Elizabeth Sandifer

A guest post by Jill Buratto

I’m not quite sure what more needs said about this. The episode rather says it all. Maybe discussing the differences between the death of Donna and the death of Clara made sense after Face the Raven (when Phil first asked if I would write this) but, let’s face it, Hell Bent was just such a lovely and succinct “fuck you Russell, that was fucked up” that I’m not sure there is much ground to cover. But this is a thing I am passionate about so forgive me a little redundancy. 

Because, ultimately, Hell Bent is an overt challenge to Journey’s End and the horrific violation of consent contained. It explicitly nods to the Donna mind wipe incident and challenges the very premise of it. “Tomorrow is promised to no one, Doctor, but I insist upon my past.” And, this time, the Doctor agrees, backs down, acknowledges that right. And in that nod to the Donna debacle, implicitly acknowledges the past mistake. 

And it’s not just Journey’s End. Davies doesn’t have a great track record with agency at the end of stories in general. It’s not just Donna, though the forced mind wipe is the most egregious example. Ignoring her informed consent and performing a procedure she flatly stated she did not want was nothing short of reprehensible and still makes my skin crawl. But it happens with Rose too. Both times really. In Doomsday, her decision to stand by the Doctor is first ignored by the Doctor himself, slipping the teleport medallion on her without her knowledge and sending her to the parallel universe. Once she finds her way back, her decision is once again undermined by her own father, pulling her with him through the closing Void. Both times, her choice was overridden by Those Who Know Better. And, to a lesser degree, this happens to her again in Journey’s End. Having finally reconnected with the Doctor, all she wants to do is stay with him and, instead, she is given the consolation prize/baggage of a newly formed Donna/Doctor clone (a hybrid, you might say). Instead of continuing her adventures, she is saddled with a dark, angry and unpredictable new life and essentially told to figure it out because the Doctor says so. It happens to Jack the first time, when he is left alone on a decimated space station with the dust of corpses and a new immortal life to figure out without any guidance or explanation. Again, none of these moments are quite as stomach churning as watching Donna beg and plead to keep her memories to no avail but still contain remove any element of choice from the companions who are exiting.

And it has been said before, but the biggest problem with the scene is that you are supposed to empathize with the Doctor. He made a hard choice for someone he cared about, he is the hero and his actions are justified. His motives and actions are not questioned by the narrative, it was just the thing to do and we know he is tortured by this decision because he spends some time crying in the rain.…

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Happy almost solstice.

Behind on everything, like one is before Christmas. The conspicuously delayed next Last War in Albion chapter is proving very thorny. I think it will be good, but the punishing nature of writing it is making me eye Fearful Symmetry nervously, lemme tell you.

We recorded the Christmas Special Shabcast this afternoon, and by we I basically mean everyone. That’s very silly. Thursday I believe?

Here’s one that ought be interesting: under what circumstances will you be watching The Husbands of River Song?…

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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.…

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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.”…

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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.…

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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? …

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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.…

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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.…

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