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:

June 12, 2013

A Brief Rumination on Iain Banks

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I have not actually read any Iain Banks. I recognize that this is a problem. I just went and got the Culture books, and I’m hoping to squeeze some time in for them, but let’s be honest, there’s well over a dozen things trying to squeeze into a finite amount of media consumption time, and life’s too short to read everything. Still, The Also People was marvelous, and I really do want to look at the truck it was bought off the back of, no questions asked.

In any case, here’s the thing that struck me. And, I mean, I know why it struck me. Between having lived through an absolutely searing bereavement a few years ago after the fabled “worst 48 hours ever” in which my wife left me and my father had a massive stroke and being now married to an oncology nurse who previously worked at a hospice, the fact that death is a thing that happens is something I am largely speaking intimately aware of. Things have endings. Sometimes the ending is far away, and other times it’s close, but things end. Change happens. Mercury has its price.

And so what struck me about Banks was the way in which he announced his terminal cancer. The line in the announcement about asking his wife to do him the honor of being his widow. The bit in his last interview where he notes that he was 87,000 words into his last book, which features a main character dying of cancer, when he got his diagnosis, and remarked, “I’ve really got to stop doing my research too late. This is such a bad idea.”

My wife and I have, shall we say, similar senses of humor. A ways into our first date, realizing that things were going well, but also that she was a hospice nurse, I made one of the higher risk decisions of my single life. See, I really liked her. She was cute and funny and a Doctor Who fan and we were just hitting it off. But she was a hospice nurse. Which, I mean, what a job. But it struck me that there were two things that could mean. One was that she was going to be very… serious. And I have a love of dark humor that would put Robert Holmes to shame. The other was that she was the sort of person who had developed a similar sense of humor to deal with that life.

And I figured I was going to have to know, so I told her the absolutely grimmest and bleakest funny story in my family’s history; a story so massively and sickly wrong that it is not so much “told” within my family as whispered about in hushed and awe-struck tones. It is not one I can repeat here – even putting it in some future work of fiction would be too much. It is an honest story about death, and those are too revealing and too luridly and horribly true stories to actually tell.…

June 12, 2013

Outside the Government 11 (Attack of the Graske)

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For only the second time ever, December 25th, 2005 featured the debut of two separate new episodes of Doctor Who. Immediately after The Christmas Invasion viewers were invited to press the red button and thus to watch Attack of the Graske, an interactive Doctor Who story in which viewers take on the role of the companion in stopping an alien invasion.

Attack of the Graske had no real prospect of being a conventionally good Doctor Who episode, nor of being a conventionally good piece of interactive fiction. This is less a factor of the people involved with it than it is a basic medial limit: the BBC Red Button service is not actually sophisticated enough, and the amount of footage they can actually afford to film with David Tennant for a throwaway like this is not actually high enough to make this work. And so what we get is about ten minutes of footage, virtually none of it actually involving Tennant (who does all his scenes from the TARDIS, meaning this was probably shot in about a lunch break), in which there’s not so much interaction as a series of tests you’re graded on. Only the final scene allows you to make a decision that affects the plot, and it divides squarely into a good ending and a bad ending.

All of which is seems a spectacularly churlish set of things to say about something with the sole purpose in life of allowing children to have their very own Doctor Who adventures. I mean, the point of this is being invited onto the TARDIS to be a companion, right? And the Doctor saying he might come back for you? And your remote getting linked with the sonic screwdriver? It’s pure fantastic glee, isn’t it?

Well, no. Probably not. I mean, children aren’t stupid. They get how the red button works. They understand the difference between fiction and reality. And they’ve played enough video games to tell a good one from a bad one. This is firmly within an aesthetic they’re familiar with. Admittedly being Doctor Who probably wins some substantive points from a fair number of kids, and it’s not as though Attack of the Graske is an outright bad game. Indeed, we should remember that as originally conceived it’s not a game at all but an interactive episode of television. This is more Silence in the Library than Call of Duty 2. It had a specific airtime in which it could be watched, and is controlled with a TV remote.

We should detour briefly here to explain the technology, as there are Americans around. The “red button” is more or less exactly what it sounds like, and launches a service that was then called BBC Red Button, but now goes with the marginally less intuitive name “BBCi,” the vowel standing for “interactive.” The service is the technological heir to the late, lamented Ceefax, a 1970s form of interactive television that gave news headlines and allowed several rudimentary games to be played.…

June 11, 2013

The Victory of the Commenters

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All righty. Our contest winners, though first, some honorable mentions, all of which get good old fashioned Marvel Comics No Prizes. I decided to get a little soft and not disqualify people for dropping either definite article. This was brutal to judge. Well played to everyone.

First off, the Rulebreakers division, where the prize goes to Lewis Christian for Lett’s Kill Pertwee.

Next, the Rude division, where we have three contenders. The bronze No Prize goes to Matthew Blanchette’s impressively awful The Fapping of the Worm, itself a modification of Tony Macklin’s The Tapping of the Wire. The silver goes to overflowontology’s Feast of the Merkins after Matthew Blanchette’s The Terror of the Mirkins, itself a modification of overflowontology’s work. And the gold No Prize goes to IG’s modification of prandeamus’s suggestion, The Wind of the Slitheen. Excellent work, you sick bastards.

Next, the Literary Theory division, which has two prizes. Like any good piece of literary theory, or, for that matter, good piece of Doctor Who, both are plagiarized. We’ll call it a tie between John Toon’s The Death of the Author and Anton B’s The Society of the Spectacle.

The Actually Sincere Attempt at a Story Title division has but one prize, AuntyJack’s pleasantly unnerving The Sigil of Xanthus. A round of applause to AuntyJack for being one of only a few entrants to actually attempt a title of that quality.

Next we have our Doctor Who In Jokes division. Bronzes goes to thingsiambotheredby’s proposal The Evil of the Chumblies, with an honorable mention for James V’s proposed modification Remembrance of the Chumblies. Ferret’s modification of Joel Phillips’s suggestion The Machine of the Gods, The ??/??? of the WiFi gets the silver. While the division winner is Jane’s The New Men of Sydney, a modification of Lewis Christian’s The H of Christopher Bidmead.

In a closely related award, the prize for “best use of the definite article” goes to IG’s The Catharsis of the Spurious Morality.

Which brings us to our general classification.

In third place, Tony Macklin’s The Heat of the Moment.

In second, Matthew Blanchette’s The Passion of the Anoraks, a modification of EarBucket’s The Passion of the Christ.

And our winner. This posed a problem, because I, somewhat foolishly, intervened slightly in one post, noting that I could see a modification that would improve it. That post was prandeamus’s The Anagram of the Master, which HarlequiNQB realized would be improved with The Anagram of the Stream, or, actually, even better than my idea, The Stream of Anagrams. So free ebooks to prandeamus, HarlequiNQB, and, apparently, myself.

Which is, of course, terribly unfair, so I’ll just declare a second winning entry and give a set of ebooks to Ununnilium for the equally brilliant The Kyriarchy of the Daleks.

Congratulations to all three winners – send me an e-mail and I’ll get your ebooks to you.

I know several of you already have a set of ebooks.…

June 10, 2013

I Become Part of Events (The Christmas Invasion)

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Tennant based his characterization on fellow Scotsman
Graham Crowden’s nuanced portrayal of Soldeed in The
Horns of Nimon

Blogger’s spam filter is being a bit frisky lately, and is catching a lot of legitimate comments by long term posters. If your posts don’t appear, that’s why. I’m cleaning it out several times a day, and all comments will appear eventually.

It’s December 25th, 2005. We are in the long winter of years in which the winner of The X Factor gets to be the Christmas number one every year, choking the life out of what had previously been a rather pleasant cultural oddity whereby a motley of novelty acts, trash pop, and hit bands would fight it out for the honor of going on a music anorak’s list of Christmas number ones instead gets supplanted by The X Factor winning everything. So for the record, it’s Shayne Ward with “That’s My Goal,” but in this case it’s everything that isn’t number one, which is to say, absolutely every other song in Britain, that matters.

News, then. Doctor Who has been off the air for six months. In those six months, London was awarded the 2012 Olympics the day before a series of terrorist attacks hit the London transportation system, killing fifty-two people, along with the four bombers. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, revealing a staggeringly poor federal response system. Jyllands-Posten published their infamously controversial set of comics depicting the prophet Muhammad, and Saddam Hussein’s trial began. While in the month of December David Cameron becomes leader of the Conservative Party, Harold Pinter wins the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work on The Abominable Snowmen, and the law allowing same sex “civil partnerships” takes effect.

Let’s go back to the issue of music, however. As I noted, the domination of The X Factor over the Christmas charts brought to an unsatisfyingly corporate end to a quaint British ritual. This construction, of course, ignores the fact that the British charts are already corporate, and, more to the point, endlessly prone to manipulation, most famously with what is widely believed to be the deliberate fudging of numbers to prevent the Sex Pistols from reaching number one with “God Save the Queen” in 1977. Nor is it prima facie the case that The X Factor produces worse number one singles than, say, “Mr. Blobby,” which was in fact the number one in 1993. No, what’s depressing here is the loss of the game – the sense that something that once belonged to the British public now belongs to Simon Cowell.

Ah yes, Simon Cowell. Now there’s an interesting figure. What is notable about Cowell is his ability to combine an unsparing ruthlessness with an instinctive grasp of populism. The result is someone who is jaw-droppingly good at engineering hits, and who has absolutely no compunctions about acting like that’s what he’s doing. The result is something aggressively soulless – a sense not just of utter conformity, but of the most mean-spirited and cynical conformity imaginable.…

June 7, 2013

Saturday Waffling (June 8, 2013)

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So, first of all, I’m running a contest, because I’ve never run a contest before and it sounds fun. The prize will be Volumes 1-3 of TARDIS Eruditorum (Volume 1 in its first edition state, obviously, as that’s the one that exists) in ebook format.

Entering is simple – you just come up with the best possible title for a Doctor Who story in the format The _____ of the _____. Post in comments. You can go for funny or sincere, and any sort of story – judging criteria will strictly be what catches my fancy.

One interesting note, though – collaboration is encouraged; you can win just as well by tinkering with someone else’s suggestion. And if a tinkered version of your suggestion wins, both you and the tinkerer will win the prize. So if someone suggested the (actually quite rubbish) title The Terror of the Giraffes, and you came along and said, “actually, I think that would be much better as The Horror of the Giraffes” then, if I agreed, both you AND the person who came up with The Terror of the Giraffes would win a set of ebooks. You thus lose nothing at all by having people tinker with your titles. You may also tinker with other tinkerings as desired.

Limit of two initial entries. Entries based on tinkering other entries are currently unlimited, though if someone annoys me I’ll change that rule.

I’ll post the winners on Tuesday, along with other favorites. Second of all, then, I have an idea.

Virtually everyone writing with advice for writers these days makes much of the fact that the market is changing and blah blah blah. I imagine the same is true for other creative pursuits. But there’s very little information on the pragmatic reality of being a professional writer – what sort of markets and forms people’s “real money” comes from, and just, broadly speaking, information on the working conditions of writers. I can find a few individual discussions – authors here or there who go into detail on their royalty statements – but the market is so idiosyncratic that a few datapoints aren’t useful.

And what I really can’t find are questions like, for instance, do writers tend to make their money by getting small royalty checks off multiple books that add up, do they live entirely off new releases, do they get one hit that keeps them going for a long time, or what? And how does it work for other media?

So I wanted to just set up a nice, informal survey in the hopes that I can get a bunch of answers and compile them into something that paints a decent picture of how working creators make their money. To that end, if you are a professional creator and don’t mind shooting me an e-mail with the answers to a few questions, please do.

Let’s define professional creator subjectively – if a significant portion of your household income comes from your creative work, you qualify.…

June 7, 2013

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 62 (Battlestar Galactica)

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“What about the United States” is, of course, a terribly weird move to make right now. After all, by the time The Christmas Invasion, which we’ll deal with on Monday, aired in the UK, exactly zero episodes of the new series had aired in the United States. Indeed, the airing of Series One in the US coincided with much of the airing of Series Two in the UK. The show’s US popularity lagged the UK by a quite massive margin. So for the most part the question of Doctor Who in America will be tabled until Matt Smith and BBC America, who do, shall we say, rather a better job with the show.

Still, let’s talk about its initial American context on the Sci-Fi Channel. The Sci-Fi Channel is one of the most unfortunate ideas in television history. It was launched as a cable channel in the early 90s, when cable was expanding and everybody thought cult television was actually a way to make money. (A year before The X-Files, then.) Unfortunately this turned out not to be the case. Sci-Fi Channel’s original plan of running old cult series acquired cheap never quite took off, and their forays into original programming were, for the most part, similarly unsuccessful. On the occasions they created good programs – Farscape, for instance, which actually ran after Doctor Who Confidential on BBC Three – they usually ran into the problem that good cult-style science fiction was expensive to create and drew too small an audience to be worth it, which is where most science fiction of this sort falls down. Farscape was good, intelligent, funny, and never attracted ratings high enough for a marginal cable channel like Sci-Fi to produce it.

It’s worth noting that even though science fiction is broadly popular, there’s virtually none of it that’s done in the old cult model anymore. Anyone pitching a high-budget science fiction action-adventure serial aimed squarely at males 18-35 is going to be laughed out of the room. Seriously, is there even a single show that works that way anymore? I’m pretty sure they’ve all adopted some version of the high emotional content/soap opera plotting approach now. (The last arguable survivor I can think of, Warehouse 13, is slated for demolition next year, and is hardly primarily a male audience anyway. Maybe Arrow? I’ve not bothered to watch.) And accordingly, the Sci-Fi Channel, these days rebranded as the non-committal and more trademarkable SyFy, steadily became a shockingly low rent channel known for deliberate pieces of cheese like Sharktopus, more ghost hunting than you can shake a stick at, and a lot of professional wrestling. (A parenthetical on this, as it may well be an entirely US thing – professional wrestling is not actually a sport but a simulated one in which results are pre-determined and stuntmen perform fake wrestling matches according to long-running plotlines. Basically, it’s a gobsmackingly homoerotic soap opera that pretends to be a sports competition. So like the Premier League, only with more match-fixing.)…

June 6, 2013

Outside the Government 10 (Doctor Who Confidential)

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Let’s start with the end – the first season finale of Doctor Who Confidential, which culminates in a celebratory montage of the Ninth Doctor year arranged to Snow Patrol’s “Run.” To anyone with a passing familiarity with fan culture this, and a wave of similar montages across the preceding six-and-a-half hours of television is immediately identifiable as a vid, or fanvid. We could go down quite a rabbit hole here, but suffice it to say that fanvids are fan-made music videos that set clips of one or more films/television series to popular music. Many of these are just unabashed lovefests – four minutes of squee set to a Coldplay track. Others present new perspectives on the original text. Slash perspectives are of course common, as are reworkings to create new POV characters and other sorts of narrative commentaries.

There is, of course, nothing hugely innovative about this sort of thing. If we want to treat the end of Doctor Who Confidential as a fanvid then we have to allow the precedent to go back decades at the least. Putting the complete lack of effort into researching it that I want to, I can off-hand go back to the series finale of Seinfeld as having done a celebratory montage set to pop music. If we allow for sports programming to count then professional equivalents of fanvids are made to fill time on schedules on a regular basis.

Nevertheless, it sets the tone for Doctor Who Confidential. We should pause here to note that making a fanvid is bloody hard, doubly so if you insist on a measure of quality in the end result. Syncing events well to the music, getting the events selected to form a narrative, having clips long enough to be recognizable and intelligible but short enough to remain punchy and varied – these are hard things to do. And while there are no shortage of crappy vidders in the world, there are also ones who routinely demonstrate that they’re as good at editing as the professionals.

Which is, to a large extent, what Doctor Who Confidential is about: demonstrating the artistry involved in Doctor Who. Which is by no means inconsiderable. The vastness of the paratext surrounding the first six series of Doctor Who, across Doctor Who Magazine, Doctor Who Confidential, and DVD commentary tracks (every episode of the Davies era has a commentary track on the DVD sets, and after Series One every episode has a second commentary track available as a BBC Radio 4 Podcast) mean that Doctor Who in the Davies era is documented with a level of detail that is mind-wrenching. And one of the things that really comes out as a product of all of this is that an absolutely staggering amount of thought goes into a given episode of Doctor Who.

This is something that presents a critical complexity. One of the frequent debates about my readings and views on Doctor Who is the eternal question of whether I’m “reading too much into” things.…

June 4, 2013

This is Not a Review Blog

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That’s something I say on a regular basis – that what I do here isn’t primarily to discuss what Doctor Who stories are good or bad, but to discuss what’s interesting about them and to tell a story out of them. And that’s very important to understanding the blog.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions, and since Gallifrey Base is running weekly mini-forums going over the history of Doctor Who a few years at a time, I’ve been entertaining myself by actually bashing out short reviews of individual stories. So I figure why not compile them here. So in honor of my moving from cleaning up the Hinchcliffe era entries to making another pass over the Hartnell stuff, here’s my short reviews and ratings for the Hartnell era.

An Unearthly Child: Fairly marvelous. The caveman bits get unfairly slagged off because they stop being fundamental bits of the series mythology, but only because they’re fundamental bits of the mythology of a series that never got followed up on. The show that’s about the sheer terror of the TARDIS and the untrustworthiness of the Doctor isn’t one that would have run for fifty years, but it’s a damn sight better than most of the rest of Season One. 7/10

The Daleks: The first cliffhanger, and the shot where the camera pulls away from the TARDIS crew to reveal a room full of incomprehensible things. We have now exhausted the good parts of The Daleks. But holy GOD those two are good parts. 3/10

The Edge of Destruction: One of two stories in the first season that outright work. Its worldview is very strange – it feels more 1960s than anything else in the first two seasons save maybe The Space Museum – but it creates a fascinating collage of classic science fiction and surrealism. David Whitaker remains one of my absolute favorite Doctor Who writers. This is just a wonderful piece of television. 8/10

Marco Polo: I complain about the pacing on most of the first season, but this one takes the cake – seven episodes of meandering in search of a plot structure. This is in the period where the show was a serial that would spin its wheels fruitlessly for a random number of weeks before moving on to a new premise. By the standards of Saturday teatime entertainment merely tolerable. By the standards of something to watch voluntarily fifty years later, a car crash. 2/10

The Keys of Marinus: Unwatchable – everything that’s wrong with a Terry Nation script at one time. 1/10

The Aztecs: Hard to believe this was by the writer of Marco Polo. Everything that story gets wrong, this one gets right – it’s immaculately structured, and with so many dramatic character beats. Along with The Edge of Destruction, the two stories from the first year that really, unequivocally work. 9/10

The Sensorites: The pacing is, as with most of the first season, shot to hell. But the moments of pure charm really stand out.…

June 3, 2013

I Wasn’t The One Holding a Gun (Bad Wolf)/A Fighting Hand (Parting of the Ways)

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This entry should appear as two columns. If it is appearing incorrectly or unreadably, a simplified version is here, but does not provide the intended reading experience and is not recommended. Thanks to Anna Wiggins for formatting assistance.

The Anne Droid purifies a leaden contestant to gold.	We play the contest again, Mr. Whitaker.
It’s June 11th, 2005. Crazy Frog is at number one with “Axel F.” Foo Fighters, Coldplay, Gwen Stefani, the White Stripes, Akon, and the Gorillaz also chart, the latter with “Feel Good Inc.” News, fittingly, is a near-total blackout. Seriously – I can find next to nothing in the news for this week.	It’s June 18th, 2005. Crazy Frog’s “Axel F” is at number one. U2, The Gorillaz, Jamiroquai, Foo Fighters, and the Black Eyed Peas also chart, the latter with “Don’t Phunk With My Heart.” The only real piece of news is John Sentamu becoming the first black Archbishop when appointed Archbishop of York.
I guess there’s The Guardian running a Pass Notes on the whole “Bad Wolf” idea, which technically happened after this episode, but which is ultimately more related to the episode called Bad Wolf than to the finale where that concept is revealed in full. (After all, following Bad Wolf the meaning of the phrase seems apparent – it’s a trap laid by the Daleks. It’s not until next episode that this gets complicated.) But its existence reflects the degree to which “in the news” in fact, this week, consisted of this episode itself. Doctor Who was the news, not just televisual background radiation, but a massive, central part of British television. What happened in Doctor Who was considered news. For anyone who had lived through the wilderness years the very idea is completely ridiculous.	So, television then. For all that The Parting of the Ways is a grand bit of “event” television – an episode self-consciously crafted as a Moment, if you will, it remains the case that, ironically, this got the lowest ratings of the season. Its attempted event – the shock regeneration of Christopher Eccleston – flopped, revealed three months ahead of time in the papers such that this episode led to inevitable climax instead of the most giddily impish shock of all. It’s completely wrong to suggest that Parting of the Ways fizzled – it didn’t at all. But it’s also wrong to suggest that it’s the climactic moment of Doctor Who’s first series is, in a cultural sense, simply wrong. The climactic moment was Rose, with everything else just being the consequences of that success.
But it’s actually even stranger than it seems. It’s not just Doctor Who being a big deal – it’s the particular nature of what the deal was. “Bad Wolf,” after all, is as culty as cult can be – a bit of television designed only for obsessives. And not obsessives of the sort at whom Boom Town was aimed, but ones who are going to obsessively analyze episodes for fleeting lines and visuals.

…

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