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Post-Geek

Myriad Universes: The Worst of Both Worlds Part 2: The Belly of the Beast

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Although he sympathizes deeply with their plight, Captain Picard is reluctant to help Captain Riker and the crew of the Alternate Enterprise because he maintains his first duty is to his own crew. Captain Riker retorts that the dimensional portal will remain open for several days, which should give them plenty of time to strike a blow against the Borg collective while still being able to return to their home universe. As the senior staff weigh their options in private, Commander Shelby (who in this universe remained Captain Riker’s first officer) leads an away team consisting of the alternate Chief O’Brien and Wesley Crusher to commandeer our Enterprise. Apparently, they’re planning some sort of mutiny against Captain Riker, whom they feel is too weak and unwilling to take necessary risks.

But this team has other intentions too, as the alternate Miles and Wesley go to meet our Beverly Crusher (who in the alternate reality remained head of Starfleet medical and was likely assimilated by the Borg when they conquered Earth), Keiko O’Brien (who is dead in the alternate universe) and Molly (who doesn’t exist). Captain Riker wants Doctor Crusher to join the rest of the senior staff on the alternate Enterprise, feeling that she’s the only one who could break Locutus’ link to the Borg collective (of course, she’s already done that in our reality), and on the way over Alternate Wesley fills her in on some of the differences between her reality and his. Beverly notes that he’s much more mature then her own son, but also far colder and more distant.

Back on the Alternate Enterprise, Captain Picard and the crew have agreed to help Captain Riker and his crew to fight the Borg, supposing that even though they’ve been “Shanghaied”, it is their moral duty to help a fellow ship out. We learn that some of the Alternate Commander Shelby’s concerns may be warranted, as it’s revealed a major reason this crew wasn’t able to rescue their Captain Picard was because they didn’t use an antimatter field: In this universe, Captain Riker dismissed Shelby’s suggestion as being too dangerous, which meant that the shuttle he and this universe’s Data were piloting got targeted by the Borg Cube straight away. The two crews elect to try the scheme again, though, after some debate, this time our Captain Picard and Data will undertake the operation, Jean-Luc feeling it’s his responsibility to free his counterpart. Once they reach the Borg ship, Captain Picard reveals to us that being aboard a vessel so similar to the one he was imprisoned on three years ago with the Borg fills him with dread, but he feels he must steady his resolve and confront his guilt head on but calmly and steadily, seeing this as his opportunity to make peace with this trauma from his past. Annoyingly, however, once he and Data reach the core where the Captain remembers being stationed, the Alternate Locutus is nowhere to be found.…

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The Abominable Bride Podcast

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I’m joined for this by Jon Blum, the other half of the legendary Ormanblum from whence the best Doctor Who novels emerge. We talk Sherlock, then do a nice career-spanning interview that includes the sordid tale of the fourth-best Zygon story ever filmed. It’s good stuff, and available for your listening pleasure here.

I also, if you missed it, guested on the Oi! Spaceman podcast to talk Mawdryn Undead, Moffat and feminism, and Vox Day. It’s the highest concentration of beard possible in Doctor Who fandom, and you can download it here.…

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Forward, to the Past! – Episode I: Back to the Future

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The first part of a new Shabgraff trilogy of posts about Star Wars. Yes, yes, I’m as surprised and upset as you are. Contains spoilers for The Force Awakens.

 

There is a spectre haunting my local Odeon. Actually, I think a better word to describe The Force Awakens is one I’ve just invented (by serendipitous typo): ‘structre’. The Force Awakens is a structre. The spectre of a dead structure. In this case, a phantom narrative.

The new film mirrors the original movie (which I will rudely insist upon referring to as Star Wars rather than ‘A New Hope’ or ‘Episode IV’) very closely, in structure. The First Order’s attack on Jakku mirrors the Star Destroyer attacking Leia’s ship; Finn and Poe’s escape to a crash landing on a sand planet mirrors Threepio and Artoo’s escape to Tatooine. When Han is killed by Ren as Rey watches, it’s impossible not to be reminded of Luke watching Darth Vader kill Ben Kenobi. A young budding hero (and, presumably, Jedi to be) watches powerless as her newly-found but instantly-beloved older mentor is struck down, by lightsabre, by an evil dude in black. Etc. This is all far more specific than what such movies usually do. And this is without moving from a consideration of form to one of content. In those terms, the new movie is equally slavish. There is an alien cantina, etc. This has all been adequately covered elsewhere, so I won’t reiterate.

Now, of course, the thing is… it’s really impossible to complain about this unless you also complain about Star Wars itself, which itself is an exercise in consciously and deliberately crafting a structre. The fact is that the least likely people to want to complain about the structral nature of the new film are fans of the original, i.e. the people least likely to complain about the structral nature of the first film. Hollywood knows from the experience of the prequels that it is divergence from the pattern of the original trilogy that brings down the wrath of fans, not slavishness… and the first film has long been forgiven for being a structre, not least by its fans… which is only to say that it has been forgiven for having certain somatic effects for a specific reason. All too understandable given how much people have enjoyed the somatic effects in question. Force Awakens thus had the luxury of having a safe form of storytelling mapped out for it, long in advance of even the first script meeting, which would insulate it from all fan ire and also from general disappointment.

Now, it’s true that most big Hollywood movies follow formulaic structural rules, as they do formulaic content rules. Undeniably, this is a matter of political economy. Films represent a massive investment of money. They must work according to established rules because the risk everyone involved is taking is so great that experimentation appears as utter folly. Of course, Hollywood frequently fails to get it right and often produces turkeys not just in spite of their own cautious rules but even because of them.…

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Comics Reviews (January 6th, 2016)

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First off, and unrelated to comics, I guested on this week’s installment of Oi! Spaceman, where I talk Moffat and feminism, Mawdryn Undead, and Vox Day. It was great fun, and you should check it out.

Also, I’ve decided to start using those free digital copies Marvel likes to give away with its print comics, by which I mean publish them for you to use. All digital edition codes can be redeemed at marvel.com/redeem, but will only work for the first person to try them. 

Star Wars #14

A serviceable installment that sets up what I’m sure will be a fun conclusion. Deodato’s art is rapidly lapsing into self-parody, however, with his use of heavy shadow really starting to feel like something he wheels out when he doesn’t feel like drawing both halves of someone’s face. Combined with an issue that has an awful lot of boxes to check and you have a lackluster though by no means bad installment of this crossover. 

Digital code: THMHQP1HU6Q0

A-Force #1

Fun, although it does that irritating thing where two of the characters on the cover don’t actually appear in the book. It’s a slow start, and clearly we’re going to spend a while getting the band together, as it were, but Willow wrote that well with Ms. Marvel, and I’m sure she can do it here as well. Slightly more worried by the news that there’s another cowriter coming on board, as I felt like the Secret Wars run of this lost focus, but I’ve loved Kelly Thompson’s criticism for years, so I’m even excited for that. All told, a nice blend of “all female book” and classic Marvel team stylings.

Digital code: THM36XW9J242

Invincible Iron Man #5

In classic Bendis style, the first arc ends without strictly speaking resolving, and the cover is a complete lie. But this is a well-designed fight issue in which what’s going on remains clear throughout even to my often forgetful mind, and the revelation of what Bendis plans on doing with Mary Jane in the title is a brilliant use of the character. And I love the Tony/Stephen Strange relationship. 

Digital code: THMVD1GHVPPA

The Ultimates #3

Al Ewing is good at many things, but he puts together some of the most satisfying team books on the market, coming up with interesting collections of characters who play off of each other well and in various combinations. Everyone save Black Panther gets a genuinely great moment here, and the sense of scale of this book – this time they’re trying to fix time itself – is reliably exciting. The highlight, I think, is Miss America and Blue Marvel’s relationship, in which each of them visibly considers themselves to be the senior partner. Also, a cameo from Puck. 

Digital code: THMSIEX0SF6P

Miracleman #6

A slower issue that feels a bit overstuffed – like Gaiman tried to shoehorn his last collection of unused ideas for this arc into one issue. The sweet indiscipline of youth. Anyway, this has been a real joy of a six issue run, and I’m genuinely excited to see the next arc and how smooth the transition from twenty-year-old work to new work is.…

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Myriad Universes: The Worst of Both Worlds Part 1: The Bludgeonings of Chance

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There must be something in the air people are sensing. Perhaps a half-remembered portent of a coming disaster. Either way, it would seem that the Borg are on everyone’s minds of late. As the comics obviously must be written some months in advance, there’s no way Michael Jan Friedman could have known Star Trek: The Next Generation would be ending its sixth/first season with a cliffhanger involving the Borg. But here in the following month (indeed, perhaps even that very same May, depending on how early you get your comic books), to kick off the summer hiatus season, we get nothing short of a four-part epic sequel to “The Best of Both Worlds” involving dark mirrors and alternate universes.

The aptly titled The Worst of Both Worlds is a preternaturally timed story, because it not only ties into the looming Borg zeitgeist of Summer, 1993 by serving as a sequel to “The Best of Both Worlds”, its plot also eerily anticipates some of the repercussions of “Parallels”, to come next year in the TV show’s second/seventh season. As has become the standard for Michael Jan Friedman’s event miniseries, issue 1, “The Bludgeonings of Chance”, serves as a low-key setup to an assuredly dramatic tale focusing on small vignettes and character monologues (mostly from Captain Picard) to introduce the arc’s major themes before the plot itself picks up starting with issue 2. This time around, the crew is talking about the different paths their lives could have taken: As Will and Deanna put it, “what could have been, and what is”. They’re having a private dinner together when Will brings up the subject of their terminated romance from years ago, asking Deanna if she ever thought about what would have happened had they stayed together. She replies she thinks about it all the time, but she doesn’t regret not choosing that path, because it was their breakup that allowed them to become best friends, and she wouldn’t trade that for anything.

Geordi and Beverly are playing racquetball together on the holodeck, and Beverly is winning handily. She tells Geordi not to sweat it as she’s had twenty years of practice on him, picking the game up not long after Wesley was born. When he asks how Wes is doing, she replies “better than ever”, saying he’s reminding her more and more of Jack all the time. The most obvious foreshadowing comes from Captain Picard on the bridge: The Enterprise is on a supply run to a planet very near the vicinity of Wolf 359 (so near, in fact, you can still see debris from the battle floating around in local space), and the captain can’t help but have flashbacks to what happened to him and the galaxy there three years prior. Jean-Luc then goes on to retell the events of “The Best of Both Worlds” for the benefit of newcomers or those who need a refresher, putting special emphasis on how close the Borg came to conquering Earth and what the galaxy might be like today if they had succeeded.…

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The Other Side of American Ritual

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So, a short while back I discussed the mainstream American ritual cycle, and it was so much fun I thought I’d do it again, but from the other side of the looking glass. Because there are many other rituals available to us that are not a part of the mainstream, and which are frankly much more interesting than the ritual most people are talking about this year, namely New Year’s Resolutions.

But since we’re here, let’s use that as a template for unpacking some of the more interesting implications of “ritual” in of itself. In the last essay I quoted my favorite academic definition for ritual, “the more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances mostly not encoded by the performers.” And I certainly think a New Year’s Resolution fits into that. The timing of the Resolution is pretty invariant, coming on the coattails of a the latest Gregorian calendar. The Resolution itself is a formal utterance, that of a pledge. The curious part is the “not encoded by the performers” bit, because at first glance it seems the Resolution is entirely encoded by one’s choice for what to put into that particular box.

Which is where the “mostly” comes from. I, for example, have resolved to exercise regularly, one of the most common resolutions. But even if I’d come up with something less banal, say, to start a graffiti campaign against the local Chamber of Commerce, or to kill the next billionaire I meet, there are still “codes” around the New Year’s Resolution in particular that do not apply to ordinary “resolutions” made in the middle of summer. For one thing, we usually don’t go around asking people if they’ve recently made any resolutions; no, the timing of the ritual allows it to be social, catching people up in it even if they’re not making a resolution. Secondly, there’s an expectation that New Year’s Resolutions will largely fail.

And this is actually a rather strange entailment to a ritual, an expectation of failure. We don’t usually see that in ritual activity. Usually ritual participants expect some kind of success, which is why they even bother to ritualize in the first place. But I would argue that New Year’s Resolutions aren’t meant as resolutions per se. Sure, sometimes they work. And yet we really don’t expect people to keep these “promises.” That’s because, in my view, a New Year’s Resolution isn’t a promise… it’s a confession. It’s an admission of failure, either in one’s self, or the world around us. And that, I think, is the encoding inherent to the New Year’s Resolution that the performers really can’t change, no matter what resolution is offered.

 

Dr. Martin Luther King Day

So, one of the first “holidays” in the American calendar is Martin Luther King Day. This is relatively new, coming into being just 30 years ago as a federal holiday, which means a day off work for certain federal employees. As of today, only about a third of Americans now get the day off.…

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Cultural Marxism 2: The Player of Games

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With The Player of Games, Banks’s series immediately becomes the legend of science fiction that it is. Simply put, it’s one of the most compelling premises in science fiction, on par with A Canticle for Leibowitz or The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: a post-scarcity utopia that conducts warfare via a board game.

Central to the idea of the Culture, and indeed to any self-respecting utopia is an abundance of leisure time. Or, put more succinctly, it’s inherently about play. The game, meanwhile, is naturally about war – a model of combat. The first time we looked at the Culture it was from the unusual perspective of them at war in the traditional sense. Now, in a novel explicitly set centuries after that, we get a novel in which they overthrow the Empire of Azad, which is bad for more or less the exact same reasons the Idirans were, except they do it playfully, on their own terms.

The key element in making this work is the protagonist, Jernau Gergeh, the eponymous gameplayer afflicted by that most beautiful of character motivations, boredom. He has played all the good games there are and mastered them all; only a handful of people in the world have any chance at beating him, and only in a handful of games at that. He is, simply put, a damn fine character. This is not because he is long on interiority or complexity; in fact he’s a tremendously simple and predictable character – an excuse for competence porn wrapped in a motivation that’s as sympathetic as it is disreputable. But he’s a tremendously effective lens for this sort of reenactment of the Culture/Idrian war, and fun to spend time with.

Another way of putting this is that Banks has efficiently figured out how to write a novel that’s mostly the good bits of Consider Phlebas, which is to say the more philosophical monologues, while leaving behind most of the pulp structuring that made that book drag in numerous places. For huge swaths of its page-count, The Player of Games is about people playing board games. Moreover, playing fictional board games that don’t actually have their rules explained on any level. And it’s scintillating.

It’s probably worth looking at how this improbable thing happens. Let’s take a representative passage from early in the book, when Gurgeh plays a game called Stricken against a young prodigy who turns out to be unexpectedly good. This is, notably, not from the part of the book where games have been built up to vehicles capable of representing fundamental cultural values – it just represents how Banks opts to write about fictional games.

“She made the right guesses about Gurgeh’s pieces, capturing several strong beads in weak disguises; she anticipated moves he’d sealed in the Foretell shells; and she ignored the tempting traps and feints he set up.

Somehow he struggled on, coming up with desperate, improvised defences against each attack, but it was all too seat-of-the-pants, too extemporary and tactical.

…

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“This is our world, the world of the Information age”: In the Hands of the Prophets

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In his Network Society trilogy, sociologist and Neo-Marxist Manuel Castells argues (among a great deal other things) that the titular concept, referring to the sociocultural, political and socioeconomic restructuring of the world and its methods of production through globalization and information technology, will inevitably, and perhaps ironically, lead to an increase in fundamentalism and violence beget from it. The argument goes that, far from opening up their eyes to a literal new world of possibility, those inclined towards a reactionary fundamentalist movement will, when exposed to new ways of thinking through globalization, instead dig their heels in even further and violently lash out against a perceived threat to their way of life.

Writing in 1998, and again in 2010, Castells seems ahead of his time, and I’ve often thought he got a beat on the direction the geopolitical climate was going well before it became evident to all of us. Living as we do in an age where it seems the world is poised on the brink of war between various assorted fundamentalist terrorist organisations and equally reactionary state governments, Castells seems downright prescient. And, airing in 1993, so does “In the Hands of the Prophets”: For its season finale, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine seems to have suffered the same fate as so much other science fiction before it, unwittingly predicting the future’s worst case scenario through cautious rumination on humanity’s worst impulses.

Writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe insists that “In the Hands of the Prophets” isn’t so much a condemnation of fundamentalism as much as it is a criticism of people who feel the need to impose their beliefs on others. Wolfe believes that anyone has a right to believe anything, so long as they don’t force anyone else to hold to the same beliefs and that this is ultimately the angle he was going for. When I was younger, I found this to be a deeply profound truism, though in retrospect the sentiment seems a bit shallower than would perhaps be desirable…For one thing I find it difficult to see how you can have one critique without the other: Fundamentalism by definition demands that its adherents hold to it without question, and the very reason it’s reactionary is specifically because it’s convinced it’s the one universal truth that everyone needs to be converted to, by force if necessary. A fundamentalism that retreats back into its own insularity to avoid contact with other ways of thought is not the fundamentalism we see manifesting in the world as a result of globalization and the network society, and it’s not the fundamentalism of Vedek Winn and her orthodox Bajoran terrorists.

Where I do see in Wolfe’s interpretation of his work, and especially in Commander Sisko’s position all throughout the episode, is a statement of a kind of anarchist ideal: “My philosophy is that there is room on this station for every philosophy”. Or perhaps “A utopia is a framework for utopias”, if you prefer.…

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The Abominable Bride Review

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Well that was odd.

I’ve pointed out numerous times that Moffat’s default mode of storytelling is based on suspense over what kind of story he’s telling. With The Abominable Bride he substitutes this, with mixed results, for suspense over what the point of telling it is. This was always going to be a factor; you can’t pick up from a stunning cliffhanger with a one-off period special and not offer some meta-commentary on why. But it would have been possible to offer the answer “because it’s fun” and gotten on with it. And for the most part that’s what they do.

And yet the larger show hangs over it from the start, with the decision to do an extended recap of the series instead of just tearing into a big silly Victorian romp. The implication that this is going to advance the overall story of Sherlock is omnipresent. Which is where problems start to come up, because it doesn’t really. Which is hardly surprising; Series Four needs its hook. But the result is that a perfectly entertaining period piece about a murderous cult of suffragettes (that’s emphatically in favor of them, to be clear) gets bogged down with a bunch of Killing Joke level hero/villain mirroring.

It’s tempting to try to make this some sort of frock/gun point, and the iconography is literally there, but it’s weirder than that. On the whole, The Abominable Bride’s main instinct is to be a silly compendium of all the iconic Sherlock Holmes moments, done as a proper period piece but with the Sherlock cast. And so it goes out of its way to get the Reichenbach Falls and the first meeting in, makes sure to find room for everyone to make a cameo, visibly can’t get Laura Pulver’s schedule to work, et cetera. Sure, the only way they can justify Reichenbach is by doing the whole silly Inception business and banal mirroring, but the basic instinct is still “whee we’re putting Rupert Graves in mutton chops.”

Except then it’s got the whole addiction theme layered in, which it can’t come close to supporting. The focus on Mycroft’s heartbroken anguish at his brother’s overdose, played with career-best acting by Gatiss, is really a quite serious reframing of Sherlock’s narrative. I mean, obviously that’s in part the point – we’re clearly setting up a “Sherlock is very much living on the edge” plot, as follows necessarily from His Last Vow. And in that regard, the spectre of Nicholas Meyere’s The Seven Per-Cent Solution is not accidental.

But quite apart from how much I like that development, and much of that depends on who’s writing the opening episode of Series Four, it’s an awkward fit with the Victorian costume party. (To say nothing of an awfully sobering one for New Year’s Day, though that’s actually powerful and compelling.) And the result ends up undermining the whole endeavor, feeling as though they didn’t really believe their period piece could stand up on its own.

But if we’re being honest, it’s a mixed bag on whether it can.…

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Capitalist Pig 5: White Cocksuckas

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A long overdue Patreon bonus essay for you. Last War in Albion will be back next week with a chapter of nonstop formalist gubbins. The Abominable Bride review will be up late tonight. Happy New Year’s, and may 2016 bring the end of western civilization. Tomorrow brings the end of the annual sale on my back catalogue. 

“Burn the land, boil the sea.” – Theme from Firefly

In Warren Ellis’s 2013 novella Dead Pig Collector the protagonist, Mister Sun, describes his job in terms of the title phrase, explaining that in China (“a place rife with pollution and disease”) pig farmers often face large-scale deaths of pigs due to the aforementioned pollution and disease, which presents a major challenge. “A small farm – and, in places like Shanghai, they’re all small farms – cannot spend what little time they have disposing of tons of dead pigs instead of maintaining their remaining assets.” And since the penalties for selling such pigs into the market are steep, “there are people who have learned to effectively and safely dispose of swine carcasses. If you have a stack of dead pigs, and you don’t want to go to prison, then you pay for a dead pig collector.” As Mister Sun explains all of this, he is pouring bleach through a pair of holes cut into a plastic sheet laid over a bathtub in order to break down the blood within. Mr. Sun, see, is a hit man specializing in the efficient and untraceable disposal of the resulting corpse. 

Many things are in the mix here – most basically this story from Foreign Policy, although Ellis changes the economic situation around in his story, eliding the fact that the government-hired dead pig collectors are in practice not getting work because the illegal pig traders offer a better economic deal – but one, almost certainly, is Deadwood, a television show that Ellis has raved about on many grounds, but most notably (and appropriately) for the way in which you want to call everybody a cocksucker for hours after watching an episode.

See, Deadwood has a minor but fan-favorite character in the form of Mr. Wu, the de facto leader of the Chinese population in Deadwood, who, among the many social roles he performs within the camp, keeps a bunch of pigs that are routinely used to dispose of the many bodies that pile up in the camp. Wu is an odd and somewhat troubling character. He’s a clear fan favorite, but for uncomfortable reasons mostly related to the stereotypical pidgin in which he speaks and the boundless enthusiasm of Keone Young as he shouts “COCKSUCKA” or his endearing mispronunciation of Al Swearengen’s name as “Swedgin.” And, of course, there’s something fundamentally depressing about the way in which the narrative reinforces its characters’ marginalization of the Chinese population by giving them, basically, a single speaking representative who, due to not speaking the same language as any of the other characters, rarely actually gets a plotline.

But for all of this, Wu’s presence in Deadwood is a potent image, and not just for the fact that it’s relatively novel to actually acknowledge the role Chinese immigrants played in American expansionism.…

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