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:

May 20, 2013

S. Alexander Reed – Assimilate

Elizabeth Sandifer reviews 16

Let’s start with the disclosures. Alex is a dear friend and colleague – my coauthor on the upcoming book on Flood, in fact. I’ve known him for over a decade; he was in my wedding party. I’m in the acknowledgments of this book. My friendship with him is one of those that is more an ongoing serialized conversation. We see each other a couple times a year and the conversation calmly picks up with litanies of things we’ve each squirreled away in the corners of our brains with mental notes to tell each other.

Alex is appallingly tall and prone to exaggeration. He is one of those people who monopolizes the available talent pool. He’s a ferociously insightful and well-read critic, an adept rock star, a phenomenal conversationalist, and damnably handsome to boot. Working with him on the Flood book consisted of a workflow in which I banged out obscene amounts of verbiage in a short time and he painstakingly worked it over and added to it until it was actually a good book.

Beyond that, my intellectual debt to him is so massive as to be impossible to fully account for. The list of things and ideas he introduced me to is simply massive. He is one of those influences so fundamental that to attempt to encapsulate it in some list of things he introduced me to feels desperately inadequate. And reading Assimilate is thus a terribly strange experience for me – a blur of past conversations where I realize these ideas were being worked out. I hit a passage on Guy Debord and remember vividly the conversation picking him up from the airport where I excitedly told him that he needed to read Society of the Spectacle. I nod along enthusiastically at his descriptions of 1970s England unable to begin to tell what bits are where talking to him influenced me, what bits are the other way around, and what bits are just us conversing into separate Word documents. And there’s nothing like a way to tell.

Which is to say that this is in no way a detached critical book review. This is unapologetic fanboying of the highest order. Because if there is someone I most consider a fellow traveler in terms of critical approach, it is S. Alexander Reed. And with Assimilate there finally exists a proper monument demonstrating what I truly and unhesitatingly believe to be one of the greatest creative and critical minds in the world today.

Oddly, if irrelevantly, the topic is not one I am by any measure passionate about. Like most people, the prospect of epically long songs consisting of little more than grinding machinery and featureless noise is not my idea of fun listening. On the other hand, there exist subjects that are somewhat more fun to read about than to experience, and industrial music, like the Pertwee era, is perhaps a prime example. It is as easy to not want to listen to Throbbing Gristle’s “Very Friendly,” which is eighteen minutes of grinding and narration about the Moors murders.

…

May 20, 2013

You Were Expecting Someone Else 21 (The Monsters Inside)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum eccleston, you were expecting someone else 53

The Monsters Inside is one of the first three books in what is unofficially called the New Series Adventures, although even that name seems, in hindsight, ever so slightly wrong. The name derives from the two other BBC Books lines that existed in 2005, the Eighth Doctor Adventures and the Past Doctor Adventures, the former of which we covered from January through April, and the latter of which we looked at alongside each of the past doctors. And the name picks up on this, implying as it does that the New Series Adventures are going to exist alongside the other two lines.

In hindsight this is rubbish. Neither the Eighth Doctor Adventures nor the Past Doctor Adventures were going to survive the year. We knew that about the Eighth Doctor Adventures, actually, but as of May, when this came out alongisde The Clockwise Man and Winner Takes All to launch the New Series Adventures, the theory was that the Past Doctor Adventures were going to keep running indefinitely, with the Eighth Doctor range being folded into it. Indeed, in May the Eighth Doctor Range hadn’t actually quite wrapped yet, with The Gallifrey Chronicles coming out the next month, alongside Eccleston’s regeneration.

All of which is to say that while to the mainstream Doctor Who was a titanic hit that was coming back for a second season and was set to be one of the BBC’s crown jewels, to fans May of 2005 was a bewildering period in which there were in fact three incumbent Doctors, the Paul McGann era having yet to resolve, the Eccleston era ongoing, and the Tennant era announced. And the question of what the auxiliary merchandise for the series would be like was still very much an open one.

Because there were, in fact, a lot of ways the merchandise could go. It could, of course, target fans. That was what Doctor Who merchandise had been doing since the 1980s, after all. That’s why the Doctor Who Cookbook and $125 Doctor Who stained glass windows made for selling in America as pledge awards for PBS existed – because adult fans could be trusted to buy this crap. And certainly this type of merchandise still exists, as apparently there are people who want to spend fifty pounds for a box set of the Pandorica chair and a River Song action figure. Or, for that matter, thirty pounds for a Winston Churchill action figure bundled with a Dalek with tea tray accessory. (And that’s just the new series. You can also, these days, spend thirty-five quid for action figures of Peri and Sil from Vengeance on Varos)

A reasonable person might have expected this to be how all of the new series merchandise would work: high end collectors items for the undiscerning Doctor Who fan with an excess of disposable income. This was basically how the novels had worked in the wilderness years, with Virgin and then BBC Books pumping out two books every month in what was actually the biggest flood of new Doctor Who material in the series’ history, especially once Big Finish got in on the act with audios.…

May 18, 2013

Sunday Pancaking

Elizabeth Sandifer 90

Well, I’m not going to make a habit out of having two weekend threads, but my dialogue with Mac Rogers on The Name of the Doctor just went up on Slate, so that’s probably there and fun to read. Or at least there and fun to have written. Thanks again to Mac and the folks at Slate for letting me play.

So while I’m opening a second front in the “let’s all discuss Name of the Doctor” battle, I figure I’ll toss out two (completely unrelated) questions to my readers to see if anyone can help.

First, I’ve been searching for months now for any copy of Springhill, Russell T Davies’s two-season apocalyptic soap with writing by Gareth Roberts and Paul Cornell. This seems a complete wipeout – nobody is getting anywhere close. It’s a massive missing link in the history of Davies’s Doctor Who, and there’s barely any information about it out there.

Second, and thinking ahead instead of back, I’d like to do a post on Outpost Gallifrey sometime during Series Two. Ideally adjacent to Love and Monsters. Unfortunately, the forum is long since gone off the Internet. I don’t suppose that anyone, for some bewilderingly freakish reason, has an archive of the long lost forum, and specifically of the threads that sprung up around that episode? If so, you’re a bigger digital packrat than even I am, but please do get in touch.

In both cases e-mailing me is probably more sensible than discussing in comments.…

May 17, 2013

Saturday Waffling (May 18th, 2013)

Elizabeth Sandifer 127

EDIT: Just to be official and emphatic on it, spoilers are allowed in the thread here, and if you don’t want to be spoiled you probably want to be in a different thread.

So, I imagine the discussion on The Name of the Doctor that starts up in a few hours will be interesting. I actually have seen most of it already – through wholly legitimate means (I’m doing another thing for Slate – though actually, the episode never leaked to BitTorrent at all, contrary to rumors). I suspect the fault lines on it will roughly map those of the Moffat era in general – those who like his stuff will love it, those who hate it will probably hate it. For my money, it and The Snowmen are the two high points of the season. And when my further thoughts on it go up on Slate I’ll let you all know.

In other news, I’ve just discovered that The CW is doing a remake of The Tomorrow People. I’ve gone ahead and embedded the trailer and a clip from the first episode for your horrified entertainment. I’m not at all certain how you’d even begin to go about presenting The Tomorrow People to an American audience. You have to explain why it’s not just the X-Men, I suppose. And I doubt the original series’ answer – that it’s utterly, flamboyantly gay – is going to cut it for modern American network television. So I’m not sure what their Plan B is on that. So yes, that looks awful.

Finally, reader Dave Simmons dropped word of an Indiegogo campaign to save a local indie bookstore in St. Louis from closure due to a developer buying their (really quite gorgeous) Victorian Gothic Revival location so that they can tear it down and build a storage facility. Here’s the link for that. I’m terribly partial to indie bookstores even as I’m horrifically in bed with Amazon and thus with many of the things forcing them out of existence. So if you’re in the St. Louis area, please do consider kicking them a few bucks.

And now back to trying to finish catching up on this week. At the time of writing, just two more blog posts out of this stretch to write. God help me.…

May 17, 2013

Crying Silently (Father’s Day)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum eccleston 113

Technically more a Time Wyvern than a Time Dragon.

It’s May 14th, 2005. Akon has finally unseated Tony Christie, giving the new series its second number one hit with “Lonely.” Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Destiny’s Child, Will Smith, and Weezer also chart. In news, Manchester United is bought by Malcolm Glazer, which is by any measure a key event in the transformation of the Premier League into a heavily leveraged playground for the super-rich.

While on television, it’s Doctor Who as only Paul Cornell can write it: intimate and Anglican.

Where The Long Game struggled with the need to fit itself into a single forty-five minute capsule, Father’s Day is one that could only ever have worked as a single, contained episode. Its structure functions in part because of its claustrophobia – because there’s outright no way out of the church. By keeping us in the intimate scene without breaks we get a sense of confinement no six-part base under siege ever managed. Because the base under siege is the model of this story, once you go far enough under the hood. Monsters are closing in from the outside, the Doctor is desperately trying to come up with a plan, and deteriorating political factions within the base eventually endanger everybody. (In this case the slowly boiling fight between Jackie and Pete that eventually results in the two Roses touching.)

But we’ve never seen a base under siege like this quite before. The base is so ostentatiously small, such that we can trivially get wide shots of it to stress just how trapped everyone is. Instead of having three Ice Warriors in one room talking about the terrible things they’re going to do to the base we can see the monsters flying around the church, scraping at the windows, laying siege to it. This is partially a case of Cornell’s choice of settings – a church is rather a more intimate sort of base than, say, a space station. But it’s also down to how the new series works, shooting primarily on location and using CGI monsters such that having a bunch of wide shots of a church with time dragons milling about is, if not trivial, at least no harder than knocking up three monster costumes.

And given that, the forty-five minute structure is great simply because it prevents there from being any release from the pressure. And it does so without any significant rushing of the plot. Because, of course, the plot of this is terribly thin. There’s very little actual concept to this: Rose creates a paradox by saving her father, and only her father’s death can right things. Everything else is just a set of contrivances to keep the plot running – most notably the entire “reforming the TARDIS out of the key and a cell phone battery” thing, which exists virtually entirely to get the plot to forty-five minutes. But it’s not like those forty-five minutes are overly stretched, simply because the sci-fi plot isn’t the point here.…

May 15, 2013

Slammed, Ergo, a Teaser

Elizabeth Sandifer 26

New Wave Superfriends, by Butcher Billy

The wedding last weekend has me a day behind on all my writing, and I’m stuck with two or three extra projects this week as well, so I’ve just been slammed busy this week and haven’t had time to bash out even a little bit extra to post. At some point I suppose I’ll have to master the art of conversational chattiness. Or linkblogging. That’s what people do these days, isn’t it. Link blog. So I guess I could link to this interview with Jaron Lanier, which raises various troubling questions about the economy I’m making money in now and the like. That said, I cannot shake the sense that Lanier is just a really crappy futurist.

In any case, and more extensively, I figured I’d share the introduction to the eventually forthcoming Wonder Woman book. Still no release date yet, but I know it’s been clanking about for a while, so I figure I should show something.

—-

Nobody indulges in utopian visions anymore. On the rare occasions when people do – the playing at classless society offered by the Occupy movements in late 2011, for instance – the general reaction is, at best, one of condescending pity. Utopians, in our culture, aspire towards harmlessness. The best of them are charmingly naive people you might want to invite over for dinner, but would never actually want to put in charge of anything. More often, though, utopianism is viewed as outwardly sinister. You can see it in the line of political attack taken against Barack Obama. Not just the outright false claim that he’s a socialist (a political view that has produced a disproportionate amount of utopian literature), but the basic claim that he wants to transform America. That this is prima facie a bad thing – that the desire to engage in radical change to improve things is self-evidently terrible and evil – shows just how far utopianism has fallen.

On the rare occasions we do allow ourselves to dabble in the utopian, our visions are almost exclusively eschatological. If there is to be a utopia it can only come after a cathartic purging of society, whether at the hands of the gods or at the hands of humanity’s own folly run amok at last. Some better world may follow from the ashes of this one, but the idea of transforming this world into a better one, as opposed to simply leveling it and starting over, is all but completely gone.

It wasn’t always like this, of course. Our cultural landscape is littered with the debris of abandoned utopias. Many, though not all, emerged from the years following World War II, a golden age of utopian thinking. These were the days of gleaming space colonies and cute robotic servants that allowed everyone a life of perpetual leisure. Entire popular genres emerged from these dreams, only to, starting in the late 1970s, find themselves shell-shocked survivors: a set of images without a purpose.…

May 15, 2013

Audioarchitectonalmetrasynchosity (The Long Game)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum eccleston 109

At last, the new series pays homage to one of the most
fundamental transitions of the classic series: monsters that
look like cocks.

It’s May 7th, 2005. The damn Tony Christie song is still at number one, stubbornly keeping me from getting to ay anything new. Snoop Dogg is new to the charts this time, as is Destiny’s Child, and Bruce Springsteen’s return to moody acoustic form Devils and Dust is topping the album charts, but it’s mainly a bit of a slow one in music. In news, Tony Blair wins his third successive general election, but with a sharply reduced majority that in effect starts the clock on his resignation as Prime Minister in accordance with the Granita pact. Which is a fairly good week for The Long Game to air during, given that it is, in the end, a story about the way power functions in the background.

It would have been easy not to do The Long Game. Much as the series could have avoided a remake of The Web Planet, it could have avoided ever touching the 1980s stories like this. The Long Game, in terms of structure and concern, belongs to the Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy eras. Actually, in a perfectly literal sense it belongs to the Sylvester McCoy era. Its basic story is from the script Davies submitted to the Doctor Who office while Cartmel was script-editing – the one Cartmel rejected with the suggestion that Davies write something more grounded, with the specific suggestion of “a man who is worried about his mortgage, his marriage, his dog.”

The critique is interesting in terms of what The Long Game became. The suture between the two versions is, after all, relatively obvious. The original story consists of the bits about overthrowing a despotic news organization, which fits smoothly into the Cartmel era’s sensibilities. One can fairly straightforwardly imagine Russell T Davies watching Paradise Towers or The Happiness Patrol and thinking “ah, yes, that’s the way to do it.” Actually, the story The Long Game has the most obvious similarity to is Vengeance on Varos, which, if the 1987 date for Davies’s failed submission is correct, suggests pretty straightforwardly that Vengeance on Varos and Paradise Towers are the two big antecedents of this.

There are worse things. It’s not like the 1980s were a wasteland of irredeemable stories. There were some high points, and Vengeance on Varos and Paradise Towers were among them. (For newer readers, yes, Paradise Towers really is absolutely brilliant.) But what’s striking, as I said, is that it would have been easy not to do it. I mean, perhaps not easy to resist turning your fifteen-year-old script submission into an actual episode as a sort of cackling and triumphant “I’m in charge now,” but certainly easy to bury the 1980s. None of it made a particular cultural impression in terms of Doctor Who beyond “they’re the rubbish years.” That is, of course, not true, but it would have been perfectly easy to just never mention it.…

May 13, 2013

Kickstarter Wrap-Up

Elizabeth Sandifer 28

So, we’re in the final 24 hours of the Kickstarter. It looks like we’re going to fall just short of the goal of the illustrated version of the Three Doctors post – though I suppose a last minute push is possible. Someone buying the Soldeed video, for instance, would put the goal in sight…

EDIT: Actually, we’re now just $600 from doing the Blake book. It could just about happen…

In any case, if you want to get in on the Kickstarter, you probably should get going – several of the reward levels are deals that I’m not planning on offering again at the end of the Kickstarter. Most notably, the $10 “starter kit” of ebooks is the only time you’ll be able to get the first three volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum at that price for the foreseeable future. And while I may offer commissioned essays and signed books through other means soon, I don’t intend to offer essays that will go into the books again at all.

Finally, a general answer to questions I’m sure I’ll be getting – I’ll be in touch with all of the backers through several means. First, I’ll send out a backers survey in the next few days to figure out the Kickstarter-exclusive essay topic (basically, I’m going to suggest the upcoming Marc Platt audio The Beginning, and unless there’s a sizable objection, do that) and to get everyone’s e-mail. At that point I’ll have a Soldeed-esque THREEEEEE ways of contacting you: your e-mail, Kickstarter updates, and this blog. I will basically use all three regularly when I need to update you with anything.

No, failing to meet the $15k stretch goal does not mean I will never do the Blake/Three Doctors book. It does mean that I’m going to wait until I see how the Logopolis book does, however, before I make plans.

Any other questions I’ll happily answer in comments. Or discourse at length about what I have or haven’t learned doing a Kickstarter.

In any case, I just wanted to use today’s post to say: whether you have donated, are about to, or just can’t manage it, thank you. The last month of running this blog has been an absolutely wonderful ride. I was hoping to be able to get to the original $1k goal that would let me pre-fund the Hartnell book itself, and was prepared to fund it out of pocket if I fell short.

I woke up the next morning clearly not having to worry about funding the Hartnell book again. And that’s just been the beginning. I get to do a special edition of the Logopolis post, to start selling t-shirts, mugs, prints, and other cool stuff, and to start in on the podcast commentaries, all of which are terribly exciting.

And perhaps most importantly, it formed the point where I really started thinking of this as my primary job and source of income, with adjunct teaching as a sort of hobbyist sideline. Which is a really nice and satisfying place to be.…

May 13, 2013

About Time I Found Something To Do (Dalek)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum eccleston 108

The most fearsome creature in the universe is known for its
love of setting off the fire alarm and toilet papering houses.

With obvious thanks and considerable apologies to Tat Wood, Lawrence Miles, and Lars Pearson. About Time Volume Seven is out at the end of the summer, and will be absolutely phenomenal.

Dalek

(Serial 1.6. One Episode, 30th April 2005.)

Which One Is This? To the general public and to long-standing fans, the return of the Daleks. Or, at least, one Dalek. To newcomers, the one where the Doctor inexplicably freaks out at a robotic salt shaker.

Firsts and Lasts: In new series terms, it’s the first appearance of the Daleks, the first story set in the near future, the first time the TARDIS is pulled off course, the first earthbound story set outside the UK, and the first mention of the Doctor having two hearts. It’s also the first new series appearance of the Cybermen, albeit not one that “counts.” In overall terms it’s the first appearance of quasi-companion Adam Mitchell, the first appearance of the Davies-era Dalek design, and the first time on television that they’ve been voiced by Nicholas Briggs. Visible only to fans, it’s the first time a story from the wilderness years has been reworked for television. And to the general public, it’s the first time that Daleks ever climbed stairs, since nobody ever actually saw Remembrance of the Daleks. And for production personnel, it’s the first of three stories directed by Joe Ahearne.

Two Things to Notice About Dalek

1. The list of debuts masks the fact that, more than any other story so far, this one is crafted to work simultaneously on two levels. To established fans – which is to say anybody reading this – the obvious focus is the perversity of the Dalek doing things like having its eyestalk droop in sadness while it says “I am alone…”, while Eccleston’s performance, while solid, is nothing less than they’d expect from this Doctor meeting the Daleks. To new audiences – and they do exist – what’s striking is in fact the Doctor goes completely unhinged here, and begins torturing what appears to be a trapped robot. The effect is similar either way – a sense that fundamental rules are being broken and that something very wrong is happening here.

{What are the Metafictional Alchemical Resonances of Dalek’s Psychochronographic Emboitments?

Dalek is haunted by the series’ past. “The stuff of nightmares reduced to an exhibit.” It’s telling that the Cybermen, i.e. the inadequate second rate Daleks, actually make their first new series appearance before the Daleks do. The Daleks are not just symbolic of their usual connotations, but of the still-lurking terror of what the series was. Van Statten represents the way in which Doctor Who and its past were generally considered, particularly in the 1990s. He’s an egotistical, overly privileged asshole who collects Doctor Who props without understanding the beauty of any of them. He’d probably give you that life-sized Dalek prop he owns in exchange for a missing episode.…

May 10, 2013

Saturday Waffling (May 11th, 2013)

Elizabeth Sandifer 95

I liked that open thread last weekend. Let’s do it again.

So, Nightmare in Silver, obviously, once it airs. There’s been a fan theory going around in comments that the episodes are linearly representing classic series Doctors in some fashion, starting with the Susan reference in The Rings of Akhaten and continuing through to Tegan in The Crimson Horror. I would like to point out that if this theory is to hold for this week then we should be invoking Attack of the Cybermen. So I’m expecting a pointless continuity runaround, personally.

I’m out of town again this weekend – not for a fun reason like the DePaul Colloquium. Just a wedding. But it meant I didn’t get as many work days this week as I’d hoped. I’m currently doing revisions on the Tom Baker material, and finished up Season Twelve. This one should actually be a fairly short book, as they go, although it’s got some very long posts in there and may surprise me. Still, I expect a pleasantly slender volume. (I’m putting it and Hartnell v2 in parallel production, so they’ll likely come out around the same time.)

I’ve also started in on a personal project to create an edition of Blake’s illuminated manuscripts of the form I want to read, namely one that preserves the illustrations and format but swaps out Blake’s handwriting for more modern, readable typesetting. It involves learning lots of Photoshop tricks, but is actually coming along reasonably well, though may be of interest only to me. That said, I’m increasingly annoyed at bogus copyright claims on digital images of Blake’s stuff such that I’m sorely tempted to spend a weekend knocking up cheap paperback and ebook editions of things that are otherwise not available in decent quality.

And that’s my week and weekend. How are you all?

…

«‹ 151 152 153 154 ›»