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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:

Warriors in the Vale of Entuthon-Benython (The Last War in Albion Part 6: Captain Clyde and Scotland)

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Greetings, faithful readers! As part of an effort to figure out how to make The Last War in Albion something I can fit in as part of a professional career, I’m trying an experiment. This is the first post of Chapter Two, focusing on Grant Morrison’s superhero strip Captain Clyde and his work in Starblazer. Chapter Two will be running weekly until September 19th. But the entirety of Chapter Two – all five posts – is already for sale as a digital single (albeit without its images, for a variety of reasons). It’s $2.99 on Amazon (and comparably priced for the UK) and $1.99 on Smashwords. The lower price is due to Amazon having quirks about royalties and my wanting all sales channels to be equal amounts of money for me – I discovered these quirks too late to do anything about it this time, but in the future will try to find some little bit of bonus content for the Amazon version to provide some vague sense of moral balance in the world. The digital single for Chapter Two also includes Chapter One as a bonus. So this time the price gets you about 20,000 words of content, though future editions will probably be about half that at the same price.


This is one of several ideas I have for how to make a profit off of The Last War in Albion, and so this is not some “pay money or I’ll terminate the project” thing. But equally, if none of the ideas to get this to be a source of income work out it’s ultimately not a project I’ll be able to devote much time to. So, you know, buying the digital single of this and future chapters is an effective way of helping make sure this project remains viable.

Right now this is an experiment, and the cover art is thus rudimentary. If it goes even remotely well I’ll get some proper cover art and probably make some other bits of fine-tuning for future chapters, and this will be a thing that happens every five or six entries. If it only sells two copies then we’ll sigh and never speak of this again. But for now, if you’re enjoying the project, please pick up the digital single of Chapters One and Two, and keep buying future singles as they come out. It is, I hope, a small and reasonable price to pay to help give work like this the support it needs to happen.

Either way, as ever, thanks for reading. – Philosophizin’ Phil Sandifer

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: The time is 1979. Grant Morrison, a 17-year-old Scotsman, has begun to write and draw comics for the short-lived but well-meaning attempt at an adult comics magazine Near Myths. These comics, like Near Myths itself, are heavily indebted to the literary new wave movement in science fiction and fantasy, a movement that was spearheaded, in the UK, by writers like J.G.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 68 (The Catherine Tate Show)

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There’s a decision we have to make going into The Runaway Bride, which is, in effect, the same decision we make about The Web of Fear – namely whether or not we’re going to treat the episode as extra important because it includes a character who was brought back later in a retooled and far more popular form. Grudgingly following the precedent of The Web of Fear, we should at least acknowledge it, while simultaneously explaining why this is transparently not the way the episode was read in 2006. Still, there’s a question worth squaring away up front: why is it that a comedian known for playing a variety of grotesques came to be what is, by a significant chunk of audience, the greatest companion of the new series?

First we should understand Catherine Tate herself. Or perhaps more accurately, we should understand David Tennant, as it is very specifically his Doctor that Donna ends up being a spectacularly good companion for. It is difficult, if not impossible to imagine Donna pairing well with Matt Smith’s kinetic and physical performance, nor with Eccleston’s often brooding portrayal. (Although arguably she’s exactly what Paul McGann always needed, and by arguably I mean “is Lucie Miller bovvered?”) It is something about the interaction of Donna with Ten specifically – or, more broadly, given that they’ve also produced compelling turns at both sketch comedy and Shakespeare, about the interaction of Catherine Tate and David Tennant.

We have previously discussed the way in which Tennant’s performance is based on a visible density of decisions. That is to say, when Tennant plays a part, his approach is usually to pack every scene and every line development with as many moments where he makes a visible decision, particularly a decision to change what he’s doing, as possible. The result is a very mannered performance, though not at all in a bad way. When one is watching David Tennant, however, one is always aware that one is watching a performance. There’s not a sense of Tennant trying to maintain an illusionary unity between actor and character. His performances are based profoundly on the longstanding British acting tradition in which the point is not the authenticity of the character but the business of communicating information to the audience.

Another way of putting all of this is that Tennant’s performance is not entirely dissimilar to a comedic performance, with particular similarity to comics who develop characters. A third way is that Tennant is, as actors go, an extremely cerebral one. He’s the sort of actor who says, with all seriousness, that as a child he had his parents explain what television actors were, and him immediately realizing that was what he wanted to do, and furthermore saying that he understood “the difference between the fantasy and reality of that, and that making it even more exciting.” He’s profoundly analytic in his approach.

All of which is to say that, quite separate from the question of which of his costars is the most skilled actor, on the basic level of technique, Catherine Tate was obviously a natural fit for him.…

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A Not-Review-Blog of Many Colours

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Today is the last day you can get the Storybundle deal. 

The Twin Dilemma: The most jarring gap in quality in Doctor Who’s history. The most colossal lapse of judgment in Doctor Who’s history. A story that had everything riding on it that just completely blew it. Every single thing about this story is a bad idea. It’s outright impossible to figure out what they were thinking. On top of that, you have the Doctor and Peri in a creepy domestic violence/Stockholm syndrome scene. No wonder the series was cancelled. 1/10

Attack of the Cybermen: As I have noted before, there is nothing more damning about this era than the fact that when Eric Saward and Ian Levine argue over who wrote this story, they each try to take credit for it instead of just blaming the other. An ugly mess of fanwank that doesn’t make sense in the context of previous stories and isn’t remotely interesting in its own context, papered over with violence as garrish as Colin Baker’s coat. Horrid. 1/10

Vengeance on Varos: It’s easy to confuse “best of the Colin Baker era” with “actually one of the best Doctor Who stories.” This is merely the former – a competent and at times very clever story that is nevertheless hobbled by many of the bugbears that plague the rest of this era. The TARDIS scenes in the first episode are intolerable, the action is slow to get going, it’s never quite clear if the satire is as wide-ranging as it has to be to forgive several elements, and several scenes, most notoriously the acid bath scene, are horrifically misjudged. Yes, it’s a very clever and prescient media satire, but it’s also Colin Baker-era doctor Who, with all the disaster that entails. Still, 8/10

Mark of the Rani: The Master becomes a complete self-parody, the Rani starts there, and Pip and Jane never have the wit to be self-parody, instead writing an unfathomably inept and awful script. There’s nothing good to say here – like all the other Pip and Jane scripts, this is actively painful to watch in a way that nothing else in Doctor Who quite manages to hit. I’m trying to think of an upside to this story, and I cannot remember one for the life of me. 1/10

The Two Doctors: Maybe it is Robert Holmes at his angriest, as Rob Shearman wittily suggests in About Time. There’s a case for it being bitter satire that makes Vengeance on Varos look fluffy, certainly. But this is still a mess. The 45 minute format means that a six-parter cannot just have one or two bad and slow episodes – instead the flab is distributed throughout, and this story never gets going. And if you don’t buy that this is a vicious satire then it’s just… ugly. Let’s pretend it’s the vicious satire we hope and then just take lots of points off for the bad structure and call it a 5/10.

Much of what is awful in the Colin Baker era is at least fascinatingly awful – a slow motion car crash you cannot look away from.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 67 (About Time)

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I went back and forth over whether to run this as an Eruditorum post or as a side post. Ultimately, I wanted to put it in before we started talking about The Runaway Bride, so it got an Eruditorum slot. Nevertheless, this is a book review of About Time Volume Seven, out on September 10th from Mad Norwegian Press, who were kind enough to give me a preview copy, which I spent two days doing nothing but reading. The short form is that it’s brilliant and you should buy it. The long form actually makes sense to describe in context of the series’ history, because About Time occupies a particular and important place in that history.

About Time is a fascinating example of a book series swallowed by history. It started and premiered before the announcement of the new series, and continued over the course of the series’ development. You can watch, reading it, as the new series exerts its gravity and changes the project out from under Miles and Wood, so that what the books are changes over the course of the series. Given that the series was released out of order, starting with Volumes Three through Five, doubling back for One and Two, and then finally concluding with the Wood-only Volume Six and Wood’s solo rewrite of Volume Three, this gives an interesting sense of things. What started as an attempt to do the most thorough episode guide ever took on an oddly elegiac feel, becoming something more like an attempt to make the definitive statement of what Doctor Who was prior to the new series, before the cultural gravity of the new series erased the ability to see it. In doing so, it went from being a very long guidebook to being the definitive account of it.

Let’s be clear: if you like TARDIS Eruditorum and have never read any of About Time, get thee to Amazon. About Time is indispensable. It’s not that TARDIS Eruditorum wouldn’t exist without it – in fact, if I’d known it existed when I decided to start the blog I’d probably have been intimidated out of starting it, because you’d have to be mad to look at About Time and say “yeah, I just think there’s more to say.” But discovering it a few entries into the Hartnell era was perfect, even if I do have a nagging sense that my Season One coverage is forever compromised by the fact that all the essays started absent the context of About Time. Because About Time got to what I was doing first. It’s an attempt to explain all of Doctor Who – everything about it. Which meant I got the wonderfully easy job of just sitting back and responding to it.

This is, of course, ridiculous as a goal. Doctor Who is far too big to be pinned down into a single explanation. Which is, of course, part of the conceit of About Time, which immerses itself so deeply in the minute particulars of Doctor Who as to willfully lose all sense of Doctor Who as a singular object.…

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Saturday Waffling: August 17th, 2013

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Work continues apace. I’ve got Last War in Albion up and running, and it’ll roll out again on Thursday with the start of Chapter 2. I’m going straight into working on Chapter 3 so there will be less of a gap there. I’ve tinkered the format in a few subtle ways that I hope will boost readability without sacrificing what I’m trying to achieve with the structure of the project. This one has narrative theory, the pulps, superheroes, and the remainder of Grant Morrison’s early work. Only one more chapter after that before we get to things anyone has ever heard of!

I’ve also got a few more of the extra essays for the books. Baker is still one off from done, though I might get him finished off this weekend, but Hartnell had two and will get a third. Three is a little slow for a week on those, but again, Last War in Albion was added in here. Next week… no Torchwood, actually. 
Meanwhile, the Storybundle offer heads into its final few days. To recap, for a price of your own choosing you get four nonfiction books on Doctor Who, including TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 2: Patrick Troughton. If you pay more than $10, you get two more books, one of which is The Best of TARDIS Eruditorum, which features some of my favorite posts from the history of the blog along with a few paragraphs of introductions about them. It’s a slender little thing, but it was fun to knock together, and while I may recycle it into something else, it won’t be available again in 2013. 
If I can put a small plea in, I’m still doing adjuncting on the side to bring in a little bit of extra money, and at the last second one of my courses was pulled and given to a full time faculty member whose class had gotten cancelled for lack of enrollment, which means my pay for the rest of the year just took a five thousand dollar hit. It’s seriously not a big deal – we’ve got the Kickstarter money as a nice cushion if there’s any sort of crisis, and have a comfortable living wage, but it’s still just a little stressful to suddenly lose a bunch of money you’d been budgeting on.
Which is to say that I do make money off the Storybundle deal, and if you don’t mind having the tip jar shaken, this is my job and this is a chance to support my work and get some neat bonuses along with. (And I’ve got We talked last week about Dalek I Love You and Dining with the Doctor, leaving Barry Letts’s memoir Who and Me and Earl Green’s Vworp!

The latter of these is a pretty straightforward reference manual. It’s got a good account of the plot of every story up through The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe, a reasonable selection of facts, and reviews no more idiosyncratic than anyone else’s, mine included.
…

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Outside the Government: Combat

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Fight off the lethargy
Don’t go quietly

It’s Christmas Eve, 2006. Leona Lewis is at number one with “A Moment Like This,” with Girls Aloud, Booty Luv, and Chris Cornell also charting, alongside the Pogues and Kirsty Maccoll and Cliff Richard with attempts at Christmas success. In news, the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons resume. The Home Office floats the exciting idea of having foreign nationals carry ID cards linked to their fingerprints, and a feud between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan worsens as Uzbekistan doubles the price at which it will sell natural gas to Kyrgyzstan.

While on television we begin one of the most remarkable runs of Doctor Who related content ever. Combat airs on Christmas Eve, the day before The Runaway Bride. A week after that, oddly on a Monday instead of a Sunday, comes both Invasion of the Bane and the final two episodes of Torchwood’s first season, meaning that over the course of nine days fully five hours of Doctor Who-related material aired.

Of these, Combat has to be the oddest fit, being a spectacularly ill match for Christmas. This seems like an artifact of the decision to start with a two hour premiere – had Day One aired a week later then Out of Time, an episode that’s explicitly set around Christmastime, would have been the one to end up on Christmas Eve, which makes, on the whole, a lot more sense than Torchwood’s take on Fight Club, which is more or less what Combat is.

In her absolutely splendid novel Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson has a character ask whether a given book counts as eastern literature. In reply, Vikram the Vampire says, “There is a very simple test. Is it about bored, tired people having sex?” When the character confirms that the book does, Vikram proclaims it western literature. It’s terribly clever, but omits a key subgenre: bored, tired people being terribly violent. This is, after all, a veritable cliche of contemporary literature – angry and soul-dead men who can only find any sort of meaning or fulfillment in fighting one another. It’s the Chuck Palahniuk/Bret Easton Ellis school of thought.

In literature, where novels of that style work – and it’s worth noting that both Palahniuk and Easton Ellis have far more tricks up their sleeve than this theme – it’s usually based around a complex tonal structure – the literally fractured personality of the narrator and Tyler Durden, or the tense ambiguity of whether Patrick Bateman’s crimes are real or fantasies. What’s interesting isn’t actually moping around about how existentially bleak the lives of capitalism’s lesser nobility is, it’s the jagged edge between that banality and a world in which existential bleakness actually makes any sense.

At first glance, then, it appears that Combat misses the mark. The key problem is that Owen ultimately succumbs to the existential bleakness, having his moment of true masculinity as he faces down the Weevil, but being saved from death at the last second by Captain Jack.…

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Your Mom is a Review Blog

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Castrovalva: The back half is marvelous, but the front half is mispaced as the show tries to grapple with its strange new airing schedule. This marks the beginning of “post-regeneration stories are about the absence of the Doctor through post-regeneration confusion” trope, which was largely disastrous. Ainley’s Master becomes a joke as of this story. Still, there are lovely bits shining through the overall lack of working, and it’s impressive for the strained circumstances of its creation. 7/10

Four to Doomsday: One of the most jarring drops in quality ever – after the Bidmead era so convincingly provided a new style for Doctor Who, this suddenly becomes tedious, predictable, and no fun. Bidmead drained the humor of the Williams era and replaced it with wonder. This drains the wonder and replaces it with boredom. Absolutely dreadful. 2/10

Kinda: Like Warrior’s Gate and Logopolis, a story that delights in showing off new frontiers in what Doctor Who can do. This time it’s done with a slick confidence and focus that Davison’s first season otherwise completely lacks. The only complaint is the giant snake, and really, this is Doctor Who. 10/10

The Visitation: Not as bad as it could be, and its reputation isn’t helped by knowledge of what’s to come from Saward. This is basically harmless. Derivative and a dumb runaround, yes, but that happens. The biggest problem is the decision to only have one supporting character – a disastrous structural decision that should have been fixed in editing. Why they’d then hire this writer as the editor is a mystery, but that’s not this story’s fault as such. 4/10

Black Orchid: Novel, but plagued by the fundamental structural difficulties of a two-parter aired over two days and the fact that Terrance Dudley is not actually a very good writer. Was much better when it was called The Unicorn and the Wasp and written by Gareth Roberts. 5/10

Earthshock: At the root of it, the problem is that Doctor Who is not actually very good at doing big action films. Still, it has its moments – the Cybermen reveal is lovely, as is Beryl Reid. The death of Adric is completely mishandled on screen, the plot doesn’t quite hang together, and, again, the show that just screwed up a giant snake should maybe be a little more hesitant about a massive action set piece. As good as “Doctor Who does space marines” can be, which isn’t actually very. 6/10

Time-Flight: Horrible and unwatchable, except for the fleeting moments where it’s suddenly charming and terribly clever. Somewhere in here was a brilliant story, and every once in a while you can see it trying to get out from under… um… this. As all-time lows of Doctor Who go, this is one of the more watchable ones. 3/10

The Arc of Infinity: This is how we decide to begin the big 20th anniversary; with a story only Ian Levine could love. Gallifrey is treated as familiar and known, the plot twists are contrived and either insane or predictable, and the whole thing depends on us remembering a villain that hasn’t been mentioned in a decade.…

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Outside the Government: Out of Time

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Have I done the “wrong image” joke recently? I can never
remember.

It’s December 17th, 2006. Take That remain at number one. Cliff Richard stalls at number two with his attempted Christmas number one “21st Century Christmas,” while Gwen Stefani, Chris Cornell, P. Diddy, and Lazy Town also chart, as do the Pogues and Kristy MacColl with their now annual chart run of “Fairytale of New York.” In news, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller announces that she will step down from her position at the head of MI-5. Time Magazine proclaims you to be the person of the year. And Ban Ki-moon is officially sworn in as the United Nations Secretary-General.

Torchwood is a series I first watched with my ex-wife, while we were in the earlier stages of our relationship. She lived in upstate New York and I lived in Florida, but she moved down to be with me after a few months of distance relationship and, for her, a frustrating grad school experience she was not happy with. We would pirate the episodes as soon as they aired and watch them on our laptops, syncing them and then talking in AOL Instant Messenger about the episode as we watched. They were our long distance dates on weeks we couldn’t make the travel back and forth from New York to Florida work. (We were very good at a cheap set of flights from Albany to Gainesville) 

On television, Out of Time. Returning to the approach of “see what kind of range Torchwood has as a concept” (which is, on the whole, the most endearing aspect of Torchwood’s staggeringly inconsistent first season – the fact that at least some of that inconsistency is the product of a genuine desire not to be a predictable television show), Out of Time presents Torchwood doing a triptych of people out of time, structured primarily as a love story with two parallel storylines to add depth and nuance.

In each case the central theme is, ultimately, death, or, at least, the past, which is essentially the same thing. On the one hand the past is inaccessible and dead – a place defined primarily by the fact that it cannot be returned to. And on the other the past is, we know, a place populated by people with, as the song goes, loves and hates and passions just like mine. This is the fundamental puzzle of death and the past – the fact that people and life goes on without us even as the world as we understand it cannot possibly do so.

I remember the big Christmas glut of episodes – a one week period with three Torchwoods, a Doctor Who, and a Sarah Jane Adventures. I remember divvying them up. I remember the different places I watched different episodes – some in my bedroom in Florida, others, once Christmas break started up, at my parents’ house in Connecticut. She moved to Florida midway through the season to pursue a different graduate program, but there was still a lot of distance to deal with as she’d have to go back to handle stuff in New York, or to visit family, and the whole season ended up being eaten by distance.…

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The Colour Foundation

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More flash fiction.

Marcel Miedinger surveyed the system one last time before he disconnected. The dumbs were already active, weaving their own tagging system to correspond to the existing catalogue. Marcel watched the broad strokes of the semantic filing system get mapped out, but moved on as it all got a bit too big data for him. No intelligence was ever going to need to deal with the dumb catalogue anyway – it was just an underlying system to support the semantic labeling that the Colour Foundation had meticulously created.

There had been some debate right before the downsizing began over whether or not to maintain all four versions of the semantic catalogue, or just the most recent one. Marcel had, romantically, advocated for the full system. He prided himself on an old-fashioned streak that valued preservation. But in the end he was outvoted by a bloc of neo-modernists who wanted to ensure the immaculate design of the Colour Foundation’s final edition. He could have reopened the issue once the Foundation had shrunk to a skeleton crew, but he didn’t. In the end, he understood the impulse; he’d been an iconoclast once too.

Now he’d come to think of himself as an old man, whatever that concept referred to nowadays. Even today he kept track of the exterior world’s calendar. He knew he’d been around the sun two hundred and eleven times since he’d last seen it, making him two hundred and sixty-five all told. That was surely enough to be an old man by any definition, he told himself.

Suddenly, a raft of connections he had to the system went dark. Marcel started, old physiological processes kicking into action as though they’d been built for this. But the adrenaline faded quickly – it was routine. The dumbs had moved the ports allocated to the Colour Foundation so that they all went through the interface the Design Committee had created for the general public. Marcel had seen it a thousand times, but decided to connect in one more time – perhaps just for the novelty of being the first customer.

The interface was based around the sensation of an antechamber. It was not, by and large, a memory, nor even an assemblage of memories. This was reverse engineered – a set of manufactured sensations laid around the sensation of feeling your sensory input shift from being in a confined space to being in an open one. The original draft had what Marcel considered a somewhat childish sense paradox – the neurological sense of an open space combined with visual perceptions of a long corridor. Marcel had gone off on a lengthy lecture at that meeting, reminding everyone, or perhaps just himself, that accessibility was a moral principle of design.

He really could be a right old bore sometimes.

Still, he’d gotten it changed to the current open chamber, made entirely out of invented materials. This produced its own vertiginous sensation; the human mind never entirely adapts to completely artificial sensation, and an excess of it remained unsettling, though not, even he had to admit, in an entirely unpleasant way.…

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Outside the Government: Random Shoes

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Not so much bovvered as… dead, really.

It’s December 10th, 2006. Booty Luv’s “Boogie 2nite” has slipped into a newly formed gap between Take That and “Smack That.” Gwen Stefani, Lazy Town, and Jamelia also chart. In news, Joseph Kabila is inaugurated as president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kevin Rudd becomes leader of the Australian Labor Party, and Robert Gates is confirmed as United States Secretary of Defense. Also, Igor Smirnov wins the presidential election in Transnistria, also known as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, which is generally considered not to be a country so much as a particularly ornery region of Moldova.

Random Shoes, on the other hand, is something of the forgotten man of the first season of Torchwood. Called Invisible Eugene until two weeks before it aired, and in fact still listed as that in the Radio Times, this is, quite frankly, the bit of the season where it becomes aggressively, painfully obvious that Torchwood proved a little too much to manage alongside Doctor Who and that things got dropped. It’s an astonishingly sloppily done episode.

Somewhere in here there’s a good idea. Doing Love and Monsters for Torchwood may or may not have actually been it, but even that feels at least vaguely admirable. Love and Monsters was, in many ways, the gem of Season Two, and an approach worth exploring again. But Torchwood is an odd venue for it. Love and Monsters is ultimately one of the most optimistic statements of Davies’s basically hedonistic theme. This theme is present in Torchwood – it’s reiterated in its darker way in They Keep Killing Suzie via Suzie’s “This is. Driving through the dark. All this stupid, tiny stuff” line. Indeed, it’s central to Torchwood, with its myriad of wondrous spaces alongside ordinary life pitched against the absolute oblivion of death. But Torchwood takes a rather darker view than Love and Monsters, to say the least, and the Love and Monsters approach doesn’t port over.

Mind you, Random Shoes basically gets that right by realizing that Eugene, unlike Elton, has to actually die at the end. The problem is that this happens a week after They Keep Killing Suzie, and thus the ascent into the heavens in a blaze of white light with a halo is… metaphysically incongruent, to say the least. A more thorough and accurate assessment would be that it plunges headlong into the bathetic – which, actually, the whole thing does starting roughly with when Eugene’s father breaks out into “Danny Boy” at the funeral. The result is a completely miscued ending that attempts to pull off a darker and more cynical ending than Love and Monsters and ends up with what is arguably the Russell T Davies era’s second most stunning moment of shooting for camp and ending up in “what the holy hell am I even watching.”

This is a big problem, though honestly, mucking up the ending after a good buildup is less of a problem than it might sound. There’s lots to really like about Random Shoes.…

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