Eruditorum Press

Stupid games *and* stupid prizes? In this economy?

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:

The Exposed Violet Membrane (The Last War in Albion Part 102: Halo Jones Book Three)

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This is the third of five parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Eleven, focusing on Alan Moore’s The Ballad of Halo Jones. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Ballad of Halo Jones is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The editorially troubled second book of The Ballad of Halo Jones introduced the character of Glyph, a character so meek and unobtrusive that people don’t even notice her when she’s standing there, and forget about her even as she’s talking to them, to the point where her roommates, Halo and Toy, don’t even realize they have a third bunkmate.

“One of the Culacaons detaches himself from the main herd and rushes screaming at the nearest mollusk. He stabs the exposed violet membrane over and over with his spear. Everyone cheers. Soon, his fellows join in, each assaulting the snail-thing of their choice. The atmosphere is overwhelmingly masculine.” – Alan Moore, “A Man’s World”
Figure 807: Halo drinking at a bar, far from home, after learning that
Rodice would not be meeting her on Charlemagne. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by Ian Gibson, from The Ballad of Halo Jones Book Two
in 2000 AD #415, 1985)
Glyph’s tragedy (they ultimately sacrifice themself to save Halo and Toy from Toby’s attack, with neither of the two noticing or remembering them after they’re gone) serves in many regards as a mirror for Halo’s own arc over the course of Book Two, which tracks her voyage on the cruise ship The Clara Pandy. Halo plans to meet Rodice on the planet Charlemagne after a year’s journey, a meeting that hangs over the entire arc from the first installment, which is narrated in the form of a letter from Halo to Rodice as she passes Pluto on her way out of the solar system. But upon reaching the appointed meeting place at the story’s end she discovers that Rodice changed her mind after Halo’s departure and is still back on the Hoop. Angry and betrayed, Halo responds to Rodice’s promise that “I’ll tell you everything when you get back to the Hoop” by proclaiming that she won’t be coming back to the Hoop and hanging up on her, leaving her, in her own way, as isolated and cut off as the forgotten Glyph.
Certainly the character was a success. In stark contrast to Book One’s chilly reception, it quickly became obvious that the profound and crushing sense of isolation and loneliness that Glyph represented had struck a chord in readers. As Moore put it, “the response to this story of a terminal nonentity was surprising in its intensity and I think that, maybe, that was the episode where we finally got the readers on our side.”
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Doctor Who Online, Sebastian J. Brook, and the Defrauding of a Community

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This piece has been updated twice since it was first posted.

IF YOU HAVE BEEN A VICTIM OF DOCTOR WHO ONLINE’S FRAUDULENT MARKETING PRACTICES, PLEASE CONTACT UK TRADING STANDARDS VIA CITIZEN’S ADVICE.

This isn’t a particularly pleasant post, I’m afraid, but it’s an important one. I’ve spoken occasionally about the fact that it’s vital for freelance creators to be open about where their money comes from and how much they make, and especially to be vocal when someone rips them off. Today we have a case study in why that is: a high profile Doctor Who fansite that has been around for nearly twenty years, and that is serially defrauding members of the Doctor Who fan community by offering expensive advertising on the back of false promises, and that has gotten away with it largely because until now, nobody had actually reached out to the site’s victims and collected their stories.

The site is Doctor Who Online, run by Sebastian J. Brook. It’s a longstanding site, founded in 1996. They have an active forum and over 100,000 Twitter followers. Their podcast is up to its 349th episode. And the site is, in practice, a front for a series of breathtakingly fraudulent business practices designed to rip off small and independent business owners.

What follows is an explanation of how Doctor Who Online’s fraud operates, and a compilation of the evidence I have gathered demonstrating that this is standard business practice for the site. Although I am not a legal expert by any means, it is my sincere belief that the site’s business practices, as documented below, constitute fraud by false representation under UK law.

I would strongly and emphatically recommend against purchasing advertising from Doctor Who Online, visiting their site, participating in their community, or supporting any of their numerous affiliated businesses, which include mobile app development (generally $2.99 news apps that seem to scrape the RSS feeds of actual content creators, based on their app pages) and a variety of auxiliary sites.

But more than that, I would recommend spreading the word. Brook has, for years now, functioned as a predator within the Doctor Who fandom, victimizing literally hundreds of fans who run small businesses. He has been able to do this because it was not widely public knowledge that his site was a scam. By spreading the word, you help make it less likely that his next victim will be caught unaware.

If you have been a victim of this scam, meanwhile, I am told that the most obvious people to contact would be UK Trading Standards.

The Scam

Brook’s scam follows an extremely well-rehearsed and consistent path. He contacts small businesses with products that might be of interest to Doctor Who fans and offers them advertising on his site, claiming that his users have been requesting content along those lines. Contact is generally made via Twitter, with a pitch describing supposedly discounted rates, although I see no evidence that any ads have ever been sold at the supposed “full” rate.…

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Comics Reviews (June 24, 2015)

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Please be sure to stop by tomorrow for a very important post that will have some severe repercussions within the Doctor Who fan community.

From worst to best of what I paid for.

E is for Extinction #1

You can’t go home again, and certainly can’t by just hiring some Grant Morrison collaborators and hoping for the best. Perfectly adequate, I guess, if all you want is nostalgia. But you know what’s better? The Grant Morrison run on New X-Men.

Crossed Badlands #79 (aka Homo Tortor #5)

Not a bad comic, to be clear, but one that’s spinning its wheels a bit. There’s no new concepts to introduce, it would seem, but plot to resolve before the end, resulting in an issue that’s functional. I suspect coming out at the same time as the other “Crossed in a different time period” book is not doing Gillen any favors here, not least because the other one is written by Alan Moore. Really, one kind of has to pity Gillen; he must have assumed, starting his career when he did, that “having your book come out alongside an Alan Moore book with which it is inevitably going to be compared” was a fate he’d be spared.

Batgirl #41

Competent, fun, but man, Convergence killed the momentum here. I like the dynamic introduced for Batgirl by Gordon becoming Batman, though. That should be a fun story. And the scene where Gordon reveals his double identity to his daughter is delightful. Basically, a book I look forward to being excited about again.

Daredevil #16

Waid makes a slick turn into his final arc, setting up a suitably epic Daredevil/Kingpin showdown that doesn’t feel like any we’ve seen before. I admit, I’ve not sat down and watched the Netflix series, but I really do hope that Waid’s approach here reinvigorates the character in the long-term and gets him away from the banal and repetitive noir take that he’s been stuck in for decades.

Where Monsters Dwell #2

Garth Ennis at his hilarious best. This is not a complex or subtle comic, just a very funny one with lots of monsters and a ruthlessly mocked protagonist. The final twist caused the sort of intensive laughter that gets you weird looks at Starbucks.

Loki: Agent of Asgard #15

Pleasantly, this is increasingly obviously just ignoring the actual Secret Wars aspects of the plot and just sort of doing a side Norse apocalypse in which they react to Hickman’s. Verity’s life story is delightful in a classic Al Ewing way, and the cliffhanger’s solid. Going to enjoy the final lap here, I think.

The Infinity Gauntlet #2

Very glad I forgot to drop this, as this is absolutely wonderful now that it’s successfully trained the audience in how to read it. Ridiculously inaccurate cover, or, at least, one that ignores what most of the comic is. But family Nova Corps is a brilliant take. Is Zigzag the best new character of 2015? I think she is.

Annihilator #6

This frustrated me through much of its run, and I suspect that Morrison could have made it work better in four issues than six, but no matter; the finale is a triumph.…

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The Ark in Space Commentary

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Jack and I are back, talking nonsense over The Ark in Space. We actually recorded this over a month ago, but then I somehow failed to post it for two weeks, and then I kept having other things to post on Thursdays. But now Game of Thrones is over and I have Tuesdays back as viable posting days, so here we are. 

Past Commentaries

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 2.05: The Ghost of Harrenhal

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State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:
Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister
The Direwolf, Catelyn Stark
Dragons of Qarth: Daenerys Targaryen
The Mockingbird, Petyr Baelish
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Lions of Harrenhal: Tywin Lannister
The Ship, Davos Seaworth
Kraken of Winterfell or maybe Pyke: Theon Greyjoy
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Direwolves of Winterfell: Brandon Stark
Direwolves of Harrenhal: Arya Stark
The Burning Heart, Stannis Baratheon
The Rose, Margery Tyrell
Bears of the Wall: Jeor Mormont
Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn
The episode is in fourteen parts. The first is four minutes long and is in sections; it is set in Renly Baratheon’s camp. The first section is three minutes long. The opening image is of a bustling path through the camp. It features the death of two of Renly’s Kingsguard, stabbed by Brienne of Tarth, and of Renly Baratheon, killed by a shadow. The second is two minutes long; the transition is by music, with Stannis Baratheon’s theme playing over Renly’s body and then over Stannis’s fleet as it sails to claim the camp. 
The second part is three minutes long; it is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by dialogue, from Littlefinger saying “the queen” to the queen, and by dialogue, with her and Tyrion talking about Stannis. 
The third is two minutes long; it is set in Renly Baratheon’s camp. The transition is by dialogue, from Tyrion talking about defending King’s Landing from Stannis’s inevitable assault to Stannis, and with Stannis planning his assault on King’s Landing and both talking about religion.
The fourth is two minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by dialogue, from Stannis and Davos talking about attacking King’s Landing to King’s Landing and Tyrion talking about defending from Stannis.
—
The fifth is four minutes long and is set on Pyke. The transition is by dialogue, from Tyrion being called a demon monkey to Theon. 
The sixth is six minutes long and is set in Harrenhal. The transition is by dialogue, from Theon talking about the Starks to Arya, and to Tywin talking about the Starks.
The seventh is six minutes long and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by family, from Arya to Jon Snow.
The eighth is three minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Jon Snow to the window of the pyromancer’s lair. 
The ninth is six minutes long and is set in Qarth. The transition is by dialogue, from the pyromancer talking about wildfire and the Targaryens to Daenerys and her dragons breathing fire. 
The tenth is three minutes long and is set in a forest. The transition is by theme, from the Warlocks of Qarth’s magic to a discussion about Stannis’s. 
The eleventh is three minuets long and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by family, from Catelyn to Bran and Rickon. 
The twelfth is three minutes long and is set North of the Wall.
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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Episode 2: How is Lady Pole?

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In a real sense, this, not “The Friends of English Magic,” is the first episode of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Where the first episode was focused primarily on the task of worldbuilding, establishing the broad strokes of its alternate history, this episode is focused on the eponymous dualism between Strange and Norrell. In many ways, this is an aggressively classic dualism. Eddie Marsan’s Mr. Norrell is the older, more conservative figure of order – the fussy scholar most at home with his books. Bertie Carvel’s Jonathan Strange is the younger, more foppish and chaotic figure – the one who makes up his magic as he goes.

It is, of course, the oldest double act in English magic. Moore and Morrison, Crowley and Spare, Urizen and Los, et cetera. But like any great setup, it’s a cliche because it works. The order/chaos dualism that underlies Norrell and Strange is a good enough hook that Michael Moorcock got an entire career out of it, after all. Entirely on its own merits, as a premise, “rival magicians representing order and chaos over the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars” is something you really ought to be able to get a good television series out of.
And the dynamic works. Marsan gives Norrell a compelling sense of patheticness that manages to stop well short of making the character unpleasant to watch, but nevertheless makes it easy to damn him. The cruelty of his cowardice when he opts to lie about Lady Poole’s maladies, saying that she is mad and seeking mainly to brush her existence under the rug so as to preserve magic’s respectability, is breathtaking, and yet the story manages to keep from simply labeling him the villain of the piece.
Similarly, Jonathan Strange, while certainly the more “fun” character, is not quite the hero. Indeed, it’s more than slightly interesting that the meat of their disagreement is not merely the way in which Norrell withholds knowledge and books from Strange, but the specific nature of what he withholds, namely books that would lead Strange towards the sort of magic used to resurrect Lady Pole. This nicely complicates the dualism animating the two characters: it is Strange who wants to take magic back towards the ancient and animist traditions of faeries, but it is Norrell, the character opposed to this, who has actually done so.
But as the title suggests, “How is Lady Pole?” is not exclusively or even primarily about its central dynamic. The Norrell/Strange dualism is the dramatic engine, but it’s not quite what the show is about. As with “The Friends of English Magic,” quite a lot of this episode is spent on the supporting cast. But, perhaps surprisingly, it’s a completely different supporting cast from the first episode. Here the focus is largely on three characters: Lady Pole, Arabella Strange, and Stephen Black, the Poles’ butler. 
And it is here that the show begins to tip its hand towards its larger concerns, because those three characters are bound together by two things that do not intuitively go together, but where the implications of putting them together is profound.
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Saturday Waffling (June 20th, 2015)

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There is a prominent Doctor Who site that I have very strong suspicions engages in deeply fraudulent and exploitative practices with regards to their advertising. I was a victim of this scam, but managed to get my money back (by threatening to go public with the evidence I had), which led me to remain silent at the time, but I’ve since come across a corroborating story that convinces me that this was not an isolated incident. However, I would like to get my ducks in a row and have a rock solid case that this wasn’t just me before I name the site.

The mechanics of this scam involve getting cold emailed by the owner of the site, who will offer supposedly discounted advertising rates for a three month banner ad on their site, offering thousands of clicks for a price measuring in the hundreds of pounds depending on the size of the ad you buy, and generally assuring you of the quality of advertising with his site and the remuneration you will get. In reality, his ad will net you at best a few dozen clicks, and no sales to speak of.

If you’ve been the victim of this scam, please get in touch – my email is snowspinner, and it’s a gmail account. This appears to be a nasty and knowingly malicious predator ripping off numerous members of the Doctor Who community. Please help me expose him. In particular, if you did any ad tracking and can confirm the actual traffic his site generates compared to what he boasts, that would be helpful.

In other news, the usual suspects are now declaring a boycott of Tor Books for reasons that are so typically dogshit that I’m not even going to get into them. Anyway, Tor is publishing most of what’s interesting in mainstream science fiction and fantasy these days, including the forthcoming novel All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders, which I’ll have a review of sometime soon. They’re a good press; not a perfect one, but what “a perfect press” means is beyond me anyway, so who cares.

So I think you should go wander over by their site, find a book you want to buy, and buy it. I promise, they’ve got something you want, even if it’s just the 99 cent ebook version of “As Good as New,” which is the actual Best Short Story of 2014. So please, give them a boost of confidence that the people who support non-fascist science fiction and fantasy outnumber the people spamming them with e-mails and calling for their heads.

As for discussion… well, what’s your favorite thing Tor has published? Novel, short story, article, whatever. Let’s celebrate one of the good guys.

Past that, a Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell review will be along tonight.…

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A Home That’s Miles From Home (The Last War in Albion Part 101: Halo Jones Books One and Two)

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This is the second of five parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Eleven, focusing on Alan Moore’s The Ballad of Halo Jones. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Ballad of Halo Jones is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore and Ian Gibson created The Ballad of Halo Jones to give 2000 AD a rare female-fronted strip. In approaching the series, they decided to largely throw readers in the deep end, offering a lot of information about Halo Jones’s world but very little context. 

“I wanna live with Halo Jones. I wanna home that’s miles from home. I wanna drugs from the Twilight Zone. I wanna never never never never never never never say no.” – Shriekback, “Malaria”
The result of this is that the first thing the audience learns about Halo Jones’s world is not what it’s like, but rather the fact that she wants to get out of there, and that everybody else in the world does too, but, as her friend Rodice puts it, “even if you do get out it’s no good, ‘cause no matter how far you get, they’ll fetch you back here and bust you to pieces.” Past that, as with American Flagg, the world is introduced more through the media playing in the background than through characters explaining it to each other. (Not that Moore avoids blatant exposition entirely -not long after the disorienting opening spread, for instance, Moore has several characters straightforwardly explain the Different Drummers to each other, despite the fact that all of them are seemingly familiar with the group and have no reason to describe their basic features.
Figure 801: Halo Jones explains her motivation in life. (Written by Alan Moore,
art by Ian Gibson, from The Ballad of Halo Jones in 2000 AD #376, 1984)
This continues throughout. Nowhere in Book One is there anything that quite serves as an explanation of the Hoop and how it works. This is not, to be clear, a flaw: The Ballad of Halo Jones is not a story about the Hoop and how it came to be. (In point of fact, it’s a scheme to move the unemployed – or “increased leisure citizens,” to use the preferred euphemism – out of sight and out of mind. This isn’t really established until Book Two, however.) It’s about what life on the Hoop is like, which is to say, about a soul-crushing dead end designed to serve as little more than a human landfill. In this regard it’s just an iteration of a trope that has already appeared numerous times in the course of the War, generally as an analogue for Thatcher’s Britain in some form.
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Perdido Street Station

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Far be it from me to criticize my generous and wise patrons, on whose behalf this essay is written, but I suspect that Perdido Street Station is not, in fact, the best way to start with China Miéville. Jack Graham tells me Un Lun Dun is superlative, and a lot of people seem to plug The City and the City, each of which are, notably, about half as long as Perdido Street Station. Indeed, at a glance, Perdido Street Station appears to be the longest of Miéville’s works.
It is not, certainly, that the book is too long, although its length and the at times willfully undisciplined nature of its plotting can be frustrating. One of the book’s most interesting characters, Lin, the insectoid partner of the protagonist, essentially drops out of the plot halfway through and reemerges at the end just in time to be violently lobotomized, a move that is both disappointing in light of the fact that she’s one of two significant female characters (and by far the more interesting and fleshed out of the two) and just plain frustrating. An action sequence towards the book’s end is resolved in part by the sudden appearance of a quasi-mythical figure mentioned early in the book, but basically ignored for the middle half of it, making his appearance jarring in the extreme. And the book’s primary plot, a group of horrific creatures called slake-moths that are stalking the dreams of New Crobuzon, doesn’t really start up until a third of the way through, causing all prior plots to be set aside until the last chapter, at which point several of them have been resolved by dint of the relevant characters having died horribly at some point.
It is, in other words, a profoundly messy book. Even this is not quite a flaw; its messiness is tangibly an artistic choice. I’ve not looked into interviews or anything, but it would not surprise me to discover that a draft or at least fragments of Perdido Street Station predate Miéville’s first book, King Rat; it has the characteristic sprawl of a first novel, desperate to get every bold idea and sweeping theme that’s been stewing in his brain for twenty-eight years into a single book. But I’ve an obvious soft spot for mad ambition, or at least a well-developed enough sense of irony to recognize that I really oughtn’t criticize another writer’s sense of literary hubris. 
Because, of course, there’s a real pleasure to messy sprawl. The clarity and depth of a tidy novel is certainly a pleasure worth indulging in, but the messy novel, with all its implications and half-elucidated ideas that leave the reader wondering if it’s they or the author who is actually playing with a given theme. And Perdido Street Station is particularly well-poised to take advantage of this. It is a book grounded in weird fiction, after all, full of fantastic creatures existing at a strange and deliberately hazy junction of magic and science.
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