Eruditorum Press

Christmas and Easter nihilists

Saturday Waffling (August 29th, 2015)

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Those inclined towards more of me nattering on about the Hugos will enjoy the video blog I just did for the wonderful Aric Clark. Embedded below.

Those who want to talk about something different, well, let’s do the Hannibal finale, which airs properly tonight (next week UK, I believe), although I do the same thing I do with Doctor Who and buy the iTunes Season Pass then torrent the episodes.
Anyway, I thought it was brilliant. Fun Shabcast with Jack coming where we talk about it and many other things. How’d you like it, if you watched it?
…

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Myriad Universes: Separation Anxiety Part 3

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Picking up where we left off last month, this issue opens with Captain Picard and Ro Laren trying to figure out where the hell the saucer section went. It obviously wasn’t destroyed, but somehow it’s been picked up and moved somewhere without any indication of how it was moved or where it ended up. One thing they can be reasonably certain of is that it likely *wasn’t* the Sztazzan, as one of their ships has apparently gone missing too. Thankfully the battle bridge crew soon receives word from Geordi, Worf and Data, and it turns out they may have found a clue as to what happened.

They figure the artificial moon is actually some kind of large-scale relay transporter device meant to move entire ships across huge distances instantaneously. Reasoning it must have been triggered by the energy discharge from the Sztazzan’s weaponry, they think they might be able to tease out how to make it work on command and bring the saucer section and the other Sztazzan ship back if they had some time. Unfortunately time is not something our heroes have in abundance, as the Sztazzan are a bit rattled and trigger happy about what happened, and, to make matters worse, there is naturally an energy buildup inside the moon that will cause the whole thing to go up in flames if Geordi and Data can’t shut it off. Meanwhile, at the other end of the galaxy, the saucer section crew has come to the same conclusion and have problems of their own. They too are dogged by a Sztazzan ship with an equally itchy trigger finger, and don’t have the benefit of a nearby relay station to work with. What they do have is a seemingly uninhabited planet, presumably one the builders of the moon intended to send people to, so Commander Riker sends an away team down to see if there are any clues still to be found on its surface.

One thing that’s immediately somewhat of a concern with the way this serial is shaping up is that it’s already bearing a worrying number of similarities with The Star Lost. Once again, we have a huge portion of the crew flung across the galaxy by unknown forces, giving us two discrete teams each with their own unique dynamics. It’s not that Separation Anxiety is doing this poorly or is coming across as a pale imitation of The Star Lost so much as we’ve seen a lot of this before already and it simply can’t be as effective the second time around. However it must be said this serial gives a significantly different weight to certain thematic aspects such that it still feels relatively fresh: In The Star Lost, for example, the Enterprise was eventually forced to give up on the Albert Einstein and leave its crew for dead. The story thus became one about loss, grieving and moving on. Here though there’s never any indication this situation is anything other than temporary-The whole crux of the motivation for everyone involved is reunification.…

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Comics Reviews (August 26th, 2015)

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Secret Wars to get an extra issue and continue into December, two months after the Marvel relaunch. DC reportedly cutting page rates to creators, eyeing price increases, and cutting back on innovation in favor of the New 52 house style. What a great time to be a comics fan, eh?

From worst to best of what I bought, which wasn’t much this week.

Old Man Logan #4

Actually a really solid comic; the Logan/She-Hulk scenes are great. Except that they’re a great She-Hulk story, and the comic is a Wolverine comic, so instead of staying with the interesting character we just watch Wolverine hurled to another location. It turns out a character whose only motivation is grudgingly surviving in a story with no visible overall plot is kind of unsatisfying. Who knew? Apparently not Bendis.

Batgirl #43

A perfectly good issue of Batgirl that doesn’t necessarily do much to impress so much as faithfully deliver what people enjoying this book are paying for.

Doctor Who: Four Doctors #3

Some distinctly dodgy plot logic on why the Macguffin affects individual regenerations of the Doctor with specificity, and an outright unrecognizable River Song in her two panel silent cameo, but for the most part the strongest issue yet, with a reasonably fun twist on the backside. Not entirely convinced by Cornell’s Twelfth Doctor, but his Eleventh is strong and his Tenth is probably the best take on the character after Davies’s. This remains fun and frothy.

Where Monsters Dwell #4

This has had a really interesting drift as Karl becomes increasingly less funny and more depraved. Ennis in his sharpest comedic mode, basically. Not a classic of Ennis’s oeuvre, but very much fun. Also, a well handled trans character, especially given that the only issue made out of it is the fact that Karl’s too stupid to realize it.…

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Myriad Universes: Separation Anxiety Part 2: Bone of Contention

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With the Sztazzan demanding they leave the area based on territorial claims that are questionable at best and Geordi, Worf and Data stranded on the artificial moon due to its alloys blocking communication signals (and the distinct possibility it is in fact no moon at all, but a superweapon), the Enterprise is faced with a difficult set of options. Captain Picard eventually decides to separate the saucer, with Commander Riker taking the saucer section to safety while he stays behind with a skeleton crew on the battle bridge to deal with whatever the Sztazzan decide to throw at them. Joining him in playing the waiting game are Ro Laren, Deanna Troi and relief officers Solis, Burke and Thorne. Commander Riker will take Doctor Crusher, Jenna D’Sora, conn officer Dooley and Terry Oliver with him along with the civilians to Beta Cangelosi.

It’s nice to see the battle bridge again. It’s also nice to see Deanna Troi on it instead of twiddling her thumbs off screen in the saucer section with the civilians and “non-essential personnel”. Not that I should be surprised by this of course, as Michael Jan Friedman is the single best author ever to write for Deanna Troi, and her expertise with extraterrestrial cultures would obviously be needed during what amounts to a diplomatic incident (also, I should hasten to add, it’s not like Friedman would be so incompetent as to completely ignore the action on the saucer section, especially as he has one of his narrative prime movers aboard it). I dig Pablo Marcos’ rendition of the battle bridge: It strikes me as a cross between the set we saw in “Encounter at Farpoint” (and that we haven’t seen since as it’s been scrapped and repurposed so many times it’s by this point in various states of disrepair) and the main bridge redress from “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, which I find to be appropriate.

(I also quite like Captain Picard’s little aside observation in his internal monologue that “it’s been a long time” since they last separated the saucer because it’s an intricate and complicated maneouvre that requires an annoying amount of preparation; a nice meta nod to how laughably impractical saucer separation has always been from both a narrative and material TV production reality perspective.)

Story-wise this issue is a bit of a holding-pattern one, serving mostly to present the key saucer separation scene itself and recap the miniseries’ major story arcs. It’s handled fairly elegantly, though, with Worf and Geordi bringing their respective subplots up with each other as conversation to pass the time. By interesting contrast, Laren exposits not to a friend, but directly to us through an internal monologue. This is noteworthy because while Captain Picard isn’t the only character in the series to have the internal monologue as his explicit signature, he is the one who uses it the most frequently, typically as an extension of his captain’s log entries. As a result, on rare occasions you could slip into the mistaken assumption that he might be Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s narrator.…

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Vox Day’s Next Move

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An image from Vox Day’s forthcoming SJWs
Always Lie, depicting him as Grant Morrison atop
a throne surrounded by his friends and a frankly
alarming number of subliminal penises.

Vox Day (who we’ll be spending a bit of time on this week; look for my review of his forthcoming SJWs Always Lie on Thursday) is making much of the question of what he’s going to do next. Including a private conference with his readers to serve as a “strategy meeting” for next year.

This is, like almost everything to emerge from the Day Bunker, largely bravado. Day’s tactics, which are really little more than what you’d get if you handed a fifteen-year-old on 4chan a copy of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, are in fact eminently predictable. So here’s your 2016 Hugo Awards preview.

First, the thing to realize is that Day’s tactics are shaped by one massive and fundamental constraint: there’s not actually a huge pool of people who want to follow a racist, misogynistic fascist lunatic. He boasts 440 “vile faceless minions,” his self-effacing term for the mob that has actively signed up to follow his orders. That’s consistent with the data from the Hugos this year, which suggested around 500 Rabid Puppy voters. More interestingly, the proportion of Rabid Puppy supporters in nominations and voting is about the same. In other words, it really doesn’t look like Day can wield more than 10-20% of the total voting pool, assuming that anti-fascist fandom (both moderate and hardline) holds their nerve and keeps up the fight.

Second, the thing to realize is that we don’t actually have to do that for all that long. Nomination reform passed at Sasquan. Another year spent cleaning dogshit off our yard is only going to make ratification of it next year easier. Which means that as of 2017, the effect of slates is going to be heavily, heavily muted. Day will have an easy time getting one or two works on the ballot, and a nearly impossible time controlling the entirety of it. At that point, the Hugo Awards will go back to something more or less like business as usual, only with, I suspect, a long-term suspicion of overtly conservative SF/F born from the memory of what utter cockmongers conservative SF/F fandom has been in the past.

Which means that 2016 is going to be the year Vox Day tries to burn it to the ground so that he can declare victory and walk away, conveniently exiting the fight as the “winner” right before the rule changes to blunt his flaming sword go into place.

Given this, I think we can safely assume that the Rabid Puppy slate in 2016 is going to consist of five nominees in every category, to try to maximize the number of categories with no non-Puppy nominees. I suspect he’s also going to pointedly include nominees that exist to dare the left to vote against them. Frankly, given his past praise of him, if he doesn’t put something from Miéville’s Three Moments of an Explosion up in short story, he’s a moron.…

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The Award of Cruelty

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Diversity and social justice issues were creeping into the Hugo Awards, or rather into the cultural artifacts they celebrate, as such issues creep into the culture generally.  It happens because people are getting more and more interested in them, more open to them, and caring more about them.  This is, by the way, the product of material struggles for recognition and equal rights by people who are marginalised by mainstream culture in the West (i.e. racist, sexist, transphobic, bourgeois-hegemonic culture).  It must be stressed that such claims are not only valid on their face but also are represented, in artistic terms, by valuable work that deserves recognition.

The Puppies saw this trend and it infuriated them.  Just as they are doubtless infuriated by any such progress, by the increasing volume of the voices they used to be able to talk over and down to with impunity, by the increasing – and increasingly recognised – validity of these voices, not only in themselves but in their abilities.  The Hugos are, the Puppies think, their turf, just as the rabble of GamerGate, and the constituency they pander to, imagine that video games are their turf.  They took the gradual changes occuring in an institution that has always reflected a seam of progressivism in SF/Fantasy (just as it has always reflected other seams) and blew the phenomenon up out of all proportion.  (Seriously, I wish their distorted view of Hugos, and culture generally, were really true, and the voices they hate and fear really were as ascendant as they fantasize them to be.)

They saw this smidge of progress and imagined that it constituted some kind of attack upon their freedom.  They imagined it, and believed it, having chosen to imagine and believe it… because it’s amazing how sincerely and passionately people can believe ridiculous things that further their interests, confirm their prejudices and pamper their privileges.  They did this because that’s what reactionaries always do.  It’s a classic maneuvre when you’re rallying around the defence of established privilege and entrenched power relations (which is what reactionary politics always is, at base): paint yourself as the victim.  It’s great camouflage.  And they love it too.  They love the smell of the victim paint on their bodies, drying on them, crusting and cracking, leaving a trail of victim flakes everywhere they go.  Conservatives and reactionaries and fascists and ressentimentalists are as fond of being the victim as the whingeing, entitled, self-pitying minorities that live in their imaginations.  (There is probably something psychological to be made of the right-wing love of victimhood, and the way they always portray themselves in much the same terms that they complain about in their confabulated enemies and hate-figures.  I remember how, at school, bullies would always howl “But he started it!” and “It wasn’t my fault!” when caught, and then pout self-pityingly at the injustice of being told not to bully.)

But yeah, they interpret the struggles of the marginalised and mocked, their demands for justice, as an attack.  Moderate demands. …

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The Mouse and the Gun (Super Scope 6/Mario Paint)

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The Gun
The first light gun was a 1936 amusement park game called the Seeburg Ray-O-Lite. Its design mirrored that of the technology’s most iconic form, the NES Zapper, at least in practice: you hunted ducks. In theory, however, they worked quite differently. The Ray-O-Lite was accurately described: it was a gun that emitted light, which was in turn detected by a target-mounted sensor – a vacuum tube, in its case. But with the turn to screen-based games, as opposed to the physical targets of the Ray-O-Lite, the technology shifted. Light guns such as the Zapper are, in fact, essentially cameras – pulling the trigger causes the screen to momentarily cut to black and then flash white in the valid target areas. If the photosensor within the gun’s barrel sees the flash, it registers a hit.
On one level, the Super Scope is simply explained as the SNES equivalent of the Zapper. And this is a true story; given that the Zapper was an iconic part of the NES experience, a Super version of some sort was effectively inevitable. But there’s more to the iconography here. The Zapper was an oversized handgun, and its defining game, Duck Hunt,  was about shooting cartoon ducks and being laughed at by a dog. (Duck Hunt was covered by the Nintendo Project here.) The Super Scope, on the other hand, is a fucking bazooka. 
This is not a decision justifiable in any sort of gameplay or design sense. The Zapper was an easy to use item. The Super Scope, on the other hand, was physically exhausting; it was not as though it was too heavy to lift or anything, but hefting the thing on your shoulder for an extended time was genuinely tiring. There was far more of it than there needed to be, for reasons that had nothing to do with anything other than the idea that a shoulder-mounted gun seemed cool.
The aesthetic continued into the packed-in game, Super Scope 6, a return to the multi-game cartridges sold with the bulk of NES systems, which were either Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt if you bought the Action Set, or Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt/World Class Track Meet if you bought the Power Set. In each case, however, the setup was basically that of a pop single – a clear a-side in Super Mario Bros that had hours and hours of replay value, and a pair of peripheral-centric b-sides that were generally fun for a few hours.
Super Scope 6, on the other hand, is all peripheral based, and lacks any sort of headlining game, instead offering six disposable minigames in two categories, called LazerBlazer and Blastris. The former is the headlining category, with all three of its games demoing first if the game is left to run without starting. All three are about fending off an alien invasion, shooting down missiles in the first, and spaceships in the other two, and match the general aesthetic of the Super Scope with hard, angular, metallic designs.
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Myriad Universes: Separation Anxiety Part 1: Bridges

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Saucer separation. It’s always been kind of a weird concept, if you think about it. Presumably the Enterprise is a capable enough craft on its own such that it could defend itself without the cumbersome process of politely asking the bad guys if they would be so kind as to hold their fire for a minute whilst the ship does the splits, yes? Andy Probert didn’t even design the Galaxy-class to separate: He had to chop the ship up after the fact when word got to him late that Gene Roddenberry wanted the saucer to come off, because that was apparently something he always wanted the ship to do in the Original Series. And of course, it was prohibitively expensive for the VFX team to shoot a saucer separation scene every week, so that particular plot thread got promptly dropped (probably in hindsight wisely) after the first season.

But what if you did a story overtly about a saucer separation? One that uses the technobabble gimmick of the show not as a plot device, but as an actual level of textual metaphor? A story where the Enterprise is quite literally divided in half, with families and communities kept apart from each other by a vast expanse, with a symbolic reunification at the end?

This is essentially the backdrop for the event miniseries I call Separation Anxiety, spanning issues 39-44 of DC’s version of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Between the Enterprise returning Captain Okona to his ship and now, we’ve had a few smaller serials one-off adventures, none of them especially noteworthy. Q came back in a rather embarrassing trilogy about turning the crew into Klingons, and the comic book line has tried to redeem a few more one-shot characters from the TV series-Sonya Gomez and Ardra, namely. While those were more or less functional tales that once again demonstrate the spin-off series’ better mastery of its source material than the actual source material, and generally cleaning up the various messes it occasionally makes of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s world, they’re above par for this line’s truest pinnacles and I can’t really recommend them to a casual fan (though the Adra miniseries boasts what has got to be the most terrific title in the entire book line: “Shore Leave in Shanzibar!”).

As for Separation Anxiety itself, it’s actually not a typical summer event miniseries mainly because it starts in October 1992, which means we’re well into the TV show’s sixth season speaking strictly chronologically. However, I read it as a far more fitting coda to the stories and themes of the fifth season, and the summer event series for 1993 is likewise a perfect fit for where the show will have just recently left off. So there’s really no better time to look at this story than here, and in Star Trek’s two-year 25th Anniversary year, such temporal chicanery seems more than appropriate. The separation itself doesn’t happen in this opening issue, but it is effectively and ominously foreshadowed.…

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Hugo Commentary

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Oh, fine, let’s just make this the Hugo thread, as apparently I want to say stuff.

First of all, Vox Day lost, and that feels fucking amazing.

Second of all, the “burn it all” No Award position lost, which means I did too. And frankly, that feels fucking amazing too. I mean, don’t get me wrong; I don’t regret voting No Award in every category. I stand by every word.

But I want to go back to something I said in “Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons,” which was that the thing I have always loved about the Hugos is their capacity for weirdness. The Hugos are a great literary award because they have a wonderful unpredictability that happens with surprisingly few outright bad and unjustifiable winners. There aren’t a lot of awards like that. The Oscars and the Emmys are littered with far more flatly undeserving winners and clear travesties, and never do anything nearly as weird as give awards to XKCD and Digger.

So yeah, my side only won five categories. What a crushing defeat; we only doubled the total number of No Awards in history in the course of a near complete repudiation of the Sad Puppies, with the only Puppy winner being something that would have made the ballot anyway, and helpfully shutting down the argument that the electorate only voted on politics, as opposed to considering politics alongside other things. (Even if I freely admit that I did vote on politics, clearly the electorate didn’t.)

Meanwhile, we had Laura J. Mixon, who exposed a loathsome troll within the progressive science fiction community, and who used her acceptance speech to speak out for #BlackLivesMatter. We had a beautiful refusal to obey the “don’t clap until the end” rule for Terry Pratchett. We had the beautiful moment of Robert Silverberg telling stories of the 1968 Worldcon in Berkeley, a date and place that speaks volumes about what the actual heritage of science fiction is, as opposed to the ahistorical lies peddled by Brad Torgersen. We had a win for Orphan Black, one of the most self-consciously diverse shows on television, and a good one to boot. We had, over and over again, voice after voice raised in support of that heritage. And we even had a Dalek on stage, so the Puppies can’t complain they weren’t represented.

But most beautifully of all, we had all the prose awards given go out to works published in translation, which is a genuine victory for diversity.

That’s the award I love and respect. That’s why the Hugos were worth fighting for in the first place.

This was an enormously good night. Thank you to each an every one of you who stepped up, bought supporting memberships, and made it happen.

I lost; we won.

EDIT (Sunday morning): And the good news keeps coming. The fairest and most effective plan to reform the nomination process, aka “E Pluribus Hugo,” just passed at the Business Meeting. It’ll need to be ratified at next year’s Worldcon, but it looks like next year will be the last year of fending off fascist entryists, and like come 2017 we can get back to being fans.…

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