustrated. As Rob Shearman has noted, the Sontarans are not monsters in the generic sense, at least not in The Time Warrior. They’re a single character, Lynx, who’s defined in terms of the Doctor. Even on their return in The Sontaran Experiment, they’re still specifically focused on the individual, with a joke about how they’re a clone species being used to explain why they have the same actor playing a different Sontaran. It’s not until The Invasion of Time that they became monsters in a generic sense, and that was an act of sheer desperation by a production team that was in so far over their heads it wasn’t even funny. And then of course there’s Robert Holmes’s own witheringly pointless revival of them in The Two Doctors, where they finally settled into existing for no reason other than drawing a few headlines.
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Fit to Lead the Life of a Dog (Planet of the Ood)

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If you missed it on Monday, the fourth TARDIS Eruditorum book, covering the first part of Tom Baker’s tenure as the Doctor, is now out. Thank you for supporting the blog.


It doesn’t taste anything like chicken!
It’s April 19th, 2008. Estelle remain at number one, and the only new entry into the charts at all is September with “Cry For You.” Chris Brown, who violently beat his partner, is also still in the charts. In news, Delta and Northwest agree to merge to become the world’s biggest airline, and Silvio Berlusconi starts his third stint as Prime Minister of Italy. 
On television, meanwhile, we have Planet of the Ood. It’s interesting that this is the second consecutive story to have a direct shout-out to the Hartnell era. But where The Fires of Pompeii was just a moment of arch-fannishness (albeit the most rawly fannish in-joke the series had produced to date, serving as it does no narrative function whatsoever), Planet of the Ood’s invocation of The Sensorites is a deliberate reference confirming something Davies had floated on Doctor Who Confidential when the Ood debuted. Davies, in other words, actively wants the Ood to be read in light of an obscure monster from a terribly unloved story in Doctor Who’s first season.
The Sensorites is an odd duck of a story. It suffers even more than most 1960s stories from its languid pacing, and to a modern eye seems terribly cliche. But it is in practice a story that is cliche because of how often it’s been imitated. Indeed, upon reflection it is the story that introduces the idea that the alien can be a sense of wonder instead of terror, as what appear to be terrible monsters at first are steadily revealed to be gentle, kindly, and even timid creatures. (Note how this is paralleled closely with Susan’s awed description of her homeworld – it’s not a side detail, it’s the entire point of The Sensorites)
This is useful background for Planet of the Ood, which begins by pretending to be a story about monsters and ends somewhere almost entirely different. At first we are led to believe that the story is as it was in The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit – a story about the Ood being taken over to go bad in some fashion. The iconography of the episode encourages this, with the problem afflicting the Ood being that their eyes turn red and they start killing things. Under standard Doctor Who iconography, this means possession, especially given that this is historically what the Ood are for.
So the story appears straightforward. And yet even from the start it’s clear that there’s going to be some sort of comeuppance for the evil corporation. For one thing, there’s an evil corporation, and standard Doctor Who logic draws conclusions from putting an evil corporation in the first act. More broadly, the Ood are a pointedly unanswered question. The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit raised the possibility that there was more to them than appeared, but also never quite rocked the boat. 
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Robook Launch

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Planet of the Ood will be covered on Tuesday.

I am pleased and indeed thrilled to announce the release of TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 4: Tom Baker and the Hinchcliffe Years in print and digital release. 
You can get it at the following locations.
Over the next couple of weeks it will appear in other ebook stores like Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and Apple, though if you have e-readers of that sort, I advise buying from Smashwords. Previous volumes, including the soon to be out of print first edition of the Hartnell book, are available from all of the same sites.
This book collects the TARDIS Eruditorum entries covering the first three of Tom Baker’s seven years in Doctor Who, from Robot through The Talons of Weng-Chiang. And so it includes:
  • Revised and expanded versions of every relevant essay.
  • Three book-exclusive Time Can Be Rewritten entries on Managra, Corpse Marker, and The Valley of Death.
  • A book-exclusive Pop Between Realities entry on Shadows.
  • Book-exclusive essays on the nature of the Master, the TARDIS language circuits, matter transmats, how Genesis of the Daleks altered history, and the true history of the conspiracy.
  • Yet another brilliant cover by James Taylor, who discusses his process here.
  • Impeccable copyediting by Chris O’Leary.
  • Exactly four hundred and seventy instances of the letter Q.
If you do enjoy James’s phenomenal cover, mugs and t-shirts based on the design are for sale in the Eruditorum Press store. 
On Saturday, I asked what people were thankful for. I’m thankful for a lot of things, but one of the things I’m most thankful for is the community of readers that has formed around this blog, and that are unflaggingly and stunningly generous in their support. Every time I do one of these book launches I usually have a big spiel about this, but I’ll keep it short and sweet this time: writing is my job. If you enjoy my work, taking opportunities to support it by buying stuff is what keeps me able to do it. 
I expect the second edition of the Hartnell book to be available in early January. The second Tom Baker book will probably be in late summer of 2014. The Logopolis book will be slightly before that. 
Thank you everybody. This has been a heck of a month. 
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Saturday Waffling (November 30th, 2013)

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Hello all.

The Tom Baker 1 book is all finished, and will be launching imminently. Hartnell v2 is still on schedule. And that’s me releasing way too many books in a short period done with.

I’m in the midst of the first properly gonzo thing I’ve done in quite a while, so am going to keep this short. In the spirit of the recent American holiday, then, what are you thankful for?…

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He Sets Fire To Rome (The Fires of Pompeii)

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“What? No. Don’t cast him. He’d make an awful Doctor. He
looks like a murderous cab driver for God’s sake.”
It’s April 12th, 2008. Estelle is at number one with “American Boy.” Sam Sparro, Kooks, Mariah Carey, Madonna and Justin Timberlake, and Chris Brown (a domestic abuser) also chart. In news, Mark Penn resigns from the Clinton campaign, which is interesting mostly because he resigned for reasons other than gross incompetence. London does (depending on your perspective) a rubbish or great job hosting part of the Olympic torch run, as an anti-China protester manages to briefly snatch the torch. It goes similarly well in Paris, where the torch is actually extinguished by authorities. Then, in San Francisco, the torch and runner briefly disappear entirely before being run along a different route where nobody knows to watch or protest it.
Speaking of fire and the classical world, The Fires of Pompeii. First of all, before we go at all into this story, let’s agree to set aside The Waters of Mars. Everything here is obviously going to come up again in that post. But we did a fine job of shutting up about The Deadly Assassin while we worked our way through earlier versions of Time Lord history, and an equally fine job of ignoring The War Games until the time came, so let’s do the same here and take this story entirely on its own terms. Let’s also note that this was written prior to Day of the Doctor and makes no effort to understand the Time War in the context of that episode.
Similarly, when it comes to Peter Capaldi, let’s note that it’s sad that such a great actor blows his opportunity to be on Doctor Who in what is by and large an underwritten bit part. Given that the new series tends not to recycle actors, it’s borderline tragic that we’re not going to get to see him again after this. Also, one of the actresses playing the Sibylline Sisters is quite good, and wasted in the part. A pity, through and through.
It is no secret that I am not, by and large, a fan of stories that treat the alteration of history as a moral dilemma. I’ve discussed my reasons for this before, but the long and short of it is that it’s an entirely fake moral dilemma. Because altering history is at present completely impossible, there are no principles on which to hang an ethical debate about it. It’s as hollow an ethical debate as whether or not it’s acceptable to use grozzlebarks in order to banderflinch. Which is to say that any supposed ethical principles involved are, in fact, purely the invention of the writer. It’s an ethical debate without substance – one in which the writer picks the outcome they want and then creates some technobabble to explain why that’s the ethical position.
Except it’s worse than that, because the position taken is inevitably that changing history is wrong. And so the only sort of message that one can take away from these stories is that things must remain the way they are, often because of the incomprehensible explanations of the People Who Are In Charge Of These Things.
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Dawn Transformed the Sky into an Abattoir (The Last War in Albion Part 20: Moores’ Doctor Who Comics)

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This is the third 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. 
“It would be equally irresponsible of me to instruct up-and-coming writers on how to write sickly extravagant captions like ‘Dawn transformed the sky into an abattoir’ or whatever.” – Alan Moore, Writing For Comics
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Steve Moore, Alan Moore’s closest friend and confidant over the course of the War, came to work on Marvel UK’s newly launched Doctor Who Weekly in 1979, where he created the character of Abslom Daak, a close cousin of the Axel Pressbutton character he co-created with Alan Moore and wrote for Warrior. In one issue of Warrior, Moore interviewed his own “Pedro Henry” pseudonym on how to write comics…
On one level this is the same sort of tightly structural approach that characterizes Alan Moore’s work. But on another, there’s a fundamentally different sort of focus. As Steve Moore puts it, “if Dez asks for six pages, you give him six… the same as some editors will ask you for a set number of frames… and if they say forty frames, they don’t mean thirty-nine or forty-one. If you turn up saying ‘Sorry, boss, I couldn’t fit it in so I’ve used four extra frames’ then that, quite simply, is bad writing.” This highlights the degree to which Steve Moore writes his comics as a professional concern, within the material realities of publishing. That’s certainly not to say that Alan Moore doesn’t, but there’s a clear difference between the sort of ruthless targeting of what the editor wants and the storytelling Alan Moore engages in. 
This perspective on Steve Moore’s work helps explain the odd tone of Laser Eraser and Pressbutton. Moore was tasked with a specific set of editorial concerns; revamp the old Abslom Daak strips into something for Warrior, using the comedy character of Axel Pressbutton. That the resulting script is a bit disjointed in many ways speaks to just how good Steve Moore was at giving editors what they want, no matter how strange. But it contrasts sharply with Alan Moore, who took his Marvelman revamp and his mandate to make a Night Raven clone and ran in unexpected directions with them that ended up far from the original concepts. 
Figure 151: Unsurprisingly, Selene made an appearance in Steve Moore’s
Doctor Who comics (Steve Moore and Dave Gibbons, Doctor Who
Monthly #50, 1981)
This sort of diligence also explains why when Mills and Wagner departed the lead strip after Doctor Who Weekly #34, during the pause in the midst of Star Tigers, Steve Moore was promptly promoted to replace them.
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