Eruditorum Press

Pounded in the butt by dialectical materialism.

Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

Saturday Waffling (September 21st, 2013)

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Chapter 3 of Last War in Albion is 9824 words long. This is not a bad length – the first two chapters are  11,577 and 12,54. So it’s in range.
Which would be comforting if I weren’t aware of how much there was to finish. Thankfully the first 2000 words are solid, so I can slice a post off the top and make Thursday’s deadline, but having the ebook together… ooh, that’s dicier. 
Once I stagger past the finish line on that, it’s time for some focus on Wonder Woman for a bit.
Meanwhile, there’s been a lot of stuff about academia whizzing about the blogonet this week. Some of you have surely seen this story, but I figured I’d repost it for those who haven’t. Death of an Adjunct
tl;dr – a part-time professor at Duquesne University, a Catholic university in Pittsburgh, died in crushing poverty after twenty-five years of service to the University. Which is citing a religious objection to unionizing its adjuncts (curious, given the historical links between the Catholic church and the American labor movement). The university asserts that it gave the late Margaret Mary Vojtko a dorm room to stay in when she could not afford to heat her house, and that priests visited with her frequently as she battled cancer (which bankrupted her). Because nothing says supporting someone who’s worked for you for a quarter-century like a dorm room and a pat on the shoulder as they’re dying.
No active question for discussion this Waffling. Just a shuddering anger at the ruins of a once proud profession.
…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 69 (Jekyll)

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Over the course of 2007, the future of Doctor Who became clear. It was to nobody’s particular surprise that Tennant and Davies walked away from the program they did; it was about the length of time people spend in jobs like that. But what was going to happen to Doctor Who after Davies left was always a question mark, and cancellation was always a viable answer. Until 2007, at which point everybody on the planet knew what was going to happen. The next showrunner became self-evident. Of course it was going to be Steven Moffat. There was no real decision making process. It’s just that everybody realized the same obvious fact around the same time. There were two basic causes for this. The first, of course, is Blink, which we’ll deal with on Monday. But Blink merely demonstrated what we already knew: that Moffat could write really good Doctor Who scripts. Sure, it demonstrated it more emphatically than it had ever been demonstrated before, but it was nothing new. No, the real game changer was Jekyll.

In many ways what is most striking about Jekyll is what it isn’t. If it were made today, it would almost certainly be produced out of Cardiff with numerous names familiar to Doctor Who. Instead we have a production done in relative isolation from Doctor Who, in England, whose major interaction with Doctor Who was that it forced Moffat to drop out of writing the opening two-parter in favor of taking the Doctor-lite slot later in the season, where he apparently handed in his script dreadfully late and they basically shot the second draft. Sure, Douglas Mackinnon, who directed the first three, went on to direct for Doctor Who, and assorted actors (Meera Syal, Michelle Ryan, and Fenella Woolgar) worked their way over, but other than Moffat and a brief acting cameo from Mark Gatiss, this is very much something going on in its own corner of the world.

Which is not to say that its existence doesn’t owe much to Doctor Who. It clearly does, at least inasmuch as Steven Moffat only got handed this project on the strength of having done a successful episode of Doctor Who – something he’s admitted opened doors for him. But what we have here is in most regards Moffat trying to establish himself as a credible producer of genre material on his own, separate from Doctor Who. This process is obscured by the fact that Moffat was announced as the next showrunner of Doctor Who within a year of this, and by the fact that BBC Cymru Wales came to devour all the oxygen in terms of drama production in the UK. Nevertheless, that’s clearly what Jekyll is meant to be – the show with which Moffat establishes himself as a viable showrunner for genre material.

In that regard it succeeded. Jekyll, in point of fact, is quite good. But in many ways what’s most interesting about it in hindsight are its hesitancies and shortcomings. It’s a very good piece of television.…

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The Real Problem With Stories (The Last War in Albion Part 10: Starblazer, Aristotle)

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This is the final installment of Chapter Two of The Last War in Albion. You can still grab the ebook single of Chapters One and Two at Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. Please consider helping support this project by buying a copy. Barring a deadline catastrophe, Chapter Three will begin next week.
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Grant Morrison’s action-packed work for Starblazer evoked both the legacy of pulp magazines and the steady rise in popularity of the “fantastic” genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, including superheroes. This, in turn, raised the question of genre fusion, and what genre means in the first place…
“She’s realized the real problem with stories – if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.” – Neil Gaiman, Sandman #6
So in the late 1970s, as this tide began in film with things like Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Alien, major filmmakers in the genre like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Ridley Scott were inspired by the pulp fiction of their childhoods – 1950s America for George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and late 40s/early 50s Britain for Ridley Scott. All of this took place in the context of other historical shifts, of course, but it was the trend that Moore and Morrison were swept up in, and, eventually, came to find themselves appearing to steer. Film and serialized print, after all, had always been bedfellows. Film adapted popular serialized print stories and genres – the films that were popular in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s were still action-adventure stories derived from the pulps, but they were war stories and westerns that lacked sci-fi/fantasy elements.
Figure 77: The more or less realist Luck of the Legion shared space in
Eagle with the sci-fi adventures of Dan Dare.
But the lines between these pulp genres often blur, much as the line between superheroes and the pulps blurs. Starblazer was the sci-fi/fantasy sister title to the straight war digest Commando, also published by DC Thomson. The American comics industry of the 40s-60s had superheroes, but also had westerns, crime comics, horror, and other genres. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote sci-fi when he did the Barsoom stories, but more straight adventure when he did Tarzan. Grant Morrison can feature a noirish private eye in what is essentially a Flash Gordon story. Eagle ran Dan Dare alongside stories of the French Foreign Legion. Adventure stories taken from the pulps have always been a subset of film, and sci-fi/fantasy has always been a subset of adventure stories. It is both crucial and obvious to point out that the pulps and film are, however, very different media. Further, it is important to point out that they have very different narrative forms. 
Figure 78: Ancient Greece has numerous subtle treatments
in comics, the bulk of which are impeccably researched.
This is best explained in terms of ancient Greece.
Virtually all thought about narrative structure is a reaction to Aristotle’s Poetics, and, to a lesser extent, his Rhetoric.
…

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There’s Another Way: Throw Away Your Guns (The Family of Blood)

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Harry Lloyd watches the Red Wedding episode and realizes
Viserys got off easy.
I’ll Explain Later
Human Nature is possibly the New Adventure needing the least introduction: it’s the book from which Paul Cornell’s two-parter in Series Three is adapted. As one might expect, it’s somewhat acclaimed. At the time, Craig Hinton called it “the finest Doctor Who book to date.” Lars Pearson calls it “a must-not-be-missed bold experiment.” It’s at number one in Sullivan’s rankings with an eighty-eight percent rating. And, you know, it’s good enough that they made a TV story out of it. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry. Original post.
——
It’s May of 26th, 1995 2007. Rihanna and Jay-Z Oasis debuts at number one with “Some Might Say Umbrella.” They remain get knocked out a week later by Livin’ Joy, who also enter the charts at number one with “Dreamer,” a rerelease of their 1994 single. They’re unseated a week later by Robson and Jerome, making a debut at number one with “Unchained Melody/White Cliffs of Dover.” Unlike the previous two songs to enter at number one, they actually stay there for more than a week all story. Bjork, Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, Maroon 5, Akon, Snow Patrol, and the Manchester United 1995 Football Squad Booty Luv also chart.
In the news, the Cutty Sark caught fire while under repairs in Greenwich, in what was believed (but not proven) to be an act of arson. The Crown Prosecution Service decides to charge Andrei Lugovoi for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. AC Milan defeat Liverpool in the UEFA Champions League final. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives approves a bill funding the Iraq Jacques Chirac is elected president of France. The Dalai Lama picks a fight by naming the eleventh Panchen Lama. Three days later the six-year-old boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, is detained by the Chinese authorities, and Afghanistan wars, with progressives failing to get a timetable for withdrawal included, while the Supreme Court issues its ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, which declares that one cannot sue for discriminatory pay disparity if the initial decision was made more than 180 days ago. Ruth Bader Ginsberg, dissenting, makes the rare decision to read her dissent from the bench, and the Court’s holding is consciously reversed in 2009 by Congress. A has not been seen in public since. A year later the People’s Republic of China names their own Panchen Lama. Christopher Reeve is paralyzed from the neck down in a horseriding accident. Japanese police arrest Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum Shinrikyo sect, over the sarin gas attacks in March. attempt to lift the commercial moratorium on whaling fails, not that this stops them from whaling, since they just claim that it’s “scientific research.” And Scotland Yard determines that Bob Woolmer died of a heart attack and was not, as some suspected, murdered.
 
While in books on television, Human Nature/The Family of Blood. Ah. A big one. The book is better than the movie.
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I Have Been Waiting For This Pathetically Cheap Excuse For A Review Blog Since I Started Doing Them

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The TV Movie: Nine years before Russell T Davies revives Doctor Who by taking the standards of American genre television and doing them all cleverly and well we had this, which does the exact same thing only takes all the standards and makes them thunderingly obvious and poorly. Fox was going to either take this to series, or commission another season of Sliders. There’s no honest way to say they made the wrong choice. It’s not really that there’s anything too awful about it. It’s just that there’s nothing that elevates it above the common and the base. Doctor Who becomes just another sci-fi franchise. 4/10…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 25 (Made of Steel)

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After its initial release by Gareth Roberts, which was marked by a strange ambiguity of audience, the Quick Reads set of Doctor Who books settled into a more familiar pattern recognizable as one of the most basic and longstanding tactics in writing a line of Doctor Who books ever: just hire Terrance Dicks to do it. This is, in many ways, impossible to object to. Whatever one might think of various moments in Dicks’s later career, the basic charm of having him write a Tenth Doctor book is irresistible.

We’ve never really talked about the sheer scope of Terrance Dicks’s contributions to Doctor Who. Strictly in television terms, he came on as script editor in the 1960s, while Patrick Troughton was the Doctor. He coauthored Troughton’s regeneration story, The War Games, script edited the entirety of the Pertwee era (and thus in practice wrote several stories when things went terribly wrong), wrote three Tom Baker stories including Baker’s debut, and co-authored a four with Robert Holmes, and wrote The Five Doctors. This alone makes him one of the most longstanding writers of Doctor Who – the range of his contributions rivals Terry Nation and Robert Holmes, and all told he contributed to thirty-five of the hundred and fifty-four classic series stories. Which is to say that if you watch a classic Doctor Who story, there’s nearly a one in four chance Terrance Dicks worked on it.

This would seem impressive were it not for the Target novelizations, a range to which he contributed a staggering sixty-four books, including novels for all of the first six Doctors. These books in many ways form his real legacy – they’re the reason he’s affectionately known as “Uncle Tewwance” among fandom. Dicks is responsible for a vast number of terribly important novelizations: Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, for instance, which kicked off the Target line, and a variety of classic missing stories like Doctor Who and the The Abominable Snowmen and Doctor Who and the The Web of Fear. He novelized An Unearthly Child, Genesis of the Daleks, and a host of other stories. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this – it wasn’t until the 1990s that home video became the easiest way to watch past stories. For decades the Target novelizations were the enduring versions of Doctor Who. They were the only way that anybody could revisit past stories. And the default Target style was Terrance Dicks.

This was not a style defined by flash, or by complex, intricate prose. Dicks’s writing is the very definition of functional, and he demonstrates why that word is straightforwardly a virtue. He can sketch a character quickly, knows how to build excitement, has a decent ear for dialogue, and keeps the plot moving. One rarely stops and drinks in the brilliance of Dicks’s writing, but the reasons for this are simple: one rarely stops with Dicks. It’s not that he doesn’t have an ear for a good phrase – his opening sentences are fantastic, and he’s got a knack for memorable descriptions, even if he does, occasionally, overuse one to the point of mild comedy.…

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Saturday Waffling (September 14th, 2013)

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It’s finally dawned on me that since I cannot actually finish the book before November, hurrying through the last few Hartnell essays instead of getting Chapter 3 of Last War in Albion together is really dumb. So I’ve been working on that, and it’s coming along well. So well that I’m going to keep this brief and get back to writing about Maxwell the Magic Cat, because I am a sick and depraved person and actually think that’s a fun way to spend a Friday evening.

I’ve also just had a fascinating conversation on the charming moral grey areas of piracy. Which brings us to our discussion topic for the weekend – where are your moral lines on when it is or isn’t ethical to pirate media? When there’s no legal and in-print edition? When you’re researching something and just need to check a reference? Whenever you want to? Never? Tell me, dear readers.…

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Ha Ha! He Got It Wrong On The First Line! (42)

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Sparkle with me.

It’s May 19th, 2007. McFly are at number one with “Baby’s Coming Back/Transylvania.” Akon, Linkin Park, the Manic Street Preachers, and Scootch, the latter with “Flying the Flag (For You),” their suitably disastrous entry in Eurovision 2007, which also explains why we have two weeks of news to cover. The Kerguelen Plateau, a sunken island off of Antarctica that used to be a part of India, is discovered. So is the largest supernova ever. Tony Blair announces that he’ll step down in June, finally clearing the way for Gordon Brown. Nicolas Sarkozy becomes President of France. And Chelsea defeat Manchester United 1-0 in the FA Cup final, the first game played in the new Wembley Stadium.

On television, meanwhile, 42. On one level, this is the most straightforwardly sensible matching of brief and writer imaginable. Take the writer who did the big action scripts of Torchwood and match him with the pastiche of a big dumb American action show. And on the other, there’s a level on which this script falls agonizingly short of its promise.

For all the hate Chibnall gets, his Doctor Who work on the whole isn’t all that bad. The Power of Three is marvelous until the ending. Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is exactly what an episode with that title should be. The Silurian two-parter flounders, yes, but that’s actually the only time he turns in a story that just doesn’t quite work on a storytelling level. Because 42 does exactly what it sets out to do – it’s an efficient action piece that pulls off the actually fairly difficult “real time” structure. It hangs together logically, sets up its conclusion well at the start, and while it has a few ideas that deserve to euphemistically be called bizarre when what we really mean is “mind-wrenchingly illogical,” this is Doctor Who, and if it doesn’t do a sequence of doors sealed by an evil pub quiz then really, what show will?

And there are moments of the story that are quite good. Putting the Doctor through this sort of wringer is absolutely marvelous – his screaming and saying that he’s scared is  genuinely unsettling in a way the series hasn’t really managed since Sutekh’s dominating of Tom Baker. Martha’s attempt to make a last call to her mother, where they talk at cross purposes, is wonderfully heartbreaking. “Burn with me” isn’t quite “are you my mummy,” but you can still properly freak someone out with it.

Most obviously, of course, it’s directed by Graham Harper, so we get a ton of interesting camera angles and well-executed visuals. The scene of the Doctor and Martha staring out the windows at each other as the escape pod separates is an absolutely phenomenally shot scene. “The Doctor and the companion get separated” is one of the absolute oldest and most bog-standard tricks in Doctor Who, and under Davies there’s been a particular focus on stressing the physical distance between them (The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, Gridlock, and, of course, Doomsday), but the shot of them physically receding from each other, watching each other drift away, and trying desperately to communicate across the silent void is absolutely breathtaking.…

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Wiping Moscow From The Face of the Earth Would Be Fine (The Last War in Albion Part 9: Starblazer, the Pulps, Russian Structuralism)

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This is the fourth of five installments of Chapter Two of The Last War in Albion. You can still grab the ebook single of chapters one and two at Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. Please consider helping support this project by buying a copy. 
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Grant Morrison’s contributions to Starblazer consisted of action-packed adventure stories that always came back with the editorial note “more space combat.” This style of writing owes much to the cheap populist fiction of the American pulps and British penny dreadfuls, which favored a dynamic and breathless prose style… 
“Wiping Moscow from the face of the earth would be fine.” – Warren Ellis recounting editorial guidance from Hasbro, 2008
Indeed, the absence of this hypnotic prose in favor of banal action set pieces provides at least part of the explanation for why the John Carter film was so singularly unable to replicate the narrative magic of its source text. Their text was a sort of verbal spectacle, doing the same thing to language that Siegel and Shuster did for the comics page. 
Figure 68: “The thing was about the size of a Shetland pony,
but its head bore a slight resemblance to that of a frog, except
that the jaws were equipped with three rows of long, sharp
tusks.” – Edgar Rice Burroughs, describing a calot in A
Princess of Mars (image from John Carter, 2012)
But the chief engine of the narrative was the cliffhanger. A story’s job was to be exciting for a certain number of words, then to end on a big cliffhanger so the reader would want to see what happens next week. Their cryptic introductions serve as replacements for the lead-ins from previous installments, and the stories quickly get into their own distinctive rhythms. Chapter Four of A Princess of Mars ends with the revelation of a creature described as “about the size of a Shetland pony, but its head bore a slight resemblance to that of a frog, except that the jaws were equipped with three rows of long, sharp tusks.” The chapter then leaves off, more questions than answers.
Figure 69: Cover of the tenth issue of Eagle,
featuring a page of Dan Dare: Pilot of the
Future (Frank Hampson, 1950)
This structure survived the pulps’ gradual evolution into comics. In the UK the successors were things like The Beano and The Dandy, but also titles like Eagle, Marcus Morris’s 1950 comics magazine headlined by two brightly coloured pages of Frank Hampson and his studio’s Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. Dan Dare is one of the most iconic figures in British comics, and will appear several times in the course of the War. A square-jawed pilot meant to evoke the heroism of the RAF in the still-vividly remembered Battle of Britain, Dan Dare fought the villainous Treens, coded blatantly as space Nazis and led by the fiendish Mekon. Dare was in the tradition of action heroes like Flash Gordon, Alex Raymond’s 1930s newspaper comic.
…

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Next Thing You Know It’s a Hundred Years Later (The Lazarus Experiment)

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Yeah, but at least my head isn’t covered in penises.

It’s May 5th, 2007. Beyonce and Shakira are still at number one, with Avril Lavigne, Ne-Yo, Mika, and Gym Class Heroes also charting. In news, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation acquires the Wall Street Journal, the Labour Party gets whacked in local and regional elections, and on the day this story airs, Floyd Mayweather Jr. defeats Oscar De La Hoya in what is apparently the highest grossing boxing match ever.

Clearly something in the air, because Doctor Who decides that what it really needs is a story that’s basically all action sequences. With Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks there was at least enough going on that we could play the quasi-entertaining game of simply ignoring quality entirely. With The Lazarus Experiment this becomes harder – there is simply not a heck of a lot going on in this story. At around the fifteen minute mark it switches into action set pieces, and it stays there until the end with almost no scenes doing anything else. This is not an episode that has much in mind beyond spectacle.

Structurally, we have another case of “let’s update one of the non-classic Doctor Who formats.” By legend, Malcolm Hulke, in complaining that the earthbound structure of the Pertwee era was a bad idea, claimed that there were now only two viable Doctor Who plots – aliens invade, and mad scientists. As it turned out only one of these had much in the way of legs – the UNIT era became known for alien invasions, which became a classic approach that Doctor WHo is obliged to go back to periodically. Mad scientist plots, meanwhile, basically dropped out of the series – there are basically no “pure” mad scientist stories – i.e. ones with no aliens – after Robot (yes, you can make a case for counting Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel, but I don’t want to).

So The Lazarus Experiment is basically The Mind of Evil without creepy racism. And, you know, with the prison raid stretched out to half an hour. Fair enough – it is indeed an odd discarded subgenre of Doctor Who. The problem is that there’s nothing much more than “ooh, let’s do this genre” here. It is, as mentioned, a staggeringly vacant episode, its purposes seeming to be esoteric.

First among them is giving Mark Gatiss a 40th birthday present (literally – it filmed on his birthday) and letting him appear in a proper episode of Doctor Who. It is, in many ways, the part he was born to play – Gatiss is an extremely mannered actor, and clearly revels in the opportunity to do various standards of the well-regarded art of Doctor Who acting. He’s particularly good at “I am turning into a monster” spasms and that ever-important Doctor Who standard, the “I have just eaten somebody” face.

But he doesn’t have anything that can accurately be called a character here. There’s a bunch of effort to give him a bunch of World War II memories, but they all come after the point that he’s been obviously established as a villain, so it’s frankly tough to care by that point.…

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