Eruditorum Press

Cuck the police

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:

Fenris Wulf: Loki’s Child (2016 edition). A witty political satire using pop music! I bet you’re delighted already.

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A guest post by David Gerard.

Every field has its standard ways to fuck up. Experienced artists never do these in public, but you’ll see the lesser lights fall for them if you go looking. Someone gets a rush of blood and is struck by aninspiration to do something different, something the big guys aren’t doing, for a new take on things! Not realising that the experienced artists don’t do these things because they don’t work.

Like writing a novel about the pop industry. No, better: a political allegory in the form of a novel about the pop industry. No, better still: a right-wing fever dream political allegory in the form of a novel about the pop industry. Yep, that’ll show ’em all!

Phil Sandifer tweeted a “hey, look what I just stepped in”:

As a connoiseur of the worst of popular culture — and novels about the music industry are definitely the worst of popular culture — I foolishly looked. (Doing a great swan dive naked into the abyss and wallowing while sending back reports probably involves staring at some point.)

The least-unreadable examples of this species of folly, that don’t make you shout “WRONG! WRONG! BULLSHIT!” twice a page, tend to be thin fictionalisations of real events; plenty of fucked-up shit happens in the music industry that makes people go “someone should write a book about this.” Platinum Logic by Tony Parsons fails as an even slightly coherent novel, but every lurid and tawdry incident in that book is a version of something that happened, and spotting the players is the fun part.

There are genuinely good novels that have the music industry as a theme — Pratchett’s Soul Music, Banks’ Espedair Street — but these tend not to be about the music or the industry as such, and avoid going into too much detail even as they slip in the in-jokes. Even The Commitments, which is literally about a band. They resist the urge to be didactic. It’s a trepidatious endeavour, though: get the details even slightly wrong and you look like a fool.

Fenris Wulf gets the details mostly right. The problem is everything else. 

“Hi, I’m Fenris. I’ve considered myself to be a LaVeyan Satanist for about 10 years, and I also embrace a Lokian version of Asatru, as my name indicates.”

Loki’s Child is published by Castalia House, i.e. Vox Day, the abovementioned human dumpster fire, who is now most famous for doing his damnedest to fuck up the Hugo Awards with the Rabid Puppies.

I thought Day was the author of this thing — “Fenris Wolf” was the name of his 1990s video game studio, and he was once in a band with minor hit records so he’s brushed up against the business. But Vox is not known for either patience or attention to detail, and this is a work the author’s been polishing and polishing for years — he put the first version up as Record Producer from Dimension X in 2005, then publicised the rewrite as Loki’s Child in this 2011 post to a fan board for Ayn Rand’s right-wing political philosophy Objectivism:

The novel gets progressively more ingenious, and it exposes the disgusting evil of the nihilist Left in a way that hasn’t been done before.

…

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Comics Reviews (September 7th, 2016)

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Glitterbomb #1

Kieron Gillen was on Twitter yesterday making a very good point about a standard first issue structure where you open by showing the interesting thing then cut back and recap how you got there, which is that it’s a weak structure. I pointed out, in particular, that it’s a TV structure based on fear that someone will change the channel at the first commercial break, as opposed to a comics structure where the concern is that they won’t come back next month. Gillen wasn’t talking about Glitterbomb, as it only came out today, but it’s a case in point – on page 2 I was 100% in for what the book was doing. By the issue’s end, I was bored and wishing we could get back to that bit where it was interesting. It wouldn’t quite be as simple as not doing the flash forward structure – if you did the issue in chronological order Farrah’s first kill would defang the end. But still, it’s a lackluster approach that puts the moment of big emphasis in the wrong part of the issue. 

Eclipse #1

Competent but unexceptional sci-fi mystery. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing that immediately announces itself as transcendently brilliant and must-read either. Some good images, but could probably have used to do a little more character work and a little less worldbuilding. 

Mercury Heat #11

Good stuff – this arc slowed down rather a lot in the middle, but it gets off to a proper roar again here, and you start to see how it’s possible that we could be leading to a semi-satisfying book ending with the next issue. (Although I wish it had gotten one more arc – this is good stuff and I trust Gillen that it’ll come to a conclusion, but it’s also clearly not the plot he’d have picked to go out on.) The first ten issues of this are available as part of the currently running Uber Kickstarter, and if you like 2000 AD-flavored hard SF, it’s definitely one you wish you’d checked out.

Kill or Be Killed #1-2

Not sure how I missed the first one of this. The Brubaker/Phillips noir stuff has historically left me a bit cold, but this has a wicked sense of humor and a really compelling narrative voice that makes it feel vigorous and fun and daring in exactly the way previous Brubaker/Phillips things have not. It’s notable that this has much of the same premise as that ghastly Demonic comic that came out a few weeks ago – reading them side by side would be an excellent demonstration of good vs trite and mediocre writing. Also interesting to compare is Scarlet – there’s a similar case of “let’s take vigilante justice as a morally serious concept.” I hope it doesn’t end up going too blandly noir as a result – I don’t demand that our protagonist “get away with it” by any stretch of the imagination, and the book’s discussion of that notion pretty firmly mitigates against the idea that it could end that way, but straightforward “no murder really is wrong” will be tremendously unsatisfying.…

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Alt (Chrono Trigger)

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It’s not about changing history; not really. One does change history, yes, but that is not the point, at least in the conventional sense. Normally we change history to alter present circumstances, after all. Here, however, we change history to alter the future, with the present remaining not fixed, but largely conceptualized as a somewhat indifferent midpoint between the two poles – strangely unimportant to the actual story being told.

On the other hand, the apocalypse is set in 1999, which is to say that it was our own impending eschaton – the end of the world we were thoroughly fixated upon by 1995. We’re less than a year out from Doctor Who’s ridiculously and pointlessly millennial American reboot. Bowie was about to launch on tour with Nine Inch Nails to promote Outside, the start (and sole piece) of his millennium-ending superproject. It’s the year that Seven hits, more murderous paranoia piling up in the cultural gutters. The greatest magician of the age is finishing up his diagnosis of the previous century’s grisly denouement, turning his attention to the task of birthing the new aeon. I go to CTY for the first time, the beginning of a genuine realization that yes, I had a tribe, it was just geographically mis-distributed. AOL was in its boom years. It was, in other words, strange fucking days.

The game’s present, meanwhile, is 1000 AD, squarely in the middle ages, which are portrayed as a standard JRPG technological medieval aesthetic – the sort of thing where there are stoves and refrigerators but no cars or airplanes, and the government consists of a hereditary monarchy whose castle is surrounded by a forest full of monsters. There’s both a tomboy princess (water-affiliated and your first healer) and a steampunk inventor (also female, satisfyingly, as is the later prehistoric barbarian). Making up the past is 600 AD, i.e. also the middle ages, portrayed as such in a more traditional European fantasy milieu (by the time the Byronic Magus with purple flowing hair shows up in that timeline the game’s doing enough genre fusion that it doesn’t jar), which is a terribly cute conceit. Rounding out the timestream are a 2300 AD “domes in a radioactive wasteland” dystopia, a 65,000,000 BC “dinosaurs and early humans” set piece, and a late addition of a 12,000 BC timeline that’s basically Atlantis with the serial number filed off. (Which, notably, means Chrono Trigger is a retelling of The Time Monster made by actual Buddhists.)

The relationship between this and our world is strange. It’s modeled on ours without having any particular connection to or relationship with it. It does not seek to reflect any particular concerns with our world. There’s a vaguely ecological bent to Lavos and the destruction of the world, but it’s vague to the point of being essentially contentless. Past that, this isn’t a game that’s about anything as such.

This is mirrored, in a key sense, in its production. It’s silly to try to identify where the notion of the AAA game began – the term arose in the late 90s, yes, but the idea of the tentpole game that’s designed with the clear intention of it being a hit has been around for ages.…

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Comics Reviews (August 31st, 2016)

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In a smidge of a hurry today, so I haven’t had time to look at what’s out next week yet.

Ms. Marvel #10

The bits that work are typically brilliant – the “nine years earlier” intro in particular is charming. But Wilson can tend towards a somewhat subtlety-free didacticism on its own, which works fine when she’s picking interesting topics like gentrification, but is a rough mix with the already crass didacticism of Civil War II. Add in yet another “Captain Marvel shows up to be blatantly and transparently wrong” scene and a desperately unsubtle bit with Becky and you get an issue that’s just not very good. Also, opening with four pages of Adrian Alphona art serves to make the rest look lackluster, which is terribly unfair to the quite talented Takeshi Miyazawa, whose only flaw is to not be flattered by the comparison. 

Avatarex #2

One strongly suspects Grant Morrison is writing the scripts for these in an afternoon and then collecting the paycheck. I’m sure it’s a very nice paycheck, and I don’t begrudge him this one bit, but it’s still Grant Morrison at his most “here are the standard issue Grant Morrison tropes put in an equally standard issue order.” If it were the mid-90s this would be refreshing. Instead it’s just got some pretty art in places.

Spider-Man #7

A solid issue. The Bombshell conversation in the middle is grotesquely contrived in that way that talking about the plot of Civil War II almost has to be, but the narrow focus on Miles and Miles trying to figure out what being a hero means to him along with the basic satisfaction of the Jessica Jones plot keeps this one in the “Bendis showing why he’s actually good” category instead of the “for fuck’s sake Bendis I know they say style is the stuff you keep doing wrong, but could you have a little less of it” category. 

Lazarus #24

An above-average issue that maintains a simmering tension throughout. There’s a lot to wonder what’s going to happen about, which is always a good place for a book like this to be. There’s still an entire plotline I couldn’t tell you what the hell was going on in, which is a frustration (the recap page for this book never comes close to doing enough). But it’s good, compelling sci-fi espionage, which is what i look for out of this book, and the “Forever finally learns the truth but from Johanna of all people” twist is a smart one.

4 Kids Walk Into a Bank #1-2

Couple weeks old, but came recommended. If Stranger Things were a heist film, basically. There’s a sort of willful sloppiness in places, which is kind of a thing with Black Mask, I find, but the entire premise of “four kids get themselves involved in a bank robbery” is sufficiently ludicrous that the moments of “what are you actually trying to do here” seem more like charming embellishments than carelessness. I’m not as in love with it as some are – I think there’s a real failure to develop a lot of the main cast adequately – but it’s smart and funny and trying interesting things, and I’m probably in for the back three issues of it to see if it pays off cleverly. …

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I Think It Would Be a Good Idea (Civilization)

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In case you missed it, “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate,” a longform piece on topics closely related to The Super Nintendo Project, went up on Saturday.

At last, the false dichotomy between playing video games and saving western civilization stands revealed. But when we choose to do both at the same time, what exactly is the civilization that we are saving, and how might that shape our understanding of certain larger conceptual wars?

In bluntly materialist terms, which are after all the best way to approach civilization, it is another instance of a PC game getting a fundamentally middling SNES port, in the same vein as Populous and SimCity. There are no doubt those for whom this is “their” Civilization – the version of a monumental piece of video game history. This is the game that inspired Iain Banks to the phrase “outside context problem,” for fuck’s sake. Or, at least, it’s the crummy console version of the predecessor to that game. Certainly that’s where my history here intersects – somewhere past 1996 with a lot of Civ2, in a phase of video gaming otherwise defined by Diablo and Quake. High school, notably, where the Super Nintendo was late elementary school/early middle school.

The games are largely similar – Civilization II refines the original, as opposed to reworking it from the ground up. It’s more balanced and more elegant. This is doubly so when compared to the SNES port – the gap from this to 1996 is in many regards far more shocking than the gap from Donkey Kong Country 2 to Super Mario 64. But the basic thrill of the mechanism and its dizzying central metaphor persists. I compared it to Populous and SimCity earlier, and it really does manage to be a fusion of the two, combining the granular deep systems of SimCity with the cosmological scale of Populous to great effect. You may have had godlike powers in SimCity, but the scale of it was always small – one’s cities fundamentally never felt vast. Civilization feels vast easily, especially in the early stages of the game, which is as it should be. The effect of your initial tiny and contextless patch of land on which you build your capital slowly opening outwards until you encounter the Other, then borders, and finally a coherent world is genuinely effective, making the scope of what you can do feel real and substantive.

But we must be careful here. This sense of progressively illuminating an exterior world is certainly the form of western civilization as depicted here, but it is not the content. We’ve identified the story Civilization likes to tell, but not how it tells it. The answer to that question is inherited from the Avalon Hill board game Civilization is unofficially based upon: a tech tree. This is perhaps Civilization’s most significant not-quite innovation – a sublimely smooth implementation of an interlocking ladder of game upgrades that also serves to create a technologically deterministic narrative of human history from road-building to space colonies.…

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The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate

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An excerpt from my book Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

One measures a circle starting anywhere, so let’s pick up where we left off. Vox Day, who got in on the ground floor, back when it was still called the Quinnspiracy, begins his description like this, in the first of two chapter fives:

In 2012, a fat and unattractive woman with blue hair and numerous piercings decided to play at being a ‘game designer’. She plugged forty thousand words into the Twine engine, a hypertext tool that allows people without any knowledge of programing to create interactive fiction games similar to Zork and other text adventures circa 1977, combined it with a ten-second piano loop, and called it a game.

It is ironic that the book should be called SJWs Always Lie, because he lies right there. He lies when he uses the same disaffected tone of factual declaration for “a hypertext tool that allows people without any knowledge of programming to create interactive fiction games similar to Zork and other text adventures circa 1977” and “a fat and unattractive woman with blue hair and numerous piercings,” as though these are both straightforward truths in the same way. He lies when he shifts the definition of game throughout; one moment she is a faux “game designer,” the next the not-games she not-designs are defined straightforwardly in terms of an iconic piece of gaming history. (And he gets it wrong for good measure; Zork was a parser game, not a hypertext.)

Day tears into the game at length –  a critical savaging. “It’s even less fun than it sounds”; “soul-drainingly boring and more than three decades technologically out-of-date”; “I have never played a less entertaining computer game.” He brings a gun to a knife-fight, eviscerating the game with a level of contempt that raises the question of why he even gives a shit about it if it’s so self-evidently unworthy of attention. Of particular note; his citation of its 1.8 score on Metacritic, based on 308 ratings.

Eventually he reaches his point, saying that the game was a complete irrelevancy until “August 2014, when an upset young man who had finally broken it off with his cheating girlfriend created a WordPress blog called The Zoe Post that documented, in excruciating detail, his experience of having loved and lost.” Apparently the designer of this game cheated on a guy with some people who wrote for some websites that had mentioned the game in articles at some point. From this he casually spins out a conspiracy theory; “Given the very poor quality of Depression Quest, it seemed readily apparent to casual observers that the unusual amount of media attention garnered by the game must have been the result of the developer’s liberal distribution of her sexual favors.”

At this point, three pages into the chapter, entitled “Counterattack,” Vox Day makes a stunning reversal, admitting that “this does not appear to have exactly been the case.” And no wonder.…

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Comics Reviews (August 24th, 2016)

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Chew #57

Three to go.

Deathstroke #1

Good, competent stuff. I’m still not sure the non-chronological storytelling has a point as opposed to just being a thing Priest likes to do, but it’s at least a better way to introduce an important “old friend” character than many approaches in comics. Unless Wintergreen’s a longstanding supporting character; it’s not like I know Deathstroke’s supporting cast well. But still, Priest is working to introduce him, and the non-chronological story helps with that, even as it leaves the actual status quo of this book a bit muddy. This hasn’t grabbed me yet as such, but I’ll persist for an arc or so.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #10

A frustratingly unfocused issue that sutures two half-issues together without much in the way of payoff or connection. Still good, as this book always is, but an obviously lesser issue that ends up feeling like it’s wasting a Ms. Marvel guest-slot, which, as I think about it, is probably the thing that’s most knocking this down towards the bottom of the list this week. 

Snotgirl #2

Has the typical second issue problems of a modern comic, which is to say that it’s mainly tasked with fixing the problems that crafting a coherent and catchy first issue has created for the overall arc, which typically means going “right, so instead of paying off that cliffhanger we’re going to take a step back and fill in details.” And complaints that the book is mean-spirited about fashion blogging have a few more teeth after this one than they did after the first, although I still have a good amount of faith in O’Malley such that I’m willing to assume loving satire. Still, this is good, interesting stuff that I’m going to at least read a full arc of. 

New Avengers #15

Al Ewing in his finest form, paying off scads of earlier stuff in inventive and unexpected ways while remaining funny and full of good character moments in the present. This is the sort of book that makes sure if it’s going to randomly bring in Warlock for a guest spot then Warlock is going to get to appear in a heartbreaking scene and also get to do a Warlockified “do you feel lucky punk” at the book’s opener. This is not a book invested in offering particularly deep pleasures, but it remains the book that most feels like my idea of what reading Marvel comics is meant to feel like, and that’s always welcome.

Patsy Walker AKA Hellcat #9

There’s a delightful slowness to the structure of this book – a willingness to spend time on the human moments just being goofy before getting to the nominal plot. So much of this consists of the characters converging at a karaoke night, and it’s scintillating. Eventually the plot shows up and is also good, in part because Leth is focused enough to make sure that the long setup actually feeds into the plot and keeps all her plates spinning, avoiding a Bendis-esque “and now for the one panel in which the thing we put on the cover shows up” bit of bullshit.…

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You Should Have Been a Mother (Earthbound)

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A Guest Post By Anna Wiggins

As any die-hard EarthBound fan will tell you, in Japan EarthBound is called Mother 2, and is the middle of the three-part Mother trilogy. As a child, I just knew that I didn’t like EarthBound very much. The game is full of unpredictable tonal shifts, genre pastiche, self-awareness, and quirky humor, and these were either things I didn’t fully grasp or just didn’t enjoy. Somehow, the game just left me feeling vaguely alienated. Possibly, I just wasn’t ready for it.

Part of this may have been the gameplay, too. The basics are familiar to any JRPG fan: wander around, get into fights, select actions from menus, pray quietly to yourself. But the game is difficult, even by the standards of the day. It falls prey to a lot of common design flaws in JRPGs that raise the difficulty without adding fun. For instance, many enemies summon ‘backup’ occasionally, but with no bounds on how frequently this happens in a single fight, fights can become increasingly resource-draining without bound. Critical hits from enemies are far too common, and respawn rates are high enough to make getting anywhere a slog.

Aesthetically, the game is very distinct. It has cartoony graphics; the character design is frequently compared to Charles Schulz. The battle sequences featured bizarre, abstract backgrounds, a style referred to by the designers as an attempt at creating a “visual drug” experience. The spell effects were likewise highly abstracted, patterns of lines and diamonds that feel almost like sigils. The music direction is some of the best of the era; the soundtrack has an amazing range of styles and moods.

Despite all of this, I didn’t remember much about the game before returning to it. There is one part of the game, though, that left a very strong impression on me, and which more than lives up to my memory: the final battle.

The source of evil and ultimate villain in EarthBound, Giygas, remains an unseen but often-named actor throughout the game. The final battle with Giygas is one of the most deeply unsettling experiences I’ve ever had playing a video game. It takes the game’s underlying “weirdness” and cranks it up until it lands squarely in “uncomfortable.” Even in the battle with him, Giygas remains unseen. Instead, you seem to be fighting reality: Giygas is the wavy, “visual drug” battle screen background itself, and the combat music, both of which are now more sinister than anywhere else in the game. As the fight goes on, and you damage Giygas, the music gets increasingly frantic, the background increasingly angry.

After a short intro sequence, though, the only way to hurt Giygas is via one of the character’s (Paula, the lone girl in the cast, incidentally) “Pray” ability. Throughout the rest of the game, this ability has random (and usually very minor) effects. But now, each invocation of prayer leads to a cutaway scene of the characters you’ve met along the way, each feeling called to pray for you, until the whole planet is praying at once, lending their psychic power to help you.…

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Comics Reviews (August 17th, 2016)

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Demonic #1

Perfectly serviceable cop-horror story, and competently executed, but painfully by the numbers. The main character sells his soul to demons, which is a perfectly good hook, but it’s all executed so quickly that there’s no room to make him interesting before that, and Sebela is stuck establishing him entirely in terms of cliches. The big turning point when a demon shows up to offer him a deal on page thirteen should probably have been the cliffhanger. Still, if demons and cops is a genre setup you like, this’ll probably satisfy.

The Ultimates #10

As with the last issue, a bit of a mess between the brilliant art of Kenneth Rocafort and the bland and lumpy faces of the guest artist who does half the work on this issue. And it’s a bit of a mess with Civil War II. But Ms. America kicks ass and takes names, Black Panther gets a genuinely hilarious moment, and Al Ewing remains entertaining. Still, this is not a great stretch of this book, I fear.

Deathstroke Rebirth #1

Came out last week, and paid for by a reader. Nice to see that Priest’s still got it after frankly too many years out of the game due to his (entirely reasonable) desire to be offered something other than books about black people. His inclination towards non-chronological storytelling doesn’t quite do him any favors here, though, and the occasional muddy plotting his work can suffer from is alas in full swing. Still, this is smart and well-characterized, and probably the best book of DC Rebirth so far. I’ll probably check out another issue or two. 

 

The Black Monday Murders #1

Also from last week, and not at all sure how I missed it. It’s a Hickman #1, so massively long on promise, absolutely pregnant with insinuation and ideas, and clearly with the potential to be one of the most briliant things ever. One expects, being a Hickman series, that it will instead either go completely off the rails or simply stop coming out entirely after three issues, but this left my brain absolutely fizzing after reading it, and I intend to enjoy the hell out of the ride while it’s still quasi-functional. 

The Wicked + The Divine #22

Well I think we all expected the end of Rising Action to be mind-blowing, but it also turns out to be heart-stopping and gut-wrenching. And the other panels are brilliant too. I’m starting to regret the enthusiasm I showed for the early issues, because I’m not sure I left room for my critical assessment of this comic to grow and emcompass the range of what it can and does do. Fun game: immediately after reading the final panel of this issue, go back and look at Laura’s first appearance in #1. Then try to wrap your head around the fact that we’re only at about the halfway point of the series, and there’s presumably just as much character development to go. Meanwhile, the next arc looks set to tackle big ideas I’m massively invested in.…

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