Eruditorum Press

Gaze not into the abyss lest you accidentally write a book

Not Suitable for Kids

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 The BBC’s Moscow Correspondent, Steve Rosenberg, recently tweeted this:

Now, despite the air of handbag-clutching sanctimony, I agree with the implied criticism here.  If true, it’s wicked that Russian kids are having their history censored.  However, the other implication – that ‘we’ would never censor history for ‘our’ kids – is trickier to agree with.  Media Lens promptly responded to Rosenberg with: “Try reading a British or US kids’ history book on the Vietnam war (for example)”. 

I myself, monomaniac that I am, was instantly reminded of ‘Victory of the Daleks’, in which Winston Churchill is presented to the kiddies as the Doctor’s bezzie mate; a naughty, fallible, but essentially heroic fighter against evil.  Nothing in that episode about, say, the Bengal famine, or the Black and Tans in Ireland, or the conspiracy to unseat Mossadegh, or the pointless firebombing of Dresden.  Sticking with Russia, Churchill was the leading British politician behind Allied ‘intervention’ (i.e. aiding the counter-revolutionary Whites) against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War… a war that (arguably) indirectly helped bring Stalin to power.  You might well argue that there is no place for such things in an episode of Doctor Who.  You could be right.  But don’t then tell me that there is a place for presenting someone like Winston Churchill, sans context, as a jolly and fiercely moral pal.

Of course hierarchical societies, which depend upon ideology to manufacture public acceptance or quietitude, are going to lie to their people, and they’re going to start early.  What’s interesting here is not the obvious fact that Russian kids’ history books and British kids’ TV shows are going to mislead them about the histories of their domestic ruling classes.  What’s interesting is the way the educated, orthodox, democratic, freedom-loving mind can notice – and be outraged by – this obfuscation when practiced by Russia, while completely failing to notice it when it is practiced by the BBC. 

You have to wonder how automatic it is, versus how deliberate. 

In Nineteen-Eighty-Four, Orwell has Party members practicing this very double standard openly and proudly, using it as a badge of honour.  It can be viewed as such because ‘we’ are good by definition, so any contortion of truth or good sense which benefits ‘our’ side is also good by definition.  Like many psychological habits, there’s no clear cause and effect, but rather a rabbit hole made of mutually-reflecting mirrors.  And I don’t think we need go to Oceania to see it.

The orthodox view of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that it’s a satire of Russian totalitarianism… and yet Orwell sets it in Britain (as was).  He’s also having a go at British Communists who willingly and happily parroted the nonsense dictated to them from Moscow.  But familiarity with his wider corpus shows us that Orwell was quite aware of the same technique in the capitalist media.  The Ministry of Truth is at least partly drawn from his experiences within the BBC.

It would be unthinkable to do a Doctor Who story featuring Stalin without portraying him as evil. …

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Lost Exegesis (White Rabbit) — Part 1

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White Rabbit really does represent a rabbit hole for the series. The Pilot was, well, the pilot, the story to get you hooked. Tabula Rasa was what an ordinary episode of Lost television might look like, and Walkabout showed off all kinds of technical and emotional chops. And all of them played with certain intriguing aesthetics. This episode plays off each of the previous ones, demonstrating a certain structural and thematic continuity, while continuing to broaden the chasm gaping open upon the show’s Mysteries.

We should start with the Flashbacks and the Mirrors. Two episodes in a row now, we’ve begun with an Opening Eye in the focal character’s Flashback. This is an example of continuity, a way of visually juxtaposing two characters, in this case Jack to Locke. It also makes three of five episodes opening with the same image – this is now a part of the show’s overall language, a language that is largely symbolic or at least unspoken (which we’ll get to, I promise).

We’ll get to the Locke/Jack stuff in a bit, but first let’s take a longer look at these Flashbacks. Jack’s first is when he’s sitting on the beach, presumably meditating on the time when Mark Silverman got “jumped” by a couple of bullies. Jack tries to change what’s happening, but his efforts are useless – he gets punched in the eye, and the screen goes blank, filled in with the cries of what’s happening now on the Island, which is Charlie shouting Jack’s name while someone drowns at sea. Jack tries to save the drowning woman, but only comes back with Boone.

So there’s an obvious parallel here about the futility of Jack’s actions. Given the iconography in the other Flashbacks, though, one thing that might go unnoticed in this mirroring is what’s actually in the dialogue – the boy Jack tried to save when he was just a kid was named “Silverman.” A reflective surface, a mirror, and entirely symbolic. Which we only learn in the next Flashback, in what’s quite possibly the most important scene in Jack’s character development, the talking to he gets from his father.

FATHER: I had a boy on my table today. I don’t know, maybe a year younger than you. He had a bad heart. It got real hairy, real fast. And everybody’s looking at your old man to make decisions. And I was able to make those decisions because at the end of the day, after the boy died, I was able to wash my hands and come home to dinner. You know, watch a little Carol Burnett, laugh till my sides hurt. And how can I do that, hmm? And even when I fail, how do I do that, Jack? Because I have what it takes. Don’t choose, Jack, don’t decide. You don’t want to be a hero, you don’t try and save everyone because when you fail… you just don’t have what it takes.

Jack’s father tells a tale of failure – and failing is just what we’ve seen Jack experience twice in a row.…

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Women in AI Boxes: Ex Machina and the Other Turing Test

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Another preview essay from Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, available for pre-order and out on December 26th, or, as I like to think of it, just in time for that Amazon gift card your aunt gave you.

Ex Machina, the best horror story about Eliezer Yudkowsky since Nick Land’s Phyl-Undhu, is based around a sly joke about the Turing Test, namely that it secretly understands what it actually is, by which I mean what’s described in “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” the paper in which Alan Turing supposedly establishes the damn thing. The usual reading, in which a machine is said to think if it can fool a human engaged in typed conversation with it into thinking it’s another human, amounts to a test of whether the machine can use language. This is a hard problem in computer science, although one that IBM is plausibly close to solving given that they can solve the closely related problem of beating Ken Jennings at Jeopardy!

It is also not actually what Turing says. It’s just that what Turing says is really weird. He opens his paper by saying, “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’” Then, after concluding, not insensibly, that this question depends on too many ambiguous definitions, says that “I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.” Following this proclamation of relative unambiguity, he begins the immediate next paragraph by saying, “the new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the ‘imitation game,’” which is, to say the least, not a great start to relative unambiguity.

It is, however, pretty much how he means to go on. The imitation game is straightforward enough, and consists of “a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C)” who engages in written conversation with the unseen man and woman and tries to discern which is which. Having described this game, he says, “we now ask the question, ‘What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?’ Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, ‘Can machines think?’” But of course there’s a massive and cratering ambiguity here: does it matter that the machine is taking the part of A and not B?

Certainly the dominant reading is that it does not matter; that the Turing Test is simply the imitation game played between a human and a computer instead of a man and a woman. And this view is reinforced by the remainder of the paper, which frames the question in terms of the basic state of computer science in 1950, which is to say, over very fundamental questions that turned out to still be monstrously difficult such that IBM still hasn’t quite solved them.…

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“No, I won’t sit idly by as you hurl clichés at me”: Suspicions

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And this would be a good example of *why* Star Trek: The Next Generation is straining against its material constraints.

I was originally planning to criticize “Suspicions” for being grimdark-Just another boring and juvenile “lengths they will go”, “doing that which must be done” exercise in false depth. But in reality if it’s grimdark, it’s only halfheartedly so, because “Suspicions” is halfhearted everything. The grimdark stuff feels like going through the motions, as if there’s just this assumption that any story about a murder investigation simply has to be grimdark for the portagonists to have any stake in solving it (tracing grimdark’s lineage back to Frank Miller is almost a cliché these days, but the comparison does need to be drawn in this circumstance as those are his signature beats to the letter, albeit really watered down and done in a middling fashion). And, for that matter, that we need token “character development” every week to hold the show together. Which, if we’re being perfectly honest, is precisely the kind of assumption it’s reasonable to guess was floating around this production team’s offices, even if it’s not as dogmatic as it might be amongst their colleagues across the street.

But more to the point, “Suspicions” is just a boring and inept production. The flashback and voiceover stuff is resoundingly pilloried in fandom (which is something of a surprise for me to learn, as I’d always figured this episode was rather well liked for the aforementioned grimdark), and there is something to be said about the hackneyed use of such noir staples to the point it’s become an almost instantaneous signifier of the parodical. However, given that this precise format is going to be used to astronomical success and wild acclaim in little under a year just with Odo instead of Beverly, I’d be careful about writing that off as a fault of “Suspicions”. Maybe then Star Trek: The Next Generation is just bad at this kind of story: While writer Naren Shankar doesn’t say that, he does say that he didn’t think he was very good at writing murder mysteries.

While I can’t speak for Shankar, I do think it would be silly to argue this crew can’t do murder mysteries. It’s true that given its setting Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a little better poised to handle a brief like this, but it’s not impossible to do it over here. “Aquiel” from earlier in the year was a damn good one as far as I was concerned, and it was successful because it remembered the major strength of Star Trek, and especially this version of it, is competency porn and that this crew shines the brightest when you let them do the things they’re good at in service of working together to solve the mystery. And that the best way you do that is essentially write a kind of procedural, but the most naturalistic and engaging procedural you’ve ever seen.…

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Hell Bent Review

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Moffat must go.

 

  • It is stunningly reckless in its oversignification. Nearly every element of the plot is another thing along the lines of the Zygons in The Day of the Doctor – an unresolved question mark that could be expanded on at vast length. Similarly, nearly every element turns on parallelism with other pieces of the mythology.
  • The most interesting of these is of course the Me/Missy parallel, emphasized both by the ostentatious emphasis on Me knocking four times and on the tripled repetition of “Missy” from Clara to the Doctor to Me in such a way as to stress that “Me” would be a perfectly plausible alias for her.
  • And don’t give me that “how would you make that work with the continuity” bullshit. The answer is obvious: Clara eventually seeks out Faction Paradox to help her with the whole “has no pulse” problem, and in the course of that adventure Me is flung into the Looms. Duh.
  • What an absolutely perfect ending for Clara, though. Not a Time Lord. (Probably) not immortal. Entirely on her own terms, as what she is. But stealing a TARDIS and running away to see all of time and space. With Maisie Williams. Given that the character’s departure is in part defined by the fact that she’s had a half-dozen of them already, three of them fatal, the question of how she’d leave for the final time was vexed. And the episode leaned into that, most obviously with the massively emphasized pan away from the “things that need to be said” conversation. Within that problem, the answer “Clara founds her own discrete and feminine iteration of the basic narrative of Doctor Who and escapes from the narrative into it” is absolutely brilliant.
  • More brilliant, though, is the way in which Hell Bent uses its oversignification to create an “it’s all true” approach to its underlying questions of mythology. Numerous things almost happen, or are gestured at through parallels but not through exposition, such that any fan theory is no more than two lines of technobabble away from confirmation. And particularly the role that women have within this – note the way that the episode is haunted by several of them, including some who are actually in it.
  • Actually, just to take a quick detour into a bit of canon the episode is mostly content to let slide, isn’t it fascinating that the Sisterhood of Karn is off at the end of the universe with the Time Lords? There’s no evidence they have time travel themselves (and indeed it would fuck with their basic concept pretty hard if they did), so presumably they’re sort of tagging along with Gallifrey. Which is fine – I have no problem expanding the “what gets time bubbled” from “Gallifrey” to “the entire constellation of Kasterborous.” But this makes the question of “where is Gallifrey” somewhat odd for the Doctor, given that he clearly knows how to stop off to visit Ohilia in The Magician’s Apprentice, which should give him a pretty good clue where Gallifrey is if they’re linked like that.
…

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“Morphology of the amorphous”: Vortex

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Odo is a shapeshifter. I know that sounds obvious to any fan of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but I’m not just talking about his plot superpowers here. Rather Odo being a shapeshifter is a diegetic allegory for the role he plays on the series, and clue as to his character’s true nature.

Odo got the first spotlight on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine following “Emissary”, and while it was excellent it was more about the setting of the titular space station itself and inviting comparison with Westerns than Odo himself; it’s that “Fort Laramie in Space” again (Star Trek certainly does seem fixated on its precious Hollywood Westerns and seems to want to invoke them whenever and wherever possible). While “Vortex” draws upon Westerns to a significant degree as well: The script took its inspiration from the movie The Naked Spur such that Peter Allan Fields hired Sam Rolfe, the writer of that movie and an old mentor of Fields’, to handle the teleplay for “Vortex” (Rolfe had previously written “The Vengeance Factor”, which is probably my favourite episode of the third season, and the script even specifies that Ah-Kel and Ro-Kel had at least two of those gloriously 1980s Gatherers as part of their crew!). But there’s more to this episode than simple genre romp pastiche, and “Vortex” is the key moment in establishing precisely who Odo is.

At first, it would seem like he’s being depicted as the stereotypical mythic lone gunman Western hero, with Odo, Croden and the script all waxing fairly poetically (and melodramatically) about being an outsider and not having a home to go back to. But this is actually obfuscating pomp and circumstance: Odo is projecting his anxieties about belonging onto his search for his origins. He feels out-of-place with Starfleet and the Bajorans alike and is hoping that if he finds “his people”, he’ll finally have a place to belong to (true, but not in the way Odo is conceptualizing it here). But what Odo doesn’t realise that the majority of his isolation is self-imposed, and that he’s too insular and self-conscious to figure out that his home has always been Deep Space 9. He probably knows this deep down, but he’s too stubborn to actually accept, admit and vocalize is to himself, much less to anyone else. So when he asks his pendant at the end about where home is, it’s every bit as much of a rhetorical philosophical question as it is an inquiry about a physical location. He’s not looking for a place to belong as much as he is looking for permission to admit that the place he belongs is where he’s spent the better part of a decade dutifully making a living.

And this does beg an interesting question: Can one actually “belong” to a place like Deep Space 9? The station is, after all, ultimately a port city, and port cities on Earth have traditionally been considered deeply liminal places.…

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Architects and Bees

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On ‘The Ark in Space’.

 

“And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” – Genesis, 3:7, KJV

“…a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” – Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.1

“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars…” – Charles Darwin, letter to Asa Gray, 22nd May 1860

 

As I’ve said before, I think SF is fundamentally the reiteration of mythology in the idioms of modernity, particularly the age of science and technology brought in by the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and their legacies. Christian stories of creation and apocalypse are probably the most important mythological narratives reiterated by SF because the genre originated in the West, and is fundamentally concerned with the implications of the modern epoch which began in Western Europe. But there’s more to it than that. There is a deep link between Christianity and the experience of the rise of technological modernity. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.  You don’t need to buy Weber’s bass-ackwards, cart-before-horse notion of capitalism born from Protestantism to see the connections.

The Eden story is about the end of one way of life and the start of a new one.  It is about the expulsion of humanity from pre-History into History. It tells this tale twice, on two tracks.

Contained in Genesis, right at the start, there is the garden.  The garden we had to leave because we acquired knowledge.  In the book, the knowledge is of good and evil, and consequently of pain and death.  It is the moment of our emergence from the animal world of sensation into the human world of consciousness.  Animals, after all, do not ‘know’ that they will die.  That is the curse of the conscious.  Here, in the first book of the Bible that the literalists so abuse by their crass slavishness, is a Darwinian acknowledgement of the emergence of the human mind from the blurry thoughtworld of the beasts.  The near-immediate legacy of Adam and Eve’s little picnic is the creation of the tool.

It is almost as though Genesis contains an ancestral memory of how the use of tools drove the rise of the big brain, which in turn powered the biological emergence of humanity.  It also seems to ‘remember’ the role of language in the creation of consciousness, and the role of consciousness in the adaptation of the environment to our needs.

In Genesis, the deadly tools, the tools that see us kicked out of our idyllic biological pre-History, are the words with which to conceptualise ourselves, with which to become self-conscious and conscious of the other human selves outside us.…

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Comics Reviews (December 2nd, 2015)

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Invincible Iron Man #4

A very standard-issue Bendis issue, with all the attendant virtues and flaws. The amount of hide-the-ball as to the basic premise continues not to much appeal, but I expect that’s just going to be an attendant condition of Marvel through to the end of Secret Wars, and I’m grudgingly going to wait through it. As usual, Bendis cares not for the cover accurately describing the contents of the book – Mary Jane is in it, but doesn’t get to do anything, and is basically introduced as the cliffhanger. But Bendis does clever things with Iron Man; “Moonlight Ninja Fight Beach Party” is genuinely funny, for instance. But no real sparks here.

All-New All-Different Avengers #2

Waid is doing a clever semi-rewrite of the original Lee/Kirby Avengers intro here, complete with what looks like it’ll be the new Loki. But decompression turns out not to entirely be his forte, and one suspects this team is going to be a lot more fun when it’s assembled than when it’s being assembled. Which is to say, same problem with all the Marvel stuff right now.

Star Wars #13

This is fun. Some truly great R2-D2 stuff, a great Han Solo/Aphra face-off that promises to continue into the next issue, and a good cliffhanger that also promises to do interesting things next issue. I admit to reading the Star Wars issues of this more because they set up what Gille is going to do, but Aaron enjoys the zaniness of the Star Wars universe, and does good stuff with it.

Miracleman #5

Another interesting vignette of the Golden Age, though I’m definitely ready to see Gaiman move into the Silver Age stuff and eventually towars actually new stuff, just because I’m fascinated by the prospect of the suture here. But this is very good; another clever use of a bit of the Miracleman mythos to tell a strange and fractured sort of story. Nice backing material for once too – another issue that fully justifies its price tag.

James Bond 007: Vargr

The promise of “Warren Ellis does Bond” finally takes lift, with a profusion of stuff only Ellis would ever do with the character. Which is coextensive with “the stuff Ellis always does with this sort of character,” but that is after all the point of the exercise. It’s a gloriously smart fit, with the bits of James Bond and the bits of Ellis dovetailing perfectly into something that’s classic and fresh all at once. Tremendous fun, this book.…

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