Eruditorum Press

Fucking around and finding out is a valid epistemology

You’re On the Global Frequency (Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge)

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Comments are going to be temporarily disabled across the site for a few hours this evening due to some site maintenance. Relatedly, you should be sure to check back here tomorrow.

I had three great loves in childhood, and though I have forgiven them, they all betrayed me. Doctor Who I have, of course, written about at length; it turned on May 12th, 1996, the day before Super Mario RPG came out. Comics, a topic relevant to this game, were a more gradual process, with no clear moment the line was crossed from a certain tension between us to outright betrayal. The beginning of seventh grade, in any case; around my twelfth birthday. Mortal Kombat II, perhaps, or Final Fantasy III. And then there are video games. 
It’s hard to count how many times I’ve been betrayed by video games. There is, after all, a high potential for it. We’ve discussed already how the basic model of business games relies on the idea that they’ll be fun for a decent number of hours. There is nothing, then, quite as awful as the phenomenon of the shit video game. To buy a game is not a small thing; there are ultimately a finite number of moments in a year where you’ll get to do it. Picking a bad one is awful.
Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge is an example – a crushing, awful disappointment waiting to sting anyone foolish enough to be seduced by its branding. It is as though they took two-level demos of five games deemed unworthy of further development, reskinned them to include Marvel characters, and released them as an omnibus. The connections between levels and the five playable superheroes are often tenuous at best. Cyclops is randomly thrown in a mine-cart level. Storm is trapped underwater, seemingly mainly so nobody would have to figure out how to get good controls for a flying character. Wolverine is fighting evil clowns. Controls are sloppy and imprecise.
But in another sense, video games betray you from the start. It’s how they work; their central dynamic. The resistance of rules to will. We bind our very nervous systems to them, and they twist away and sever us, leaving us staring at the sudden amputation of the Game Over screen. Even today, Spider-Man and the X-Men: Arcade’s Revenge exists within me. I have not touched it in a decade at least, but when, in the first level, I drop down a shaft and find three paths that I can go down, there is an deep instinct, beyond even a memory, of what order to go in. In yet another, then, it’s only ever one big betrayal: an ongoing process of being repulsed by what defines you. 
I am about fifteen minutes from most of the places I grew up, halfway up Morris Ridge, overlooking downtown. Summer is breaking on the shores of the shrinking days, but retains the high ground for now. The sense of oddness that has permeated the weather for years persists; it feels as though it didn’t used to be this hot in early September.
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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Part 1 – Wave 1 and the Bridge Crew

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Alan Moore teaches us that reality begins with fiction. “The idea of a god is a god”. But fiction can not just be written, it also must be read. And when we read things, according to Shoshana Felman, we are not uncovering hidden meaning, but generating truth. And the truth that we generate will be different for each person, for each person is different themselves. My truth will not necessarily be your truth, and yours will not necessarily be mine.

If this project has taught me one thing, its this: Reinforcing my conscious intellectualization of the reading process by forcing me to undergo it at an intimate and primal level so that I may attempt to convey what I’ve seen to all of you. It’s a shamanic process; travel inside and out (because they’re the same thing) and try and share the experience through art for the benefit of others. It’s no great arcane secret-I’ve always helped that by my doing it, it would demonstrate that you could do it too.

When we talk about a work of art having a transformative effect on us and leaving a lasting impact on our lives, what we’re really talking about is the experiential meaning the work evoked in us, not the physical work itself. The material artefact is important, obviously, but that meaning only manifests when creators and audiences both react to it, and any meaning inherent to the text itself by necessity undergoes a process of translation. I can say Star Trek: The Next Generation has been a huge influence on my life for decades, but I’m only ever going to fixate on specific things about it that resonate with me personally: My positionality and perspective define what I take out of it and how I react to it.

And then what happens when ideas, characters and themes migrate? They travel, and are shaped and reformed by their travels just like the rest of us.

The Wave 1 line.

The second line of Star Trek: The Next Generation toys and action figures debuted in the fall of 1992. Playmates Toys received the license this time, after the failure of Galoob’s earlier stab at adapting the show to the 3 1/4 inch plastic scale. Marketed, of course, as part of Star Trek’s 25th Anniversary (indeed, the only part of the two-year celebration apart from The Star Lost and The Return of Okona officially and specifically dedicated to Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: The Next Generation alone), Playmates’ auspicious first wave featured the toyetic likenesses of Captain Picard, Counselor Troi, Lieutenant Commander Data, Lieutenant Worf, Commander Riker, Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge, a Borg, a Ferengi, a Romulan and Gowron.

As fans we sometimes talk a lot about “our” Star Trek (or whatever your pop culture mythology of choice might be), or at least those of us who were exposed to the show sporadically on initial run broadcast TV do.…

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Weird Kitties Reviews, Batch Two (Frankenstein, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Full Disclosure, The Race for Space)

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I do not anticipate needing any more Best Dramatic Presentation reviews in the immediate future.

 

Frankenstein, by the Mechanisms
Reviewed by William Shaw

Eligible for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, and available here.
 
If you’ve ever thought that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein would have been better as a prog rock ballad, this new song from the UK-based steampunk folk band The Mechanisms looks to have you covered. Retelling the classic gothic tale as a ten-minute song about a rogue AI, Frankenstein, while perhaps the least grandiose of the Mechanisms’ projects to date, is still a wonderful piece of work, and crackles with the same energy as their lengthier albums. 
 
The story is told in one long song, with linking narration putting one in mind of a geekier version of Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds. The tale concerns a far-future world where a scientist named Victoria Frankenstein creates a revolutionary AI, and… honestly, you know how the story goes from there. 
 
Initially it might seem a bit of a disappointment, after three albums of giddy textual play in established musical genres and mythical traditions, to see the Mechanisms doing a straight pastiche of a specific text. But the band, to their credit, seem to realise the dangers of this approach, and turn them to their advantage. At ten minutes long the song is tight and focused, avoiding the slightly slipshod nature of their longer and more complex albums, and dialling back a bit on the usual self-indulgence. There’s also a genuinely clever twist at the end, which manages to convey a sense of shock as well as ironic inevitability.
 
But what really sells it is the technical side of things, which is excellent. The singing and instrumentation are both top-notch, with the shifts in tone handled deftly by the introduction of new musical techniques as the song goes on. As ever, the Mechanisms manage to turn what could easily have been a one-gang premise into magnificent entertainment by sheer skill and chutzpah. 
 
 

This is a song which has clearly had a lot of thought put into it, as well as an awful lot of effort and talent And it’s that sense of passion which makes this song such a worthwhile piece of storytelling. These a clearly a group of people who care deeply about what they do, and long may they continue to do it. 

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Reviewed by James Wylder

Eligible in Best Novel, and available here.

Fanfiction as a genre is barely appreciated as an art form, so its hard to go too far stating exactly how Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality needs to be read and appreciated, as it has opened up the genre in a bold new way. Eliezar Yudkowsky has crafted a massive work that redefines the relationship of fanfiction to the work it stems off from in exceedingly fascinating ways.

The premise: that Harry Potter is not raised by the abusive Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia, but by Petunia and a different man she married: an educated man well versed in science, who does not mistreat Harry, but provides for him as well as instilling the scientific method deep into his worldview.…

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Weird Kitties: Best Short Story Open Thread

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Got an interesting batch of reviews up for you tomorrow, including a number of candidates in Best Dramatic Presentation.

Here’s a couple of novels that got mentioned more than once in last week’s thread. I’d love reviews of any of them if you’ve read them – send those to snowspinner at gmail: 
  • Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings
  • N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season
  • Terry Pratchett’s The Shepherd’s Crown
  • Jo Walton’s The Just City and/or The Philosopher Kings
  • Naomi Novik’s Uprooted
  • Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest
  • Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora
  • Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant
  • Aliette de Bodard’s The House of Shattered Wings
  • Elizabeth Bear’s Karen Memory
  • Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown
  • Max Gladstone’s Last First Snow
  • Joanne Harris’s Gospel of Loki
Meanwhile, tell me of good and Hugo-worthy short stories you’ve read. I’m monstrously behind on this category – I’ve not even gotten to the eligible Charlie Jane Anders or to pouring over China Miéville’s Three Moments of an Explosion to pick something. (Actually I’ll probably just read whichever one Jack tells me is best and nominate it, and save the rest for later.) 
Ooh, and I should see what, if anything, of Trigger Warning is eligible. 
Check back tomorrow for reviews. 
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Flight Simulator: Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (Mac, PC)

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Quite simply, a watershed moment for me. 

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary is the reason the video game section of this project exists. It is, as far as I’m concerned, *the* Star Trek video game because it was *my* Star Trek video game, or at least my first. In true 25th Anniversary fashion, it missed the actual date itself by a good year and a half, possibly even longer depending on which platform you played it on. But with time unbound such things are as trivialities and we can make moments last as long as they need to. 

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary was released between 1992 and 1993 on a number of platforms: It came out on DOS first, and was eventually ported to the Amiga and Macintosh. Much, much later it was re-released a few times on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, but I played the original release. There was a different game also called Star Trek: 25th Anniversary made for the NES and Game Boy in 1991 but (and this is an extreme rarity in my history with video games), it’s the version that came out on home computers that I remember, not the console one. In particular, it’s the Macintosh release: My first computer was one of the original Macintosh Classics…I can’t remember the actual model, but it must have been able to support some form of colour graphics considering it could run this game. I loved that machine dearly and a huge portion of my formative gaming memories were kindled on it: This game, the planetarium programme Voyager II, Cyan Worlds’ beguiling Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Seudo (which anticipates their much more famous Myst), the Carmen Sandiego games…They were all there among the first slate of video games I actually got to own for myself.

Some years later, I’m going to guess around 1995, I came home one night to find my computer had been replaced by one of the first generation of the new Power Macs, the ones where they started using those PowerPC chip architectures. That machine was as big and bulky and 90s as my old one had been sleek and compact and 80s and I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that…I appreciated having a more powerful computer to play around with, but I still deeply missed that plucky little machine I had loved so much. This new one seemed to tower over me while my old one had felt just the right size. Although I’ll certainly give the Power Mac points for longevity-I still have it, and dug it out in anticipation for this essay. After locating some irritatingly misplaced power cords, I fired it up and was playing Star Trek: 25th Anniversary within minutes. Everything still works as well as they day I first got it.

Apart from my personal sentimentality, my having the Macintosh version of this game is actually relevant in two important respects: One, because I actually still have the original game running on more or less original hardware, this sadly means I couldn’t get any screenshots of my personal copy to share with you.…

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Comics Reviews (September 9th, 2015)

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This is a hugely important piece about the comics industry. You should read it.

And now, from worst to best of what I bought. Much of it by Kieron Gillen.

The Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows #5

A comic that presents itself as an argument for the merits of a married Peter Parker with an awesome superhero daughter, which is fine save for the tacit overlooking of the fact that it all gets reset at the end, and so it’s an argument for something it flatly refuses to give.

Star Wars: Shattered Empire #1

Bought because of Rucka and because I figure I’ll see The Force Awakens, so this sounds neat too. Tied very tightly to the end of Return of the Jedi, however, which I haven’t seen in probably twenty years, so that kind of lost me, though through no real fault of its own.

A-Force #4

I suspect I’m going to be much more excited about this book when it’s not in Secret Wars continuity anymore, but right now my Secret Wars fatigue is crushing this. And I’m not sure I parse the cliffhanger; the state of the Wall and the Deadlands is clearly in different places in different books right now, and I think several of the tie-ins are ahead of the main series.

Darth Vader #9

Quite like the interplay between Vader and Thanoth, which kept this a fun, entertaining read for most of it. Found the entire section with the twins a bit of a slog. Still, fun book. I bet if I cut some of the crap from my pulls I’d enjoy things like this more.

1602 Witch Hunter Angela #3

A decided uptick for this book – indeed, I think I liked Bennett’s main story more than Gillen’s substory. And the final page is a hoot. I don’t think the post-Secret Wars Angela title is currently in my pulls, but this issue makes me reconsider that a bit.

Siege #3

The weakest issue of this so far, plagued with an excessive quantity of hope and optimism, and the continually idiosyncratic art of Filipe Andrade. Also, what’s with the house ad gatefold in the middle of Juan Jose Ryp’s double page spread, Marvel? Ah well. I’m sure it will all turn dark and tragic for #4.

Mercury Heat #3

This picks up quite a bit – the rhythm of the investigation is finally forming, as is a bit more of a sense of character. I quite like Luiza asking for a tape of the bad guy getting her spine ripped out; that’s a wonderfully interesting and macabre character beat. And it’s a good cliffhanger too. Still looking a bit like a minor work for Gillen, but fun.

Injection #5

The bulk of the pieces here are finally on the board. So, basically a sort of reverse Planetary then. I won’t lie, I’m a mite disappointed by the series on the whole. It’s smart and clever, but more than just about anything I’ve seen Ellis do recently, it feels like Ellis by numbers; like the most obvious thing that Ellis could be doing at this point.…

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Myriad Universes: The Outer Light

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Ugh.

Right, here’s another essay on a story I had a lot of high hopes for and had planned to look at in extreme detail only to have those hopes deflate pathetically as soon as I looked at the story in question. Well, let’s just get it over with so we can move on, shall we?

I guess in hindsight I shouldn’t have been too surprised. Sequels inevitably always ruin anything, and doing a sequel to “The Inner Light” of all stories seems like a recipe custom-tailored for disaster. This seemed like it had potential though-In one of his many chats on AOL, Ron Moore had this to say reflecting on “The Inner Light”:

“I’ve always felt that the experience in ‘Inner Light’ would’ve been the most profound experience in Picard’s life and changed him irrevocably. However, that wasn’t our intention when we were creating the episode. We were after a good hour of TV, and the larger implications of how this would really screw somebody up didn’t hit home with us until later (that’s sometimes a danger in TV – you’re so focused on just getting the show produced every week that sometimes you suffer from the ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’ syndrome). We never intended the show to completely upend his character and force a radical change in the series, so we contented ourselves with a single follow-up in ‘Lessons.’”

Thing is, “Lessons” more or less sucks, as we’ll see next season. And this is interesting, as it’s claimed Rick Berman and Michael Piller had a fairly strict “no sequels” policy on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and this was used as justification for turning away a pitch for a follow-up to “The Inner Light” penned by the story’s original writer, Morgan Grendel. So if the producers were opposed to sequels sight unseen, why did “Lessons” (and a fuckton other things, like everything having to do with Worf or the Borg) get greenlit? Or if they were actually open to sequels to things like “The Inner Light”, why did they turn away the one the original writer himself came up with?

The answer comes when we take a look at “The Outer Light”, a fanfiction comic Grendel produced in 2013 in collaboration with Andre Duza and TrekMovie. And it seems that answer is simply that “The Outer Light” isn’t very good.

Responding to a distress call on…some planet, the Enterprise finds a crashed starship that looks suspiciously like the Kataan probe that engaged Captain Picard in the ancestor simulation exercise that leaves him wanting more than anything else to become Kamin again. Beaming down against Commander Riker’s protestations, the Captain discovers the crashed ship contains Kataanian scientists who have been preserved in suspended animation for centuries, one of whom miracuolsly happens to be Kamin’s wife Eline! Unfortunately for the Captain, Eline has also brought her husband with her, some dude who’s not named Kamin and is so forgettable despite being the primary antagonist I’ve since forgotten his name and don’t care enough to go back and check.…

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Fight Every Fight Like You Can Win (Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest)

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By Anna Wiggins

So here we are. Final Fantasy. I often say that Tolkien was my “first fandom”, but I don’t actually know whether I was introduced first to Bagginses or Chocobos. At any rate, Final Fantasy is a part of my personal mythology, signifiers and metaphors that are wired into the way I think, stirring oddly specific sense memories during my mind’s idle moments.
The Final Fantasy franchise is peculiar. Despite the games (mostly) bearing sequential numbers, the games in the series are not sequels of an ongoing narrative. For the most part, each game takes place in a different fantasy world, with its own cast of characters and internal logic. There are occasional references between games, but these are more akin to easter eggs than any attempt at continuity. Instead, the Final Fantasy games have a shared iconography that grows over the history of the series. Crystals, giant riding chickens, magic that comes in colors, astonishing liberties taken with world mythology; Final Fantasy is a set of common stylistic elements that is eternally being rearranged into new shapes.
Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest is the first Final Fantasy game I have detailed memories of. I know it wasn’t the first Final Fantasy I played; I have vague memories of Final Fantasy II and even Final Fantasy. (And its contemporary, Dragon Warrior. There’s a secret history there, a moment in 1989 or so when I swore fealty to one of two rival houses without knowing it. But that’s another story.) But practically speaking, Mystic Quest was my jumping on point. And I remember being excited about Mystic Quest because it was a Final Fantasy game. Luckily for me, in 1992 I hadn’t really developed the ability to discern quality yet.
Because Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest is not a good game. Playing it, I get the impression it isn’t even trying to be a good game. The story is thin, even by the standards of early 90s poorly-translated RPGs. The visuals are less detailed and interesting than earlier games from the same company. Instead of being difficult and rewarding tactical thinking, skill, or even memorization, the game punishes the player arbitrarily, with unavoidable instant- or near-instant death doled out according the whims of the random number generator. There are few choices to make, and the overall experience feels hollow and pointless. It is impossible to feel any sort of connection to these characters or events.
(What I didn’t know at the time is that this game was created to be an ‘entry-level’ game, an attempt to make the Japanese-style RPG experience appealing to Western players, where the genre was faring poorly. Whether Squaresoft executives actively thought Western players wanted less story and characterization, or if this was just a phoned-in effort, is unclear.)
And yet 8-year-old me was riveted by this game. I had to realize, on some level, that this game was not as interesting or as fun as its predecessor. And yet I played this game eagerly, consumed it.
…

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Myriad Universes: The Broken Moon

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So I wasn’t originally going to do the 1992 annual. It’s good, but it doesn’t quite hold up to the likes of “Thin Ice” and “The Gift”, or even some of the most recent serials in the monthly series. But it turned out, quite frankly, that I needed an extra essay here and this was an easy pick.

But I’m going to do more than just kill time and fill space with this one, as there’s still a fair amount of interesting things to say about “The Broken Moon”. The first thing to note is that, like the two previous annuals, this story is predominantly about one specific character. This isn’t too surprising, as since “The Gift” was about Captain Picard (and Q) and “Thin Ice” was about Commander Riker (and Captain Lyrinda Halk), it’s to be expected “The Broken Moon” would follow suit and predominantly feature another main character. What’s interesting is who that character ended up being: Given his crippling overexposure in the TV series, we would naturally assume the next character to get a prominent spotlight in an extra-length Annual issue would be Data. But no, Data is actually barely in this story. In fact, it’s actually Geordi La Forge! Which is good, because there’s a good deal more for us to say about Geordi La Forge.

My reading of Geordi should be fairly obvious and clear by now. Because of LeVar Burton’s presence on both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Reading Rainbow, and the comparative similarities of his performances on both shows (not to mention the fact D.C. Fontana essentially conceived of Geordi as being “LeVar Burton as himself” anyway), I see Geordi as filling the narrative role of a children’s educator or children’s television personality on a series that can be succinctly described as “children’s television for adults”. This is why he’s the chief engineer; the heart and soul of a starship. The problem is that, for whatever reason, very few writers who have jobbed for Star Trek: The Next Generation seem to have picked up that this is straightforwardly and self-evidently the correct way to conceptualize who Geordi is, what he does on the Enterprise and what his relationship with the rest of the crew is (especially Data, who is plainly a child analog).

I am reminded most of all of Ira Steven Behr’s assessment of Geordi while talking about his episode “Qpid” and the infamous mandolin scene in Star Trek: The Next Generation 365:

“Geordi was a very sweet character who was kind of underused. He didn’t have much of a dark side about him. He’s the kind of human that Klingons would have devoured. And Worf-you know, from a Klingon perspective-I was sure that Worf would lie in bed at night thinking, ‘Can’t they at least let me kill Geordi?’ So taking the mandolin and smashing it was the Klingon view of the Federation and the ‘perfect society’ the show portrayed.”
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Weird Kitties Reviews, Batch One (Elektrograd: Rusted Blood, The Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Just City, and Strong Female Protagonist)

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Here’s the first batch of reviews. I’m still taking submissions for the next batch, to go up next Sunday. Send them to snowspinner at gmail.com. Short fiction reviews especially wanted.

Elektrograd: Rusted Blood, by Warren Ellis
Reviewed by Philip Sandifer

Eligible for Best Novelette, and available here.

The second of Warren Ellis’s current experiments in self-published shorts, this is a police procedural set in a now-crumbling early 20th century city of the future. It’s impossible not to compare it to Miéville’s The City and the City, especially given the way in which Ellis uses iconography of Soviet Russia to signify “failed 20th century utopia.” Which is a good angle, treating it, robotics, and AI as essentially interchangeable images of abandoned futures.

Stitching it together is a capable and unflashy cop drama. Ellis is good at these, having written both mysteries and police procedurals (two subtly different categories) several times. This isn’t where the story earns its wings, as it were; its purpose is to let Ellis work efficiently with the plot, getting in and out of his strange world. This makes for a story that spends less time dwelling in the particulars of its ideas than many of Ellis’s stories; those who love his knack for Stephenson-esque exposition about ideas will not find this to be their favorite thing he’s done. But it’s a tight-knit aesthetic experiment. Ellis talks in the postscript about wanting to write about architecture, and it’s an effective way to bind the iconography together.

Basically, a murder mystery about a rusting old future. Lovely stuff.

The Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Sam Maggs
Reviewed by John Seavey

Eligible for Best Related Work, and available here.

I was going to start this review off with a satirical rant about this book being a perfect example of the way the SJWs “get you”–they start out with shipping and OTP and fanfiction, and then when you’re hooked, they start in on the feminism! But then I remembered Poe’s Law and decided to truncate that part significantly.

It is true, though, that Sam Maggs uses this book to walk women from the very basic points of fandom, such as identifying the things you love and finding other women who love it just as much as you do, up through to the point of having a social conscience about the things that you enjoy and critiquing them as items of cultural significance with potentially problematic subtexts. Most impressively, she does it without ever losing the casual tone, the warm-hearted atmosphere of acceptance and welcoming, and the inspirational message that embracing the things you love is unconditionally good and you should never feel ashamed of being excited and enthusiastic about them.

Along the way, the book takes in topics like, “What is a convention and how do I have a good time at one?”, “How do I deal with online trolls?”, and “How do I, too, write smutty fanfiction featuring my favorite characters?” It also has a few short interviews with various female creators, which was one thing I thought could have been expanded greatly, but the book does have a lot to take in, after all.…

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