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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.

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Weird Kitties: An Organized Anti-Slate For The 2016 Hugos

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Weird Kitties is an organized anti-slate with a simple goal: to try to make sure every work on the 2016 Hugo ballot is there because of fans who nominated it because they liked it, and not because some bigoted jerk told them to nominate it.
This isn’t going to be easy. We already know Vox Day has 540 nominations for anything he wants to put on the ballot. John C. Wright’s got a novella out. SJWs Always Lie will surely be up for Best Related Work. And I’m sure a little thing like forgetting the existence of the number four isn’t going to keep the Voice of God from proclaiming himself best editor again. Given this, George R.R. Martin’s advice to ignore Vox Day is not going to accomplish anything other than letting a fascist jerk set the ballot. Again. 
In practical terms, anything that the majority of Hugo voters might actually prefer to No Award is going to need at least 541 nominations to be on the ballot. And that’s not going to be easy bar for anything to clear, especially not without sinking to the ugly and bullying tactic of slates.
The good news is that there are five thousand of us, united, if nothing else, by the facts that 1) We voted in the Hugos, and 2) We are not Puppies of any stripe. We are not a campaign. We are not a political movement. We are not playing some elaborate game of four-dimensional chess in order to topple Christendom. Indeed we, in the sense of “me and everyone reading this,” are not even all five thousand voters. But nevertheless, we are a bunch of fans defined by the simple fact that we’re eligible to nominate things for Hugos next year, and we’re not Vox Day’s pack of rabid dogs.
One of the most helpful things, then, would be if all five thousand of us nominated, and if we nominated a full ballot. Among us, we’ve got 25,000 open slots on our ballots in every category with which to push a work over the slate-busting threshold of 541. That’s doable, but it’s also hard. A lot of us, myself included, don’t identify five eligible Hugo-worthy items in every category in a normal year’s reading. In many categories, a lot of us don’t identify one. We don’t all have writing Winds of Winter to be distracted from, after all. And we could use some help.
So I’m creating Weird Kitties for exactly that. It’s going to be an ongoing conversation about awesome science fiction and fantasy that’s come out and is coming out in 2015, conducted for people who want to fill in their Hugo ballots with things they love.
First off, some promises. Weird Kitties is not and never will be a slate. It will never be some sort of stealth “slate by another name.” It will never have an official list of suggestions, of recommendations, or of anything else like that. It’s also not going to just reflect my taste, although I’ll obviously be contributing to it.
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Comics Reviews (September 2nd, 2015)

5

You know the drill; worst to best of what I bought.

But first, something I didn’t buy, because it’s free.

Electricomics

Out today for free for iPad, this is the digital comics platform Leah Moore and company have been working on, featuring, among other things, Alan Moore and Coleen Doran’s “Big Nemo.” Which is unsurprisingly the highlight of the package here, with a series of clever uses of the virtual page and its mutability that evoke the playful wonder of McCay’s work in a new medium. It feels like it ends on the title page of what should have been a much longer comic, though. The Garth Ennis strip is also neat, but the other two feel more interested in their own whizz-bang gimmicks than in actually being interesting, and the app is still a bit sluggish, resulting in frustrating reading experiences for both of them. Still, well worth the price, and they’re apparently still smoothing it out, so hopefully it’ll end up as a more functional package in a few weeks. Still hard to see this having much in the way of legs as a platform, but a fun little oddity of the world.

As for paid stuff…

18 Days #3

The art takes a turn towards abject mediocrity, the plot seems to wander off completely from anything it had been doing, and Grant Morrison’s not even in the credits as doing anything but “creating” a series that’s just a retelling of classical Hindu mythology. Wretched.

Daredevil #18

Fine, in the sense that there’s little wrong with it as such, and it’s nice that Waid was given leave to avoid there only being Secret Wars at the end of his run, but the truth of the matter is that he stayed on this book at least a year too long, and probably closer to two. It’s never been bad, but the energy had long since drained, and the denouement, despite bringing Kingpin in, did very little to change that. And the Shroud’s plot seems totally unresolved.

Doctor Who: Four Doctors #4

This lost rather a lot of pace for me, with an ending that’s much more “what’s happening” than “what’s going to happen” and the limitations of Neil Edwards’s art getting in the way of the story sometimes. (His Tennant and Smith can be very indistinguishable in the middle distance.) There are fun bits, but this event is starting to look like it’s going to underwhelm.

Silver Surfer #14

There’s really not such a thing as a Michael Allred comic that’s not fun to look at, but this has to be the most one note comic I’ve seen in a while; it starts with a tone, carries that same tone to the end of the comic, and then, well, ends, generally without doing much. Strange and lazy-feeling, frankly.

Miracleman #1

The best part of this comic is the edit to Neil Gaiman’s script to refer to “The Original Writer.” So nice to see the project still haunted by its past.…

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I Can Lock All My Doors (Super Mario Kart)

5

It feels as though we are only ever going in circles or hurtling off cliffs.

For most of the Super Nintendo originals so far we have seen series that originated on the NES, and then found more refined forms in the 16-bit era. Super Mario, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Contra, and Zelda all had fantastic games on the Super Nintendo that were either the equal of their NES forebearers or their better. 
Here we have something new; a franchise that begins on the Super Nintendo. These days Mario Kart is one of the tentpole releases for a Nintendo platform; just as they all must have a Zelda and a Smash Bros. Here it exists in its primal form, as much a piece of history as Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda. 
Time has done it no favors. Almost everything there is to hate about later Mario Kart games is here, along with flaws idiosyncratic to this version, while little of what makes some of the later games classics had been honed here. The rubberbanded AI is at its most cloying, adding a sense of futility to the player’s actions. The race is as capricious as ever, not just in the way that small mistakes are amplified brutally, but in the same infuriating “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” way that makes every game in the series such a hazard to controllers. Here it’s  aggravated by the way in which AI opponents can simply spam you with infinite projectiles, often leaping over yours in ways you can’t do to theirs, an asymmetry that gnaws constantly, as opposed to things like the last lap blue shell, which is at least a rare occurrence. 
Unique to Super Mario Kart, the increase in difficulty from 50cc and 100cc is completely out of whack. at 50cc the race is tolerant of numerous small mistakes like clipping a wall, and often even of a big one like falling off the course. At 100cc, even small mistakes are likely to cost you victory. Meanwhile, the handling is sloppy; the drifting mechanic that would define every subsequent iteration of the game did not exist yet. Played today, it has a frustrating roughness that is not so much difficulty as alienation. It’s just not much fun.
In 1992, it was a very different kettle of fish. For one thing, not only was it not yet the progenitor of a classic line of games, it was a sequel in all but name. Like F-Zero before it, it is a racing game based on using Mode 7 for the track, creating a pseudo-3D effect that was quite striking for the time. But F-Zero was something of an empty suit of a game; a tech demo without content that became a classic almost in spite of itself, much as Anna described. 
Super Mario Kart, then, is the refined attempt – the same gameplay mechanic, only fine-tuned so as to entrance the player far more deeply in it’s spell.
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Saturday Waffling (August 29th, 2015)

11

Those inclined towards more of me nattering on about the Hugos will enjoy the video blog I just did for the wonderful Aric Clark. Embedded below.

Those who want to talk about something different, well, let’s do the Hannibal finale, which airs properly tonight (next week UK, I believe), although I do the same thing I do with Doctor Who and buy the iTunes Season Pass then torrent the episodes.
Anyway, I thought it was brilliant. Fun Shabcast with Jack coming where we talk about it and many other things. How’d you like it, if you watched it?
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Be afraid of stories, be afraid of storytellers. They are only trying to lie to you. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Seven: Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre)

3

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Before Watchmen: Minutemen did some mildly interesting technical things with the form, but was frustratingly vapid in its portrayal of race, gender, and sexuality.

As with race, the real problem here is a lack within the book; it is, in the end, pretty much only interested in white men. And, of course, this is a complaint that can readily be leveled at Watchmen as well: essentially all of its non-white characters are supporting characters who are killed in the book’s climax, and women are thoroughly marginalized within its plot, which also focuses almost exclusively on white men. These are well-trod and valid criticisms of Watchmen. What is baffling and disappointing, however, is that Cooke, a writer who got the job largely on the back of his historically-grounded previous take on the time period in which it’s set, repeated the errors. Especially given the extent to which Cooke retcons out large swaths of Under the Hood. To go to great lengths to revise Watchmen only to, in the end, uncritically reiterate its flaws is, to say the least, a disappointment.
 
Figure 860: Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre
also featured the worst of Jim Lee’s generally
execrable variant covers for the series.
At least some of these problems are addressed by Cooke’s other Before Watchmen series, Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre. The book’s racial politics are still deeply imperfect, with the overwhelming majority of non-white characters being villains, as are its gender politics. But there’s at least an evident investment in the latter, and one that came into the book’s conception quite early. Cooke made the presence of artist and co-writer Amanda Conner a precondition for taking on the book, on the grounds that, as he puts it, “I didn’t feel like I could convincingly write a young girl at that point in her life.” The breakdown of work appears to be that Cooke came up with the basic plot, and that Conner did actual page breakdowns (Cooke explicitly credits her with the decision – unique among the Before Watchmen artists – to work entirely within the nine-panel grid) and a lot of the nuance. 
 
Figure 861: The final page of Before
Watchmen: Silk Spectre tacitly positions
Laurie as an object traded among the male
characters. (Written by Darwyn Cooke and
Amanda Conner, art by Amanda Conner, from
Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre #4, 2012)
For the most part, this breakdown of duties favors Conner. The overall plot, after all, is where much of the weakness comes in. The premise – a sixteen year old Laurie Juspeczyk runs away from home in frustration at her mother’s demands on her and lives amongst hippies in 1966 San Francisco for a bit – is a solid idea. But the execution, which ultimately hinges on her two father figures, Eddie Blake and Hollis Mason, going to San Francisco to, in their own ways, rescue her. It’s certainly a story with a female lead character, but it’s a story that’s ultimately about the way in which Laurie is a possession traded among men, focusing heavily on her obsession with boys and closing with the abortive Crimebusters meeting depicted in Watchmen #2 with her giving her (ironic given Watchmen) assessments of the characters, before a final splash page of Laurie sitting between Night Owl and Doctor Manhattan, her two romantic interests in Watchmen, making eyes at Doctor Manhattan and thinking, “get a load of this guy.
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Comics Reviews (August 26th, 2015)

2

Secret Wars to get an extra issue and continue into December, two months after the Marvel relaunch. DC reportedly cutting page rates to creators, eyeing price increases, and cutting back on innovation in favor of the New 52 house style. What a great time to be a comics fan, eh?

From worst to best of what I bought, which wasn’t much this week.

Old Man Logan #4

Actually a really solid comic; the Logan/She-Hulk scenes are great. Except that they’re a great She-Hulk story, and the comic is a Wolverine comic, so instead of staying with the interesting character we just watch Wolverine hurled to another location. It turns out a character whose only motivation is grudgingly surviving in a story with no visible overall plot is kind of unsatisfying. Who knew? Apparently not Bendis.

Batgirl #43

A perfectly good issue of Batgirl that doesn’t necessarily do much to impress so much as faithfully deliver what people enjoying this book are paying for.

Doctor Who: Four Doctors #3

Some distinctly dodgy plot logic on why the Macguffin affects individual regenerations of the Doctor with specificity, and an outright unrecognizable River Song in her two panel silent cameo, but for the most part the strongest issue yet, with a reasonably fun twist on the backside. Not entirely convinced by Cornell’s Twelfth Doctor, but his Eleventh is strong and his Tenth is probably the best take on the character after Davies’s. This remains fun and frothy.

Where Monsters Dwell #4

This has had a really interesting drift as Karl becomes increasingly less funny and more depraved. Ennis in his sharpest comedic mode, basically. Not a classic of Ennis’s oeuvre, but very much fun. Also, a well handled trans character, especially given that the only issue made out of it is the fact that Karl’s too stupid to realize it.…

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Vox Day’s Next Move

37

An image from Vox Day’s forthcoming SJWs
Always Lie, depicting him as Grant Morrison atop
a throne surrounded by his friends and a frankly
alarming number of subliminal penises.

Vox Day (who we’ll be spending a bit of time on this week; look for my review of his forthcoming SJWs Always Lie on Thursday) is making much of the question of what he’s going to do next. Including a private conference with his readers to serve as a “strategy meeting” for next year.

This is, like almost everything to emerge from the Day Bunker, largely bravado. Day’s tactics, which are really little more than what you’d get if you handed a fifteen-year-old on 4chan a copy of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, are in fact eminently predictable. So here’s your 2016 Hugo Awards preview.

First, the thing to realize is that Day’s tactics are shaped by one massive and fundamental constraint: there’s not actually a huge pool of people who want to follow a racist, misogynistic fascist lunatic. He boasts 440 “vile faceless minions,” his self-effacing term for the mob that has actively signed up to follow his orders. That’s consistent with the data from the Hugos this year, which suggested around 500 Rabid Puppy voters. More interestingly, the proportion of Rabid Puppy supporters in nominations and voting is about the same. In other words, it really doesn’t look like Day can wield more than 10-20% of the total voting pool, assuming that anti-fascist fandom (both moderate and hardline) holds their nerve and keeps up the fight.

Second, the thing to realize is that we don’t actually have to do that for all that long. Nomination reform passed at Sasquan. Another year spent cleaning dogshit off our yard is only going to make ratification of it next year easier. Which means that as of 2017, the effect of slates is going to be heavily, heavily muted. Day will have an easy time getting one or two works on the ballot, and a nearly impossible time controlling the entirety of it. At that point, the Hugo Awards will go back to something more or less like business as usual, only with, I suspect, a long-term suspicion of overtly conservative SF/F born from the memory of what utter cockmongers conservative SF/F fandom has been in the past.

Which means that 2016 is going to be the year Vox Day tries to burn it to the ground so that he can declare victory and walk away, conveniently exiting the fight as the “winner” right before the rule changes to blunt his flaming sword go into place.

Given this, I think we can safely assume that the Rabid Puppy slate in 2016 is going to consist of five nominees in every category, to try to maximize the number of categories with no non-Puppy nominees. I suspect he’s also going to pointedly include nominees that exist to dare the left to vote against them. Frankly, given his past praise of him, if he doesn’t put something from Miéville’s Three Moments of an Explosion up in short story, he’s a moron.…

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The Mouse and the Gun (Super Scope 6/Mario Paint)

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The Gun
The first light gun was a 1936 amusement park game called the Seeburg Ray-O-Lite. Its design mirrored that of the technology’s most iconic form, the NES Zapper, at least in practice: you hunted ducks. In theory, however, they worked quite differently. The Ray-O-Lite was accurately described: it was a gun that emitted light, which was in turn detected by a target-mounted sensor – a vacuum tube, in its case. But with the turn to screen-based games, as opposed to the physical targets of the Ray-O-Lite, the technology shifted. Light guns such as the Zapper are, in fact, essentially cameras – pulling the trigger causes the screen to momentarily cut to black and then flash white in the valid target areas. If the photosensor within the gun’s barrel sees the flash, it registers a hit.
On one level, the Super Scope is simply explained as the SNES equivalent of the Zapper. And this is a true story; given that the Zapper was an iconic part of the NES experience, a Super version of some sort was effectively inevitable. But there’s more to the iconography here. The Zapper was an oversized handgun, and its defining game, Duck Hunt,  was about shooting cartoon ducks and being laughed at by a dog. (Duck Hunt was covered by the Nintendo Project here.) The Super Scope, on the other hand, is a fucking bazooka. 
This is not a decision justifiable in any sort of gameplay or design sense. The Zapper was an easy to use item. The Super Scope, on the other hand, was physically exhausting; it was not as though it was too heavy to lift or anything, but hefting the thing on your shoulder for an extended time was genuinely tiring. There was far more of it than there needed to be, for reasons that had nothing to do with anything other than the idea that a shoulder-mounted gun seemed cool.
The aesthetic continued into the packed-in game, Super Scope 6, a return to the multi-game cartridges sold with the bulk of NES systems, which were either Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt if you bought the Action Set, or Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt/World Class Track Meet if you bought the Power Set. In each case, however, the setup was basically that of a pop single – a clear a-side in Super Mario Bros that had hours and hours of replay value, and a pair of peripheral-centric b-sides that were generally fun for a few hours.
Super Scope 6, on the other hand, is all peripheral based, and lacks any sort of headlining game, instead offering six disposable minigames in two categories, called LazerBlazer and Blastris. The former is the headlining category, with all three of its games demoing first if the game is left to run without starting. All three are about fending off an alien invasion, shooting down missiles in the first, and spaceships in the other two, and match the general aesthetic of the Super Scope with hard, angular, metallic designs.
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Hugo Commentary

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Oh, fine, let’s just make this the Hugo thread, as apparently I want to say stuff.

First of all, Vox Day lost, and that feels fucking amazing.

Second of all, the “burn it all” No Award position lost, which means I did too. And frankly, that feels fucking amazing too. I mean, don’t get me wrong; I don’t regret voting No Award in every category. I stand by every word.

But I want to go back to something I said in “Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons,” which was that the thing I have always loved about the Hugos is their capacity for weirdness. The Hugos are a great literary award because they have a wonderful unpredictability that happens with surprisingly few outright bad and unjustifiable winners. There aren’t a lot of awards like that. The Oscars and the Emmys are littered with far more flatly undeserving winners and clear travesties, and never do anything nearly as weird as give awards to XKCD and Digger.

So yeah, my side only won five categories. What a crushing defeat; we only doubled the total number of No Awards in history in the course of a near complete repudiation of the Sad Puppies, with the only Puppy winner being something that would have made the ballot anyway, and helpfully shutting down the argument that the electorate only voted on politics, as opposed to considering politics alongside other things. (Even if I freely admit that I did vote on politics, clearly the electorate didn’t.)

Meanwhile, we had Laura J. Mixon, who exposed a loathsome troll within the progressive science fiction community, and who used her acceptance speech to speak out for #BlackLivesMatter. We had a beautiful refusal to obey the “don’t clap until the end” rule for Terry Pratchett. We had the beautiful moment of Robert Silverberg telling stories of the 1968 Worldcon in Berkeley, a date and place that speaks volumes about what the actual heritage of science fiction is, as opposed to the ahistorical lies peddled by Brad Torgersen. We had a win for Orphan Black, one of the most self-consciously diverse shows on television, and a good one to boot. We had, over and over again, voice after voice raised in support of that heritage. And we even had a Dalek on stage, so the Puppies can’t complain they weren’t represented.

But most beautifully of all, we had all the prose awards given go out to works published in translation, which is a genuine victory for diversity.

That’s the award I love and respect. That’s why the Hugos were worth fighting for in the first place.

This was an enormously good night. Thank you to each an every one of you who stepped up, bought supporting memberships, and made it happen.

I lost; we won.

EDIT (Sunday morning): And the good news keeps coming. The fairest and most effective plan to reform the nomination process, aka “E Pluribus Hugo,” just passed at the Business Meeting. It’ll need to be ratified at next year’s Worldcon, but it looks like next year will be the last year of fending off fascist entryists, and like come 2017 we can get back to being fans.…

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