Eruditorum Press

Doxing gods

Sensor Scan: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

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My house sits on a small meadow, at different tiers owing to the craggy glacial deposits that make up this part of the country. The lower portion of the meadow is flat, tapering off from its hilly upper portions and ending in a small pond we used to swim in a lot when I was younger. We don’t swim in it anymore though because a series of powerful rainstorms followed by two consecutive hurricanes in recent years, caused the pond to overflow its banks, kickstarting the process of ecological succession. It’s now slowly transforming into a wetland. The children of the previous owners liked baseball a lot, and used to use this part of the meadow as a baseball field. In fact, you can still see the small piece of shale they would use as home plate, though each year it vanishes further and further into the ground as the grass grows around it. The meadow is surrounded on all sides by mixed broadleaf forest, and on certain summer days in June the wind hits the deciduous trees at such an angle that the sunlight is reflected brilliantly off the bottoms of the leaves. If you were to look up on those days, you would see towering, rolling structures of cloud drifting by in the endlessly deep blue summer sky, and might catch a glimpse of a distant plane travelling far overhead.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is not a movie. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is not a manga. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is somebody’s magnum opus. This is a life’s work collected to chronicle one person’s metamorphosis and growth over the course of a career. The piece we get to look at today is but a tiny, tiny fraction of an indescribably, incomparably sprawling work of philosophy and emotion (as all works of art ultimately are, but this one embodies this truth better than others), and yet even so it still manages to be a crystal clear, defining statement by and about its creator, even if it only catches him at one specific moment in time.
Where can I even begin talking about something like this? I suppose with Nausicaä’s medium, Hayao Miyazaki, an artist who is as acclaimed and beloved as he is misunderstood. Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli are major players in what’s often called the Renaissance Age of Animation: Roughly lasting the period between 1985 and 1995 (though people do squabble over the start and end dates), this period saw animation as a medium almost completely casting aside the negative connotations it had accumulated, however fairly or unfairly that may be, over the course of the Long 1960s. For the first time since the 1940s, critics began to sit up and take notice of the work animators were doing and cartoons began to be taken seriously as legitimate forms of creative expression for what was, in retrospect, probably the last time.
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Saturday Waffling (June 7th, 2014)

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Hello everyone. I’m out of town for the weekend and checking the blog minimally, so will keep this brief.

So, many of us have seen the 50th Anniversary poll from Doctor Who Magazine. For those who haven’t, TheSmilingStallionInn gave the top and bottom 40 in a comment over here.

I cannot imagine that this is not enough to fuel a solid weekend’s discussion. So. Thoughts?…

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Sensor Scan: Reading Rainbow

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Talk about Roots all you want, it definitely deserves it. But from my perspective, if you want to get a handle on LeVar Burton’s personality, style of acting and overall legacy, there’s only one place to look.

It doesn’t get commented on anywhere near enough that Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: The Next Generation were on the air at the same time. Having started Reading Rainbow four years before being cast as Geordi La Forge and continuing an additional twelve years after the television voyages of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D came to an end, Star Trek was LeVar’s night job, quite literally so in some cases. This makes him somewhat unusual among the Trek pantheon, and also means that between 1987 and 1994 he was arguably one of the busiest, most hardworking people in Hollywood. And consider what that was like for an entire generation that was at the age where they would have been familiar with both shows: Imagine how cool it felt to see one of your childhood heroes in costume onboard the Starship Enterprise on one of the highest rated and most talked about shows of the time.

One has to wonder if there wasn’t some element of design in this. Patrick Stewart’s later phenomenal acclaim tends to eclipse the historical reality that he was by no means intended to be the main attraction of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the beginning. He was hired because he’s a gobsmackingly brilliant thespian, of course, but, just like everyone else on that cast, he was an unknown in the United States and any fame he came to was the *result* of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s success, not a cause of it. Well…When I say everyone was an unknown, I mean everyone except LeVar Burton, that is…who *was* already well established thanks to both Roots and a beloved and award-winning children’s television programme he hosted. Yes, believe it or not, LeVar Burton was the one bit of celebrity casting Paramount allowed themselves, was wildly more known and popular than any of his co-stars at the time, and was likely somebody who was the main draw for Star Trek: The Next Generation to a lot of people in its early days, be they skeptical OG Trekkers, mainstream audiences, or kids who were fans of Reading Rainbow.

I know he was for me. I was one of those people who came to Star Trek through LeVar Burton, being a big admirer of his other work. In fact, the very first piece of Star Trek merchandise I ever got was the reissued Wave 1 Playmates Geordi La Forge figure. That’s not to say there weren’t other things that caught my attention about Star Trek: The Next Generation, there definitely were, but LeVar was a *major* contributing factor in my becoming a fan and as a result, when I first started watching, Geordi was the character I focused on almost exclusively. I mean, I liked everyone else just fine: I enjoyed the sense of dignity Patrick Stewart exuded as Captain Picard and I really enjoyed how dynamic and commanding Jonathan Frakes was as Commander Riker.…

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The Week In Comic Books (May 5th, 2014)

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No idea if this will become a regular feature. It very well may not. Certainly there are numerous potential issues such as “I don’t have time for this sort of thing” and “I don’t always manage to get my comics on a Wednesday making the Thursday position of this a bit dodgy.” But hey, let’s see what we can do. Here’s what I picked up at the shop today, with some arbitrary letter grades tacked onto the end. All titles are links to where you can grab the issues at Comixology if you’re interested in reading.

Avengers World #7

Think I’m dropping this, actually, which makes it a bit of a sad note to lead on. I started pulling it because it was nominally tied to the rest of the Jonathan Hickman Avengers arc, but Hickman seems to not be writing the book anymore, and I’d be a liar if I said I had any idea what was going on in it. It’s been the thing I leave for last every week it’s come out, and I’m just not feeling it. This time we’re introducing a team of Chinese superheroes, it seems, which has been done before. And one of them is modeled on Su Wukong, because God forbid anyone ever draw on another part of Chinese mythology. Boring. C-

Cyclops #2

Greg Rucka is a favorite, with a knack for character-driven stories, nice pacing, good dialogue, and books that are generally a good time whether they’re experimental or straightforward. This time it’s a father/son roadtrip through space, with the father apparently hiding a few secrets. Good. Fun. Enjoyable. As of issue #2 it’s still got plenty of cards it’s keeping to its chest, so it’s tough to comment too much, but this seems set to be a fun ride. B+

Iron Man #27

I’ve said elsewhere that Kieron Gillen’s run on Iron Man feels like some squandered potential to me, and this fits the bill. I love bits of it: the left-wing journalist, the Silk Road reference. But I consistently feel like the book would be better if it went more towards its Warren Ellis instincts and less towards its mainstream superhero instincts. The last page reveal is flaccid. It reads well enough, but there’s no spark here. I find myself glad Gillen is off the book soon, not so much because I’m eager to see what someone else does with it as because I’m eager to see him doing something else. B-

Loki: Agent of Asgard #5

First of all, let’s back up and say that Al Ewing is absolutely killing on this book. Given a ludicrous challenge of following Gillen’s absolutely iconic run on the character, he’s been keeping most of what Gillen did well while making the book his own. There’s a lot of nice buildup and payoff here, and I’m eager to see the consequences of the climax play out. Really hoping the book doesn’t lose momentum taking two months off to do a big crossover.…

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Sensor Scan: Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

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If I need to explain to you who Mister Rogers is, this can only mean one of two things. You either hail from somewhere that isn’t North America or Hawai’i or something has gone badly wrong with the universe. Because the only thing that needs to be said about Mister Rogers is that he was one of the greatest television personalities, if not one of the greatest human beings period, to ever live. For almost forty years, he asked generations of children and children-at-heart to be his television neighbour for a half an hour each day. And, anyone who took him up on his invitation knew that for that time they would feel welcome and safe and enjoy sharing the company of someone who truly cared about them and was interested in what they were thinking and feeling.

The more pertinent question is why now? I could have looked at Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood at literally any point in this project, that’s how important Fred Rogers was to our collective memory and for how long. But I wanted to take just a little time to talk about him, his show and his legacy here, in the mid-1980s for a number of reasons, one of which is because in an era so deliberately and self-consciously steeped in artifice and performativity, it’s important to keep in mind that all this spectacle isn’t just for its own sake. There are real, genuine truths we’re trying to talk about here, even if we’re approaching them from odd angles, and we must never lose sight of that. Performativity and artifice do not equate to vacuousness and falseness, and nobody understood that better than Mister Rogers.

The Neighborhood only ever existed on TV, and Mister Rogers was well aware of this. There’s a reason he always called us “television neighbors”, after all. It clearly operates by televisual logic, and most certainly hails from a time when television was seen as disposable theatre. The show always opened with an aerial pan over the Neighborhood, which is very obviously conveyed through miniatures.We then cut to inside Mister Rogers’ house, where he hasn’t arrived yet. Then we pan over to the front door, and Mister Rogers comes in singing “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”, taking off his coat and shoes and putting on his sweater and sneakers. Likewise, the show always ended by doing the opposite, panning away from Mister Rogers’ house and retracing the steps in reverse.

I always got the sense that the show’s intro was meant to depict each one of us coming to the Neighborhood from different places: Mister Rogers probably hitched a ride on the Neighborhood Trolley, which you can always see making the rounds in the street, and then walked the rest of the way. As for us, perhaps we flew because we exist on the other end of the television and can travel via camera angles. Each episode then is a different visit to the Neighborhood, which is a place we all come to from somewhere else at the same time, even Mister Rogers himself.…

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Some Hastily Sketched Thoughts On Amazon and Hatchette

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First, some context for those unaware of this particular issue – Amazon and Hatchette Book Group are having themselves a bit of a spat over ebook pricing, and Amazon is retaliating against Hatchette’s failure to agree to their terms by refusing to take pre-orders on Hatchette books, raising prices on them, and lowering their on-hand stock of physical books so that they take 2-3 weeks to ship. This has been widely criticized as being a massively dick move. Which isn’t inaccurate. But…

Thus far in my career I have not done a lot of work with traditional publishers. This is not because of any principled opposition to them, but mostly because thus far in my career I’ve consistently looked at manuscripts I’ve had and thought “I can make a couple grand off this right now or I can spend months or years trying to find a publisher with whom I may or may not make much of anything.” That may well change in the future, particularly as I slowly maneuver towards trying fiction, where self-publishing is much trickier.

For writers who have thrown their lot in with traditional publishers, this is a very scary time for understandable reasons. Greg Rucka – a writer I absolutely love – has a book out in July. Second part of a series, first one was a very fun little thing, very exciting, and you can’t pre-order it on Amazon right now because they’re fighting with his publisher. This is going to gut his first week sales, which will have knock-on effects for the entire book’s sales, and I can’t imagine he’s not terrified about the implications of that, because lord knows I would be. J.K. Rowling’s pseudonym’s second book is caught up in it too, which must make that the book with the most mangled promotional campaign ever. These are real and horrifying prospects. 
It’s also the consequence of the entire system under creative labor takes place in 2014, and complaining about it as an isolated case is absolutely ridiculous. 
Why is Amazon in the position they’re in? The answer is simple: because twenty years ago they risked a lot of money on a bet about what bookselling would look like in 2014, and they were right. Then they made another in 2007, and they were right again. That’s literally it. They guessed that people would buy books online, and they guessed that they’d be happy to read them on digital readers instead of buying dead trees that they’d have to store somewhere. 
And I honestly don’t want to diminish Amazon’s contributions here. They got online retail right where a lot of companies didn’t. As for ebooks, who remembers the Rocket eBook, which, for several hundred dollars, could hold ten books on a machine the size of a hardcover, which was actually find, because I don’t think there were actually ten books available for it? Amazon got the ebook to be a usable format, in no small part by actually getting skittish publishers who were nervous about piracy onboard selling the damn things, but also by actually making a good reader in the first place.
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Sensor Scan: Blade Runner

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People are going to argue with me, but I think it’s a pretty safe bet to say Blade Runner marks the beginning of cyberpunk in Western science fiction, at least in terms of mass mainstream pop consciousness. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say Blade Runner is likely the film that codified at least the visual style and iconography associated with the genre and is even probably what most people think of when they think of science fiction in the 1980s (well, this and Tron).

And although the anime, which defined much of the look and feel of the franchise, wouldn’t debut for another two years, the fact is we’ve already covered a great deal of Blade Runner‘s most important innovations by introducing Dirty Pair in the last post. Yes, Dirty Pair owes a great deal to Golden Age science fiction too, but by virtue of the specific tradition it comes out of it is very much what we’d now call cyberpunk. Which means that, from my perspective at least, going from “The Case of the Backwoods Murder” to Blade Runner does feel like something of a rather large step backwards. But this is not entirely fair, given the fact that even though they’re in some sense comparable, the fact is these two works ultimately come out of two different cultures and traditions.

Blade Runner is of course loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but I’m going to leave Dick’s work out of the analysis here for the most part largely because it has nothing to do with it. Dick’s stories were famously extensively altered before they were adapted into movies, and Blade Runner is no exception: The original novel was an exploration and defense of empathy, while the movie, well, isn’t, mainly. The one major theme of Dick’s the movie leaves more or less intact is his exploration of the Self and personal identity theory-We talked about this a bit in the context of “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, but as this is pretty much the single thread Blade Runner‘s entire plot hinges on, it’s worth talking about again here. Breaking the issue down into its component parts, we get two horns: “The Self” refers to theories about what, if anything, we fundamentally, essentially are, which is oftentimes liked to the idea of consciousness, while “personal identity” refers to more to how these said essential personalities persist over time and how that can be used to categorize and describe us.

None of the works we’ve looked at so far that have tackled personal identity have handled this exceptionally well: Gene Roddenberry’s big rebuttal to the persistence of the self argument and why the androids in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” (namely Doctor Korby, who beamed his consciousness into an android body) shouldn’t be considered sentient extant beings basically amounted to “because robots”, but thankfully Blade Runner gives us something a tad more nuanced-The Tyrell Corporation’s main argumentative premise, and the one Deckard initially holds to, is that Rachael’s memories are inauthentic; implanted into her positronic matrix to maker her more human-like and thus more controllable (this, incidentally, brings up another interesting train of thought in regards to both corporatism and transhumanism, but I honestly don’t think the writers thought the ramifications of these motifs all the way through).…

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Saturday Waffling (May 31st, 2014)

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So, the Last War in Albion Kickstarter wraps today. If you’ve not contributed, please think about doing so.

All of which said, thank you. I say this often enough, but it really does bear repeating. I have a phenomenally cool job. The reason I can do this job, though, is that all of you are repeatedly willing to support me, whether by buying books or backing my periodic Kickstarters. (And I already have one in mind for 2015 that I think I can guarantee everyone will be very excited about.) You’re an incredibly generous, lovely bunch of readers, and I’m proud as hell to have earned the respect and love from people as fantastic as you.

I won’t lie, this Kickstarter was a bit scary for me. I’ve had the sense that Last War in Albion was starting to go well, but I didn’t really know if it was a project that was going to make it. It needed to find a way to start earning money, and I really wasn’t sure how much it could earn. And while it’s clearly not as popular as my Doctor Who stuff (which is unsurprising, given the relative size of television’s audience versus comics’ audience – in the US, Doctor Who at its lowest-rated episodes are seen by more people than buy the highest-selling comics several times over), it’s also clearly a project that has legs, which is heartening given that I absolutely adore writing it.

So here I am, about ninety minutes into what is technically Saturday morning, having wrapped up writing up A Christmas Carol (my buffer on Eruditorum is not what it used to be) and about to grill some burgers in a midnight drizzle before sitting down with them, a bottle of wine, and… actually, it would be spoiling things to tell you what the next episode I’m going to watch, wouldn’t it? Everything I get to write about for the next month excites me. Sometimes it terrifies me (the Swamp Thing chapter is 11.5k already and is not even vaguely in the neighborhood of almost done. I think that chapter is going to end up being longer than the Flood book), but it thrills me. I’m astonishingly blessed to get to do all of this work. Astonishingly.

So thank you. No clever discussion topic or anything like that. Just thank you. Thank you so much.

-Phil…

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Advent of the Angels: The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair

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It seems at first glance obvious that I should cover anime and manga at this point in the project. After all, isn’t the breakout of Japanese media in the United States a major part of the 1980s entertainment landscape and a defining event in the history of Nerd Culture? Well…not exactly.

Firstly, according to the observations and inferences I’ve personally made studying Nerd Culture, the foundational moment as it pertains to anime and manga didn’t happen in the early 1980s and wasn’t even due to the rising popularity of people like Hayao Miyazaki: Instead, it can be traced to the 1990s and Neon Genesis Evangelion (which was already a unique and transformative piece of anime in Japan) if you were a part of proto-Nerd Culture, or shonen (boy’s action entertainment) stuff like Dragon Ball Z if you were everybody else (though some bleedover did occur).

And secondly, the Dirty Pair franchise, of which The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair (actually, a compilation of the first two Dirty Pair stories serialized in science fiction magazines) is the inaugural work, is at once neither anime nor manga and both them and many other things all at the same time. Dirty Pair concerns the continuing adventures of two scantily clad female secret agents named Kei and Yuri who solve cases in the 22nd Century after mankind has become a sprawling alliance of a thousand star systems as part of a tag-team partnership aided by their giant hyper-evolved sentient pet cat alien and chief engineer Mughi, but who also have the dreadful misfortune of leaving trail of utter devastation in their wake. It is also a massively important part of this project because it leaves an indelible mark on the history of science fiction from this point on.

At this point, you presumably have (at the very least) two questions. “What even is this? This sounds insane” and “Why in the name of the Prophets are you covering this on a *Star Trek* blog?” spring immediately to mind. To the second question, the truth of the matter is, believe it or not, Dirty Pair is the secret history of Star Trek in the Long 1980s: The two franchises are so intertwined and interconnected during this period and reference each other so breathtakingly frequently that it’s actually impossible to talk about one *without* also talking about the other.

This is famously due in part to two particular members of the Star Trek: The Next Generation creative team who were profoundly inspired by Dirty Pair. Namely, Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda, who are *massive* anime fans, ran an anime CompuServe group and who would show imported Japanese films on VHS to the rest of the Next Generation creative team whenever a shoot dragged on into the wee hours of the morning, which it frequently did. But Dirty Pair itself has very strong ties to Star Trek as well, to the point it’s been called the Japanese version of Star Trek: The anime based on the book series makes regular, screaming obvious shout-outs to the Original Series and the first Dirty Pair movie is *actually called* Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture.…

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Sensor Scan: Cosmos

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There are, in the history of television, extremely few moments like this one, where the heart and soul of an entire generation is swept up in the rapture of a shared experience that becomes the defining memory of an era.

Cosmos, which opens declaring itself to be standing “On The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean”, is on its own a watershed. This is the series that not only made PBS, but codified the documentary as at least I remember it and changed the face of not only the popularization of science, but of science itself. It really is astonishing to look back and see how so much of the discourse we now associate with science can be linked directly to Carl Sagan’s ethos and positionality. Because this is what makes Cosmos so special and why it remains relevant and valid over thirty years later when the world it came into and spoke to now belongs to some long-distant and half-forgotten mnemolic time-spacescape: And even though his perspective has been frequently misunderstood and his name invoked in vain by the many, many people to come in his wake, the fundamental and provocative radicalism of his voice still resonates, and is what allows Cosmos to remain so powerful.

Carl Sagan is a fascinatingly marginal figure, and in retrospect it’s sort of odd that he was the one to break out in the way he did. Famously too speculative, imaginative and spiritual for the scientific establishment, yet too grounded in hard science for UFOlogists and true believers, Sagan occupies a curious, and unenviable, no-man’s land in scientific discourse. But yet in many ways it’s this nomadic isolationism that helped him reach such a staggeringly huge audience: Sagan wrote and spoke with the voice of a poet and a mystic, yet fiercely committed to the scientific method, he was in many ways the only personality positioned to take science education in this direction. He’s of course far from the first to fuse science and mysticism: John Muir did it, and J. Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallée and Steven Spielberg accomplished it masterfully quite recently with things like Passport to Magonia and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Going all the way back, what were the ancient navigators if not science mystics?

But Carl Sagan was the first to take this approach and apply it to science education, at least on such a grand scale. Carl Sagan wasn’t just a science popularizer or even the greatest science popularizer-He was the science popularizer, all stop. Nobody who has tried to follow in his footsteps has come remotely close to emulating what Carl Sagan did. In some ways Robert Burnham, Jr. is Sagan’s anticipation in this regard, but, let’s face it, try as he might (and he did, mightily) Burnham’s Celestial Handbook was never going to be embraced outside of an extremely small subset of amateur astronomers. No, what Sagan understood was the power of television as not just a forum for teaching and learning, but as a medium where communal images could be experienced together.…

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