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:

December 18, 2015

Paradise Towers Commentary

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UPDATE: The original zip file (up until Friday afternoon) had a bad version of Episode 4. That’s fixed in the zip, but if you downloaded it and need episode 4, that’s available on its own right here.

Jack and I are back again to blather all over perfectly good Doctor Who episodes, this time having frankly an excess of fun watching Paradise Towers, which is simply a wonderful and brilliant piece of television that we should be overjoyed to have in the world and anyone who disagrees should be fed to the tentacle beasts at the heart of modernism.

Anyway, download a .zip of all four commentary tracks right here. Awesome. You’re so cool now.

Also, Jack Graham fans, which is to say anyone with taste, should make sure to check him out on the Oi Spaceman! podcast where he talks Planet of the Ood, which is another story that’s just an expression of pure fucking joy. Grab that here.

And now to sit down and record the Christmas Special Shabcast.

Yes. That is a thing.

God help us all.…

December 17, 2015

Comics Reviews (December 16th, 2015)

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Ultimate End #5

Even had this come out alongside the rest of the series it would have been a flaccid non-ending to a non-story – the end of the Ultimate Universe that does not actually take place in the Ultimate Universe or quite actually involve the characters from it. Months late, it’s yet another “oh yeah, that book” from Marvel to go with the general pissing away of any good will they’ve had in recent memory. A staggeringly inept comic – look at the complete randomness of Wolverine’s entrance or the utterly arbitrary-seeming choice to have the final monologue co-narrated by two Spider-Mans and a 616 Iron Man. Basically shit, and everybody involved should feel actively bad that people spent $4.99 on it.

Batgirl #46

A somewhat untidy issue in which the whole is less than the sum of its parts – I enjoyed almost every scene of it, but was left with a distinctly unsatisfied feeling simply because there were too many plots and not enough connective tissue. Still, under the hood, a wonderful and fun book, but this was definitely an off month for it.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #3

This dragged for me a bit; Nancy/Doctor Doom just didn’t quite cohere as a comedy concept for me, although the “it’s just cosplay” gag was fantastic, and the back half didn’t pick up enough to make up the slack, resulting in a flaccid-seeming issue. Compelling cliffhanger, though, which is something, and as with Batgirl it seems important to stress that a middling issue of this is still fundamentally delightful.

Darth Vader Annual #1

Lenil Yu turns out to be a strong artist for Vader, and Gillen writes a nice self-contained issue. I was wrong about the Star Wars Annual cliffhanger picking up here – apparently these both feed into post-Vader Down stories instead. But this is a good issue that actually feels like a done-in-one, tracing Vader and his droids on a mission to an entertainingly courtly society long on ballroom dances and royal succession. It’s a good setting, and a solid single issue introduction to the sort of thing Gillen does with Vader.

The Wicked & The Divine #17

A very odd end to an arc, though in some ways the only way it could have worked, as it had to exist in contrast with the first two arc-enders. Which is to say that this is decidedly not a mindblowing issue. The Sakhmet story is quiet, borderline plotless, and probably the most emphatically interstitial of the Commercial Suicide arc. The one-page McKelvie backup, on the other hand, is fascinating, was probably inevitable, and makes the wait til April before this starts up again look absolutely agonizing.

Klaus #2

The snap and cleverness of the first issue is gone, and we’re left with a book it’s somewhat hard to see how gets to six issues if this is how it works. Still interesting and fun, and probably the best work Morrison has done in years, although I’m somewhat hard-pressed to imagine being passionate about the secret origin of Santa Claus come April, especially if this doesn’t have more issues that bring a big stupid grin to my face like #1 did as opposed to “yep, same comic as last month.”…

December 16, 2015

Cover Reveal: Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons

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I just uploaded the final versions of the ebook files to Amazon and Smashwords, which means that I finally have the official cover to share instead of the low-res version I previously had. So here it is (and you can click on the image for the full 4 MB version of that if you want to). As ever, credit goes to James Taylor, at least for the front of the book. Pre-orders remain open – here it is on Amazon, and here on Smashwords (where it’s available only in epub format because of some idiosyncratic rules on file size; the Amazon .mobi is DRM free, however). Print will be available to order sometime next week, with a slim chance of it being up in time for last minute Christmas orders.

And we’ve got an official book description too:

2015 was a messy and contentious year for science fiction, dominated by the Sad Puppies controversy, in which fascist entryists led by Vox Day, the pen name of Theodore Beale, exploited flaws in the Hugo Award nomination process to dictate the nominees, selecting works that favor his politics in an attempt to, in his view, save western civilization from people who poop wrong.

This anthology of essays written by acclaimed Marxist occultist critic Philip Sandifer during 2015 starts from the Puppies controversy, presenting an alternative vision of science fiction grounded in progressive politics and the ability of the genre to explore strange and unthinkable ideas – one that holds that its primary value is its ability to do new things, as opposed to being in permanent debt to antiquated ideas and styles.

The book includes:

Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, an epic takedown of Vox Day.
A transcript of a debate between Sandifer and Day about the relative merits of Iain Banks’s classic novel The Wasp Factory and Puppy nominee One Bright Star to Guide Them.
Essays on Orphan Black, Hannibal, True Detective, Janelle Monáe, Ex Machina, Mr. Robot, and more.
A lengthy essay on V for Vendetta excerpted from the forthcoming first volume of The Last War in Albion.
Recursive Occlusion, a non-fiction novella about Doctor Who and occultism.
An exclusive interview with superstar Doctor Who writer Peter Harness.
Many other weird things.

I’ll post again on the 26th when it officially launches with a more substantial musing on the book, but I think it’s pretty much the best one I’ve written.…

December 14, 2015

Cultural Marxism 1: Consider Phlebas

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Consider Phlebas is not generally considered to be the best way to start the Culture series, and in fairness it’s not how I did, having previously read Use of Weapons and The Player of Games. And by almost all standards these are better books, and surely more likely to hook new readers. But Consider Phlebas has one significant thing over both of them: it is by far the best introduction to the Culture, which is to say to the specific idea of Iain M. Banks’s peculiar society.

It is not quite a Marxist society, although this is mostly because the notion of labor within the Culture has been so thoroughly upended that large swaths of Marx simply fail to apply. But it is blatantly a society a Marxist would love, along with numerous other stripes of western leftism. And inasmuch as “Marxist” is the standard epithet for “further left than we want to admit to the Overton window,” whatever that might be for a given speaker (and note, of course, that “cultural Marxism” is a phrase designed specifically to tar feminism and anti-racism with that brush), a post-scarcity liberal utopia that indulges near limitless sexual perversities and where everybody has a “drug gland” offering highs on demand would certainly seem to qualify in an, if you’ll forgive me, cultural sense.

And it is certainly true that Banks’s underlying premises of the Culture are distinctly Marxist in tone; not merely his declaration, in his 1994 essay “A Few Notes on the Culture,” that he believes “a planned economy can be more productive – and more morally desirable – than one left to market forces,” a statement he follows with an extended critique of capitalism, but also his declaration that “the Culture, in its history and its on-going form, is an expression of the idea that the nature of space itself determines the type of civilisations which will thrive there,” a fundamentally materialist worldview that in many ways leads inexorably to certain Marxist and utopian premises, at least when coupled with Banks’s (seemingly emphatically untrue) supposition of a galaxy teeming with life.

The result is, as Banks has said in interviews, his idea of an ideal society, and this is clearly its appeal to no small number of its readers as well. But, crucially, that’s not the point. Nor is the point some “serpent in the garden” explanation of utopia’s fall or inadequacy. Rather, the point is that the utopia of the Culture is positioned in a world in which other civilizations exist, some very much hostile to the Culture, and the Culture, as a result, has the same interference-heavy quasi-imperialist policy as the Western liberal tradition that it elsewhere takes to its logical conclusion. Or, perhaps more broadly, that utopia is not dependent on any particular assumption of some sort of inherent goodness in human nature (“A Few Notes on the Culture” offers several explanations of what the Culture does with its megalomaniacs), nor is the utopia itself innately “moral.”

This, at least, is a point upon which Consider Phlebas remains topical.…

December 12, 2015

Saturday Waffling (December 12th, 2015)

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Exciting things afoot, as ever; recording a commentary for Paradise Towers with Jack tonight, another podcast on Monday, and setting up some more of those for the future. The neoreaction book is at 30k, and looking like it’ll be ready to do a thing in early 2016. (Doing a thing being different from “be published,” of course.) I have some fun essays lined up for the near future. Last War in Albion Book Two Chapter Four is going to be very, very fun.

And I’m really happy with Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, which gets the finishing touches put on it this week. I think it is my best book, in a sort of raw quality sense. It feels like it hangs together as a book, which is always a risk with a kind of disparate essay collection, and this is a very disparate essay collection. It’s very much the “demonstrate what I do” book, anchored by three novella-length pieces: the title essay, Recursive Occlusion, and the V for Vendetta chapter of Last War in Albion, with a series of shorter and more discursive pieces in the middle. A winning move in my ongoing war with 2015.

What’s been the highlight of your year? …

December 10, 2015

Hell Bent Podcast

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For our season finale (until Christmas) I’m joined by the legendary Kate Orman, writer of an appallingly large number of very good Doctor Who books. The first half is interview about her Virgin Books novels and her recent Faction Paradox anthology Liberating Earth, the second (starting at about the hour and twenty minute mark for those with no interest in the Wilderness Years, which is to say, wrong people) on Hell Bent. You can get it here, and I recommend you do, cause it’s lovely.…

December 9, 2015

Comics Reviews (December 9th, 2015)

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Secret Wars #8

The splitting of issue #7 into two proves rough, mainly because #7 was just a big fight book, and two issues of punching in a series that’s past due for conclusion ends up being a bit of a hot mess. I’m invested in the main character conflict of this – Reed, Sue, Doom, and Valeria, essentially – and looking forward to its resolution, but everything else feels like it’s been going on for simply ages, persumably because of how it’s been going on for simply ages.

Guardians of the Galaxy #3

Bendis’s books are often slow, but this one is really being intolerable at the moment. Three issues in and it feels like virtually nothing has happened, and like nothing does happen in this issue. As ever Bendis remains good at character moments, but he’s not integrating those moments into any sort of directioned overall storytelling here. The return of Yotat is a complete non-thriller, three issues in there’s still no visible benefit to Ben Grimm’s addition to the team, and just… meh.

Star Wars Annual #1

Gillen does an espianoge done-in-one, which is a genre I don’t feel like he’s played with much outside of Alastor. Definite notes of Ellis throughout, which is basically where you’d expect Gillen spies to go, but with a nice, approachable Star Wars sheen that makes it distinctly fun. I assume this is continued in next week’s Darth Vader Annual, also by Gillen, but I base this entirely on the vaguely cliffhanger ending and not on anyone bothering to indicate this anywhere whatsoever in the issue – there’s not even a house ad for the other annual. That’s dumb. Anyway, this is fun.

Contest of Champions #3

After two issues that felt a bit slower and more setup-based than one necessarily wants for something basically pitted as “ultimate punch book,” this finally takes off and starts using its premise in full. Ewing is fantastic at playing with the deep weirdness of the Marvel Universe, and things like an Elektra Natchios Bullseye, the original Eddie Brock Venom, and a Rick Jones Hulk full of 60s idealism adn smashing are genuine treats, used here in fun ways. Glad to see this getting up to speed.

Trees #13

Some brilliant stuff in the first half, in which Ellis comes very close to tipping his hand about what he’s doing in this book, which is probably a good thing by issue #13 of something. The second half is more of a let-down, as Ellis does a basically wordless action sequence that, while drawn beautifully by Jason Howard, is brutal to follow given the absolute lack of reminders as to who anyone is. The incoming mayor seems happy with who’s getting shot, so that’s something, and I assume the fallout from this next issue will make some sense, but there was some distinct roughness here.

Radioactive Spider-Gwen #3

This picks up a lot, and is my favorite issue of the relaunched series to date, rescuing it from my half-considered drop.…

December 7, 2015

Women in AI Boxes: Ex Machina and the Other Turing Test

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Another preview essay from Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, available for pre-order and out on December 26th, or, as I like to think of it, just in time for that Amazon gift card your aunt gave you.

Ex Machina, the best horror story about Eliezer Yudkowsky since Nick Land’s Phyl-Undhu, is based around a sly joke about the Turing Test, namely that it secretly understands what it actually is, by which I mean what’s described in “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” the paper in which Alan Turing supposedly establishes the damn thing. The usual reading, in which a machine is said to think if it can fool a human engaged in typed conversation with it into thinking it’s another human, amounts to a test of whether the machine can use language. This is a hard problem in computer science, although one that IBM is plausibly close to solving given that they can solve the closely related problem of beating Ken Jennings at Jeopardy!

It is also not actually what Turing says. It’s just that what Turing says is really weird. He opens his paper by saying, “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’” Then, after concluding, not insensibly, that this question depends on too many ambiguous definitions, says that “I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.” Following this proclamation of relative unambiguity, he begins the immediate next paragraph by saying, “the new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the ‘imitation game,’” which is, to say the least, not a great start to relative unambiguity.

It is, however, pretty much how he means to go on. The imitation game is straightforward enough, and consists of “a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C)” who engages in written conversation with the unseen man and woman and tries to discern which is which. Having described this game, he says, “we now ask the question, ‘What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?’ Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, ‘Can machines think?’” But of course there’s a massive and cratering ambiguity here: does it matter that the machine is taking the part of A and not B?

Certainly the dominant reading is that it does not matter; that the Turing Test is simply the imitation game played between a human and a computer instead of a man and a woman. And this view is reinforced by the remainder of the paper, which frames the question in terms of the basic state of computer science in 1950, which is to say, over very fundamental questions that turned out to still be monstrously difficult such that IBM still hasn’t quite solved them.…

December 5, 2015

Hell Bent Review

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Moffat must go.

It is stunningly reckless in its oversignification. Nearly every element of the plot is another thing along the lines of the Zygons in The Day of the Doctor – an unresolved question mark that could be expanded on at vast length. Similarly, nearly every element turns on parallelism with other pieces of the mythology.
The most interesting of these is of course the Me/Missy parallel, emphasized both by the ostentatious emphasis on Me knocking four times and on the tripled repetition of “Missy” from Clara to the Doctor to Me in such a way as to stress that “Me” would be a perfectly plausible alias for her.
And don’t give me that “how would you make that work with the continuity” bullshit. The answer is obvious: Clara eventually seeks out Faction Paradox to help her with the whole “has no pulse” problem, and in the course of that adventure Me is flung into the Looms. Duh.
What an absolutely perfect ending for Clara, though. Not a Time Lord. (Probably) not immortal. Entirely on her own terms, as what she is. But stealing a TARDIS and running away to see all of time and space. With Maisie Williams. Given that the character’s departure is in part defined by the fact that she’s had a half-dozen of them already, three of them fatal, the question of how she’d leave for the final time was vexed. And the episode leaned into that, most obviously with the massively emphasized pan away from the “things that need to be said” conversation. Within that problem, the answer “Clara founds her own discrete and feminine iteration of the basic narrative of Doctor Who and escapes from the narrative into it” is absolutely brilliant.
More brilliant, though, is the way in which Hell Bent uses its oversignification to create an “it’s all true” approach to its underlying questions of mythology. Numerous things almost happen, or are gestured at through parallels but not through exposition, such that any fan theory is no more than two lines of technobabble away from confirmation. And particularly the role that women have within this – note the way that the episode is haunted by several of them, including some who are actually in it.
Actually, just to take a quick detour into a bit of canon the episode is mostly content to let slide, isn’t it fascinating that the Sisterhood of Karn is off at the end of the universe with the Time Lords? There’s no evidence they have time travel themselves (and indeed it would fuck with their basic concept pretty hard if they did), so presumably they’re sort of tagging along with Gallifrey. Which is fine – I have no problem expanding the “what gets time bubbled” from “Gallifrey” to “the entire constellation of Kasterborous.” But this makes the question of “where is Gallifrey” somewhat odd for the Doctor, given that he clearly knows how to stop off to visit Ohilia in The Magician’s Apprentice, which should give him a pretty good clue where Gallifrey is if they’re linked like that.

…

December 4, 2015

6. In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds. (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Twenty: J. Michael Straczynski and Before Watchmen)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: J. Michael Straczynski wrote Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan. Badly.

^{Figure 911: Adam Hughes likes drawing breasts. (Written by J. Michael Straczynski, from Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan #2, 2012)}

This sort of sloppiness is a tough pill to swallow in the context of a high profile prestige project like Before Watchmen that seeks to pair allegedly superstar creative teams like Straczynski and Adam Hughes (who, though good, is a somewhat odd choice for Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan, given that he’s generally best known for so-called good girl art, although he manages to find plenty of occasions to frame panels so as to focus on women’s breasts anyway). But it would be one thing if Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan were a sloppily written and incoherently plotted comic that at least gave some interesting insights into Dr. Manhattan’s character. But it doesn’t. The most significant and weighty character moment Dr. Manhattan gets is a revelation that he was a childhood immigrant from World War II whose Jewish mother was killed during their escape. As with most of Straczysnki’s additions to Watchmen, this is first of all just difficult to square away with the original text – Straczynski has this be the reason Osterman’s father became a watchmaker, which requires compressing the family’s settling in America, his father’s mastery of watch repair, Jon’s following suit, and his father’s ultimate rejection of it in favor of nuclear science into a five year period. But it’s also just boring. It’s a cliche cribbed clumsily from Holocaust literature, with the Holocaust serving mostly as a shorthand to let Straczynski sketch a major tragedy in just eight pages instead of having to do the work of generating emotional resonance himself, made all the crasser by the fact that there are already a wealth of historical connections between the German persecution of the Jews and both superheroes and atomic science, none of which Straczynski draws on while treating the Holocaust as a handy plot device.

^{Figure 912: Unsubtle Christ imagery. (Written by J. Michael Straczysnski, art by Eduardo Risso, from Before Watchmen: Moloch #2, 2012)}

Perhaps the more illustrative example of the particular pointlessness of Straczynski’s additions to Watchmen, however, comes with Before Watchmen: Moloch, which was hastily added to the Before Watchmen schedule after launch but before DC realized the project was a boondoggle and scrapped the Before Watchmen: Epilogue one-shot. The two issues for a life history of Moloch, with the first issue going from his birth to his release from jail and the second issue being the events around his death. But the overall effect is to tie almost everything into the teleology of Watchmen and specifically Ozymandias’s plan. The first issue’s cliffhanger is Ozymandias waiting for Moloch on his release; the second deals with Moloch’s involvement in Ozymandias’s plans, which mostly consists of Ozymandias heavily manipulating Moloch’s Christian faith (that faith having been largely inspired by meeting Dr. Manhattan in the first issue).…

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