Eruditorum Press

None of you understand. We’re not locked in here with you. We just lost our keys.

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:

What’s a Tree Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (Robot of Sherwood)

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As absurd conceits in Doctor Who go, the fact that Clara can spontaneously grow several feet of hair ranks among my favorites.

It’s September 6th, 2014. Lilly Wood and Robin Schulz are at number one with “Prayer in C,” with Maroon 5, Sam Smith, and Taylor Swift also charting. In news, a poll showing majority support for Scottish independence sends just about everybody into one sort of frenzy or another. And a massive cache of nude photos hacked from celebrities’ iCloud accounts, most notably and vocally including Jennifer Lawrence, hits the Internet. (Lawrence eventually offers the entirely sensible response that “anybody who looked at those pictures, you’re perpetuating a sexual offense. You should cower with shame.”)

While on television, the inauguration of what we might call late Gatiss. This is not a term or concept we think about as much as late Moffat. Part of this is simply a matter of volume—pinning Robot of Sherwood as the commencement of Gatiss’s late style is, in terms of episode count, equivalent to declaring that Moffat hit late style with The Eleventh Hour. But more of it is simply a general disinclination to treat Gatiss with the sort of seriousness that the phrase “late style” implies. The usual line on Gatiss is that he’s an empty trad nostalgist, an approach that implicitly rejects the idea that one’s style could evolve.

And yet starting with Series Seven, Gatiss clearly began improving. Cold War and The Crimson Horror were among the best scripts in an admittedly uneven season, with The Crimson Horror in particular demonstrating a newfound interest in form. And that broadly continues through his Capaldi-era contributions, none of which are quite as straightforward as unreconstructed nostalgia pastiches, and two of which are at least pretty good. They are still clearly Gatissy in the same way that Moffat’s late work remains Moffaty, but there’s been a concrete shift in their concerns and goals. What previously seemed like a pathological aversion to originality has mellowed to an embrace of simplicity and clarity. Traditionalism has softened to classicism; nostalgia has evolved to homage.

On one level, for instance, Robot of Sherwood is nothing more than a straightforward celebrity historical of the sort Gatiss already did in The Unquiet Dead and Victory of the Daleks. Except, of course, as the Doctor points out, Robin Hood isn’t real. Admittedly, the same can be said of Victory of the Daleks’ depiction of Winston Churchill, but that wasn’t a major plot point. Here, on the other hand, the question of Robin Hood’s fictionality is one of the driving engines of the story. This doesn’t result in something that is radically different from a celebrity historical—all of them are basically just genre romps with prominent guest stars. But to a degree unmatched by anything save The Unicorn and the Wasp (which notably takes the piss out of The Unquiet Dead), this is a story that’s actually open about this fact. This is a story that is not so much open about the fact that it’s storming through all the major set pieces of a Robin Hood story as it is reveling in it, repeatedly lampshading it for the audience.…

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Cultural Marxism 7: Look to Windward

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Banks published the Culture novels in essentially three chunks during which he’d write one every other year and between which he basically didn’t touch the setting. The first, consisting of everything through Use of Weapons, is dominated by already drafted material that Banks wrote prior to The Wasp Factory, and consists of Banks establishing the Culture in all its glories and problems. The second, beginning with Excession, but aesthetically encompassing The State of the Art, sees him testing the limits of the concept, pushing it to various breaking points to expose new faces of the idea. And it reaches its conclusion with Look to Windward. Whereas Excession and Inversions tested the limits of the format with massive high concept ideas like “what if the Culture met a vastly technologically superior civilization” or “what if you took the Culture out of a Cuture novel,” however, Look to Windward opts to break a far subtler rule: it’s a sequel to a previous book.

The clue’s in the title, which is a quote from T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”—”O you who turn the wheel and look to windward.” The next line? “Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.” But Look to Windward is not a sequel to Consider Phlebas in any straightforward sense whereby it shares characters or even particular incidents. It is not the story of Bora Horza Gobuchul’s previously unknown child wrecking bloody revenge upon the Culture. It is not even another book set during the Idiran War. The War hangs over things, but only distantly: the novel is set in a period between the time the light of two supernovas becomes visible on a particular Culture orbital, the supernovas having been the result of the Idirans destroying two stars in the now eight hundred years past war. The Mind of the orbital is a veteran of the war, but this detail only becomes important (and indeed prominent) in the book’s denouement.

The seeds of shutting the whole Culture apparatus down for another eight years, in other words, are clearly visible. This is a book that’s straining against its own desire for straining, and it carries the sense of exhaustion you’d expect from that. And yet, ironically, this is also the reimagining of what a Culture novel can be that actually takes. From this point on, when Banks writes a Culture novel the act consists of simply writing a Culture novel as opposed to making some fundamental case for what it means to write a Culture novel.

In this regard, at least, it is fitting that the novel should serve as a sequel to the first Culture novel. Because make no mistake, it is a sequel to Consider Phlebas. The title doesn’t lie, and the Idrian war is too central to the book to be ignored, even if it’s too peripheral to call the focus. Like Consider Phlebas, Look to Windward is a book about war, a topic that, while certainly present in the other Culture books, is not generally their subject.…

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It’s a Game! They’re Taking Me For a Ride! (Into the Dalek)

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WE ARE THE DALEKS. WE HAVE INTERIORITY.

If you want any Eruditorum Press books that aren’t Neoreaction a Basilisk, they’ll be going off sale around 2:00 EST this afternoon. This means it’s your last chance ever to buy Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons.

It’s August 30th, 2014. David Guetta and Sam Martin are at number one, with Taylor Swift, Magic, OneRepublic, Wankelmut, and Union J also charting. In the last week, Modern Family and Breaking Bad won at the Emmys, while Amazon purchased Twitc. Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling debated Scottish Independence, Douglas Carswell defected from the Tories to UKIP, and Kate Bush staged the first concert of her Before the Dawn series, marking her first live performance in thirty-five years.

On television, meanwhile, Peter Capaldi climbs around inside a Dalek. On one level, this is another example of playing Capaldi’s rollout inordinately safe, going from a conservative Robot-inspired debut immediately to a Dalek story. On another, however, there’s a compulsive strangeness to this Dalek story. It’s based on what is clearly a kind of batty idea. Fantastic Voyage with Daleks is several miles from the sanest Doctor Who pitch ever. This is not necessarily a bad idea, of course. Some of the best Doctor Who stories ever come from completely insane pitches, and we all know what Series Eight story I’m thinking of here. But battiness is not a guarantee of success either, or else Daleks in Manhattan would be good. 

More broadly, there is an element of “will this do?” to every Dalek story since about Doomsday. The answer to that question is often “yes,” and even sometimes “and then some,” but there’s still a niggling sense of “well we have to do Dalek stories occasionally so let’s see if we can come up with something” to them all. And Into the Dalek exhibits this more than most. It’s not fair to say that nobody was excited to see Phil Ford named as a writer for Series Eight, but those that were probably overestimated his contributions to The Waters of Mars and didn’t watch The Sarah Jane Adventures. Those who did recognized Ford as a writer who turns out unremarkable mediocrities with tedious repetitiveness, and his hiring as a clear and conscious lack of ambition for this story. The cynical way to frame it is that Ford is here to be rewritten by Moffat, a task he basically succeeds at. 

Certainly anyone looking for reasons to slag off Into the Dalek is going to have a fairly easy time of it. Most of its best ideas were plagiarized from Rob Shearman. Nobody has actually come up with an interesting idea of what should be inside a Dalek, and the resulting set design is insipid. The CGI largely aspires to adequacy. But none of these are catastrophic problems. And while the same can be said of the stories’ virtues—none of them really manage to justify the whole—the story attains a sort of harmless mediocrity, neither particularly loveable or hateable.

…

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Neoreaction a Basilisk New Edition

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After a rather frustrating day grappling with Amazon, we are pleased to properly announce the revised edition of Neoreaction a Basilisk is now available for sale. This link will go to the current paperback edition, but the Kindle edition is live as well. (Right now there are two Kindle editions, but they are in fact identical despite one still having the old cover. I’ll get this tidied up soon.) Here’s a UK link. And if you want it in epub, here it is on Smashwords. This new edition features a few minor revisions and corrections throughout along with an appendix containing “Guded by the Beauty of Their Weapons,” a precursor essay to the ones in the book about the alt-right and science fiction.

Currently if you have any digital editions, they should be upgradeable for free. I can’t 100% guarantee that will remain the case, so you may want to make the upgrade fast.

Thanks as always to James for the delightful cover update. (Future covers will not play with defacement like this, but it was obviously how to do this one.)

I’ll be temporarily pulling all other Eruditorum Press books from sale on Monday. Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons will be permanently out of print at that point. I expect the updated Eruditorum v1 will be available within the next month, but if you want any of those books in the near future (or Guided at all), this weekend is the last chance saloon.

Thanks for your support.…

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Amazon Discriminates Against Trans Authors

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UPDATE: Thanks to the heroic efforts of Morgan at Createspace, this is now fixed. Thanks to all or the support. I’ll take this post down in a few hours and replace it with a proper happy announcement post of the new edition, and toss Cultural Marxism out over the weekend.

I was going to post a Cultural Marxism post today, but then things happened, so instead I’m going to tell you all a hilarious story about how Amazon discriminates against trans authors of nonfiction. See, I just got the new Elizabeth Sandifer edition of Neoreaction a Basilisk published. Here it is in paperback, and here it is in ebook if you’re into that kind of thing. And then I called Amazon Author Central, who I’d previously talked to and was assured that if I republished the book in a new edition under a new name they’d be able to link the books so that my reviews and sales history would be preserved.

Except it turns out that they neglected to mention the tiny little detail that this is only true for fiction books. For nonfiction books, they won’t link them if there are any changes. Which means all of the sales history that makes my book the third hit on “alt-right” and the nineteen reviews averaging to four and a half stars are going to disappear as soon as I unpublish the deadnamed edition. 

Their nominal reason for this is to “provide a better customer service experience.” But in practice, what this means is that because I’m trans and want to put a new edition of my book out under my new name, I have to suffer what will be a significant hit to my search rankings and lose the extremenly good reviews I cultivated. And this is going to happen for every single book I’ve published. The years of history and reputation I cultivated as an author are just going to disappear because I’m trans and don’t want to be deadnamed.

Again, I recognize that Amazon has their internal logic here. I recognize this is not aimed at trans nonfiction authors. Nevertheless, it’s a policy that amounts to causing significant and irreparable career damage to us, and one that only affects us because we’re trans. Cis people don’t have to republish all their books like this in the first place. 

I’m continuing to work with Amazon to try to get them to change their policy, and I’m fidgeting some things behind the scenes (the Kindle edition will let me change the author, cover, and contents on the old database entry, so I’m trying that to see what happens), but as it stands my entire history of reviews and sales is going to disappear. Because I’m trans. And I’m furious. …

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Like Breath on a Mirror (Deep Breath)

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Get it oooooon. Bang a gooooong. Get it on.

It’s August 23rd, 2014. Nico and Vinz are at number one with “Am I Wrong,”  with Ariana Grande and Iggy Azalea, Cheryl Cole and Tinie Tempah, and Charli XCX and herself also charting. Ed Sheeran tops the album charts. In news, since Time of the Doctor took its bow there’s been an Ebola epidemic, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, there was a military coup in Thailand, and Michael Brown was murdered by police in Ferguson, Missouri, kicking off the Black Lives Matter movement. We’re also in the last month of the campaign for the Scottish independence referendum, which isn’t technically the sort of thing that goes in these sections since it’s just sort of an ongoing thing, but clearly I’m out of practice and anyway it’s kind of relevant. Oh, and a week before this airs some jackass makes a big blog post about how an indie game designer he used to be dating supposedly cheated on him, which really doesn’t seem like it should be the sort of thing that should make a news section but actually serves as a perfect summary for how the news is going to go over the next three years and change.

While on television, Peter Capaldi makes his long-awaited third appearance as the Doctor, just over a year after his announcement. This was not, it should be stressed, an unusually long gap between announcement and first episode. Indeed, the gap was shorter than Smith’s, and looks set to be shorter than Whittaker’s as well. But there was a clear, if slightly ineffable difference between Capaldi’s debut and these others. With both Smith and Whittaker there was a tremendous amount of mystery over what their Doctor would be like—Whittaker because of the obvious gender issues, Smith because he was young, relatively unknown, and working with a new showrunner. But Capaldi was a known quantity—an already well-respected actor who, indeed, already had what would have been a perfectly good career-defining role in Malcolm Tucker. As a result, in addition to the usual excitement and goodwill a new Doctor gets there was an unusual level of expectation as to what Capaldi’s take on the character would be. And the promotion for Series Eight leaned into this, with trailers emphasizing the “where are we going,” “into darkness” and “am I a good man,” “I don’t know” exchanges from Into the Dalek and Moffat talking to Doctor Who Magazine about putting a “Capaldi moment” into every episode in which the Doctor “slightly alarms you.” By any sane accounting, Deep Breath had all the stars aligned – a pleasantly uncompetitive week just before the real heavy hitters of the fall debuted, a receptive audience, and a clear set of marks to hit. 

So why, then, is Deep Breath so ostentatiously cautious? This is, after all, the new Doctor story where you could most get away with just storming out of the gate as you mean to go on. Instead, however, Moffat consciously models the story on Robot, letting Capaldi wreck havoc on Smith’s supporting cast for seventy-five minutes.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Lego Movie, It Follows

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By rights, Moffat should have left. Sure, he’d done a season less than Davies, but it was clearly time. Each of his three seasons had been a step down from the one before, with Series Seven being an openly miserable experience. The Day of the Doctor and Matt Smith’s departure provided an occasion where he could leave on a high. His style had become exceedingly recognizable and recognized, which is the phase right before utter stagnation. It was time to go, and if he didn’t he risked—indeed, given the tenacity of his critics, essentially ensured—that there would be accusations that he stayed too long. But, of course, he didn’t. He retrenched, got a new star and executive producer, and went back to try again. This is the story of how that went, and of what may be Doctor Who’s most unexpected golden age.

But to understand that unexpectedness we must first understand the landscape that Doctor Who was returning into. Because the problem wasn’t just that Moffat’s tenure looked long in the tooth on its own merits. It was that outside Doctor Who’s window, the world was catching up. In one sense this was not a surprise. Doctor Who was onto its eighth season, and while obviously it had an unusually strong precedent for long runs, the new iteration was definitely a televisual senior citizen. But it’s worth appreciating the degree to which both Doctor Who and Moffat’s defining arsenal of tricks had been absorbed into the popular culture.

The obvious place to start is with the relentless blockbuster factory that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Quietly chugging along in the background since the late Russell T Davies era, by 2014 Marvel was well into Phase Two of their cinematic expansion, going back over the franchises they’d used to build up to The Avengers to give them sequels while introducing a handful of new ones alongside them. The wisecracking sci-fi action-comedy of Guardians of the Galaxy might seem the more obvious 2014 comparison, but its primary debt is clearly to Star Wars, and anyway, it’s the whole we’re interested in more than the individual parts. Because what the MCU does on aggregate is apply a relatively consistent narrative structure to a bevy of different genres.

This isn’t done in the exact same way that Doctor Who does it, of course. Doctor Who has a narrative conceit that directly fuels its genre hopping. The Doctor can drop into any sort of story they please and muck it up. The MCU, on the other hand, accomplishes its genrefluidity by having access to any character Marvel hadn’t already sold off to Fox or Sony. And so over the course of Phase Two it moves from a technothriller to high fantasy to a political thriller to a Star Wars riff to its big crossover set piece before closing out with a heist comedy. And by Phase Three it’s cycling in even more approaches. The result moves more slowly than Doctor Who—only the political thriller and the Star Wars riff come out in 2014, for instance.…

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A Rather Large Announcement

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We do psychochronography here, and so recognize that any significant piece of information has a vast root structure of paths leading up to it and an equally vast structure of implications and consequences, both of which exist in stubborn defiance of any attempt to simply present it. When this information doubles as an event such that the moment of its revelation splits time into discrete “before” and “after” periods, the complexity of these structures only becomes more important. Stripping all of this away to formulate an Announcement, then, is a desperately theatrical and artificial act.

Nevertheless, I’ll frame this simply in terms of site business: the content previously published under the name Philip Sandifer will, going forward, be published under the name Elizabeth Sandifer.

There. Now we exist in a world of implications, which open up and branch outwards instead of leading portentiously towards the singular. For the sake of clarity, first a restatement: I am a transgender woman using female (she/her) pronouns. Now for things that follow from this.

In terms of this site going forward, basically nothing will change. I’ll still be starting TARDIS Erudtorum on Monday, I’m still publishing Volume 7 this year, I’m still getting back to Last War in Albion. That said, obviously this is going to shape and affect my perspective in future writing (and indeed has quietly been shaping it for some time already), including at some obvious points in covering the Capaldi era. Equally, I remain me, my interests and approaches remain mine, and this is not part of some radical revision of my basic worldview. I imagine I’ll do some very openly trans writing at some point—I’ve got the start of a storming epic in a Google Doc—but it’s not imminent, at least not here. (Twitter, on the other hand…)

In terms of books, this is the motivation behind the occasionally teased “all Eruditorum Press books are going out of print” thing: everything’s getting republished as Elizabeth. Neoreaction a Basilisk is ready to go and will be a seamless transition with no gap in availability over the next week or two. Once that’s out, I’ll be pulling everything else from sale while James works on updating the covers and I tinker the interiors. New editions will be rolled out one by one over the next few months, but if there’s anything you’re going to want, I recommend grabbing it now.

Most of the interior changes are being slated at “nice enough to reward the handful of people I know are going to rebuy them, but nothing so essential that anyone feels like they have to rebuy them.” TARDIS Eruditorum books will get a short and minor essay on a Big Finish thing or something similar. Recursive Occlusion will get something small somewhere in it. A Golden Thread will get a somewhat sizeable update that gets it caught up to the movie, while Last War in Albion may get essentially nothing—still deciding there. Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons will be going out of print for good.…

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Outside the Government: His Last Vow

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It’s January 12th, 2014. Pharrell Williams is happily at number one, with Beyonce, Eminem, Ellie Goulding, and Pitbull also charting. In news, a cold snap in the US has all fifty states with at least somewhere below freezing, and a chemical leak in West Virginia leaves 300,000 without clean water. In the UK, the death of Mark Duggan, which kicked off riots in the summer of 2011, is ruled to have been lawful, while Keith Wallis pleads guilty for falsely claiming to have heard Andrew Mitchell call some police officers “plebs.” 

On television, meanwhile, the shooting star that is Sherlock Series Three finishes its arc across the firmament with the Moffat script. His Last Vow is an odd thing. There are days on which I think it might be Moffat’s greatest ever script. But I mean “great” in its most complexly troubled sense. Moffat has been open about the fact that Series Seven of Doctor Who and The Day of the Doctor were miserable experiences. If the latter was him hauling himself back into fighting shape, then, this is the script with which he means to take back the mantle of being one of the most essential voices on television. But that means that this story lacks the runaway sense of triumph the fiftieth anniversary had. This is the long, hard title fight in which Moffat goes the distance with a set of ideas that are right on the edge of his capabilities. The result is harder, spikier, and far less approachable. It’s also the far greater accomplishment. Chris O’Leary, writing about “Station to Station,” describes the song thusly: “One of the many lies we tell children is that there’s no limit to the imagination. Of course there is. Even the most consuming and perceptive of minds reaches its borders and retreats. Expanding the mind is dog’s work, as grueling as it’s often fruitless; few attempt it, fewer succeed in it, and those who do often come out twisted and torn. In 1975, binging on cocaine, living in paranoid isolation and making a rock record, David Bowie succeeded.” One doubts Moffat’s version of this involved quite so much cocaine, but there is a similar sense of an artist clawing his way, bloodied and stunned, to a peak he knows even as he reaches it that he will never surpass. 

But while Moffat’s script is the element that’s pushing to new heights, it comes off because he’s backed by an absolutely staggering array of talent. Cumberbatch, Freeman, and especially Abbington rise to the ambition of the material, while Nick Hurran shows why he’s become one of Moffat’s most trusted collaborators. With Moffat at the frayed ends of his powers, he needs everyone to show up. They do, and the effect is an entire show determined to see just how far it can push things. In answering that question, then, we basically have to start at the ending, in which Moffat comes down firmly on the side of shooting Rupert Murdoch in the face. …

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The Proverbs of Hell 39/39: The Wrath of the Lamb

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THE WRATH OF THE LAMB: Reframing the title scheme for the back half of the season away from “Blake paintings” and towards “lines from Revelation,” and not entirely honestly. The title drop in the proceeding episode forces single vision, such that it can only refer to Will’s vengeance against Hannibal, although it’s not as though it would have been long on ambiguity without that.

I complained on Twitter a while back that there are no good instances of the deceptive edit, in which information is withheld from the audience purely by selectively editing around it so as to obscure it. The general problem with this is that it depends on selectively and covertly breaking the basic narrative codes of the medium, which state that editing is for communicating information, not for casual lying without any hints to this effect. Hannibal likely comes closer than most to being able to get away with it by the simple virtue of its editing never really suggesting a directly communicated reality in the first place. But the real reason it just about gets away with having an unseen cadaver in the room for this entire scene is just that the deception is mercifully short-lived.

It’s also worth noting that fully six minutes of this episode are pulled forward from “The Number of the Beast is 666.” To my knowledge the full details of the production of “The Wrath of the Lamb” have not yet been shared, but it’s evident that it was a troubled production, a fact that particularly affects the final fight scene, and the amount that had to get moved into it to get it up to its length seems to speak to that.

REBA MCCLANE: I drew a freak.

WILL GRAHAM: You didn’t draw a freak. You drew a man with a freak on his back. Nothing wrong with you, don’t let yourself believe there is.

REBA MCCLANE: I know there’s nothing wrong with me. In making friends, I try to be wary of people who foster dependency and feed on it. I’ve been with a few. The blind attract them.

WILL GRAHAM: Not just the blind.

It’s probably not the show’s deftest handling of blindness to use it as a basis for equating Reba and Will, but equally, the moment of shared empathy is important, especially as it’s the one opportunity to interact with someone other than Dolarhyde that Reba gets. The more interesting line, however, is Will’s defense of Dolarhyde, which grants the reality of his split personality in a way that leaves Dolarhyde himself oddly blameless. 

WILL GRAHAM: Molly and I want it to be the same.

HANNIBAL: When life becomes maddeningly polite, think about me. Think about me, Will, don’t worry about me.

There’s a cut to Hannibal’s line, which is scripted to begin “Mutual assurances you try to exchange in the dark and in the day will pass through some refraction, making them miss their mark.” One assumes it’s for pacing reasons so as to get to the punchline faster, and in turn set up Will’s retaliation, but its a pity, as it’s a good line.…

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