Eruditorum Press

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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:

Hello From The Cracks (The Last War in Albion Book Two Chapter Six: The Abyss Gazes Also)

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If you enjoy this and haven’t already, please consider buying the book version of The Last War in Albion Volume 1, which collects the pre-Watchmen history of the War. Your support keeps this project going.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Actually, this is basically a great jumping on point for new readers, though it helps to know that the previous chapter left off with the line “We do it because we are compelled.”

The line, of course, belongs to Rorschach, the glamorous poison at the heart of Watchmen’s appeal. Moore is self-effacing about the character these days, joking that his popularity is down to the fact that Moore “had forgotten that actually to a lot of comic fans that smelling, not having a girlfriend – these are actually kind of heroic.” But unlike a lot of Moore’s self-deprecation, there’s an edge to this quip. He’s emphasizing his failure to anticipate the reaction to Rorschach, but only as a means to insult Rorschach’s fans even more spectacularly. There are obviously a lot of things about Watchmen that have gone sour for Moore, but at times it seems that there is nothing he resents quite as deeply as the reception of Rorschach.

Figure 977: The Zodiac Killer, a Californian serial killer named for his literally cryptic letters, has nothing to do with either Watchmen or From Hell.

In some ways it’s no wonder. It’s not just the throngs of fans eager to tell Moore how much they admired Rorschach, a phenomenon that is surely associated with the sudden spike in Moore’s popularity that turned comics conventions into deeply unpleasant experiences where he felt crushed and mobbed (the usual anecdote is the time a fan followed Moore into the bathroom to get his autograph, but his recurring nightmare of hands grabbing at him perhaps more accurately captures the sense of horror Moore felt at this). It’s also the sorts of people who identify with Rorschach, a list whose most eye-popping member is perhaps 2016 US Presidential Candidate Ted Cruz, who included him along with Spider-Man, Wolverine, Batman, and Iron Man on a list of his favorite superheroes. Given that Ted Cruz is a warmongering homophobe opposed to any form of social welfare, this is, to say the least, not the sort of endorsement Moore was seeking. And while Cruz is just one (deeply idiosyncratic) datapoint, the truth is that it’s not hard to see why a lunatic right-winger famous for alienating virtually everybody he’s ever worked with might view Rorschach as an aspirational figure.

The fundamental problem at the heart of this is simply that Rorschach is an unsettlingly fascinating character. Even Moore, for all the reservations he would come to have about him, freely admits that “Rorschach was one of the characters I enjoyed writing most.” And no wonder – think of a classic line in Watchmen and the odds are overwhelming that you’re thinking of a Rorschach line, probably either a bit of his opening monologue or “none of you understand.…

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Book Launch: The Last War in Albion Volume 1

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Eruditorum Press is pleased to announce that, at long last, the first volume of The Last War in Albion, Phil Sandifer’s epic critical history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, is available for purchase. Covering the period from Morrison’s earliest professional sales in 1978 to just before the publication of Watchmen #1 in 1986, the book charts the beginnings of two of the most fascinating careers in the history of comics. The book features extensive looks at Swamp Thing, V For Vendetta, Marvelman, The Ballad of Halo Jones, Captain Britain, and more, including the first detailed study of Morrison’s early superhero strip Captain Clyde since 1985. 

The book is available in both print and digital editions at the following locations.

Print: US ($22.99), UK (£18.99)

Digital: US Kindle ($4.99), UK Kindle (£4.99), Other E-Readers ($4.99) 

Please note that the digital editions, for a bunch of very stupid and boring reasons, do not have illustrations. They do, however, have a link at the end of the book where you can download a version with illustrations. We apologize for this profoundly stupid inconvenience, but felt that it was preferable to having to charge $9.99 for digital editions. 

Thanks to everyone who’s supported this project through its painfully long gestation. Formatting this was by far the hardest book I’ve ever put out, but I’m really proud of the end product, and think you’ll enjoy it a lot. If you do, please spread the word and post reviews of the book, both on Amazon and elsewhere. These books keep Eruditorum Press afloat.

In particular, as always, I want to thank James Taylor for his inevitably phenomenal cover work. He talks about the process on his blog.

Also, be on the lookout for some fun content over the next week to promote this book, including the long-awaited Chapter Six of The Last War in Albion Volume 2 (in which, among other things, I give The Killing Joke its due) on Friday and a very fun podcast on Monday. 

Thanks for the support, and enjoy the book. …

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Build High for Happiness 4: Vers Une Architecture (1923)

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new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction

The brutalist architecture that High-Rise does not critique has many fathers (and essentially no mothers), but its Anthony Royal figure is no doubt Le Corbusier, the pseudonym of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, whose 1923 manifesto Vers Une Architecture (first published in English as Towards a New Architecture, but these days called simply Toward an Architecture) laid out the principles of a new, sleek modernist style, and whose Unité d’Habitation design, used as the blueprint for several 1950s housing projects, defined the specifically brutalist style with its use of rough (or, in French, brut) concrete.

As an architect, Le Corbusier is a giant. Whatever crimes may be laid at the feet of the movement he spawned (and there are many), his actual buildings were iconoclastic and compelling, and remain striking to this day. But it is in many ways as a polemicist that he really shines. Modernism produced no shortage of manifestos, but any list of the great ones that excludes Vers Une Architecture is simply off its head. It is a work of masterful provocation, full of taunting and grandiose slogans. The most famous of these, and thus, given the nature of Le Corbusier’s impact, the most important is his declaration about a third of the way into the book that “a house is a machine for living in.” Ballard echoes it, almost certainly consciously, in the first chapter of High-Rise when he describes the building as “a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation. Its staff of air-conditioning conduits, elevators, garbage-disposal chutes and electrical-switching systems provided a never-failing supply of care and attention,” a litany that echoes Corbusier’s next sentence, “Baths, sun, hot water, cold water, controlled temperature, food conservation, hygiene, beauty through proportion.”

But the Ballard quote quietly embeds the critique of Le Corbusier when it notes the distinction between serving the collective residents of the building and the isolated individual. At first glance, this is counterintuitive. Even before his turn towards the harsh greys of raw concrete, Corbusier’s aesthetic had a clear austerity to it that’s implicit in the cold inhumanity of the word “machine.” (Note Ballard’s subsequent use of it to describe how people like Laing “thrived like an advanced species of machine” in the high-rise, and for that matter Corbusier’s own praise for men who are “intelligent, coolheaded, and calm” and in touch with their “mechanical side.”) Indeed, the declaration comes in the course of a three-part essay in which he admires the construction of ocean liners, airplanes, and automobiles, praising the uniform principles of their design across multiple manufacturers, their forms standardized by the needs of the clearly stated problem they solve. The statement “a house is a machine for living in” is, for Le Corbusier, essentially equivalent to the observation that the form of an airplane is not that of “a bird or a dragonfly, but a machine for flying.” He praises at length the long and uniform promenades of ocean liners, describing them as “pure, crisp, clear, clean.”…

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Father’s Day Commentary

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Jack and I are pleased to bring you our commentary for Father’s Day. Be warned, this may be basically peak off-topic. I may need to change our brand after this. Still, if Jack and I talking about whatever amuses you, here’s some of it.

God I suck at marketing.

Listen here.…

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Build High for Happiness 3: Paradise Towers (1987)

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outrage at the fact that anyone’s life can be so pathetically limited

Going into directing High-Rise, which would see him working with the highest budget of his career, Ben Wheatley directed a pair of episodes of Doctor Who on the logic that working fast and on the tight budget of television would be, as he put it, “like a boot camp” that would leave him “fighting fit to go into High-Rise.” But the choice of Doctor Who was fitting in another regard, in that one of the closest existing things to an adaptation of High-Rise prior to the Wheatley-Jump film was the 1987 Doctor Who serial Paradise Towers.

Like Wheatley’s two episodes, which served as the first two stories for Peter Capaldi’s incarnation of Doctor Who and as the first two stories for newly installed executive producer Brian Minchin, Paradise Towers was one of the opening stories for both Sylvester McCoy’s iteration of the character and script editor (at the time essentially one of two people filling the role now filled by the executive producers) Andrew Cartmel. And indeed, Wheatley watched Paradise Towers in preparation for High-Rise, although his conclusion was that it “more like an amalgam of A Clockwork Orange and other stuff” than an adaptation of High-Rise.

This is not entirely fair of Wheatley. Certainly it’s clear that High-Rise was a major influence on Paradise Towers, a story set in a crumbling modernist tower block that has fallen to anarchy, with gangs roaming the hallways, cannibalistic residents, a triad of factions within the building, a focus on climbing the tower, and a key scene set at a swimming pool. Certainly Stephen Wyatt, the writer of the story, makes no secret of the inspiration. Still, Wheatley’s right that it’s not an adaptation per se. Given that a key part of what High-Rise does is its “science fiction without futurity” approach, moving the concept to a more traditionally science fiction setting in which the tower block is on an alien world and has homicidal cleaning robots fundamentally changes things. Adding a figure like Doctor Who that combines Wilder’s insurrectionary tendencies with an aristocratic bearing shifts the mix even more.

But perhaps the biggest change is simply that there’s no character in Paradise Towers who even remotely resembles Ballard/Laing. Although the extremes of the class structure are retained through the Royal-equivalent Great Architect Kroagnon, the actual tenants of Paradise Towers – the cannibalistic Rezzies or the girl gang Kangs – are all clearly working class, and the conflict between the two groups is more generational than economic. Entirely absent from Wyatt’s tale, however, is the hyper-adapted middle class that serves as Ballard’s primary focus. On the whole, however, this decision is relatively on-point. The modernist high-rise, at least in the UK context in which Ballard and Wyatt were writing, was always aimed at the poor, seen as a smaller-footprinted alternative to the sprawling terraced housing in which poor people had previously been housed. More to the point, in the twelve years between High-Rise and Paradise Towers it became increasingly clear that that utopian rhetoric with which the terraces’ demolition and replacement had been justified was falling rather short of the reality.…

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The Lost

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There’s something grimly and hilariously inevitable about Class ending with the Weeping Angels. I mean, it’s not as though “The Weeping Angels try to invade Earth” is a particularly gripping premise in and of itself, but after a fourth episode of the Shadow Kin it’s more than slightly galling to see the show offer such a straightforwardly superior alternative, as though it wants to remind us one more time on the way out that this could have been a much more interesting show than it was.

Instead we get yet another case of the show being pretty good with a clear attitude of “will this do?” to it. The big bad returns. There are some carefully selected secondary character deaths – enough to flag “it’s the season finale and things are serious,” not enough to actually require that we grapple with it on a level other than having Ram or Tanya shout “my dad”/”my mom” in suitably distraught tones a few times. The trigger on the MacGuffin gets pulled, revelations are made about next season, and we end with a cliffhanger instead of a narrative resolution.

It’s not that there aren’t good bits. On the whole I quite liked the “if we kill them are we any better than them,” “yes” exchange, though it’s even better in the gifset version I’ve seen floating around Tumblr where it instead cuts to Tanya saying “white people” back in “Detaned.” Tanya fighting was delightful, even if it’s difficult to imagine how the 5-10 minutes of training she had with Quill could, you know, matter.

But a lot more noticeable than the good bits of the episode, or indeed the bad bits, are simply the bits that aren’t there at all. For instance, Corakinus’s plan is… what, exactly? Matteusz will be “five” in his count-up of kills, which handily implies a revenge scheme along the lines of “he’s going to kill someone close to each of our main characters,” except of course Quill and April don’t actually have anyone available (since we’ve apparently decided April’s mother can’t be killed, presumably because that would actually have consequences) the murders are distributed as one for Ram, three for Tanya, one for Charlie. All of which apparently exists to get April to return to the Underneath with him, except his actual plan is just to destroy the Earth apparently? I mean, you can tell how little actual weight is being put on this by the obligatory “but we beat you,” “yeah but we’re back” exchange between April and Corakinus, which all but counts on the fact that the viewer is sufficiently uninvested in the outcome of the midseason two-parter to just go “oh, OK, sure.” For the most part this isn’t a problem per se – the episode has enough momentum that a bit of incoherence in Corakinus’s plan doesn’t really register. But it illustrates a lack – the degree to which there’s nothing going on here but the raw, unfiltered bombast of a season finale with the big bad.…

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Build High for Happiness 2: High Rise (1975)

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ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures

As the precise center of the hypercube, Ballard’s novel is even more tightly bound into 1975 than the Wheatley-Jump film. Lacking the externalizing vantage point of futurity, Ballard cannot look at what the brutalist tower blocks became, and is forced instead to extrapolate out from what they are. Which is, of course, Ballard’s basic job description. He’s a science fiction writer by trade. His first four novels imagined apocalyptic scenarios, starting with The Wind From Nowhere, in which the world is destroyed by constant hurricane-force winds, and subsequently The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World, which feature flood, drought, and weird crystalline growths appearing on everything. But starting with his alarmingly experimental 1970 novel The Atrocity Exhibition, a series of reveries in which human bodies, mediated culture, and material carnage of the 1960s blend together into one of the most unsettling psychic landscapes of the 1970s (no mean feat given the decade), his career took a different track.

This resulted in a series of three books of which High-Rise was the culmination. These novels were still science fiction, but of an unusual sort in which there are no imaginative technologies or futuristic conceits. Instead they are all set in the present day of the 1970s, with Ballard taking the technologies and social structures of his time and twisting them to their most suggestively violent excesses. And so in Crash the automobile becomes a source of infinite perversions, in Concrete Island the median of a highway becomes an inescapable island, and in High-Rise, well, you know.

But it would be a mistake to read Ballard as particularly concerned with any of these technologies per se. Wheatley has proclaimed that “it’s important that the film isn’t seen as a critique of Brutalist architecture,” a goal he’s not entirely successful at, but it’s absolutely true of the novel. Ballard famously described his approach to science fiction as rejecting the notion of outer space in favor of what he called inner space, “an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge.” In this regard, High-Rise is no more a critique of brutalist architecture than The Drowned World is of water.

This is not to say that the building, or indeed brutalist modernism, are irrelevant to Ballard’s project. High-Rise has its own architecture, composed according to a structural logic that provides much of the book’s actual energy and momentum as it moves towards its conclusion. The book cycles among three viewpoint characters – Laing, Wilder, and Royal – in increasingly shorter stretches, starting with three consecutive chapters for each character, then a second pass with two, and finally a third pass through with single chapters for each character, with Royal’s final chapter further fragmenting so that Wilder breaks into it at the end, and a final Laing chapter as befitting his eventual ascension within the building.…

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Eruditorum Press Books Make Great Christmas Presents

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It’s not still Black Friday or Cyber Monday or any shit like that, right? OK, good.

So, first of all, thanks everyone for funding us through eight Class reviews on Patreon. They’ve been fun, they’ve been infuriating, it’s always nice to write adjacent to Doctor Who again. I’ll keep the $300 threshold for a Return of Doctor Mysterio review, and expect S10 to be in the same general range, maybe a little higher because I can probably get away with it. Still cheaper than making me go episode by episode through the Chibnall era might end up being.

Second of all, I did want to politely direct your attention to a few things that might be of interest during the holiday shopping season. Supporting independent leftist media is a revolutionary act, donchaknow. First of all there’s Josh Marsfelder’s Vaka Rangi, A briliant critical history of Star Trek that anyone who enjoyed TARDIS Eruditorum will get a kick out of. For the smart Star Trek fan in your life. Or because you want him to be in a good mood when I try to get him to podcast about Star Trek: Discovery next year.

Second, there’s the myriad of books I’ve written. Nothing new yet this year, though note the word “yet,” but all the old favorites like the first six volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum, A Golden Thread, the book on Flood I did with Alex Reed, and the Choose Your Own Adventure-style edition of Recursive Occlusion. Plus one I’d like to highlight, Guided By the Beauty of Their Weapons, my 2015 essay collection on thinking progressively about science fiction in the face of the alt-right. If you’re minded to start 2016 by thinking about fighting back, I’m comfortable saying it’s one of the most up-to-date books on the market.

Finally, I am going to get Last War in Albion for sale on Amazon in time for fairly easy Christmas delivery, so if that’s a thing you want/want someone to get you, rest assured it can happen. For those budgeting, it’ll be $4.99 in ebook and somewhere in the low $20s for print. Announcement when it’s ready. (Kickstarter backers, full update tomorrow.)

And as always, even if you can’t afford to give any money to support the blog, thanks for reading.

Oh, and I know loads of people who are in the general orbit of the blog have cool stuff for sale that people who read this blog might want to buy or put on their lists. If that’s you, please, post in comments. And if you’ve still got presents to buy for awesome people, check the comments.…

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Pex Lives 37: The Mind Robber

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We’re pleased to announce a new episode of Pex Lives – one that’s actually about Doctor Who at that. (You remember Doctor Who, right? It’s that show about hope that doesn’t air in years like 2016.) Specifically, it’s about The Mind Robber, i.e. the twelfth greatest Doctor Who story ever. There’s also discussion about Fidel Castro, America’s inexorable slide into a dystopian hellscape, and childhood mindscapes.

You can listen to that here.…

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