Eruditorum Press

Haunt the Future

“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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The Husbands of River Song Review

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An effective holiday farce that serves as a fitting end to the story of River Song. It’s not much more than that, but it makes no claim to be, and you can hardly fault a Christmas special for its froth. So, all told, good episode.

What really jumps out, though, is an idle comment Moffat made about writing it with the knowledge that it could be his last Doctor Who. He walked it back in a later interview, saying that he thinks that every Christmas, but it’s hard not to notice the lack of any forward-looking elements in the last few stories. This is the first time in ages a season has ended with essentially no lingering plot threads. Clara is sorted and departed, Gallifrey is found, the Hybrid is presumably dealt with. And with The Husbands of River Song we get a story that seeks active closure on River’s story, in a way not even Name of the Doctor did. It’s not that there’s no possibility of further stories, although at this point they’d have to take place post-Silence in the Library. And we still don’t actually know the circumstances under which the Doctor could tell River his name. But we’ve seen them live happily ever after, an explicit accepting of endings.

Obviously the reality is that Moffat’s not going. And I’m certainly not unhappy about that, although I wouldn’t have been unhappy had he gone either (unlike last year). But there’s a mindfulness to the possibility of this being an ending – a clear sense that Moffat made sure he’d be happy with this as an ending, as opposed to just knowing it theoretically might be.

So unsurprisingly, if he’s going to maybe go out on Christmas, Moffat does farce. Which is his most elemental state as a writer. His puzzle boxes and mysteries have always, in key ways, been farces with the jokes taken out, or, as in Let’s Kill Hitler, with the jokes left in. And he’s very good at it – probably the single greatest practitioner of it over the last quarter-century of television. All of this is on ready display here, with a wealth of well-executed comedic set pieces about River not realizing who the Doctor is. The “bigger on the inside” sequence is probably the funniest single one, although I think my favorite bit of farce is the “oshit the worship the guy who’s head we have in a bag” moment.

But the result is an episode that’s a bit lopsided; much as I loved that bit, almost everything after they land on the spaceship left me impatient for River to figure it out already. It wasn’t quite to the point of being bored – that’s more a Sleep No More or Before the Flood sort of problem – but it was definitely more than the Doctor and River doing a “she doesn’t know who he is” farce while being chased by a generic robot can strictly speaking sustain.

And then of course there’s the end, which is wonderful and perfect.…

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“Till the sun grows cold”: Descent

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The Borg are back.

“Descent” marks an important turning point in a number of respects. Up front, it’s the first time Star Trek: The Next Generation has done a cliffhanger season finale more or less only because this is the sort of thing it does to close off filming block seasons; in other words, the first time the cliffhanger finale structure is implemented as a matter of course and functional habit instead of being the result of unexpected necessity. “The Best of Both Worlds” was born out of a narrative-melting crisis springing from the chaos of the third season’s production as well as contract disputes with Patrick Stewart’s agent. “Redemption” was a double length story done to lead into the 25th Anniversary year and to accommodate the bombshell return of Denise Crosby, as well as closing off Worf’s epic story arc about his isolation from his Klingon heritage (oh how naive we all once were). And “Time’s Arrow” wasn’t even going to be a a two-parter until the building hype for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine started to concern viewers that Star Trek: The Next Generation was going off the air.

Interestingly enough, much of this remains palpable swirling about the thematic and aesthetic core of “Descent”. Most notably, of course, the Borg. What’s important to remember about the Borg’s status in Star Trek is their joint role as extradiegetic challenge and interloping threat: The Borg are not exactly a dark mirror of the Federation, and while it’s tempting to call them purveyors of narrative collapse, they’re actually not. “The Best of Both Worlds” threatened to be a narrative collapse, but if it had been that would have been the show doing that to itself-The Borg winning was a symptomatic result of the show’s panic-stricken crisis, not the cause of it. The closest Star Trek: The Next Generation has actually come to narrative collapse is the forced artifice of “Chain of Command”, which examined the potential threat of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine dispersing its older sister by purging Bajor and the Cardassian occupation from it. Crucially, this story came not long after two other double-length episodes meant to reassure us this wasn’t going to happen (one of which even featured a cameo by the Borg). Since then, we’ve seen Gul Ocett on this side of the lot and there’s even a Bajoran extra in “Descent” itself.

In practice, the Borg are actually more of a counterfactual narrative invader. They come from Star Trek’s future, and as iconic as they may be to Star Trek: The Next Generation in pop culture they fundamentally do not belong here. The Borg represent all the darkness and ugliness the Star Trek universe inherits as part of its pedigree, the terrifying end result of science fiction’s teleology and technological determinism gone horribly right. And, keenly aware of the show’s perpetually unfulfilled potential, the Borg lie in wait for a moment of weakness to strike and appropriate.…

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The Eruditorum Press Christmas Party Shabcast

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Take time off from wading through the flooded ruins of your home and join the entire ‘inner party’ (as it were) of Eruditorum Press – Holly, myself, James, Jane, Kevin and Phil – for Shabcast 14, a massive festive blather-session.  (Anna was invited, but was too tired from doing little things like, y’know, fixing the site.)

Like any office Christmas ‘do’ there will be simmering resentments and blazing rows, the awkward office joker will embarrass everyone, somebody will get spannered and photocopy their arse (or, these days, scan it and email it to people I suppose), the boss will be unconvincingly jovial with staff who can’t relax while he’s around, two people will sneak off for a tryst in an empty office, and the whole thing will be interrupted by terrorists led by Alan Rickman.

It’s undoubtedly the finest piece of Christmas-related media you’re likely to experience in the next couple of days.

Download or listen here. 

And have a pleasant end of December.

 

 …

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Comics Reviews (December 23rd, 2015)

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Chew #53

An odd issue that feels borderline like just establishing a new premise for the book seven issues from the end, which is an odd feel. Not really sure what to say about this book as it runs the clock out; it’s in the critically odd position of having been a book with promise that never quite fulfilled it and is heading towards conclusion and a permanent midlist obscurity. Which is a recipe for anticlimax, and this issue exemplifies that. Nothing objectionable, nothing exciting.

Nameless #6

Grant Morrison tries his hand at killing the moon, and ends up with something that frankly reads like a grimdark parody of Grant Morrison. The mind frankly reels at him complaining about the writing in Promethea and then turning out this laundry list of occult references wrapped in a plot that has to be obscurantist to remain at all interesting. A comic that aims to be about nihilism and ends up being about nothing.

Saga #32

This continues to read like a book that will read really well in trade, which is more than you can say for Chew. As a single issue, this one rumbled along pretty well in a welcome return to the characters that first grabbed you in the book. Fiona Staples remains one of the best talents in comics, Vaughn continues to write perfectly adequate serialized comics, and this remains a fun exercise in wishing I knew what was going in.

Darth Vader #14

Gillen basically has all the toys to play with here – the Star Wars cast, Vader, and his own Aphra/0-0-0/BT-1 team, and he relishes it. Being part four of a crossover it’s more setup than fireworks, but it’s another fun, satisfying romp with good bits for several characters, and particularly for Leia. Only real flaw is that Larocca is not well-served by the photo-referenced characters, ending up at his most static and awkward. Also I forget who the guy in the cliffhanger is.

The New Avengers #4

The New Avengers fight space-Cthulhu, which they call exactly that, in a delightful slice of Claremont-style big team soap opera that feels as “now” as it gets, with the horror ideas of Nameless, a Hot Chocolate quote, and a major plot thread of Young Avengers resurrected. Plus Squirrel Girl. Basically, the Platonic ideal of a certain type of Marvel book in 2015. Well done.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #2

Basically the best thing ever; a joyful mad science romp with evil monkeys and dinosaurs and glowing green magic technology stuff. This is firmly Marvel recreating the formula that made Ms. Marvel work, and they’re doing it in fine fashion, creating a hero whose world is vivid and compelling and feels real precisely because of its majestic silliness. Really a highlight of the current market.…

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The Force Awakens Review

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Well, it’s no “Tilotny Throws a Shape.”

It seems almost obvious to suggest that The Force Awakens is a film that feels more like it was engineered than created as such. There is never a moment within it that doesn’t feel calculated. This is hardly surprising; the original film’s conscious aping of Joseph Campbell is at times overstated, but in the post-Save the Cat! cinematic world we live in the idea that a Star Wars screenplay was ever going to contain anything that seems to be there because of some actual interest, concern, or idiosyncrasy of the screenwriter is blatantly absurd. The cold reality is that The Force Awakens basically just had to shoot on film and go back to the “used future” aesthetic that Lucas ditched for the prequels and it was going to debut to cheery reviews about Star Wars being back.

Even by that standard, however, there’s something intensely rote about The Force Awakens and its unblinking tour through all the classic bits of Star Wars. It would be going too far to say that it’s cynical – everybody is clearly having a good time making Star Wars. But there’s a palpable sense, in basically every scene, that what they’re having fun is very much making Star Wars as opposed to making this particular movie. There are exceptions – in particular Domhnall Gleeson, who has clearly never tasted finer scenery in his life – but by and large nobody seems invested in this film.

That’s not terribly surprising, I suppose, given that this film (like Star Trek before it) really isn’t interested in anything more than “here is the setup for a new version of this classic thing.” The main beneficiary here is Rian Johnson, a filmmaker with an actual track record of interesting and challenging movies who inherits the plum Empire Strikes Back position, an accomplished cast, and an actual premise, and who thus presumably gets to go be interesting without having to waste acres of time going “look! Another plucky hero on a desert planet!”

Ah, yes, Rey. Along with Finn, the good part of the film. For two reasons. The first is simply the hilarious idiocy like the review Vox Day posted to his PUA sub-blog that objected to a girl beating a boy in a light saber fight before concluding that “women ruin everything,” or the Return of Kings review that says everything you’d expect it to say. The second, quite separate from the genuine pleasure of impotent nerd rage, is simply that it’s fucking wonderful to see heroes like Rey and Finn. A world where Daisy Ridley and John Boyega get to play the heroes of an action/sci-fi movie is a nicer world than one where they don’t. Countless movies have gone less well-cast because they didn’t have the bravery or ingenuity to hire actors like them.

And yet for all that the choice of sobriquets reveals the ugly motives for the critique, it’s hard not to have a whisp of sympathy for the people who accuse Rey of being a Mary Sue.…

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“Everything is alive”: If Wishes Were Horses

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The interpretation here seems obvious. So obvious, in fact, it almost feels hard to accept.

Stories have power. That much we have established: “What war hasn’t been a war of fiction?” as Alan Moore would say. Our ideas of how the world is are cultivated in the stories we tell about them and guide our actions in a myriad of ways, from the material psychology of the copycat effect to the more intangible power of symbols and synchromysticism. And so it’s no great stretch to see, in “If Wishes Were Horses”, our stories take on a very real life of themselves derived from the meaning we imbue them with. One way to look at it is to argue that all our knowledge of the world is in some sense a kind of story-A representative facsimile meant to stand in for experiential perception. Our conscious understanding of others in necessarily incomplete, based as it must be on what we see, what we are allowed to see and how we interpret what we see. Fantasies are narratives we outline ourselves deliberately built out of distortions and exaggerations.

None of this is new for us: We know spirituality goes hand in hand with performativity. Like Alan Moore also said, “there’s a certain amount of sham in shamanism”. Some shamanic rituals involve adopting the guise of spirits or the retelling of sacred stories. Magic, in the western sense, is just another form of symbolic language representation of individual experience. The occult is “hidden” specifically because it belongs to a realm we’re not consciously aware on an everyday basis. It’s also well-trod ground for Star Trek: The obvious point of comparison is “Where No One Has Gone Before”, but Michael Piller said since that was “six years ago on a different show” there was no reason not to do another story that “celebrated imagination”. I agree inasmuch as I believe it’s *always* important to tell stories like this.

I’m not convinced Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are different shows.

But going back beyond this particular series, the theme does tend to reoccur; “The Magicks of Megas-Tu” being possibly the other biggest example in Star Trek’s history prior to “Where No One Has Gone Before”. This does seem odd territory for science fiction, though: It’s the very thing you might think Hard SF, or at least the proponents of Hard SF, would denounce as fantasy at best and “woo” at worst. Mind and consciousness, and thus the experiential, is something traditionally seen as taboo for empiricism. And yet even in the celebrated works of the old masters you see things like “telepathic science”, hinting that perhaps the experience and the observational process aren’t as irreconcilable as we might think. Star Trek is not Hard SF, but this only means that it lacks the self-conscious narrow materialist focus that the genre has come to represent in this day and age: It does not mean, and should not mean, that it is anti-science.…

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The Feast of Steven

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For you holiday pleasure, I gift to you this little lovely essay on The Feast of Steven. Which is neither a reference to the current showrunner, nor to the marvelous Steven Universe, despite their similarities. No, this is the seventh episode in the epic The Daleks’ Masterplan, and quite possibly one of the best therein. See, at this point in the show, as Phil so eloquently inscribed back in the early days of TARDIS Eruditorum, Doctor Who had swung away from its counterculture ethics and aesthetics, and Masterplan was certainly a part of that swerve, an insistent undermining of the Doctor’s efficacy and the show’s overall optimism. But for one shining moment on Christmas Day, 1965 (despite a singular dark splotch within that moment) this was most certainly not the case.

The Feast of Steven is perhaps most memorably known as the most blatant case of the show breaking the 4th Wall, when at the end the Doctor turns to the camera and wishes everyone in the audience a Merry Christmas. In some dreary netherparts of our fandom, this is considered a mistake. Apparently the showrunners at the time, producer John Wiles and script editor Donald Tosh, weren’t too fond of it either, suggesting it was an ad-lib by Hartnell, a literal mistake. Of course it’s not a mistake. Everything in the episode was always leading up to this.

Not that this is an easy episode to analyze. The Feast of Steven was the first episode of Doctor Who to ever be junked – because everyone knew this was going to be the Christmas episode, and that people might not be watching on Christmas (how times have changed), they decided it would be something completely unnecessary to the larger serial around it; ergo, it wasn’t ever copied and shipped to other TV stations around the world with the other 11 parts of Masterplan.

So all we have is an audio recording, from which two main reconstructions have been reconstructed. On the one hand we have the version from stalwart recon studio Loose Cannon, which uses a variety of telesnaps (there were only 20, so even here there’s a dearth of material) in many creative ways to form the vague semblance of a visual narrative. The other is a crude animation, which is in some ways superior to the somewhat incoherent mélange of motionless stills of the former recon, but which elides any semblance of “performance” – gone are any of the actors’ expressions, the actual sets, and perhaps less obviously, the direction of the piece. Not that the Loose Cannon recon saved much in the way of direction, but its very lack of direction is ironically more honest. All that said, the animated version is certainly more watchable. Both are available at the usual places you might find such stuff.

The story basically consists of two parts, with some connective tissue inside the TARDIS – the story actually begins there, ends there, and that is the place that bridges the two main setpieces.…

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