Eruditorum Press

Watery tarts distributing hammers and sickles

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:

Weird Kitties Reviews, Batch Three (The Vorrh, The Goat Variations, Aurora)

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 The Vorrh, by Brian Catling
Reviewed by Phil Sandifer
 
Eligible for Best Novel and available for purchse here. 
 
In many ways, I just want to link to Alan Moore’s introduction, since it is not as though I’m going to write a better review than it. And if one wants to be brief about it, “the sort of novel Alan Moore would call ‘the current century’s first landmark work of fantasy'” serves as a perfectly good description.
 
Which is to say that this is dense, literary fiction. It is tempting to call it magical realism as opposed to fantasy. But this would obscure more than it reveals. Its main plot (although it has many subplots) is the story of a man with a magic bow who is trying to cross the enchanted forest of the Vorrh. Its world is flecked with reality – another major character is Eadweard Muybridge, whose life plays out mostly as in our world – but is unmistakably a fantastic landscape, a world anchored by the hallucinatory forest and the monstrosities within.
 
What makes the book remarkable is in many ways the juxtapositions within it. The Vorrh is both medieval forest and colonial jungle, and the book draws from both iconographies, giving it a vibrant and intriguing heft. It is a book where things never quite become clear, and are all the more enticing and rewarding for it. It is labyrinthine and strange.
 
Catling is a sculptor by trade (The Vorrh is his debut novel), and the book has the heft and weight one would expect from this. It is intricate and carved prose that rewards attentiveness. This can make slow going at first, although the book becomes faster and easier once the vagaries of its structure and approach are known. It never becomes a page turner, but is instead one to savor; a structure of shifting viewpoints makes it easy to read one or two bits a night, allowng its strange tapestry to unfold. It has much to reveal. 
 
The Goat Variations, by Jeff VanderMeer
Reviewed by Eric Rosenfield
 
Eligible for Best Short Story and available here.
 
Jeff VanderMeer’s story “The Goat Variations” fuses together some fairly hoary science fictional tropes: the government keeps psychics alive in dream states to predict the future (ala Minority Report), a time machine, a man who sees versions of himself across alternate realities. As with much fiction, originality is produced by the peculiar alchemy of how the tropes are mixed, melded and remixed, and this is a stellar example of how that is done.
 
Told chiefly in half-scenes and flashbacks, we find a strangely familiar president ruling over Anglo-America (the touch of his crown during coronation like an  “iron kiss from the mouth of God”), reading to children in a dilapidated school while his country is attacked. It is not Islamic fundamentalists attacking, however, but Christian ones in the rebellious heartland of the country. The president can’t focus, does not know what to do.
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The Magician’s Apprentice Review

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Well, you can see why the promotional campaign was structured like it was. There’s really no way to describe The Magician’s Apprentice without just calling it a trailer. It’s a forty-five minute slab of raw plot designed to set up whatever The Witch’s Familiar is going to be, which looks like something involving Davros setting up a trolley problem with Missy and Clara on one track and every Dalek ever on the other.

In one sense, then, it’s a pretty faithful imitation of Dark Water. But where Dark Water was a moody eleventh episode think piece that got to pay off a season’s worth of character and theme, The Magician’s Apprentice has to basically start from scratch. Accordingly, it’s built almost entirely out of bombast and spectacle. To say that the episode is stuffed to the gills is an understatement: six Doctors (unless they used a McGann Big Finish bit I missed, which at this point you wouldn’t bet against), Missy, UNIT, Davros, every Dalek ever, the Maldovarium, an Ood, the Shadow Proclamation, Karn, and a joke about the different versions of Atlantis.

This is a familiar approach for Moffat at this point, and one he’s good at. Sure, those inclined to play “spot the recycled bits” will not be short of options, but there’s no inherent reason to focus on the fact that the setup is just The Impossible Astronaut with a hint of Name of the Doctor over the fact that a guy who’s made of snakes, hand mines (what the actual fuck), and all the planes stopping are all new and clever ideas. As is the guitar/axe battle, although I think you’d be hard-pressed to say that scene worked. (Still, Peter Capaldi as Doof Warrior is one of those things you don’t want to argue with as such.) It’s not the best iteration of this particular style of everything and the kitchen sink setup that Moffat’s done, but it’s not the worst either.

I recognize that my tone here is that of a long lead-up to a paragraph beginning with the word “but,” but that’s unfair. The “but” I’d build to is simple enough: that this is basically raw spectacle with minimal actual substance. And it’s not that this is untrue (although I’m sure Jane will come up with some spectacular stuff); it’s just that it’s more than faintly ridiculous to ask anything else of a season premiere. Its job is to bring back the state of being where one thinks of every day of the week primarily in terms of its proximity to Saturday. And so this sort of massively high-speed tour through the series’ strengths and default tropes works.

But it is, necessarily, more a summary of what the show’s strengths are than a demonstration of what it has to offer going forward. And for the most part, those strengths come in the form of the cast. Jenna Coleman, for instance, is at this point reaping the full benefit of being the most richly characterized companion in the history of the series.…

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Weird Kitties: Best Graphic Story Open Thread

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It looks like I forgot to actually name this week’s category last week, so let’s do a fairly easy one, at least in terms of this site’s readership: Best Graphic Story. 

This is the category I’ve got the most locks in already – with the publishing calendar pretty much set for the year, I’ll be nominating The Wicked + The Divine, Bitch Planet, Crossed +100, and Questionable Content for sure. I’m still not sure about the fifth slot. The frontrunner is probably Trees, but I mean to go actively looking for work by people who aren’t white before I commit to that.

Here’s the Hugo Nominees 2015 Wikia’s list of eligible stuff. So, what are you thinking you’ll nominate?

And tune in tomorrow for another batch of reviews, including one from me of Brian Catling’s The Vorrh. Still room in that batch, so feel free to lob something to snowspinner at gmail.

Next week, let’s discuss… Best Professional Artist. That’s a fun one. 

Oh, and there’s apparently some TV show about a magician and his apprentice on tonight? I dunno. Check back later today I guess. …

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Interview with Pulpozaur

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The lovely folks at Pulpozaur asked me to do an interview with them, which went up today, and is particularly cool to my mind in that the site is a Polish site, and so the interview has been translated, which I believe marks the first time I’ve been translated. I always love seeing which bits of interviews people pull title quotes from – this one’s “Elusive in the same ways as the secret truths of the universe,” which I have to admit, sounds like the sort of quote I’d pull to title something. Here’s the bit of the interview that’s from:

I think criticism really has to show you things that weren’t necessarily obvious. And for all that these approaches fall short in terms of strict empiricism, I think they retain a lot of attraction. I’m not sure Freud did a great job of understanding many actual people, but man, he understands Hamlet well. And for all the failings of Marxist governments – and obviously a Polish readership is going to have a more acute understanding of that than I do – I think he captures what it feels like to be a relatively poor worker under capitalism like nobody else. So they’re good for finding new ways of looking at things, especially art, which isn’t bounded by empiricism anyway.

So I’m drawn to occultism, as an interpretive method, for many of the same reasons. There’s something about the idea that there’s some sort of lost, hidden order to things that’s just immediately compelling. Even if it’s just the human instinct for pattern recognition firing blindly at the random noise of an ultimately meaningless universe, which I don’t rule out, the sense of some almost present truth that slips out of reach whenever you grasp at it is fundamentally compelling. And so it’s a useful way to get at stories; especially because art tends to be elusive in exactly the same way as the secret truths of the universe.

The full interview is available here, although I imagine most of you will prefer the English-language version, available here.…

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She was just somebody who had to get out. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part 10: Burroughs)

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Figure 876: The revelation of Mr. Mxyzptlk’s villainy is one of several shared plot points between Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow and Superfolks. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger, from Action Comics #583, 1986)

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Among the commonly cited influences on Watchmen is Superfolks, a novel by Robert Mayer that shares several plot beats with it and other superhero stories Moore wrote in the 1980s. Moore has generally resisted this comparison, pointing to other texts that influenced him more.

This gestures towards a larger issue with treating Superfolks as a major antecedent to Watchmen, which is that very little of what Moore allegedly drew from it is actually all that innovative. Indeed, Pádraig Ó Méalóid, in a thorough analysis of Morrison’s claims, found that in almost every case either the similarities were overstated or an earlier antecedent could be found. (The sole exception was the use of Pxyzsyzgy, Mayer’s analogue for Mr. Mxyzptlk, as the ultimate villain behind everything, a plot point shared with the resolution of Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow.) But in many ways it’s more helpful to take a step backwards and look at what both Superfolks and Moore’s work are attempting, and situating it in a larger context. Ultimately, both of them are engaging with superheroes in a manner familiar from the New Wave of science fiction spearheaded, in the UK, by J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, and in the US by a broader group of writers including Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delaney, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

The defining aspect of the New Wave was a turn away from pulp adventure and a focus on plausible extrapolation of science and towards using the tropes of science fiction and fantasy to explore human experience, applying the approaches of literary modernism and postmodernism to the genres. One major approach to this, pioneered by Michael Moorcock, was to rework pulp genres into new forms, asking, in various ways, what the subjective experiences of a character in a pulp adventure story might be like. In many regards, it was inevitable that this would eventually be applied to superheroes; that it took until 1977 for the first one to be released is mainly down to the fact that the companies producing the overwhelming majority of superhero stories, Marvel and DC, were fundamentally conservative in their publishing. But with a concept as historically inevitable as this, a priority dispute is almost beside the point.

Indeed, what’s most revealing about the priority dispute is the degree to which Moore’s influences largely leapfrog Mayer and go back to the larger New Wave tradition. The central idea of Superfolks comes from the New Wave, but its scattershot approach of random pop culture namedropping is just the Mad Magazine sight gag approach translated to text. (Indeed, Superfolks, with its focus on a barely disguised Superman and Captain Marvel, owes no small debt to Kurtzman and Wood’s “Superduperman,” which Moore has always cited as the primary inspiration for Miracleman.)…

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Comics Reviews (September 16th, 2015)

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Some quick site announcements, by which I really just mean “yes, we know there are still some things that are a bit wonky and we have our entire IT team on it, but our entire IT team is better known as ‘Anna,’ so it goes at the speed it goes.” Working on the remaining layout and formatting problems now – those on smaller screen resolutions should be having a much better experience than they were yesterday, and we’ll have it even more improved later tonight. Then we’ve got some backend stuff that nobody but me is going to notice like making it so I get comments sent to me via e-mail, and sometime next week or so we’ll start working on redesigning the comment system.

For now, comic reviews. As always, ranked from worst to best of what I paid money for. And tomorrow, Jane’s back with the second part of her look at Doctor Who Season Twenty.

Guardians of Knowhere #4

It is in some ways difficult not to simply feel angry at this book. Four issues gave nothing that could meaningfully be recognized as a plot. Deodato’s artwork shows all of his worst problems, namely a tendency to prioritize mood over storytelling (I had no shortage of trouble figuring out when characters were being killed or just knocked out here). But more than that… what’s the point of this? I mean, there wasn’t even a self-contained plot or arc to speak of, save for a debate about the ontological validity of Battleworld between Gamora and Angela. It was just four issues of Deodato mood pieces and contrived fight scenes. Utterly horrible miniseries, and emblematic of the way the initial promise of Secret Wars is just being squandered in the most cynical and wallet-draining ways imaginable. 

The Infinity Gauntlet #4

Despite my increasing reservations about Secret Wars, this is continuing to be a real treat. Duggan caught my eye with his tie-in to the dreadful Black Vortex crossover, or whatever the hell that thing was called – I’ve already forgotten – and this is the second thing of his I’ve read, and his skill at writing young characters in emotionally mature drama with lots of spectacular punching is really impressive. This issue’s a bit sloppier than some – I admit I lost the plot of the fight scene for a chunk of it – but the character beats are still enormously strong, and I’m genuinely invested in how it ends, which is way more than you can say for most of Secret Wars.

Sex Criminals #12

Hilarious in the way that only Sex Criminals is, which is to say that within the first seven pages the phrases “translated from some kind of weird cum angel language” and “are you just saying that because I booped your clit” have both appeared. So has the beginning of a really good discussion of the way in which female sexuality is historically treated as a form of monstrosity. So, yes, this is basically perfect and wonderful. …

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Eruditorum Press: A Manifesto

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People of the universe, please attend carefully. The message that follows is vital to the future of you all.

Welcome to Eruditorum Press, a group blog and small press dedicated to innovative and intelligent cultural criticism. I suspect most of you, at least right at the moment this posts, have come from Philip Sandifer: Writer. Hi, I’m still Phil Sandifer, and whatever it is you came here for is still here and will continue to be here, unless you came for that monochrome paisley, in which case your life will now be an endless sea of disappointment. I’ll still be doing weekly comics reviews, Last War in Albion, and a rotating project a la The Super Nintendo Project, as well as hosting Weird Kitties. There’s also going to be a lot more.

We, or at least I, am acutely aware that there is no shortage of pop culture analysis sites on the Internet, all of them claiming that they’re different and unique. We, however, think that we are different and unique. For one thing, we’re a somewhat more personal affair. We’re still funded by the same Patreon the site has been funded for a year now by you, dear readers, although some of that money will be going to people other than me now. (Everyone is either paid a modest sum or stubbornly refusing my money here.) And there’s a new milestone goal called “Phil stops losing money on this idea” that I’d love to hit, by the way. But more than that, I think we offer a perspective that’s unlike what you can get from any of the other sites in this vein. And that perspective is… well… hmm.

One of the most absolutely satisfying things about my blogging career over the past few years has been the fellow travelers I’ve met and befriended. I’ve become a part of an intellectual circle of critics, not through any active attempt to create a critical empire, but just because I’ve had the honor of meeting cool and brilliant people doing cool and brilliant work. Which, now that I think of the implications under late capitalism, is appalling. I should absolutely have a critical empire, dammit, and so now I’m making one.

More seriously, I don’t want to be so crass as to define the terms of this intellectual circle or anything. I’m sure that if you asked the other contributors what the vision or mission statement of Eruditorum Press is, you’d get different answers, which is as it should be. Indeed, you’ll get different ones, of varying degrees of sincerity and coherence, every time you refresh the page. But it’s traditional, when christening mad endeavors like this, for the editor-in-chief (oh fuck, that’s me) to offer some sort of confident mission statement as to what it’s all about. So here’s a faltering attempt at, if not a manifesto, at least a description.

Obviously, we’re most easily united by common interests. This is not a Doctor Who blog, and some day I may even hire someone who doesn’t like Doctor Who, although it is obviously always going to have something of a special place within Eruditorum Press, as will British culture in general.…

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You’re On the Global Frequency (Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge)

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Comments are going to be temporarily disabled across the site for a few hours this evening due to some site maintenance. Relatedly, you should be sure to check back here tomorrow.

I had three great loves in childhood, and though I have forgiven them, they all betrayed me. Doctor Who I have, of course, written about at length; it turned on May 12th, 1996, the day before Super Mario RPG came out. Comics, a topic relevant to this game, were a more gradual process, with no clear moment the line was crossed from a certain tension between us to outright betrayal. The beginning of seventh grade, in any case; around my twelfth birthday. Mortal Kombat II, perhaps, or Final Fantasy III. And then there are video games. 
It’s hard to count how many times I’ve been betrayed by video games. There is, after all, a high potential for it. We’ve discussed already how the basic model of business games relies on the idea that they’ll be fun for a decent number of hours. There is nothing, then, quite as awful as the phenomenon of the shit video game. To buy a game is not a small thing; there are ultimately a finite number of moments in a year where you’ll get to do it. Picking a bad one is awful.
Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge is an example – a crushing, awful disappointment waiting to sting anyone foolish enough to be seduced by its branding. It is as though they took two-level demos of five games deemed unworthy of further development, reskinned them to include Marvel characters, and released them as an omnibus. The connections between levels and the five playable superheroes are often tenuous at best. Cyclops is randomly thrown in a mine-cart level. Storm is trapped underwater, seemingly mainly so nobody would have to figure out how to get good controls for a flying character. Wolverine is fighting evil clowns. Controls are sloppy and imprecise.
But in another sense, video games betray you from the start. It’s how they work; their central dynamic. The resistance of rules to will. We bind our very nervous systems to them, and they twist away and sever us, leaving us staring at the sudden amputation of the Game Over screen. Even today, Spider-Man and the X-Men: Arcade’s Revenge exists within me. I have not touched it in a decade at least, but when, in the first level, I drop down a shaft and find three paths that I can go down, there is an deep instinct, beyond even a memory, of what order to go in. In yet another, then, it’s only ever one big betrayal: an ongoing process of being repulsed by what defines you. 
I am about fifteen minutes from most of the places I grew up, halfway up Morris Ridge, overlooking downtown. Summer is breaking on the shores of the shrinking days, but retains the high ground for now. The sense of oddness that has permeated the weather for years persists; it feels as though it didn’t used to be this hot in early September.
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Weird Kitties Reviews, Batch Two (Frankenstein, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Full Disclosure, The Race for Space)

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I do not anticipate needing any more Best Dramatic Presentation reviews in the immediate future.

 

Frankenstein, by the Mechanisms
Reviewed by William Shaw

Eligible for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, and available here.
 
If you’ve ever thought that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein would have been better as a prog rock ballad, this new song from the UK-based steampunk folk band The Mechanisms looks to have you covered. Retelling the classic gothic tale as a ten-minute song about a rogue AI, Frankenstein, while perhaps the least grandiose of the Mechanisms’ projects to date, is still a wonderful piece of work, and crackles with the same energy as their lengthier albums. 
 
The story is told in one long song, with linking narration putting one in mind of a geekier version of Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds. The tale concerns a far-future world where a scientist named Victoria Frankenstein creates a revolutionary AI, and… honestly, you know how the story goes from there. 
 
Initially it might seem a bit of a disappointment, after three albums of giddy textual play in established musical genres and mythical traditions, to see the Mechanisms doing a straight pastiche of a specific text. But the band, to their credit, seem to realise the dangers of this approach, and turn them to their advantage. At ten minutes long the song is tight and focused, avoiding the slightly slipshod nature of their longer and more complex albums, and dialling back a bit on the usual self-indulgence. There’s also a genuinely clever twist at the end, which manages to convey a sense of shock as well as ironic inevitability.
 
But what really sells it is the technical side of things, which is excellent. The singing and instrumentation are both top-notch, with the shifts in tone handled deftly by the introduction of new musical techniques as the song goes on. As ever, the Mechanisms manage to turn what could easily have been a one-gang premise into magnificent entertainment by sheer skill and chutzpah. 
 
 

This is a song which has clearly had a lot of thought put into it, as well as an awful lot of effort and talent And it’s that sense of passion which makes this song such a worthwhile piece of storytelling. These a clearly a group of people who care deeply about what they do, and long may they continue to do it. 

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Reviewed by James Wylder

Eligible in Best Novel, and available here.

Fanfiction as a genre is barely appreciated as an art form, so its hard to go too far stating exactly how Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality needs to be read and appreciated, as it has opened up the genre in a bold new way. Eliezar Yudkowsky has crafted a massive work that redefines the relationship of fanfiction to the work it stems off from in exceedingly fascinating ways.

The premise: that Harry Potter is not raised by the abusive Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia, but by Petunia and a different man she married: an educated man well versed in science, who does not mistreat Harry, but provides for him as well as instilling the scientific method deep into his worldview.…

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Weird Kitties: Best Short Story Open Thread

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Got an interesting batch of reviews up for you tomorrow, including a number of candidates in Best Dramatic Presentation.

Here’s a couple of novels that got mentioned more than once in last week’s thread. I’d love reviews of any of them if you’ve read them – send those to snowspinner at gmail: 
  • Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings
  • N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season
  • Terry Pratchett’s The Shepherd’s Crown
  • Jo Walton’s The Just City and/or The Philosopher Kings
  • Naomi Novik’s Uprooted
  • Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest
  • Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora
  • Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant
  • Aliette de Bodard’s The House of Shattered Wings
  • Elizabeth Bear’s Karen Memory
  • Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown
  • Max Gladstone’s Last First Snow
  • Joanne Harris’s Gospel of Loki
Meanwhile, tell me of good and Hugo-worthy short stories you’ve read. I’m monstrously behind on this category – I’ve not even gotten to the eligible Charlie Jane Anders or to pouring over China Miéville’s Three Moments of an Explosion to pick something. (Actually I’ll probably just read whichever one Jack tells me is best and nominate it, and save the rest for later.) 
Ooh, and I should see what, if anything, of Trigger Warning is eligible. 
Check back tomorrow for reviews. 
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