Eruditorum Press

The Coalition of Chaos

“We who are without kings”: Duet

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There are classics, and then there are classics.

“Duet” needs no introduction. Even those who would be inclined to slag off Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s first season, either on its own merits or due to some rule of thumb about first seasons, readily admit that this is one of the very best episodes in the entire series. Any Star Trek fan worth their salt is going to go one step beyond and will likely posit “Duet” as one of the very best episodes in the *entire Star Trek franchise*. I’m not about to rock the boat on this one, not this time. “Duet” is absolutely superb.

The biggest reason why this episode is so phenomenally successful is that it’s completely unafraid to do something that Star Trek in general, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in particular, can do effortlessly well so long as it’s given the chance. “Duet” is a bottle show, one of many commissioned at the back end of the season to make up for the ludicrously expensive and overbudget episodes from earlier on in the year (c.f. “Emissary”, “Move Along Home” and “The Storyteller”): No new sets, no major effects shots to speak of and only a couple of guest stars, which is frankly heresy for US television sci-fi at this point in time. And it absolutely doesn’t need any effects shots or fancy effects to be one of the most chillingly gripping and powerful things ever. 80% of “Duet” is held together by nothing more then Nana Visitor and Harris Yulin talking to each other, and that is absolutely all this episode needs. Is there any joint performance in Star Trek that’s even remotely comparable to the show they put on here? I submit to you there may well not be.

We of course have to single Nana Visitor out here. Two weeks in a row she’s gotten some pretty unprecedented showcase episodes for her range, which is is two more than anyone who wasn’t named Patrick Stewart or Brent Spiner got at this point in the game six years ago. Nana also got “Progress” and “Past Prologue” to herself earlier on in the year, so things are already looking great for Kira Nerys. That’s a great indication of how quickly Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has attained a level of egalitarianism in comparison to Star Trek: The Next Generation: Although there are still a few characters this team struggles with (*ahem* Jadzia Dax), this is still a great sign. Again though, this is no indictment of The Next Generation, but rather a regret that really nobody who’s worked on it (*including* this team, who have obviously proven themselves fully capable on this side of the lot) ever got comfortable enough with those characters to afford them the same treatment. But either way, “Duet” is in a class of its own for Visitor: None of her previous showcases are on this level and, while some will come close, none of them really ever will be again.…

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The Beast of the Epiphany

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The comedian Richard Herring has a Christmas story he tells about a thirsty cat in a bathroom. He was sitting on the toilet and reached across to turn the bath tap on for the cat, which then lapped enthusiastically at the water. He says he found the sight hilarious, but imagines that the cat also had quite an amusing view… though, as he goes on to observe, Jesus had the funniest view, getting the combined sights of the drinking cat and the “fat, defecating man”. Because, as Christianity teaches us, Jesus is always watching.

Now, I’m not sure I agree with Herring’s interpretation of Christian doctrine. He’s similarly dodgy in his representations of most religions, in his New-Atheisty way. He tends, as such people do, to take the worst and/or silliest possible interpretations of religious ideas and then generalise them, and to essentialise the religion he’s attacking along the lines of such thick-end-of-the-wedge strawmen. However, it’s also true that a) he’s unambiguously joking, what with saying most of this stuff as part of an open project of, y’know, being funny for a living, and b) he’s deliberately using his own infantile interpretation of religious ideas as part of his usual method of deriving irony from weaponised childishness.

(One day, when I write my massive series about Lee & Herring – comedians who fascinate me both as a team and as individuals – I’ll mean-spiritedly itemise Richard Herring’s many embarrassing forays into simplistic, Dawkinsian, secularist liberalism.)

More pertinently to this essay, there’s something on point about his combining of the concepts of Christmas and of surveillance… because, rather surprisingly, they turn out to be inextricably linked.

As we know, you’d better not pout, you’d better not cry, you’d better be good. I’m telling you why: Santa Claus is coming to town. He knows when you are sleeping, he knows if you’re awake; he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake.

It’s a perfect example of shit we’re told as kids that we take for granted, and which the world as a whole winks at or takes as fun, but which is actually bloodcurdling when you stop to really think about it. All over the world, children – including almost all the ones you know, and are at school with, and are friends with – are gearing up to receive presents from a magic, benevolent man… but you might not get any if you fail to obey the rules set for your behaviour by the unaccountable authorities above you, including those who claim to love you. If you disappoint or anger those authorities by infringing their laws, even in your deportment, you might find yourself deprived and excluded from a massive fun game that literally everyone else is getting to play. Of course, you could argue that very few kids these days genuinely believe they’re likely to wake up on Christmas morning to a stocking full of coal. I’m honestly not sure, looking back, if I believed stuff like that or not.…

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Comics Reviews (December 30th, 2015)

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A surprising Marvel-free week.

Lazarus #31

Frustrating; I enjoyed most of this issue, which was a well-done play on fog of war in which we see a fight play out from the perspective of the boots on the ground and the people in the ops room, each with limited perspectives on the action. Great stuff. But the cliffhanger is 100% pure inscrutability for me. Is there a time jump? If so, why does this two page time jump serve as a cliffhanger and not the seemingly much more gripping events of the previous few scenes? Who is “her” in the immediately prior scene? I can find no setup for any of this in the issue. Perhaps it’s in some prior issue long buried in my stacks of comics, but yeah. Frustrating.

James Bond: Vargr #3

Ellis is in “make most of the book an action sequence” mode, which is not my favorite Ellis mode, and the action sequence in question – a fairly straightforward shootout in a warehouse – hardly merits the attention lavished within a book in which not a ton actually happens for the nominal protagonist even as things shift around him. Fine and entertaining, but not a particularly memorable issue.

Black Magick #3

I’m intrigued by the worldbuilding here, which is inclined to hold off on much in the way of explanations of how the book’s view of magic works. Broadly speaking the answer seems to be “Wicca only with more explosions,” which is fine, but it sits on a weird cusp between not needing to be explained and being mysterious. Still, this was a great deal of fun. Nicola Scott turns out reliably gorgeous art, and Rucka writes excellent cops. I wish this would put more cards on the table of one sort or another, but I’m enjoying it a lot.

Mercury Heat #6

The first arc of this ends, and at this point what it’s doing feels properly clear and exciting. Not entirely sure I like the ending, more as a “how this sets up interesting things for the future” than in terms of effectiveness on its own; Luiza’s final decision is interesting and in character, but also one of those things that delays rather than advances the plot. But on the whole, a funny and smart book. Love the themes of colonialism introduced this issue. Good stuff, and I’m glad Gillen fits weird Avatar work like this into his schedule.…

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In Case You Missed These Fabulous Opportunities To Give Phil Money

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I mean, this is all in posts sitting not far below this one on the site, but hey, those posts went up the weekend after Christmas and were easy to miss, so here we are again.

First off, Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, my sprawling anthology about science fiction in 2015, from the Sad Puppies to the anthropocene extinction to Kabbalsitic enlightenment at the hands of Doctor Who, is out. Here’s the US link, here’s the UK link, here’s the Smashwords link. I genuinely think this is my best book ever, and encourage you to buy it. And if you’ve got it, please consider leaving a review, as those sorts of things are important. 

Second, the annual sale on my back catalogue is going on until January 2nd. Details on that are in this post.

Finally, just so that there’s some content, this essay on Donald Trump, white supremacy, and Adele’s “Hello” is the best piece of criticism I’ve read this week, and you should totally check it out.

Back… probably this evening actually with comics reviews, just based on how my day is likely to be shaped. 

Oh, hell, let’s make it an honorary waffling post: how was Christmas? (Whether you celebrated it or not.)…

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“All the world’s a stage”: Dramatis Personae

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An often overlooked entry from the first season, “Dramatis Personae” was always one of my favourite episodes to think about, even if this time around I found it a little difficult to actually watch. As is increasingly the case, the reason for this is not so much due to the quality of the piece itself as much as the fact it’s dealing with televisual storytelling norms that I find myself less and less inclined to watch as I get older.

The title says it all: “Dramatis Personae” is an exploration of performative themes, which on the one hand is nothing new, but on the other this episode is more textually overt about it than most. Writer Joe Menosky’s original idea was inspired by his observation that people tend to follow a kind of socially approved (and very, very stock) script whenever major life events happen, and there seem to be a very slight number of scripts generally available. This means that, no matter how different and unique the individual circumstances are, absolutely everyone’s story about, for example, falling in love is going to sound exactly the fucking same. Menosky saw this as a kind of voluntary self-imprisonment within a very bad pulp fiction play, and he was interested in exploring what that was like and why it happened. In a Star Trek context, this theme took the form of a telepathic matrix that was transmitted like a a virus.

For my money, this is a genius concept and a perfect fit for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. As a kind of science fiction urban community, the show offers a great setting to explore how this manifests on the level of populations and, even though this episode doesn’t end up taking the approach that “Babel” did, dealing with a disease outbreak is a solid plot to throw at a team of scientists and administrators working in a metropolitan environment. The handling of performativity itself “Dramatis Personae” does mark an interesting evolution from the way it’s been handled in the past: On Star Trek: The Next Generation, much of the performative facade comes from the cast themselves looking for room to play around with the roles they’ve been given, although at this stage the show is finally beginning to fully plumb the recesses of its sham theatricality, and this will come to a charged head next season. Here though the performativity is a crucial aspecct of the textual narrative, and that’s not actually something we’ve seen a ton of to date, although, like I said, this is starting to change.

With “Dramatis Personae” Menosky has in a sense penned a kind of spiritual follow-up to “Frame of Mind”, where the extradiegetic themes about being imprisoned in a stock set of narrative tropes become diegetic. The form this takes on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a bit more straightforward and traditional than what Brannon Braga pulled on Star Trek: The Next Generation, with the crew literally being taken over by other characters as opposed to the structure of the narrative reality itself breaking down (which is, interestingly enough, a certain kind of theatrical approach).…

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The Husbands of River Song/Series 9 Wrapup Podcast

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Right. Loads of stuff. First off, just a heads up, I’m bumping Last War in Albion one more week because I decided I don’t want to launch a new chapter on a holiday and then drop a Sherlock review on top of it later in the day. There’ll still be Friday morning content though.

Second, James Taylor has posted his usual process blog for the Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons cover which is, as usual, fascinating and worth reading. And of course you can still buy that book right here if you’re in the US, or here if you’re in the UK, and I hope you will because it’s lovely.

But for our main event, I’m joined by the brilliand Andrew Ellard for the last of our Doctor Who Series 9 podcasts to talk about The Husbands of River Song and then to go meander over a season recap because why not. You can grab that right here.…

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Doctor Who in 2015

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We’ll start with the stories ranking, with letter grades assigned, and then finish with some general thoughts on the season.

Under the Lake/Before the Flood

There’s really no way to avoid this being the stinker of the season. I’m not going to rehearse my basic criticism of Toby Whithouse’s output from about 2012 on at great length, but man I hope he starts displaying any instinct towards varied character arcs soon, preferably by writing stories about things other than protagonists who are mildly uncomfortable with their own moral ambiguity. That said, watched in the context of the rest of the season it improves, and in ways that serve to highlight the overall structure of the season.

To take a page from Jane’s usual collection of interpretive tricks, this is a season built around mirroring, both in its structure of two-part episodes with paralleled titles and in the sense that in various ways each story rehearses the events of Hell Bent. And this story is a part of that, and a significant inversion in that it’s the one iteration in which it’s the Doctor who seemingly dies instead of Clara. Most notably, Clara’s furious refusal of the Doctor’s death and her insistance on not being abandoned puts the lie to her eventual claim that she never asked the Doctor for a duty of care (though not nearly as much as his entirely sensible point that you shouldn’t have to ask in Face the Raven).

But it’s a clumsy and half-conceived of version of what the season is doing – one that becomes clear when rewatched in the context of the larger whole, but still only as something that doesn’t really take the place because the story is inexplicably of the belief that “ghosts on an underwater base” is a premise with inherent weight and doesn’t seem to grasp that i you’re going to do an extended procedural stretch of Doctor Who you need to actually have the key steps of the procedure make sense and be set up. Some of this is explained by the fact that this was made while Moffat was busy doing Sherlock and before the rest of the season actually existed. Other bits are explained by the failings of Toby Whithouse. None of that removes the basic fact that this sucked.

D

 

Sleep No More/Face the Raven

My decision to make this a two-parter on my initial ratings list was mostly a joke – a stubborn insistence on the “season of two-parters” tag in the face of its obvious counterexample. But I decided to watch them back-to-back for my rewatch as well, and was bemused to see that they actually work thematically, if not on any plot grounds, both in how they quietly break the two-parter structure in a way that’s important for the finale (I’m much more inclined to argue that Heaven Sent and Hell Bent are separate stories than that they form a three-parter with Face the Raven) and in that they are both stories in which the Doctor loses.…

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“We never touch but at points”: The Forsaken

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So I miscounted a bit when I was planning these entries. Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine do run completely parallel, beginning and ending their seasons roughly the same week. However, when Deep Space Nine premiered in January, 1993, the studio held production on The Next Generation back a few weeks so the new show could air four episodes in a row without any potential competition for attention. I, however, missed that when I was planning my watch schedule and went straight from “Emissary” to “Ship in a Bottle”, thus neglecting the fact that “Past Prologue”, “A Man Alone” and “Babel” all went out before that episode aired.

Which means we have to go back in time a bit for “The Forsaken”. Technically speaking, having just watched “Descent” we should be passed “In the Hands of the Prophets” and into the between season material by now, but I have to make up those four episodes somewhere. But it turned out OK after all because “The Forsaken” is a great episode to kick off a brief Star Trek: The Next Generation hiatus on the site, and I like the narrative this sets up from my writing perspective better anyway. And besides, you all should be used to time travel and temporal mechanics having stuck with this project this long, and there’s going to be plenty more where that came from in the not-too-distant-future. Well, I say future. But now I’m getting ahead of myself. Or behind.

You know what? I’m just going to stop now and get into “The Forsaken”.

Of all the Star Trek: The Next Generation characters who have crossed over to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine this season, Lwaxana Troi makes far and away the most sense. It’s not like Q, who’s really bound up thematically and symbolically with Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise specifically and thus doesn’t have much of a point in being here (though I maintain you could have found a way for him to work over here that wasn’t “Q-Less”) or Vash who doesn’t have much of a point at all. And while you could conceivably see Lursa and B’Etor lurking around the area scrounging up resources for their next nefarious scheme, it takes no leap of the imagination whatsoever to picture Lwaxana here. She may have family and friends on the Enterprise but she’s an ambassador herself and has her own life outside of them. In fact, it would be an insult to her character to insinuate she doesn’t. Of course she’d be part of a Federation diplomatic delegation to Deep Space 9, the most important port of call in the galaxy.

This is very well portrayed during Lwaxana’s introductory scene in the teaser: Although it’s not required for viewers to have seen her previous episodes as she’s consciously positioned alongside the other members of the ambassadorial delegation, the show does on some level expect us to know who she is and be familiar with how she acts and the kind of stories she appears in.…

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The Annual Eruditorum Press “Enjoy That New E-Reader” Sale

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As usual, we’re doing a one week year-end sale on our back catalogue.

Unsurprisingly, given that it’s been out for a day, I’m not putting Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons on sale. But it is for sale, and if you buy just one book it’s certainly the one I’d prefer. Details on that one are here.

But the discounts! As usual, I’m doing this via Smashwords, so click through and use the following coupon codes at checkout as you wish.

A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman: $3.99 with coupon code PS59U ($4 off)

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 1: William Hartnell: $1.99 with coupon code VY72U ($3 off)

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 2: Patrick Troughton: $1.99 with coupon code NS69E ($3 off)

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 3: Jon Pertwee: $1.99 with coupon code FZ67Y ($3 off)

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 4: Tom Baker and the Hinchcliffe Years: $2.99 with coupon code QQ79H ($2 off)

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 5: Tom Baker and the Williams Years: $2.99 with coupon code NC66G ($2 off)

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 6: Peter Davison and Colin Baker: $3.99 with coupon code SM92M ($1 off)

Enjoy, and thanks for another year of kind support.…

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Book Launch: Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons

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Box Day, as it were.

So, it’s not exactly news that this has been coming, but Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons is now available. Purchase links below. As always, I have no preference where you buy.

US Kindle. US Print.

UK Kindle. UK Print.

Smashwords (epub version).

Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons is my end-of-year collection, which is to say, a collection of my best work in 2015. For what it’s worth, which is, I hope, either $6.99 or $19.99 depending on your choice of formats, I think it’s also just my best book outright. Plus it has a space ship on the cover.

It’s not a book about Vox Day. It’s a book that starts with Vox – indeed with a revised and expanded version of the title essay. If you liked it before, and lots of people did, you’ll love it now. The background is more thorough, providing a pocket history of the Hugos and a full history of the Puppies. The definition of fascism is more rigorous (I use Umberto Eco’s “Ur-Fascism” for it). The analysis of Vox Day is more substantive. And I talk a bit about Ursula Vernon’s “Jackalope Wives” and contrast it with a John C Wright story, which is really funny. And it’s got my interview with Vox, the Shabcast “afterparty” (Jack is very happy to have himself saying “fuck you, Vox Day” in print in an actual book; page 167, incidentally) and some other stuff that mentions him.

It’s also got a preview chapter of The Last War in Albion Volume 1 (the V for Vendetta chapter), a sort of best-of of The Super Nintendo Project, and the complete text of Recursive Occlusion, which also marks that book’s debut in ebook form. And a ton of stand-alone essays, including my big guide to Janelle Monae’s Metropolis Suite, my piece on True Detective, Hannibal, and the anthropocene extinction, and a short story in which I casually propose how to end capitalism. Oh, and an exclusive twenty-five page interview with Peter Harness about The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion in which he reveals his rejected Doctor Who pitch featuring “beheaded medieval bishops, gigantic wicker men, and Scottish nationalism.”

But none of this quite describes what the book is.

Warren Ellis, in one of his frequent bouts of profound wisdom, describes the job of the writer as just looking up, at the world, and describing what you see. 2015 was a year where the progressive science fiction tradition I ply my trade in came under a sustained attack. We fought back, and we won, but it was an ugly, harsh year. And that’s the sort of year where it’s important to do that. And that, more than anything, is what Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons is: an attempt to take stock and say “here’s where we are” in the wake of a hell of a year. An effort that starts by dealing with the right-wing zealots, but that moves on to far bigger questions like “other than opposing the fascists who explicitly want a scorched earth policy where the world is devoid of any expression of progressive values whatsoever, what should we be thinking about?”…

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