Eruditorum Press

Haunt the Future

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:

iCompton: Dre as Apple Product

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August 7th, 2015 will presumably not join January 24th, 1984 and October 23, 2001 on the list of celebrated Apple anniversaries. This will, I suspect, be a mistake. The release of Compton (all together now, “Dr. Dre’s first new album in sixteen years”) is every bit as significant a cultural moment as the Macintosh and the iPod, even if its status as a pop moment is likely to obscure its status as a moment in the history of tech culture, and, more broadly, the way it positions Dre as the king of both Compton and Cupertino, for good and for ill.

The album is, after all, an Apple product, even if it says Aftermath/Interscope on the label. Because, of course, there wasn’t a physical label when the album was released: it was an Apple Music/iTunes Store exclusive. This is part and parcel of Dr. Dre’s newfound status as Apple executive, as was the album’s announcement, just a week before its release, on Dre’s Beats One show.

The theatricality of that move is not the only thing borrowed from Steve Jobs. Dre is working in the same role of renowned visionary overseer that Jobs occupied in his later years. Dre’s albums have always been intensely collaborative affairs, but on Compton he is less the lead artist than the CEO, serving as the drummer for decades of hip hop talent, from Ice Cube to Kendrick Lamar, to march to. Beats by Dre, if you will.

In this regard too, Dre is following in Jobs’s footsteps, with Apple’s 2014 acquisition of Beats by Dre being made in the model of its 1997 acquisition of NeXT. In 1997 they sought both to use NeXTSTEP to make up for years of stalled and inadequate modernisation of MacOS and to (re)acquire the services of Steve Jobs. In 2014, the platform past due for modernization was the iTunes Store, the acquired technology was the Beats Music service, and the executive talent was Dre.

Central to this process is the fact that Dre functions as a luxury brand. That’s the whole point of Apple Music itself, which, for all its interface foibles, still has the sense of quality design one expects from Apple, carefully chosen and immaculately kerned typefaces over lush stock photos all combining to scream “we’re classier than Spotify” as loudly as possible. But this sense of design is just as visible in Compton. A Dre album has always demanded that it be listened with an ear trained on the quality and innovation of the production. It has to be a smash hit also, but its true audience is the engaged connoisseur. With its collage of 70s funk and analogue synths, 1992’s The Chronic hinted to listeners that hip-hop’s most formidable power wasn’t revolutionary rhetoric or gun love, but a particular poise of laid-back confidence; seven years later, 2001 was a victory lap featuring the era’s top names paying Dre tribute, demonstrating the immeasurable material payoff of his approach

Or, to put it in terms of the tech buzzword du jour, Dre has always been curatorial, presenting new sounds and artists to the world so as to carefully cultivate an image as the ultimate in tastemakers.…

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Thought and Memory (The Lost Vikings)

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They are, in truth, not lost, although they have gone far more astray than even Vinland. Were one to locate it on a map of genre, it would rest near Lemmings in the genre of action-puzzle. Like Lemmings, it is a game about navigating some characters through a series of traps to a goal. Also like Lemmings the characters are each given unique abilities. There are major differences – Lemmings’ central mechanic is based on the idea that the Lemmings are going to behave the same regardless of what you do, and on assigning special abilities to specific Lemmings at the right time, whereas The Lost Vikings gives you a trio of norsemen, each with their own special abilities, and has you alternate among controlling them. But the basic mechanic is the same.

First is Eric, swiftest of the Vikings, and the only one who can jump. Nominally, this means that he is the one with whom one explores the level to figure out what you’re supposed to do. And in this, he represents a crucial drive. Indeed, exploration is one of the basic types of gameplay in some models of how players interact with games, and it’s certainly one of the basic psychochronographic drives.

This is, perhaps, inherited from psychogeography, which is, after all, first and foremost a means of exploration. Although in both cases (as with Eric) it is not pure exploration, which is to say, it is not driven simply by a desire to find something that is new. Instead it is exploration in pursuit of a goal – a promised land, of sorts. The literalness of this shifts in context – Eric, for instance, very literally seeks a new land with every level, that being what an exit is. Similarly, the psychogeographer’s quest is necessarily defined by the physicality of land, even as they seek to conceptually reconfigure it, as opposed to abandoning it in favor of a new place. The psychochronographer, meanwhile, does not explore land in the conventional sense at all, instead looking for new modes of being and ideas.

In every case the pursuit is at its heart a tragedy. To find the promised land is always to despoil it. The psychochonorapher finds a new idea only to have it snap into place with relation to all other ideas, to become a spot on the psychic map like any other. The psychogeographer reconfigures space to his whims only to see it endlessly recuperated as the oppressive ordering of things takes hold. And even Eric will find that every exit is, in reality, simply an entrance to another map. Discovery is and always will be the death of exploration.

Although that one’s a bit dodgier with relation to The Lost Vikings. This is not so much because discovery is not the death of exploration as because there’s just so many other ways to die. The traps, generally speaking, aren’t a huge problem for Eric – more often than not, with his ability to jump, he’s actually the one who’s supposed to navigate those.…

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Weird Kitties Reviews, Batch Five (The Dark Forest, Ghost Champagne, The Gospel of Loki)

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The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
Reviewed by Philip Sandifer
 

Eligible for Best Novel and available for purchase here.

I had some reservations about The Three-Body Problem, although they’re as much sour grapes as genuine objections, and its merits were considerable. This, I think, is a stronger novel, and a strong candidate for my ballot. Liu constructs an interesting conceptual structure; an alien fleet is 450 years away from Earth and bent on destroying it. A MacGuffin exists whereby Earth is under constant and total surveilance by the aliens and unable to produce any scientific advancements in theoretical physics, thus more or less locking technology more or less into variations of what’s on contemporary Earth (with a few exceptions when it furthers the plot such as cryonics). 

The novel follows a couple of cunning plans unfolding over about 250 years of future history, the main one of which also unfolds along a novel explanation of the Fermi paradox that doubles as a theory of interstellar relations. This is not to say it’s a theory original to Liu - I’ve no idea there – but it’s not one that’s been overdone in stories about aliens. And that’s the basic and real appeal of this, I think. Throughout it, there’s just a genuine feeling of innovation. There’s a fresh feeling to even the hoariest of old sci-fi tropes here. It feels fresh like one imagines Asimov and Clarke did in their days. One suspects – though it’s outside my area of expertise to conclude – that a fair part of this is that we haven’t really seen a Chinese perspective on these genre conventions before, but whatever the reason, it works well.

The book’s heftier than it’s predecessor, and probably doesn’t work well if you haven’t read it, but it’s a solid and interesting science fiction novel in the grand and classical sense, which is a nice thing to see. It never drags in its length, and Liu comes up with a fresh idea often enough to keep things moving. I ended up wolfing the bulk of it down in a nice autumn evening under the blankets with a few pots fof tea and absolutely loving it, and can’t wait for the last book of the set in January. 

Ghost Champagne by Charlie Jane Anders
Reviewed by William Shaw
 
Eligible for Best Short Story, and available here
 
I mean, the title is brilliant just on its own.
 
‘Ghost Champagne’ may well be the best short story of Charlie Jane Anders’ career so far, which, as our host has pointed out in the past, is really saying something. Anders is fond of dusting off old storytelling standards, and so it becomes tempting to fall back on old reviewing standards when describing her work; I laughed, I cried, I was moved unlike anything else I have read this year, etcetera, etfuckingcetera. But while that may be an accurate summation of my reaction, the fact is that no review of this story can possibly be as engaging as the story itself.
…

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Under the Lake Review

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It’s tempting to call it ruthlessly traditional Doctor Who. I don’t think it is, mind you, but it’s certainly tempting to call it that. What it definitely is, however, is oddly procedural Doctor Who. There’s very little time spent on theme-building; even the big Doctor/Clara scene that the episode contrives to have them nip back to the TARDIS for is more just a character piece than something that feels like a heavily built thematic piece. And there’s not a heck of a lot of time spent building characters – the base crew are pretty underdeveloped compared to, say, Last Christmas, The Rebel Flesh, or The Impossible Planet, to the point where the Doctor rallying them to stay and explore the church feels slightly unearned as a scene. There’s not even a ton of plot. I mean, lots of things happen, but it’s no The Magician’s Apprentice or Dark Water, nor even The Rebel Flesh. Actually, one really has to rack one’s brain to think of the last time a whole episode was used to set up a premise this straightforward. The Sontaran Stratagem?

No, even that has more moving parts than this, an episode that is more interested in lengthy scenes in which characters watch grainy green-tinged footage on a computer monitor or an extended corridor relay race than in what we normally describe as “doing anything” in television. I don’t think I’ve ever wondered so much what the Tumblr gifset crowd is going to make of an episode.

The real answer to the question, then, is probably… ooh, Curse of Fenric 1? (Survival has a pretty complex premise.) Or hell, the last actual proper base under siege, Warriors of the Deep 1? Certainly you have to look to the classic series to find anything as willing to spend quite this long on people fiddling with machines on a BBC soundstage. It’s just not something Doctor Who does much, as television. For the most part this has generally struck me as a good thing, although there’s certainly a brand of traditionalism that would say otherwise.

And yet there’s no obvious reference point for this in the classic series. It doesn’t feel like a McCoy story or a Davison story. It’s tempting to call anything that’s a base under siege a Troughton story, but no, this isn’t how one of those works or feels either. Indeed, its basic formula is unmistakably a new series standard – the action-heavy setup to a premise-changing cliffhanger.

The result makes a credible claim to being Whithouse’s best work in years, and I think actually shows a really interesting perspective on the series. Recall that Whithouse, when he debuted on the series nearly a decade ago, noted that he’d not been a classic series fan. Indeed, and this is a fact that I don’t think has been remarked upon much, he was the first new series writer for whom their episode was the first Doctor Who they’d ever done; the literal first of the new school.…

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Weird Kitties: Best Fancast Open Thread

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Ah, Best Fancast. Or, as literally anyone that isn’t the Hugo Awards would call it, Best Podcast. I’m sufficiently bad at listening to podcasts that I miss the majority of the stuff Eruditorum Press puts out, personally, although I’m dead certain to be nominating Verity! this year, and might well go for Welcome to Night Vale, although I’d generally figure they’re a better fit for Dramatic Presentation. (They were among the runners up in Fancast this year, though.)

So what’s good?

Also, I’ve got outright nothing to run tomorrow review-wise, so once again I beat that drum. snowspinner at gmail. If someone sends me something, I’ll write up a review of The Dark Forest so that we at least have two things. Otherwise, it’ll be the return of Sunday Pancaking. 

Next week… I dunno, Dramatic Presentation Long Form? Aka the category where the thing everyone knows will win isn’t out until December? Sure. Let’s go with that.

But for now, tell me what podcasts I should add to my list of things I won’t get around to listening to.…

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She saw places that aren’t even there any more! (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part 12: Pax Americana)

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Figure 885: The eight panel grid and recurrent figure eight motif in Pax Americana. (Written by Grant Morrison, art by Frank Quitely and Nathan Fairbairn, from The Multiversity: Pax Americana, 2014)

Previously in The Last War in Albion: When it came out, Watchmen was generally hailed, along with Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns as the vanguard for a more “mature” taken on superheroes – one marked by a great degree of cynicism and violence, an approach Moore would later come to repudiate, and that would lead him towards a profound ambivalence about Watchmen as a work.

It would be ridiculous to suggest that Moore did not want Watchmen to succeed, but equally, it’s clear that the terms on which it did succeed were intensely upsetting to him. In a fundamental sense, the book he wrote and the book people read were two very different things. And the gulf between those two versions of Watchmen is a huge and fundamental part of the reaction to the book.

It is also a gulf explored by Grant Morrison in his 2014 comic Pax Americana, part of his larger Multiversity series of semi-connected one-shots exploring alternate Earths in the DC Multiverse he had helped restore in 2007. The comic was explicitly modeled after Watchmen– indeed, Morrison had been hyping it since 2009, describing it as rooted in “that sort of crystalline, self-reflecting storytelling method” and an attempt to capture what would happen “if Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons had pitched the Watchmen now, rooted in a contemporary political landscape, but with the actual Charlton characters instead of analogues.” In this regard, what is perhaps most significant about it is that it is not an imitation of Watchmen as such. Where many comics overtly following from Watchmen adopt its nine panel grid, Pax Americana is based around an eight panel grid, albeit significantly more loosely than Watchmen is around its grid. This is in turn reflected within the comic, which uses the figure eight as a recurring visual motif. But Morrison slyly plays on the image, using it not just to represent the number 8, but as an infinity symbol, a figure that tacitly invokes Doctor Manhattan’s line shortly before the end of Watchmen, “nothing ever ends.”

Figure 886: An assassination in reverse. (Written by Grant Morison, art by Frank Quitely and Nathan Fairbairn, from The Multiversity: Pax Americana, 2014)

Indeed, the complex notion of time implied by this iconography manifests throughout Pax Americana. Like Watchmen, it engages in considerable non-linear storytelling, but where Watchmen has a clear forward-moving narrative that runs from the beginning of issue #1 to the end of issue #12, albeit one punctuated by a number of clearly designated flashbacks, Pax Americana is simply told non-chronologically, with the reader left to piece together the actual sequence of events within the narrative. Its opening section, depicting the assassination of the President of the United States by the Peacemaker (shot in an open-topped motorcade, a tacit reference to Watchmen’s suggestion, made explicit in the film, that the Comedian was involved in the Kennedy assassination) in reverse over the course of three pages, a clear sign that this is not a comic with a straightforward relationship to time.…

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Comics Reviews (September 30th, 2015)

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As always, from worst to best of what I bought.

Sandman Overture #6

Ultimately, this fails under the weight of five previous issues spent going “well, maybe it’s all going to come together in the end.” Which, obviously, you know better than, or at least I do. No, the truth is that there’s no good reason for this miniseries to exist. It served mainly to waste J.H. Williams’s talents for two years on a mediocre and uninspired book, the result of which ends up being some of the worst work of his career simply because, for all its formal brilliance, it’s a pain in the ass to tell what’s going on, and usually what’s going on wasn’t worth the effort. None of the crackle or energy of Sandman is present here; it’s just a tired exercise of checking some boxes and getting to the end of the plot. What an utter disappointment of a book.

Young Terrorists #1

Picked up off the rack because it was a light week, and because I was intrigued by a book blurbed by Laura Sneddon (a critic I have great regard for, but whose taste differs pretty sharply from mine) and Julian Darius (a critic I have literally no respect for whatsoever, but whose taste runs close to my own) that used the tagline “get radicalized.” It’s messy – an eighty page opening issue that luxuriates a bit too much. Artist Amancay Nahuelpan is working in that messy, scratchy style of Daniel Žeželj or Riccardo Burchielli, which trades a degree of clear storytelling for impact, and the premise feels ever so slightly tired. I don’t want to say there are too many books that are taking terrorism seriously as a tactic instead of treating it as something to reflexively demonize, because there aren’t, but this mostly just leaves me wishing Bendis and Maleev were putting Scarlet out on anything like a reasonable schedule.

Providence #5

I admit to having a terribly large amount of fun with all the St. Anselm’s segments, that being my wife’s alma mater. (She was particularly tickled that her school motto was proposed by a bunch of Necronomicon-obsessed occultists.) This is a weird and deliberately unsettled issue based around dreams and time breaking down, and I’m curious how the transition into “Herbert West: Reanimator” is going to work in terms of tone from this heavily dream-inflected issue (mixing mostly “Dreams in the Witch House” and “Color out of Space”). But, perhaps as expected, this is transitional. Although Moore is clearly having a lot of fun with characters getting to explain things in ways that go over poor Robert Black’s head. “I’m more of a revivalist” indeed. 

Mercury Heat #4

I wondered when this would pick up a bit. Gillen finally provides the exposition drop that the book proper had been lacking, and as a result Luiza’s character comes appreciably more into focus. It’s funny, the plot kicks into a properly functioning gear, and for the first time we get an issue where all the parts seem to be working together.…

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Technological Determinism (Star Fox)

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Quietly and behind the scenes, far from the watchful eyes of most of us, Nintendo was systematically fucking absolutely everything up. The long term result of this would eventually be the cataclysmic end of Nintendo’s dominance over the video game industry. The short term result was Star Fox.

The problems began, in many regards, in 1988 when Nintendo partnered with Sony to create an add-on for the SNES using the newly standardized CD-ROM format. This was by and large a defensive move – NEC had a CD-ROM expansion for the TurboGrafx-16 out in Japan in 1988, and it reached the US in 1990, becoming integrated in the standard release of the console in 1992. Work on a CD peripheral for the Genesis began almost as soon as the format was standardized, and saw Japanese release in late 1991, coming out in the US a year later and immediately attaining infamy due to having Night Trap as a launch title. And so Nintendo essentially had to follow suit.

The device was to be announced in the summer of 1991 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. But shortly before the announcement Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi got cold feet over the degree to which the deal with Sony would give them licensing control over the new CD format. Since control over the cartridge supply had been a key plank of Nintendo’s business model, especially in the US where the “Seal of Quality” was a rhetorical device to counter fears of an Atari-style crash, this was ultimately deemed unacceptable. And so Nintendo made an audacious move, quickly arranging a new deal with Phillips and announcing it at CES the day after Sony unveiled their “Play Station,” which would combine a SNES cartridge slot and a CD-ROM drive.

Almost every part of this went badly for Nintendo. Sony eventually repurposed their CD unit into the stand-alone Playstation, decisively winning the fifth generation of console. The Phillips device never materialized (and indeed Nintendo would not release an optical-disc system until 2001), but as a consequence of that deal Phillips was allowed to release a raft of shovelware featuring Nintendo properties for their moribund CDi system. And worse, the Super Nintendo had no upgrades that would allow it to compete with its rivals on technical grounds for the remainder of the 16-bit era.

The response to this state of affairs was the Super FX chip, designed by British developer Argonaut Games, who produced it to enable a Super Nintendo version of their acclaimed Starglider series. The chip was a cartridge-based auxiliary graphics processor for the Super Nintendo that dramatically increased its ability to handle 3D graphics.

Implicit in this is a vision of the future, namely that video games would someday be 3D. This is a significant change from how basically all games on the NES and, thus far, the SNES had worked. Those games had all been based on two-dimensional sprites. This was the technological innovation offered by Mode 7 at the SNES’s launch – a new set of ways of manipulating sprites that allowed for things like Super Mario Kart where the track was, in reality, a background layer being manipulated via Mode 7, with the actual cars just being sprites that were resized up and down to produce the illusion that the car was moving forward or background.…

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Capitalist Pig

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Roasted pig’s head with barbeque sauce, raw vegetable salad, brioche bun, lime, and lettuce cup from the Greenhouse Tavern in Cleveland. ($52)

“All the pigs are all lined up. I give you all that you want. Take the skin and peel it back. Now doesn’t that make you feel better?” -Nine Inch Nails, “March of the Pigs”

There is something more than faintly reasonable about the droves of Tories attempting to spin the news that David Cameron fucked a pig with variations of “well who hasn’t?” After all, that’s basically why the story was so viscerally enticing – the fact that nearly everybody’s reaction to the news is complete credulity. Simply put, fucking a dead pig is the sort of thing you expect someone like David Cameron to do.

There are many reasons for this. Plenty of people have written intelligently about the psychological basis for initiation rituals among posh male societies and the way in which the resultant mutual possession of blackmail material ensures loyalty. More broadly, the idea that posh people are in reality depraved dunces is more or less a standard assumption of British comedy. “They all secretly fuck pigs” is perhaps not something that had been widely uttered before the Daily Mail started serializing Ashcroft’s book, but the basic sentiment bordered on the universal.

Less discussed, however, is this: why a pig? Because the pig clearly matters. It would be an entirely different scandal – and one Cameron probably could not politically survive – if he’d fucked a dog or Boris Johnson. Even a sheep wouldn’t quite work – sheepfucking is firmly a poor person’s bestiality. No, it was clearly a pig or nothing.

It’s not that pigs are specifically a rich man’s animal. One can just as easily imagine a rural yokel fucking a pig as David Cameron; the only difference is that when a poor person fucks a pig it’s because they want to, whereas the rich only fuck pigs when they have to. But the fact that pigs traverse the class divide is much, though not all, of why David Cameron had to fuck one.

If one were to take a position of culinary technological determinism, the pig would have an almost causal relationship with European rural poverty. It reproduces quickly and grows to slaughtering weight equally quickly, making them an economical choice of animal. Unlike the Near East, where urban pigs served essentially as a sewage system, thus marking them as fundamentally unclean (and an entirely different vulgar metaphor), European pigs, due to the comparative excess of water and forestation, were historically well-raised while still being fairly cheap animals to keep. The pig is also a historically flexible animal, hence the French saying that you can use every part of the animal but the oink. But more important is why the entire pig is usable: pork is perfect for salting and smoking, and thus lends itself to preservation techniques for the winter.

But it’s here the class divide becomes important. Living high on the hog means more than just fucking one while coked up.…

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Weird Kitties Reviews, Batch Four (The Buried Giant, Woman at Exhibition, Empowered Volume 9)

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The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Reviewed by Jack Graham
 
Eligible for Best Novel and available for purchase here.
 

Nobody expected Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in ten years to be a fantasy novel, but it is – complete with dragons, ogres, pixies, and spells. The novel is set in a mythic version of the British past, during an uneasy truce between Britons and Saxons, a few decades after the death of King Arthur. The setting and style both rely as much uponThe Sword in the Stone as on Chaucer or Geoffrey of Monmouth.

Ishiguro (probably still best known for The Remains of the Day) is one of those literary authors who experiments with genre fiction. His last novel, Never Let Me Go, was written like a conventional ‘realist’ literary novel, but the backdrop and plot of the story depended upon both the SF trope of cloning and the SF technique of discursive worldbuilding. Unlike most critics I found Never Let Me Go disappointing, at least as SF. The SF elements didn’t do much except introduce a rumination on cloning that struck me as something of a moralistic strawman, and a metaphor about the fleeting nature of human life – not to give too much away: the novel is about people who die young – which left you wondering why he didn’t just write about how old people feel like time has gone by too fast. Literary novelists often do this sort of thing when they adopt SF inflections (c.f. Margaret Atwood). They grab the power of the fantastic to provide metaphors, but in so doing they disrespect the categories of the fantastic by using them to say things they could just as easily say literally. The great power of the fantastic is not only that it comes loaded with meaning, but also that it allows for polysemy, for multiplicity and instability of interpretation.
 
The Buried Giant, unlike Never Let Me Go, has met a mixed reception from critics, but is far less guilty of this sort of thing. Generally, Ishiguro is happy to present the literal fantastic as meaning what is says it means, even if it isn’t spelled out. For instance, boatmen who take elderly couples across the water to magic islands are literally taking the dead to the next world. They’re not a redundant metaphor for death, they are just a description of death. The description of death is couched in mythical terms because the story occurs in a mythical version of history. Paradoxically, this literalism (i.e. the dragon is pretty much just a dragon) means that the book refuses to foreclose upon easy, straightforward meanings. Clearly the dragon means something, but we are not being instructed by the author in what this is. Apparently intelligent people have complained about this. I relished it.
 
The book is clearly about all sorts of things, some of them perennial Ishiguro obsessions. Old age, memory, failure of communication, wasted opportunity, and self-delusion, for example. At the heart of the novel is the question of memory, both personal and historical.
…

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