Documentary Footage of the Inside of My Brain
Jane will be on Wednesday this week. Until then, what the title suggests, from KLF Night at something called The Cube. I have no idea, really. Which is true of the inside of my brain too.
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Elizabeth Sandifer
About Elizabeth Sandifer
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The Three-Body Trilogy, Or At Least Two-Thirds Of It
From my forthcoming colleciton Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: Notes on Science Fiction and Culture in the Year of Angry Dogs, available for preorder at Amazon and Amazon UK.
One of the most complex events surrounding the Hugos, at least in terms of untangling its meaning and significance, was the victory of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, the first part of a trilogy, in the marquee category of Best Novel. On the night it looked like a triumph – a book that had originally been kept off the ballot by the Puppies that only got on when Marko Kloos withdrew himself in protest at the tactics that had gotten him on, and was the first time Best Novel had been won by a work not originally published in English, which was another welcome note of diversity in a night that needed them.
Beyond that, it was a genuinely good sci-fi book. This is in some ways distinct from calling it a genuinely good book; there’s definitely a bit of “grading on the curve” involved here whereby one excuses the fact that one of the two protagonists is woefully underdeveloped and seems to exist mostly to slowly work out one of the big sci-fi concepts (the eponymous Three-Body Problem) at the pace Liu wants that revelation to unfold and then to have a specific technical skill (and one entirely unrelated to the Three-Body Problem itself) needed in the climax. But it’s long on interesting ideas and does some fun stuff moving between two time periods, and the point of the Hugo Awards is in part to reward compelling sci-fi content over other literary merits.
And it’s worth stressing that the diversity aspect of it is a real one. The Three-Body Problem is the most successful work of science fiction in China in living memory. This matters, as does translating it into English where it can reach a smaller audience. It is of course absurd to saddle one book with the task of representing Chinese science fiction as a whole, and the topic is far enough from my areas of expertise that it’s not going to be the focus of this discussion, simply put, it’s extremely valuable just to get a window, however small, into this perspective. There’s nothing particularly strange or exotic about the book as such; there’s much more that’s familiar to a science fiction reader than not. But equally, it’s clearly a new perspective on a wealth of familiar tropes.
It wasn’t until people ran the numbers on the Hugo data the morning after that an unpleasant reality emerged, however: the margin of victory between The Three-Body Problem and the second-place novel, Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor, was smaller than the number of voters who had voted in accordance with Vox Day’s recommendations, which included putting The Three-Body Problem in first place, ahead of any of his actual nominees. In other words, Vox Day could fairly be argued as being responsible for the victory.…
Face the Raven Review
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| Art by cardinalcapaldi |
Dollard for showrunner.
What is perhaps most striking about Face the Raven is its studious lack of flashiness. Especially given the extent to which the denouement involves the story nearly being swallowed whole by the season arc. By the end the episode is nearly as awash in references and metaplots as the start of The Magician’s Apprentice, and yet at no point does it lose sight of its underlying goal of being a fairly straightforward Doctor Who story in the “here is a cool premise, let’s explore it” tradition.
That’s not to say that there aren’t some obvious moments where Dollard’s story gets sacrificed to the needs of the season arc. In particular, the fact that Me’s benefactors have to go unnamed (though they’re obviously the Time Lords, right?) and the entire “what the hell is going on here” is offloaded to, at the very least, Heaven Sent and one suspects at least partially Hell Bent means that this all feels a bit messy. It’s a mystery, and yet it never quite feels like it comes to a solution. Particularly awkward is the fact that the Doctor seems to more or less arbitrarily remember the whole “burn their dead” thing when it’s convenient to move the plot along.
But crucially, Dollard handles each of her two briefs here well enough that the slight awkwardness of the transition between them is largely beside the point. The first chunk of the story, prior to the Doctor turning the key, is raw cleverness. Of particular note is the deftness with which Dollard ditches one premise for another. The trap street is clever, and very Doctor Who. Similar ideas exist in other media – Danny the Street in Doom Patrol and the Wandering Shop in Discworld spring to mind off the top of my head, and I’m sure your head will provide as well. But it’s also necessarily a setup to another kind of story, and the handoff to “alien refugee camp” is well-timed and well-executed.
Moreover, though, “alien refugee camp” is a flat-out astonishing premise. And “murdery mystery in an alien refugee camp” is an even better one. Indeed, its compression into a third of a single episode has to go down as one of the most ridiculously swift disposals of a promising premise in the history of the season, and one really wonders what on Earth was ever going to happen in the parallel world where we spent two weeks on Sleep No More. But even in its ultra-compressed form it works well, with the elements fitting together in a satisfying fashion that builds ominously while also giving the audience sufficient opportunities to feel clever.
As for the second chunk, what is there to say? Not for the first, but nearly for the last time Capaldi and Coleman are given astonishingly good material, and they do astonishing things with it. Notice the structural cleverness of it: the cliffhanger is identical to The Magician’s Apprentice: Clara’s dead and the Doctor’s trapped.…
Saturday Waffling (November 21st, 2015)
We haven’t done one of these in a while, now have we?
Hope you’re doing well. I’m slightly under the weather, with a generic November drear as western Connecticut gears up for another round of “let’s try not to fucking freeze to death,” but in good spirits. I’m literally putting the finishing touches on Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, my definitive statement on 2015, which has been a real problematic fave of a year. That’s out the day after Christmas. I’m excited for it. I was just rereading the rewritten version of the title essay, and man, I am genuinely proud of that thing. It’s now a 19,000 word epic, and I look forward to sharing it with you.
I’ve also unexpectedly started writing a book that wasn’t really on the schedule or in any plans, but just sort of happened to me. It’s currently 18,000 words long, and nowhere near done. It’s a work of theory, because clearly everyone was waiting for one of those from me. Its starting points are the neoreactionaries, particularly Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land, as well as the work of Elizier Yudkowsky. It does many other things. I have some neat ideas on how to sell it, so look for that in 2016.
Anyway, how have you been? And better yet, who are you? Say hello, dear readers. If the Captchas will let you. …
5. Criminals shall not be presented so as to be rendered glamorous or to occupy a position which creates the desire for emulation. (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Nineteen: Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan)
Previously in The Last War in Albion: Following the tempest in a teapot that was the DC ratings system controversy, Moore and DC parted ways with acrimony on both sides, and more to the point with a near complete failure to understand each other, with Moore taking what he viewed as a principled stand and DC making a business decision.
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| Figure 908: Mike Grell’s Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters was DC’s attempted follow-up to Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. |
So from DC’s perspective, the loss of Moore was largely not a big deal. He had played his role in the process, identifying both the serious-minded take on superheroes and a fresh style of horror comics that proved to sell well. These, combined with ideas like the prestige format used for The Dark Knight Returns and the permanently-in-print trade paperback collection used for Watchmen, were more than enough for them to do what they wanted without any need to deal with the eccentrically principled. And for the most part they did. Moore’s run on Swamp Thing was followed smoothly by Rich Veitch taking over the writing while continuing on art, creating an easy transition and remaining in the same basic style. Jamie Delano, a close friend of Moore’s who had previously followed him on both Captain Britain and D.R. & Quinch, started up Hellblazer, featuring John Constantine, giving DC a second book in the Swamp Thing mould. Plus there were plenty of writers who came up through the same publications that Moore had who could be hired to do similar work. And DC continued with the grim realism introduced by Moore and Miller, putting out Mike Grell’s enormously successful prestige format Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters, which reworked the title character to no longer use silly trick arrows, and with a plot that included the brutal torture of Black Canary followed by Green Arrow killing her torturer. And all of this was on top of things like John Byrne’s massively successful take on Superman, Marv Wolfman’s perennially popular Teen Titans comics, Dennis O’Neil’s acclaimed run on The Question, and former Dick Tracy scribe Max Allan Collins’s doing a brief stint on Batman. It was, in other words, still an extraordinarily good period for DC.
But there is a visible absence in all of this. The Veitch Swamp Thing and Delano Hellblazer runs were excellent books, and will come into focus within the War in good time, but their success in reprints has been a fraction of what Moore’s run has done. The Longbow Hunters sold well and remains in print, but is nothing compared to The Dark Knight Returns, and back issues go for roughly cover price, as opposed to the massive valuation of its predecessor. And as for Watchmen, well, there’s not even an obvious choice to compare it to. In the thirty years since its debut, DC has simply never come close to replicating its success. That they never matched the success of what is arguably the single most successful superhero graphic novel in the history of the genre is, of course, baked into the premise of Watchmen being the most successful, but to have the only other book to challenge it for the title, The Dark Knight Returns, be from the same year is, by any standard, a shocking failure at DC’s primary goal of replicating its own successful formula.…
Sleep No More Podcast
This week I’m joined by my former partner in crime over at Slate, playwright Mac Rogers, to talk about Sleep No More, Mark Gatiss, and whatever the fuck else we got off topic about. Which, being an Eruditorum Press podcast, was many, many things.
Comics Reviews (November 18th, 2015)
Vader Down #1
It’s a good week when this is the sort of thing occupying the bottom slot of my list, because there’s almost nothing wrong with it. You can, perhaps, tell that Aaron is better suited to his characters than Gillen’s – his dialogue for Aphra and company feels like a hollow imitation of the characters. But that’s a minor detail in a comic that giddily makes Vader seem tremendously powerful and tremendously fucked all at once. Good fun, and hard to imagine a Star Wars fan that isn’t going to be loving this.
The New Avengers #3
I love the pentacled Cthulhu villain that is Moridun. And the three-scenes-in-one banter at the start. And Power Man deciding to call out Wiccan on his name. And really most of this. And I’m fascinated by POD, a character I’m not actually sure I’ve registered as a thing before, but who is without a doubt the most interesting part of this issue. Good stuff; I think this is the current best of the Avengers books.
Ms. Marvel #1
Ms. Marvel punches gentrification. It’s as awesome as you’d hope from that description. The “artisinal sushi” line is probably my favorite of the week, and the backup story by Alphona is genuinely charming. Mike looks like a great character, and I can’t wait to see what Wilson ends up doing with her. While I definitely prefer Alphona’s art to Miyazawa’s, this series is clearly in wonderful hands as ever.
Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl #4
Gloriously out of left field, Phonogram swerves away from all of its apparent plots, connecting back to them only fleetingly and midway through, in an issue that’s mostly black and white for good measure. It’s the sort of thing that makes you genuinely surprised that we’re officially Done With Phonogram in two issues time, as it gestures to just how much there is to do with this world and these characters. How will this tie back in? Will it tie back in? What the fuck is Gillen doing? I have no idea, but I’m wholly confident it’s brilliant, so whatever. “I liked Claire Danes’s earlier, more difficult material” is definitely the second funniest line of the week though.…
Seveneves, Vox Day, and Blowing Up the Moon
This is an essay from my forthcoming collection Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: Notes on Science Fiction and Culture in the Year of Angry Dogs, out on December 27th, and available for preorder on Amazon. (Print will be available when the book comes out on December 26th.)
There are two obvious angles to take on Seveneves given the discussions that make up the rest of this book. The first is to attempt to decipher Vox Day’s hatred of the book, an effort that involves getting deep into the weeds of scientific racism. The second is to try to figure out what it is with blowing up the moon these days. In the spirit of Seveneves itself, then, we’ll try to do both without any regard for whether they actually fit together.
First the moon. As with the other obvious touchstone here, Kill the Moon, its destruction is part of a larger story that wrestles with the changing status of space travel as a signifier in science fiction. In this regard, on a basic level, it serves as a symbolic breaking of a barrier. In 2015, it appears entirely likely that the moon will prove to be the furthest point humanity reaches prior to its extinction. And in both Kill the Moon and Seveneves its destruction is the impetus for rejecting that in favor of a different sort of future.
In Kill the Moon at least this is a reasonably complex event rooted in the long history of Doctor Who, which stretches back through the new frontier liberalism view of space travel, and serves to reconcile that utopian vision with the present day. And ultimately, Doctor Who taking place in a universe where the only thing that decisively isn’t canon is the Fermi Paradox, which means that this reconciliation ultimately has to be a restoration of a very classic mode of science fiction, which it is, with the shattered moon ultimately restored so that the future we long dreamed of can arrive.
Seveneves, on the other hand, is a Neal Stephenson novel, and thus focused first and foremost on the technical and material realities of the world. Where Kill the Moon is firmly about space as a symbolic concept, Seveneves is about the ways in which space travel is a massively difficult science and engineering problem. Or, to put it another way, it’s about why the classic sci-fi fantasy of space travel is not plausible in the first place. It’s a novel of radiation sickness, tiny and fatal punctures, and fuel conservation. Being Neal Stephenson, all of these technical bits are brilliant and gripping, of course, but they are very much the focus of the exercise.
And so in Seveneves the moon’s destruction exists to create a much harder problem that will require humanity to solve the hard problems of space. But this puts the book in something of an odd position. Stephenson has to advance the current state of space technology just a little bit past the present day in order to come up with a plausible way for humanity to survive (most obviously in the form of plausible asteroid mining), and has to create an entirely artificial and ostentatiously unexplained planetary crisis in the form of the moon exploding in order to justify it.…
Pex Lives 27: The Invasion
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We’re pleased to announce the release of Pex Lives 27, in which James and Kevin are joined by, and I quote their episode description here, “the very clever and lovely Eliot Chapman to discuss The Invasion.”
Sleep No More Review
This is solidly Gatiss’s best-ever Doctor Who story. It is in several regards outright brilliant, in a giddy and brave way that makes a perfect little quiet breath of an episode in the tradition of Love and Monsters or Blink, which it most obviously resembles. I’ve not, obviously, run the timing of it, but it certainly feels like a Doctor-lite episode, sharing their structural trick of treating a Doctor Who story as a defined thing happening inside another story. But where those stories put the Doctor into a very different sort of story, here he’s put into a found footage horror film. The result, very cleverly, is a story that gradually unravels into two separate stories, with the Doctor falling out of the narrative instead of slowly overtaking it.
This unraveling is by some margin the highlight of the episode, and is done with deft panache. Information is conveyed through the subtle shifts of the narrative rules, so that the found footage approach moves gradually and cleverly from being a gimmick to being the entire point of the episode. This is handled smartly on multiple levels, including Gatiss’s script, Justin Molotnikov’s direction, and Reece Shearsmith’s performance, which is a beautifully clever blend of familiar forms of Doctor Who acting that shifts cleverly with each twist. The final scene is particularly beautiful, with just the right amount of ecstatic thrill in his evil plan and clear relish in his transformation into dust. What a finish.
On top of that, many of the ideas here are genuinely great. I imagine Jack and Jane will both be over the moon with aspects of this. The leisure time destroyed by unchecked capitalist growth rises up and consumes us, our dreams taking revenge on us for our failure to attend to them. The dust is watching us, and the story it tells about us will kill us. I mean, these are just the sorts of sentences you live to write as an anarcho-Marxist occultist television critic, you know?
There are, however, two significant weaknesses. The first is, simply put, the irreducible flaws of Gatiss. Even when he, as he does here, has genuinely brilliant ideas, he’s rarely inclined to push them particularly far. Given a concept with all the metaphorical heft and conceptual possibility of sleep monsters, we really should have something more interesting than the smashy brutes that are the Sandmen. He doesn’t even go as far as indulging in the obvious grossness of literal snot monsters with people getting transformed into Sandmen and crumbling to dusty snot as they die or anything. Just smashing, and a bunch of kills in the form of “oh no one got in the room with you and we cut to black.”
Beyond that, he remains infuriatingly rubbish at giving his characters interesting arcs or things to do. The supporting cast makes that of Under the Lake/Before the Flood look like Osgood or Ashildir; they’re banal cannon fodder for corridor runs. Clara gets to trip and fall into a box.…