Eruditorum Press

An entryist coup for your subconscious

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:

Comics Reviews (February 24th, 2016)

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Oof. Rough week.

All-New All-Different Avengers #6

This has been a shocking disappointment of a book through and through, and does not improve with this issue, which consists of obvious plot beats, banal pop culture references, and relatively minimal characterization. I honestly had no idea it was possible to write Kamala Khan so dully. Dropping it for Assault on Pleasant Hill, and I think the odds of my picking it up again after are basically nil.

Digital code: FCMLM0YTC6RW

Chew #55

Oh, well, they didn’t fridge the character last issue. That’s nice I suppose. Past that, we’re in that “quiet issues before the end” lull that seemingly every creator-owned sixty issue series has to do, and it’s as dull as that usually is on a book that I’m just riding out because I’ve bought, well, fifty-five issues of it now and am not going to stop this close to the end. Still, it’s better than late Fables.

Saga #34 

I just… don’t care. There is nothing in this entire issue that I care about. No, that’s not quite true. There are sparks – little flashes here and there that remind one why this is such a beloved book. The interactions with Hazel’s teacher are genuinely good. The little seal guy is charming. The questions in the survey at the end are funny. Fiona Staples remains one of the best artists in the history of the medium. But I have to admit, I’m pretty on board with the growing Vaughan backlash that argues that he can’t structure an ongoing book and that his plots all feel the same. In any case, I’m done here.

Black Magick #5

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the week, or indeed of recent comics. Greg Rucka has always, for my money, been a little dicey on magic/horror (the Crime Bible stuff was always the weakest link of his Question/Batwoman stuff, and Veil was an almost complete misfire), and unfortunately that weakness has consistently overwhelmed his strength at police procedural stuff in this book. At the end of the first arc it’s impossible for me to find anything to invest in. The main character is a cipher, the supporting cast is indistinguished, everyone’s motivations are played too close to the chest, the larger threat is undefined. Does virtually nothing a first arc should. Tragic to see such a good team produce something this weak.

Karnak #2

I’m not a huge fan of the Warren Ellis “one long fight scene” issue, which is at this point a formulaic Ellis thing that appears in multiple books. This isn’t quite that, but it has eleven wordless pages, including seven pages of Karnak punching things silently at the outset. Which is fine – you know Ellis is going to throw one of these in. Zaffino kills with it, in a fitting finish to his brief time on the book. It’s just a rough way to come back after a three month delay to the book. Definitely something designed to work in an actually monthly comic.…

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Phil Sandifer’s Hugo Ballot

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Let me start by making something as clear as I possibly can.

This is not a slate. These are not recommendations. If you submit a Hugo ballot that looks exactly like this you are a deeply lame human being who should feel bad about yourself.

That said, I maintain my position that talking openly about our Hugo preferences and thoughts is the best way to combat attempts to hijack the Hugos while we wait for E Pluribus Hugo to pass in August. And probably beyond that, because frankly, it’s just a good idea to have a public conversation so that more casual fans who want to play the Game of Rockets can do so.

So here we go, with selected commentary. Retro Hugos will be done another day.

 

Best Novel

The Fifth Season (N.K. Jemisin)

Easily the best of the pack here. Really hoping Patreon backers pick it for a bonus essay. This is a genuine masterpiece with a last line almost as astonishing as its first.

The Dark Forest (Cixin Liu)

Better than the first volume, as I’ve said, and the first volume was a perfectly acceptable Hugo winner.

The Vorrh (Brian Catling)

I’ve been switching this and Seveneves back and forth repeatedly, and may continue to do so as the voting deadline approaches. Or maybe I’ll drop the next one.

The Shepherd’s Crown (Terry Pratchett)

I admit this as a ridiculously sentimental pick that would not be on my ballot were it not the author’s last book. Still, a Hugo ballot without it feels unimaginable to me.

The Water Knife (Paolo Bacigalupi)

Brutally materialist SF.

 

Novella

Chasm (Nick Land)

More interesting and compelling right-wing science fiction than literally anything on the ballot last year. The failure of the Puppies to nominate Phyl-Undhu last year is really the best demonstration available of how, much like “Men’s Rights Advocates” do not actually advocate for the rights of men so much as attack women, they do not actually advocate for a right-wing literature so much as complain that people enjoy different books than them. I mean, Land’s even a blithering racist. What more could they possibly want?

Witches of Lynchford (Paul Cornell)

As a Paul Cornell fan who eagerly awaited the release of No Future, it’s thrilling to see him killing it in the mainstream.

Binti (Nnedi Okorafor)

I went looking for some compelling afrofuturism, because this seemed like a really good year to honor it. Man did I find it.

The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps (Kai Ashante Wilson)

Rolling in the Deep (Mira Grant)

 

Novelette

An Evolutionary Myth (Bo-Young Kim)

Stumbled on this late while trawling the Hugo Nominees Wikia for a fifth choice, and was absolutely blown away by it. Easily my pick of the five.

Elektrograd: Rusted Blood (Warren Ellis)

The Dusty Hat (China Mieville)

The Corpse Archives (Kameron Hurley)

The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild (Catherynne M. Valente)

 

Short Story

Pocosin (Ursula Vernon)

Another category with a clear and unquestionable frontrunner for me, this is one of my favorite authors at her best.…

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Eco, Ur-Fascism, and Dogs

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Jack, as news of Umberto Eco’s death was breaking last night, Tweeted a link to his “Ur-Fascism” essay, which he is quite right to say is brilliant and worth (re)reading. To my deep annoyance I first came across it after I had written “Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons” and had used an ad hoc definition of “fascism” for a key section when I could have just used Eco’s. 

For this revisions were invented, of course, and when reworking the essay for the book version (still for sale, by the way) I did just that. So since it’s relevant to the times and a good day to honor one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, here’s the revised “On Fascism” section of the title essay, in which I argue that the Sad/Rabid Puppies movements are accurately described as “fascist.” 

RIP Umberto Eco.

Part Four: On Fascism

I mentioned at the outset that this was not going to be a piece that made much of an effort to convince fascists not to be fascists. Here this becomes particularly important. I am not going to bother trying to refute the arguments that Theodore Beale has made for his positions. I am assuming, at this point, that you, as a reader, are in no way on the fence about fascism, that it is not a viewpoint you are seriously considering, and that you are appalled at Theodore Beale’s beliefs and disturbed by the fact that he has influenced a major and historic literary award.

Therefore, let’s not engage Beale on his own terms. The easiest mistake to make when trying to understand fascists is to think that they are best described in terms of a philosophy—as though fascism is a set of tenets and beliefs. This is a mistake that largely benefits fascists, who are generally disinclined to actually call themselves fascists, since they recognize that, much like “Nazis,” it’s not exactly a label that does a great sales job. On top of that, fascists have a remarkably well-developed vocabulary of jargon and a propensity for verbose arguments that puts me to shame. What this means is that if you attempt to get into some sort of practical, content-based argument with a fascist, you will suddenly find yourself staring down a thirty-item bulleted list with frequent citations to barely relevant and inaccurately described historical events, which, should you fail to address even one sub-point, you will be declared to have lost the debate by the fascist and the mob of a dozen people on Twitter who suddenly popped up the moment you started arguing with him. (And it’s always a him.)

In other words, this is manifestly neither a refutation of Beale’s positions nor of fascism in general. Rather, it’s an attempt to understand the “intellectual” traditions Beale follows, both explicitly and implicitly.

As a term, “fascism” is admittedly one whose definitions have become exceedingly broad. There are, these days, few adherents to the early 20th century fascist movements headed by Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco in Italy and Spain, for instance.…

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Hey, Did You Hear The One About The Nuns? (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Twenty-Seven: Nemesis)

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Figure 938: Miracleman throws a car full of people at Kid Miracleman. (Written by Alan Moore, art by John Totleben, from Miracleman #15, 1988)

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Coming to the end of his run on Miracleman, Moore decided to grapple with as brutally realistic a portrayal of a superhero fight as he could imagine – to actually show what such a battle would mean for the world in which it took place.

Moore had grappled with some of this in the first Miracleman/Kid Miracleman fight when, for instance, Kid Miracleman hurls a baby through the air in the middle of the fight, distracting Miracleman by throwing a baby at a nearby building, which Miracleman of course saves, but with the note that he’s broken a couple of the baby’s ribs because of the speed he was traveling, a grimly funny note of realism in a standard superhero trope. There’s a not entirely dissimilar moment in Miracleman #15 when Miracleman, in another fairly standard superhero punch-up moment, picks up a car and throws it at Kid Miracleman. “My apologists have claimed the car that I first hurled at Bates was empty, those who’d been inside having all previously escaped,” he narrates. “I’m sorry, but that isn’t true,” the final caption box changing color to be yellow on black – Bates’s colors. The shift in tone – from a winking subversion of the “superheroes save everybody” to a stark-faced refusal to offer any sort of salvation at all – is stunning.

And this is hardly the only such moment in Miracleman #15, an issue that returns over and over again to images of stark brutality. Kid Miracleman, under Moore, had always been portrayed as a brutally sadistic figure, whether in his mocking murder of his secretary in his first appearance “just to show you that I don’t mind doing that sort of thing. In fact, I quite enjoy it” or in his dispatching of the nurse in Miracleman #14. But what is striking – especially for Moore – is that the issue contains almost no textual descriptions of what Kid Miracleman does to London. Early on the narration establishes that Bates spends hours in London before Miracleman and company realize he’s back, and talks about “those hours that he had crammed with centuries of human suffering; those narrow side-streets filled with miles of pain. Having exhausted all the humdrum cruelties known to man quite early in the afternoon he had progressed to innovations unmistakably his own,” and the end narration makes a fleeting and bleak mention of “coral reefs of baby skulls, and worse,” but this is the extent to which Moore uses the written word to frame these depravities into the sort of classic and endlessly quotable lines that had characterized, for instance, Rorschach’s famously bleak narration in Watchmen. There are neither “abattoirs of retarded children” nor “gutters full of blood” to drown the vermin in.

Figure 939: John Totleben’s double page spread of utter carnage.
…

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Comics Reviews (February 17, 2016)

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Avengers Standoff: Welcome to Pleasant Hill

Abysmal. Genuinely, shudderingly awful. Spoilers ahoy. A patchwork of ideas that have been done before, including an ending that not only directly rips off a well-remembered 90s book, but that rips off a well-remembered 90s book that was also drawn by Mark Bagley, right down to the reveal being “he was Baron Zemo all along.” Except Thunderbolts actually sought to do something with its premise, whereas the only idea this has is “well I guess we should do some misdirection and make people think it’s Bucky and Tony Stark.” The thing is, SHIELD trapping superheroes in totalitarian suburbia is actually interesting, whereas SHIELD mind-wiping villians and sticking them in totalitarian suburbia prison is Identity Crisis with the serial number half-filed off. This is insipid, a cash-grab crossover that doesn’t even pretend to have a motivation other than trying to forbid readers from actually picking and choosing among the glut of Avengers books for two months. I can tell you already that nobody is going to read Avengers Standoff in five years. Nobody is going to read it in one year. Shit, nobody should read it next month. I’m sure as fuck not going to. Why would I? I mean, if the choice is “drop both New Avengers and All-New All-Different Avengers, one of which has been serially disappointing me anyway” or “spend an extra $42 in order to follow a complete banality of a crossover?” Yeah. Fuck that.

Digital code: FMC1V5FXB5PX

Sex Criminals #14

That Fraction and Zdarsky steal the “masturbatory” joke that begs to be made about the four page sequence in the middle of this does not really avoid the fact that there’s a four page sequence of the comic openly admitting that it couldn’t get a key narrative beat to actually work right. The killer – I was shocked when I looked to discover that it was only four pages of the comic. It felt vastly longer. Anyway, it’s still Sex Criminals with all the wonder that implies, but this is a duff issue not helped by a recap page that serves more to sell the book to someone who’s already bought it than to remind a reader who may have forgotten the precise relationships among the secondary cast that make up most of what actually happens in this issue. 

Silver Surfer #2

Man, I was all set for this to be low in my rankings and cause for lots of complaining, but instead Slott and Allred make a well-timed digression into the Silver Surfer back catalogue for an issue that serves as a nice reminder of the fact that “it’s Silver Surfer done as Doctor Who with Michael Allred cutting loose on the Kirby homages” is a genuinely delightful premise. 

Digital code: FCMY5SJD89W7

Bitch Planet #7

Another comic that suffers from a huge delay in issues and an insufficient recap page – Whitney has, I’m pretty sure, not appeared since September, the cliffhanger hinges on who she is and what her relationship to the main character is, and yet the recap page neglects to mention her.…

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The Dark Enlightenment of Flint

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones will return on February 29th.

Jack Graham notes that “if you want a vision of the future, imagine Flint, Michigan – forever.” The neoreactionary movement, meanwhile has been doing just that for several years. Neoreaction – essentially the pseudo-intellectual wing of the loosely defined alt-right (see also Gamergate, Trump, and the “human biodiversity” crowd) – has been clanking around the fringes of the discourse for a few years now, basically getting started when a software engineer named Curtis Yarvin started a sideline career blogging as Mencius Moldbug in 2007, and gathering proper steam when Nick Land, formerly an academic associated with the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit at the University of Warwick and one of the forefathers of accelerationism, made a dramatic heel turn in the form of an essay called “The Dark Enlightenment” in 2013 in which he, and I’m paraphrasing here, basically concluded that the best hope of a posthuman future where everyone has face tentacles lies in the form of white nationalists. I’m writing a book that’s more or less about them. It’ll be fun.

Anyway, the key detail in all of this is that the catastrophic decision to try to save $4m by switching Flint’s water system over to the Flint river was made by not by elected officials, but by an Emergency Manager, a position created by a 1988 law and expanded dramatically in 2011. The law allows the governor to appoint someone to take charge of a municipal governor if he certifies that the city is suffering from a financial emergency. This Emergency Manager is unelected, but his powers trump those of the elected government; indeed, he can remove elected officials at will. His sole mandate is to balance the budget (My second favorite detail in all of this: he’s forbidden from raising taxes to do it). The sole oversight is the Local Emergency Financial Assistance Loan Board, a similarly unelected body that rubber stamps decisions over $10,000 including the sale of public assets. (My favorite detail: the law requires that Emergency Manager’s salary be shouldered by the city.)

What’s striking about the Emergency Manager position is that it’s more or less exactly what Mencius Moldbug proposes as the ideal system of government. Moldbug advocates for, essentially, government by CEO – an individual manager with absolute power subject to oversight by a board of directors who can replace him, with the metric for whether a government is successful being the degree to which the government turns a profit. Very much excluded from this – indeed consciously and deliberately excluded – is any notion of democracy. Moldbug despises democracy, viewing it as inefficient, duplicitous, and largely degenerate. In his view people are, whether they want to admit it or not, subjects of a sovereign. And given that, we may as well admit it and just return to actual monarchy.

It’s easy to laugh at Moldbug; he’s a more than faintly comical figure whose default style is meandering blog posts running thousands of words in which he badly stitches together clumsy readings of primary source documents in order to claim they reveal the bankrupt heart of modern democracy.…

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I Asked Him What Record It Was, But He Didn’t Know (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Twenty-Six: Olympus)

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Figure 930: Winter is worth it. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Rick Veitch and Rick Bryant, from Miracleman #9, 1986)

Previously in The Last War in Albion: After a convoluted series of events, Alan Moore’s Marvelman, now renamed Miracleman, was published in the US by Eclipse, and Moore was writing new material for it, starting with a controversial issue including detailed images of Liz Moran giving birth.

As the sequence reaches its most famous page, it switches structure, the sepia-toned panels becoming insets on the full-color ones instead of the other way around as the baby’s head emerges. “Did it feel like this, when you took the first cell scrapings,” Miracleman asks the absent Gargunza. “Did it feel like this as you watched it divide and replicate; as you hauled me dripping from the tank? The head emerges; a face drawn on a fist. My eyes cannot grasp the fact of it: a head protruding from inside her. It looks so hideous, beautiful, absurd, awesome. But of course. Of course.” And finally, as Miracleman grasps his daughter’s head to finish delivering her, he asks, “was it worth it? Worth the risk of loosing gods and monsters on the world? Worth all the blood and violence? Yes. It was worth it. For here is blood. Here is violence. Redeemed by love, by this pure act of creation.”

Figure 931: Winter, delivered at last. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Rick Veitch and Rick Bryant, from Miracleman #9, 1986)

It is, of course, a standard technique for Moore, right down to the heavily iambic flow of the narration. But the content is remarkable. It’s not that Moore hasn’t blended imagery of sex and death before, most obviously in “Rite of Spring,” where the orgasmic unity of all things includes a description of how “my enemy’s blood erupts to fill my mouth with molten copper,” but notes that “there is no contradiction” between this and sexual passion. Or, for that matter, in the description of the “almost sexual hatred” between Miracleman and Kid Miracleman in their early confrontation. But, of course, “Scenes from the Nativity” is not about sex, even though it contains the most detailed depiction of female genitalia to grace Moore’s work prior to Lost Girls. “Rite of Spring” stretched the definition of sex to its widest point, but stayed firmly within the realm of the erotic; “Scenes from the Nativity,” on the other hand, retains all the sense of taboo and sacredness, but strips it down to the most elemental binary, proclaiming that “in the careless and foggy continuum of our lives, these precious moments burn like suns: birth, death… these are the moments when we are real,” the final phrase coinciding with a 2/3 page panel of Miracleman and Liz crying as they hold the just-delivered Winter up to the gleaming sun. And in turn all of this is presented as the true and inevitable teleology of superheroes, with all of the ornately rewritten mythology of Miracleman being framed explicitly as something existing only to lead to this moment.…

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Comics Reviews (February 11th, 2016)

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A very Marvel-heavy week, which is helpful in comparing some of the more intermittently frustrating titles in my pulls.

Guardians of the Galaxy #5

Like this, which will be the last issue I pick up. Bendis’s books always meander, but his Guardians has become pathological in that regard, lurching from point to point without anything recognizable as an overarching reason. With this issue, the new post-Secret Wars setup is undone and we return to the old setup while simultaneously providing a new origin for Yotat, which is at least two origins too many for a sublimely pointless character. Fun characters, as the movie has shown, but this needs a new writer.

Digital code: FCMK4CDAZHN1

All-New All-Different Avengers #5

The extent to which Waid’s pacing and shape on this book is thoroughly inept is genuinely shocking. The ouster of Ms. Marvel on the cover is awkward and unmotivated in the extreme – a transparent contrivance made all the worse by its complete lack of suspense. For the third time running the enemy is an out of nowhere silliness. I have no idea how a creative team and cast this good can be this bad, but man, it stinks. Will stay on through the Pleasant Hill crossover at least, but what an abject disappointment of a book this is.

Digital code: FCM2WNWVMJAF

Radioactive Spider-Gwen #5

This continues to slowly bend towards being pretty good, though the sense of its improvement being two steps forward one step back continues. This one focuses pretty much entirely on supporting cast, which is a mixed blessing. I still have trouble particularly investing in the high concept inversions of Matt Murdock as the Kingpin (although his t-shirt is hilarious in a sort of Eviler Seth Bingo way) and the like, but what the book is doing with them works, and that counts for a lot. Frustrating, but not in a way that makes me think about walking away from it.

Digital code: FCMPEKLE5UH0 (that’s a zero)

Darth Vader #16

A slow-burn start to an arc handled with the efficient competence you’d expect from Gillen. Nice cliffhanger, and some good character bits, but on the whole a lull in the book. 

Digital code: FCMQSR0FXZW9 (also a zero in there)

New Avengers #6

The decision to do two-issue arcs here hobbles it a smidge, with a good story that lacks some of the room to breathe that it could probably use. But the takeaway there is really “good story,” with the whole Demiurge/horrific demonic possession arc wrapping up in a way that pays glorious homage to the Young Avengers history of the characters, not so much on a plot point level as an aesthetic level. “Horror! Life is horror!” might end up being the funniest line of the week. In fact, yes, it is. Delightful, wonderful, kinda mispaced.

DIgital code: FCMT5AFM4Y44

 

Ms. Marvel #4

The “teen hero gets behind on everything” schtick feels a nbit tired and played out as Ms. Marvel plots go, and saps this book of some energy, as does the degree to which it retreads All-New All-Different Avengers (although obviously it does a much better job with those plot points). But…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 3.05: Kissed by Fire

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“That’s not a fucking kiss!”

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:

Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Tywin Lannister

Lions of Harrenhal: Jaime Lannister

Dragons of Yunkai: Daenerys Targaryen

Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow

Direwolves of Riverrun: Robb Stark, Catelyn Stark

Bears of Yunkai: Jorah Mormont

Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish

The Boat, Davos Seaworth

The Burning Heart, King Stannis Baratheon

Roses of King’s Landing: Margery Tyrell

Tigers of Riverrun: Talia Stark

Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark

The Direwolf, Arya Stark

The Stag, Gendry

Bows of the Wall: Ygritte

The Dogs, Sandor Clegane

Winterfell is abandoned and in ruins.

The episode is in parts. The first runs four minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The opening image is of Thoros of Myr stepping into frame as he calls upon the Lord of Light. It features the death of Berric Dondarion, his head cut in half by the Hound. It doesn’t take.

The second runs six minutes and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by family, from Arya Stark to Jon Snow.

The third runs one minute and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Arya Stark.

The fourth runs three minutes and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by region, remaining in the Riverlands.

The fifth runs three minutes and is in two sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is one minute long; the transition is by family, from Jaime to Cersei Lannister, and also from Harrenhal to its lord. The second section is twominutes long; the transition is by family, from Cersei to Tyrion Lannister, and from talking about the Tyrells to Olenna.

The sixth part runs two minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by hard cut, from Tyrion eating sheepishly to Gendry smithing.

The seventh runs five minutes and is set in Riverrun. The transition is by region.

The eighth runs three minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by family, from Robb to Arya Stark, region, the image of fire, and dialogue, with Arya and Thoros discussing Robb.

The ninth runs five minutes and is set on Dragonstone. The transition is by dialogue, from Thoros and Berric discussing the Lord of Light to Selyse praying.

The tenth runs six minutes and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by hard cut, from Selyse holding the ship Davos made her to Brienne in the bath.

The eleventh runs two minutes and is set in Dragonstone. The transition is by hard cut, from a spasming Jaime to Davos asleep.

The twelfth runs five minutes and is set outside Yunkai. The transition is by dialogue, from Shireen talking about the Targaryens to Daenerys’s camp.

The thirteenth runs two minutes and is set in Riverrun. The transition is by hard cut, from Barristan to Robb’s battle plans.

The fourteenth runs seven minutes and is in two sections; it is set in King’s Landing.…

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