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:

November 2, 2016

Comics Reviews (November 2nd, 2016)

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Bitch Planet #9

Righteous and angry the way you want tis book to be, but… who’s Eleanor Doane again? I mean, the issue tells me somewhat, but clearly she’s a big part of the book’s underlying mythology, and, well, that’s always rough when a book’s as sporadic as this. This would work if it were coming out on an actual release schedule, but the “an issue every once in a while” is just killing it, and I’m increasingly contemplating switching to trade for it.

Animosity #3

The meta-arc of this one is feeling cloudy – there’s a big jump between the second issue and the third, enough of one that I went back to the second to refresh my memory, which was a mistake because I’d forgotten just how clumsy the end of that issue was, making the jump even more jarring. But on a single-issue level this is golden – an unsettling and provocative look at animal-human relationships that’s an absolute joy to read. I suspect its problems quite fitting together will eventually overwhelm it, but for now this is a highlight.

The Wicked + The Divine #23

An ambitious high-concept issue in which Gillen proceeds to get a bunch of real journalists to roleplay interviews with his characters and then write up those interviews as though they were real articles. There’s literal authorial self-insertion. Add to that some gorgeously lush portraits by Kevin Wada and you’ve got something that’s obviously a lot of fun, and that manages to seed hints for where the next arc of WicDiv is going as well. Shit like this is why this is one of the best books on the stands. …

October 31, 2016

Nightvisiting Review

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Something of a holding pattern episode, executing a bog standard premise whose primary virtue is clearly that it’s cheap and depends primarily on interior shots in which two people talk or street scenes in which static monster tendrils are strung about. This is, of course, not something to complain about – “the cheap one” is a thing Doctor Who has always had to grapple with. Sure, it ends up being the downside to the decision to drop the first two episodes together, in that you don’t really want your cheap holding pattern episode to come on your second week, but that’s a pretty minor complaint. And on the bright side, Class is intelligent enough to burn off “people are mysteriously visited in the night by their dead relatives” as the cheap midseason episode, which is more than can be said for Babylon 5, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or, the most obvious comparison, Torchwood.

On top of that, “Nightvisiting” has what can increasingly just be described as Class’s usual instinct to avoid genre defaults in favor of more interesting routes. For one thing, at no point are any of the main characters particularly tempted by the Lankin, so that at no point does the drama hinge on the fact that the audience knows genre tropes and the characters don’t. Particularly satisfying, after two episodes focusing pretty hard on his trauma, is Ram’s reaction to Rachel showing up at his window, which is basically to go “nope” and run like hell. But Tanya’s consistent and intelligent interrogation of the situation and eventual self-rescue is good stuff as well.

There are certainly some ways in which the script is sloppy. The idea that Tanya’s family constitutes the biggest reserve of grief in London on the two year anniversary of Tanya’s father’s death is… sloppy, though wisely buried in the denouement when things are happening quickly enough that you don’t notice. On the other hand, the sequestering of Charlie and Matteusz in the bedroom, lampshaded explicitly by Ms. Quill when they finally make it down to involve themselves in the plot, is hard to treat as anything other than a particularly clumsy bit of storytelling that serves to keep Matteusz at an odd remove from the main characters, dropping out of the story for an episode and then popping up having been thrown out of his house, as opposed to us getting to see him get thrown out. It’s odd, because there’s no obvious reason for him not to be given roughly the same weight that Tanya, Ram, April, and Charlie get, and yet he very clearly isn’t. It’s also a bit puzzling to do this as your third episode, such that your ghosts are all characters we’ve never seen before, which ends up being somewhat underwhelming. Tanya’s father is at least well-set up by the previous episode and the intro montage, but Mrs. Quill’s sister is an utterly damp squib.

But for everything that’s clumsy there are bits that are deft and intelligent.…

October 27, 2016

Comics Reviews (October 26th, 2016)

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The Ultimates #12

Well, they solve the artist-swapping problem that’s been killing this book, but the solution – getting Christian Ward in to do the final issue – is an odd one. Ward’s great, but he’s great at weird cosmic psychedelia, and this is an issue pretty heavy on people sitting in hallways and offices of government buildings. With a ton of plot information offloaded to, basically, “see other comics.” And a setup to The Ultimates², which I admit I’m not immediately excited by. The result is one of those very comicsy things, a final issue that fails utterly to bring anything to a satisfying conclusion. Still, the Ms. America stuff was nice, as it always is.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up The Marvel Universe

Finally got to check this out. Good, and at times delightful (the “draw Squirrel Girl” activity pages were brilliant), but I definitely came out of it feeling like an OGN was more Squirrel Girl than I necessarily wanted in a single dose. By the end it’s just not sparkling anymore, and the laughs felt fewer and further between than they did at the start. Not because the book isn’t still good, but because I just don’t think the Squirrel Girl style is suited to that sort of longform. This felt like a flabby and overlong issue as opposed to an OGN. Still good, but definitely not $20 of good.

New Avengers #17

Apparently this is a Civil War II tie-in? This isn’t even a red skies crossover. This is just an issue of New Avengers. Of course, since Civil War II is a car crash and I’m kinda less than impressed with Bendis’s “let’s tell the female writer who’s being harassed off Twitter that it isn’t comics fault” schtick today not actually being a tie-in as advertised in the cover fails to lose this book any points. Which means it gets to stand on the strength of its gonzo Al Ewing plotting, which is a perfectly good thing to rely upon. Nice emphatic twists that point towards an exciting resolution for the story Ewing’s been telling for more than a year here, and that presumably sets up U.S.Avengers whenever that starts.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #12

A delightful wrap-up to the second arc, which maybe on the whole feels like it went on longer than it needed to (the first one did too, actually – six issues is a rough length for a superhero book). There’s really nothing but good things to say about a comic that involves a rampaging lego triceratops. But as it happens there’s top notch character work and some of the funniest responses to a profession of love in comics to boot.

Ms. Marvel #12

A tight and charming done-in-one with a shockingly good guest artist in Mirka Andolfo. Kamala goes to visit family in Pakistan and, inevitably, ends up fighting crime. Good character beats, a delightful opportunity to see a superhero story in an unusual setting and dealing with different issues.…

October 25, 2016

Theses on Trump 16

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This essay is going to need some substantial (though obviously not total) revision, and keeping the original in circulation feels wrong. A revised version will appear in the generally available edition of Neoreaction a Basilisk that will come out in 2017. …

October 24, 2016

C-Beams Glitter (Mega Man X3, Rockman and Forte)

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Hello again. Where are we now, January 1996? Best we start wrapping this up, I suppose.

In a sense I never left, of course. Let’s see. Summer of 1995 was the first year of CTY, the big nerd camp that was the defining social framework of late middle school/early high school for me. Place those three weeks between Civilization and Chrono Trigger. I was still playing video games, but favored the PC – I got a Playstation around the time of Final Fantasy VII, and would get a Nintendo 64 for Christmas at the end of 1996, in my first year of high school, but neither captivated me. I was starting to intellectually specialize – at CTY I’d taken what was basically a college-level intro comp course, and was beginning to think of myself as, if not “a writer,” at least “a guy who could write.” This coincided with the regression of my ability in math, previously my best subject, as the handwriting requirements of algebra and ADD-taxing nature of drilling a problem over and over again made the subject stop favoring me. Indeed, the best paper I wrote at CTY was a descriptive essay about how much I’d hated my 7th grade math teacher. (Meanwhile, I got on quite well with my 7th grade English teacher, and ran into her at the supermarket earlier this year.) From there I’d gradually deflect from aspiring towards fiction to realizing a greater strength in criticism, a bias I’ve yet to correct despite occasional efforts.

But my exile from the Super Nintendo era was short-lived. The summer of 1997 introduced me to the wonders of NESticle, and I dove happily into the suddenly opened archives of my childhood. Then, in the fall of 1998, I got my learner’s permit, and early in 1999 could drive. This being western Connecticut, the main available attraction was the same thing it had been since the 1980s evenings spent with my mother: the Danbury Fair Mall. Or, in my specific case, the Funcoland about a block further down Backus Avenue, where I dove into a more materialist phase of retrogaming by picking up a NES and, not long after, a SNES.

Which is to say that there was a period of my life these games belonged to. Both of them were admittedly on the tricky end. Mega Man X3 was late enough in the SNES lifecycle that it was a relatively rare cartridge that coust upwards of $40 – I didn’t get to it until college when I’m pretty sure I drove upwards of forty-five minutes to a Gamestop that had one. Rockman and Forte, on the other hand, was originally an emulation concern – I remember playing it on the eOne my mother had bought on a lark, which probably means in early 2000. (I remember being baffled by a bug where jumping would simply fail on occasion, which I finally, after extensive testing, traced to the cheap keyboard that shipped with the flagrant iMac knockoff, which was apparently wired so that a particular key combination that was common when playing a side-scroller with the arrow keys would lock out a handful of other keys.)…

October 23, 2016

For Tonight We Might Die & The Coach With The Dragon Tattoo

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Right, so apparently we’re doing these by a margin of $3 on the Patreon. Cool. Thank you all for your support, and if you enjoy the reviews please consider supporting Eruditorum Press.

When I was waxing rhapsodically about Mr. Robot a few weeks ago I praised it for being a show that didn’t feel done revealing its range. By that standard at least, Class is a rousing success. The downside of this is that it also doesn’t quite feel like it knows what it wants to be, but that’s not inherently a bad thing for a show about teenagers. It’s smart and full of ideas, at least, and if these first two episodes don’t contain any moments of outright genius they at least clearly belong to a show that could deliver some.

It’s also a show that’s acutely aware of the expectations that are going to be put on it. Its opening gag is a Bechdel test joke, it namechecks Buffy with aplomb, it’s got the obligatory Peter Capaldi sequences, it’s given ostentatious levels of thought to its notions of diversity, and there’s almost a conscious sense of “OK, what’s the exact halfway point between Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures?” In the first episode this all gets a bit oppressive, and the show can fairly be accused of trying too hard, but even there it’s got some real charm.

The second episode, meanwhile… I mean, there’s just so much potential in that cut from a Hannibal pastiche to the (one fears over-)aggressively youth-friendly credit sequence. And the episode mostly aims to pay that off. Its denouement is genuinely ballsy, underplaying the way in which it subverts a genre standard into something much smarter about masculinity and abuse. And this is typical of the comparison. Where the first episode seems at pains to make sure it lampshades all the moments where it’s being derivative and struts at all the moments where it’s not, the second is much smarter about what it overplays and underplays. The moment where it kills Mr. Armitage does some varied heavy-lifting, both from Buffy and in terms of ostentatiously establishing the show’s “anything can happen” cred. But what’s interesting is how the show revels in the transgressive glee of ripping apart the sympathetic headmaster inherited from the parent show but then undersells the degree to which doing so genuinely alters where things are going.

Which feeds into the most interesting card the show plays, Miss Quill. Like everything in it she’s cut from existing and well-defined cloth, but putting what we might describe as the “Moffatrix” trope in the Sarah Jane role is an inspired choice. She’s consistently the thing that most enlivens the first episode, at times managing to make even Greg Austin’s character (basically the Luke Smith role, only actually gay not Dumbledore gay) seem interesting. I don’t think Jack’s watching this, and he’s probably happier that way, but I admit that I wondered what he’d think of the ex-revolutionary who openly and not without reason accuses her situation of being slavery.…

October 19, 2016

Comics Reviews (October 19th, 2016)

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Rough week. Let’s get started.

Black Panther #7

Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn’t actually think that ending works, does he? I mean, everything else is the sort of thing he usually does, which is to say use an issue to advance each of his plotlines a few pages with no real thought to the issue’s overall cohesion and often minimal thought to whether the events depicted form a satisfying chunk of story in their own right, but as I’ve been saying for, well, seven issues now, that’s legitimately hard stuff that I’m willing to give him time to work out. But come on. Other than that, no new problems here and no new merits either.

Patsy Walker aka Hellcat #11

Another oddly organized issue – the cut away to Black Cat for the final cliffhanger scene is jarring and ends up feeling underweight just by dint of the lack of scene length and the fact that we skipped over Bailey actually getting captured. And it’s not like the previous scene ends on a particularly good end-of-storyline-for-the-issue note either. As always some lovely bits in the middle, but the overall messiness detracts.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #13

The best of a weak bunch – this isn’t a particularly extraordinary issue of Squirrel Girl. The Ant Man jokes mostly fall flat (although I liked his bewilderment that Doreen actually talks to the squirrels versus bossing them around), consisting as they do of “major guest star acts one way the entire time.” There’s wit and charm, and an actually competently structured issue, but it’s still nothing near this comic at its best.…

October 18, 2016

Pex Lives 36: The Curse of Peladon, or, #imwithher

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We’re pleased to announce a new episode of Pex Lives. The description follows:

Look! Just when you thought we were down and out, we leap off the canvas and throw a few more hits.

We spend our first half catching up, then have an extended chat about Kevin’s hero Mike Love of the Beach Boys before dropping into ever cheerful Current Events. After that, we talk about a western from 1951 called the Furies and then just a little sprinkling of your Doctor Who content with the topical Curse of Peladon.

You can download that here.

…

October 17, 2016

Cultural Marxism 5: Excession

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Reflecting on the fact that his last book was going to turn out to be the relatively slender and small-scale The Quarry, Iain Banks made the observation that “the real best way to sign off would have been with a great big rollicking Culture novel.” It’s difficult to imagine he didn’t mean Excession. Like The State of the Art before it, Excession is a novel about pushing the premise of the Culture to a breaking point. But where The State of the Art picked an approach to this that was fundamentally a dead end, Excession comes up with one that’s thrilling in its boundless possibilities. Ironically, it basically does this by taking the premise of The State of the Art and turning it on its ear. Where that novella asked “what if the Culture met us,” Excession asks “what if the Culture met a race even more advanced than itself?”

This leads to Excession’s – and arguably the Culture’s – most enduring contribution to the broader culture, namely the phrase Outside Context Problem. The passage where Banks describes this is very possibly the most-quoted paragraph of his career, and with obvious reason:

The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass… when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.

There’s a lot to love here. Banks has always been a witty writer, but here he’s visibly taking on Douglas Adams as a major influence (also apparent in the book’s other great line about Outside Context Problems, namely that they’re something “most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop” – the performative hesitation of “rather in the same way” prior to the sentence metaphor is a dead giveaway, as is the oblique turn of the metaphor, which is in the same basic vein as Adams’s famous “hung in the sky in much the way bricks don’t,” although the harmony of form and function involved in having the sentence end with “a sentence encountered a full stop” is a bit of sparkle above and beyond the obvious influence). But he’s also just got a damn good idea there. Contact between civilizations of wildly differing technological capabilities is a sci-fi standard, but discussions of the phenomenon are almost always framed from the perspective of the technologically superior species – “first contact” and “the Prime Directive” and the like.…

October 15, 2016

Saturday Waffling (October 15th, 2016)

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Long time no waffle. Let’s see. First off, promotional considerations, which is to say that Jed Blue’s got a Kickstarter for an essay collection of his writings on anime. Jed’s a longtime friend of Eruditorum Press and a hell of a good critic, and if anime’s your bag I have zero doubt his book will be phenomenal, so please check it out.

I should also probably mention, since we’re a week away from the premiere, that Class reviews are still $13 from happening on the Patreon. But if we fail to meet that goal, I’ll still write short reviews of every episode for $2+ Patrons, so if you back the Patreon at $2 a week you’re guaranteed reviews either way. If you need to cap your pledges at <5 a month (the most I’ll ever end up charging you for) then that’s cool too – if you can avoid capping at just one pledge a month I’d appreciate it, but all support is always welcome.

As for where I’m at… Getting towards the end of “Theses on Trump,” which may end up having a different title at the end, but which I’ll refer to that way until I publish. It’s good stuff – I feel like I’m continuing to get a different read on the most oversignified topic in the world right now. Which is the key thing. And it’s not a piece that’s going to date instantly after the election, although I’ll be getting it up before the election.

Once that’s wrapped and I’ve got the Neoreaction a Basilisk books sent out (having a few hoop jumps with Lulu in pursuit of saving myself a couple hundred bucks, but looks like orders will go out next week) I’ll finally put the last formatting touches on Last War in Albion and open pre-orders for that, with books shipping in time for the holidays. Safe to assume I’ll release the long-embargoed next chapter around then, and probably start on chapter 7 too, as I’m starting to get itchy on that project again. Which is nice.

Blake annotations are delayed a bit, as my head’s been turned by a different project that’s more timely, but that also satisfies some of the “do something with a clear traditionalist streak” urges that I’ve been having in the wake of Neoreaction a Basilisk. Right now it’s firmly in the long slow research phase as I watch/read a whole bunch of stuff. Including, for the first time in any substantial project I’ve done actually, a whole bunch of anime. So speaking of which, I should go back Jed’s Kickstarter myself…

Actually, hell, I’ve been talking about it a fair amount on Tumblr, so let’s just put the cards on the table: I’m leaning pretty hard towards my next bespoke project being a history of cyberpunk, specifically one that avoids getting bogged down in proto-cyberpunk and instead treats the genre as basically starting with the twin punch of Neuomancer and Blade Runner in the mid-80s (with a soft start in 1980 along with Gibson’s career).…

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