Eruditorum Press

Post-Geek

Star Trek Is…: The Cage

, 12

Rare Playmates Cage-era “Innerspace” toy prototype.

“The Cage” occupies a strange space within Star Trek lore: As a pilot created by Gene Roddenberry and those closest to him to demonstrate to NBC what they envisioned Star Trek to be all about, but one that never actually aired on television, it is at once the progenitor of the entire franchise and also the only part of it impossible to reconcile with the rest of the series’ canon. “The Cage” is a very strange specimen indeed then: It’s not quite Star Trek, at least not the Star Trek that fans would come to recognise and love years later, but, by virtue of it being a pilot designed to embody the show’s core values and themes made before executive compromises changed the tone of the series, it is in many ways the purest Star Trek of all.

The one individual irreducibly linked to “The Cage”, what it is and what it does, far more so than in anything else bearing the Star Trek name, is Gene Roddenberry. Over the years mainline fandom has all but deified Roddenberry, and people tend to hold him up as a figurehead for everything they want Star Trek to embody and strive for (particularly so in the years immediately following his death in 1991 and the cancellation of Enterprise in 2005). This is also not helped by muddy and at times completely contradictory historical accounts of key moments in Star Trek history and Roddenberry’s own biographical details perpetuated by what can frankly best be described as rampant hearsay and cult of personality. As a result, it can be hard to actually get a solid critical handle on who Roddenberry was, what the extent of his contribution to Star Trek was and what exactly he wanted it to be.

“The Cage” then really is the best place to talk about Roddenberry and his influence on Star Trek, because no matter what Star Trek is going to become over the next several decades it will never again be as closely tied to Roddenberry’s personal conception of it as it is here. There are several reasons for this, the most immediately obvious one being its aforementioned status as a pilot, but also the fact that even as of the early Original Series Gene Roddenberry had a lot of help and input in shaping the direction of Star Trek that he didn’t have as much of here. The fact he was willing to entertain and genuinely listen to everyone’s ideas for, and criticisms of, his project is telling, but so is the fact their influence has been all but effaced from the history of the franchise to the point Roddenberry is, implicitly at least, held up as the source of every single good idea the series ever had, which is simply and flatly not true. But there is a reason Majel Barrett called “The Cage” her favourite episode and “Pure Star Trek”, and anyone who is seriously interested in the history of the franchise and Gene Roddenberry’s “vision”, whatever that may turn out to be, really ought to study it.…

Continue Reading

Maybe some of us BELONG in the fields

, , , , , , 15

A very good overview of the squalid pass to which Moffat has brought the show in its 50th anniversary year, with special attention paid to the issue of mysoginy, via River and Clara:

…we’re not being encouraged to think there’s something wrong with this person [River]: it’s the show itself that comes across as jaded and withdrawn from empathy and decency to a psychopathic extent (and what a charming ethical copout to have the Doctor leave before he can witness the rest of the killing). Again, we have the depressingly widespread idea that a woman acting violently is empowering and a corrective to sexism and misogyny. When questioned about his ability with female characters during a Guardian interview Moffat replied:

River Song? Amy Pond? Hardly weak women. It’s the exact opposite. You could accuse me of having a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people. That would be fair.
It would indeed. Unfortunately, a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people is no substitute for an interest in human beings.

http://richardhcooper.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/steven-and-women-or-how-steven-moffat.html

I don’t agree with every jot and tittle of this, but it’s still excellent.  Very well worth reading, with lots of points which seem, to me, pretty much irrefutable… depressing but irrefutable.

I do want to express my increasing impatience with the idea of accidental reactionary writing, a notion that the writer of the above article flirts with (though his conclusions are nuanced).  Personally, I’m coming to the brain-bending conclusion that people who aren’t racists or sexists don’t need to concentrate on remembering not to say racist or sexist things. 

Thanks to Johnathan Barlow (or ‘old Legohead’ as I always think of him) for putting this my way.…

Continue Reading

Sunday Pancaking

90

Well, I’m not going to make a habit out of having two weekend threads, but my dialogue with Mac Rogers on The Name of the Doctor just went up on Slate, so that’s probably there and fun to read. Or at least there and fun to have written. Thanks again to Mac and the folks at Slate for letting me play.

So while I’m opening a second front in the “let’s all discuss Name of the Doctor” battle, I figure I’ll toss out two (completely unrelated) questions to my readers to see if anyone can help.

First, I’ve been searching for months now for any copy of Springhill, Russell T Davies’s two-season apocalyptic soap with writing by Gareth Roberts and Paul Cornell. This seems a complete wipeout – nobody is getting anywhere close. It’s a massive missing link in the history of Davies’s Doctor Who, and there’s barely any information about it out there.

Second, and thinking ahead instead of back, I’d like to do a post on Outpost Gallifrey sometime during Series Two. Ideally adjacent to Love and Monsters. Unfortunately, the forum is long since gone off the Internet. I don’t suppose that anyone, for some bewilderingly freakish reason, has an archive of the long lost forum, and specifically of the threads that sprung up around that episode? If so, you’re a bigger digital packrat than even I am, but please do get in touch.

In both cases e-mailing me is probably more sensible than discussing in comments.…

Continue Reading

Saturday Waffling (May 18th, 2013)

127

EDIT: Just to be official and emphatic on it, spoilers are allowed in the thread here, and if you don’t want to be spoiled you probably want to be in a different thread.

So, I imagine the discussion on The Name of the Doctor that starts up in a few hours will be interesting. I actually have seen most of it already – through wholly legitimate means (I’m doing another thing for Slate – though actually, the episode never leaked to BitTorrent at all, contrary to rumors). I suspect the fault lines on it will roughly map those of the Moffat era in general – those who like his stuff will love it, those who hate it will probably hate it. For my money, it and The Snowmen are the two high points of the season. And when my further thoughts on it go up on Slate I’ll let you all know.

In other news, I’ve just discovered that The CW is doing a remake of The Tomorrow People. I’ve gone ahead and embedded the trailer and a clip from the first episode for your horrified entertainment. I’m not at all certain how you’d even begin to go about presenting The Tomorrow People to an American audience. You have to explain why it’s not just the X-Men, I suppose. And I doubt the original series’ answer – that it’s utterly, flamboyantly gay – is going to cut it for modern American network television. So I’m not sure what their Plan B is on that. So yes, that looks awful.

Finally, reader Dave Simmons dropped word of an Indiegogo campaign to save a local indie bookstore in St. Louis from closure due to a developer buying their (really quite gorgeous) Victorian Gothic Revival location so that they can tear it down and build a storage facility. Here’s the link for that. I’m terribly partial to indie bookstores even as I’m horrifically in bed with Amazon and thus with many of the things forcing them out of existence. So if you’re in the St. Louis area, please do consider kicking them a few bucks.

And now back to trying to finish catching up on this week. At the time of writing, just two more blog posts out of this stretch to write. God help me.…

Continue Reading

Sensor Scan: Foundation

, 14

Foundation

It is a maxim among some writers that all science fiction, no matter how varied and diverse it may be, can ultimately trace its lineage back to the so-called “Golden Age” of science fiction literature. Despite this being far too reductive a statement for my personal taste, there is some genuine erudition to be gained by examining it as the era’s signature works are indeed fundamental inspirations for a particular approach to writing science fiction that defines early Star Trek (or at least they way Star Trek is perceived) and the intellectual tradition it’s a part of.

Some background: The Golden Age of Science Fiction, as it has come to be known, is a period (roughly spanning the years between 1938 and 1953) during which marked interest in futurism and the potential of scientific and technological breakthroughs influenced authors to craft stories set far into the future featuring, and often explicitly about, technology written to feel plausibly extrapolated from that of the time of writing. This approach, and the intellectual tradition that comes out of it, is often referred to as “Hard” sci-fi in an attempt to stress its focus on scientific realism and to distinguish it from (and in more than one instance tacitly imply a superiority over) other “pulp” or “fantasy” inspired science fiction. Indeed a great many sci-fi writers claim that this is the defining feature of science fiction: That it portrays a future that can reasonably be expected to derive from real-life science and technology. This is a very pervasive attitude and one that will crop up on more than one occasion on our journey, so it’s best we take a look at it here.

In many ways then Foundation is the text best representative of the Golden Age style, at least as it pertains to Star Trek: A sprawling attempt at a space epic spanning multiple generations that chronicles the decline, collapse and rebirth of humanity’s galactic empire written by Isaac Asimov, already famous as one of the leading lights of the period for his Robot short stories. The Foundation and Star Trek series are not directly connected, but there are enough superficial similarities between the two and Asimov’s influence on later science fiction is ubiquitous enough it merits a discussion.

Perhaps the biggest point of comparison between Foundation and Star Trek is that both franchises started out as one self-contained work that very quickly snowballed into a series of sequels, prequels, retcons and continuity-laden spin-off works handled by first, second and third generation fans. In the case of Foundation, the, er, “foundational” work in question is a series of short stories Asimov wrote for Astounding Magazine in the 1940s and then edited and re-published as a trilogy of standalone novels in the early 1950s under the titles Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. While Asimov himself went on to write four additional novels in the series during the 1980s and 1990s (two sequels and two prequels) for the sake of brevity, scope and chronological relevance I’m only going to be looking at the original trilogy here.…

Continue Reading

Slammed, Ergo, a Teaser

26

New Wave Superfriends, by Butcher Billy

The wedding last weekend has me a day behind on all my writing, and I’m stuck with two or three extra projects this week as well, so I’ve just been slammed busy this week and haven’t had time to bash out even a little bit extra to post. At some point I suppose I’ll have to master the art of conversational chattiness. Or linkblogging. That’s what people do these days, isn’t it. Link blog. So I guess I could link to this interview with Jaron Lanier, which raises various troubling questions about the economy I’m making money in now and the like. That said, I cannot shake the sense that Lanier is just a really crappy futurist.

In any case, and more extensively, I figured I’d share the introduction to the eventually forthcoming Wonder Woman book. Still no release date yet, but I know it’s been clanking about for a while, so I figure I should show something.

—-

Nobody indulges in utopian visions anymore. On the rare occasions when people do – the playing at classless society offered by the Occupy movements in late 2011, for instance – the general reaction is, at best, one of condescending pity. Utopians, in our culture, aspire towards harmlessness. The best of them are charmingly naive people you might want to invite over for dinner, but would never actually want to put in charge of anything. More often, though, utopianism is viewed as outwardly sinister. You can see it in the line of political attack taken against Barack Obama. Not just the outright false claim that he’s a socialist (a political view that has produced a disproportionate amount of utopian literature), but the basic claim that he wants to transform America. That this is prima facie a bad thing – that the desire to engage in radical change to improve things is self-evidently terrible and evil – shows just how far utopianism has fallen.

On the rare occasions we do allow ourselves to dabble in the utopian, our visions are almost exclusively eschatological. If there is to be a utopia it can only come after a cathartic purging of society, whether at the hands of the gods or at the hands of humanity’s own folly run amok at last. Some better world may follow from the ashes of this one, but the idea of transforming this world into a better one, as opposed to simply leveling it and starting over, is all but completely gone.

It wasn’t always like this, of course. Our cultural landscape is littered with the debris of abandoned utopias. Many, though not all, emerged from the years following World War II, a golden age of utopian thinking. These were the days of gleaming space colonies and cute robotic servants that allowed everyone a life of perpetual leisure. Entire popular genres emerged from these dreams, only to, starting in the late 1970s, find themselves shell-shocked survivors: a set of images without a purpose.…

Continue Reading

If Only We Had a Reasonable Negotiating Partner…

, , , , , , 6

Anniversary of the Nakba today, an event that shaped the modern world, creating a festering sore of injustice that still infects global politics.

Also, less importantly, the origin of a situation that provides the basis for a vast number of trite, naive, glib, uninformed political allegories in sci-fi TV shows.

The Silurians got the treatment in their first reappearance in the new series, ‘The Hungry Earth’ / ‘Cold Blood’ (2010).

The funny thing is that, wheras the intentional Palestine allegory worked up in these episodes doesn’t fit the real facts, patronises the oppressed, excuses the oppressors, etc, the accidental allegory works.  Indeed, it chimes surprisingly well witth the Silurians generally.  Every time the Silurians come back they are still squeezed out, displaced, outnumbered… and every time they are condemned when they dare to get angry about it, and exhorted by the liberal hero to stay indefinitely patient, warned that if they don’t then they’ll have lost the moral high ground, effectively informed that its up to them to be forebearing to the people who’ve stolen their world. And they never get anywhere near getting redress or restitution.

Most recently, the solution offered to the matter was for the Silurians to retire again and wait for humanity to become more liberal and tolerant all by itself.  As Charles Daniels argued on the comment threads, this is repulsive.  It says that the oppressed must wait for their oppressors to see the light.  The agency lies with the oppressors.  The oppressed must simply be patient.  Such things happen because humans are just intolerant.  But luckily there’s (in Dawkins’ vacuous phrase) an “ever changing moral zeitgeist” which will inevitably lead us to greater heights of liberalism, without us having to do anything.  (A millenarian idea if ever I heard one.)

Meanwhile, back in storyland, the best solution is for the Silurians and the humans to live apart.  Well, there’s a word for that.  A word increasingly being recognised as an apt description of the Israeli domination of Palestine: Apartheid.

The only bit that doesn’t tesselate beautifully is the origin of the situation. The Silurians retired voluntarily because they thought the Moon was going to crash into the Earth.  A natural disaster / tragic misunderstanding with no cause and no agency behind it is the official, mainstream narrative, not the reality.…

Continue Reading

Traversing the Heavens’ Expanse

6

What is “Vaka Rangi”?

The name Vaka Rangi comes from the common language of the Polynesian islands and the area making up the larger geopolitical region known as “Oceania”. Although each region in the Polynesian triangle has its own variations on it, it is commonly believed all of these dialects can be traced back to a common language, which would account for the striking similarities to be found in all of them.

The Ancient Polynesians and their ancestors were simply put the greatest mariners the world has ever seen and the term vaka (meaning canoe, or canoe hull, in several languages) displays the centrality of the concept to their culture. Spurred on primarily by limited resources and the need to manage sustainable populations, the Ancient Polynesians used voyaging canoes to settle remote and previously unpopulated islands throughout the Pacific Ocean, and many scholars claim they further managed to reach any shore that touched the Pacific and Southern Oceans. The Ancient Polynesians were explorers, navigators, poets, mystics and philosophers, not conquerors or empire-builders: For them, each vaka was not merely a watercraft or a means to an end, but a microcosm of Polynesian society and an island unto itself symbolizing the interconnectedness of the village, the sea, the Earth and the Heavens.

Rangi is thought to be derived from the hypothesized proto-Polynesian word “*laŋi”, meaning the sky, or the heavens. The variant “rangi” is found in several Polynesian languages, most notably that of the Maori and Rapa Nui. In Polynesian Reconstruction, a vaka is often given a secondary name to distinguish itself and its people, thus a “Vaka Rangi” would be “A Canoe for the Stars”.

Today, traditional Polynesian navigation is undergoing a renaissance, bolstered by, among other things, the rediscovery of ancient oral history and techniques on the outlying island of Taumako and a renewed sense of cultural pride in places such as Hawai’i and Samoa. Fleets of vaka once again roam the Pacific, this time to share their message of solidarity with the natural world. It is this spiritual exploration of the universe’s interconnectedness that has been a guiding inspiration for my life and provided the impetus for this project, which I hope will help translate these concepts for those who, like me, grew up during Western post-industrialism. I felt the best way to explore this was to call upon another major interest of mine: Experimental comparative media studies.

What This Project Is

Vaka Rangi is the account of a spiritual journey. Vaka Rangi is a personal memoir. Vaka Rangi is an unauthorized post-structuralist critical history of Star Trek. Vaka Rangi is many things at once.

Fundamentally, this project an attempt at a critical history of utopian futurism in televised science fiction, particularly science fiction involving voyaging starships, from a specific perspective and using the Star Trek franchise as a “guiding text”. I chose Star Trek for a number of reasons, most notably for its substantial cultural capital in Western regions and my personal connection to it. I coined the term “Soda Pop Art” in another blog project of mine to refer to a product of commercialized pop culture that attains enough significance and ubiquity to become a kind of shared Western mythology.…

Continue Reading

Not With A Bang

, , , 12

Some assumptions ‘Closing Time’ relies upon: a man being rubbish at looking after a baby is richly hilarious; James Corden has talent of some kind; it’s still amusing when someone wrongly thinks two men are a couple.  All very questionable.

And, as ever, (heteronormative) love conquers all.  It kills Cybermen because emotions ‘n’ stuff, yeah?  Okay, they did something like that in ‘The Invasion’, but at least there it was any emotion, and it made the Cybermen go bonkers instead of just conveniently dying of endoftheepisodeitis.  Notice the utterly pedestrian, idea-free logic here.  You kill the loveless things with love.  That’s like saying you kill poor people with money.  I know the gold thing was stupid, but at least that suggested the logic of using a magical metallic talisman against the zombies.  And at least, when the Cybermen got killed by gold or gravity or radiation, they were simply defeated and chased off rather than being negated or solved.  Kill a Cyberman with radiation and you simply defeat his physical presence.  Kill him with love and you solve him.  You explain him away.  You fill the empty space that he once was… with syrup.  The Cybermen are worthless now.  They have been emptied out of all threat because their hollowness has been stuffed with candyfloss.  Thus is the rump gothic ritually defeated by the power of comforting banalities.

By the way… remember when Gareth Roberts scathingly wrote about how silly ‘The Green Death’ was because nobody in the audience needed to be told that pollution was bad?  Well… does ‘Closing Time’ mean that he now believes people need to be reminded that loving your baby son is good?  Are we to understand that banal statements about political issues are a Bad Thing while banal statements about personal feelings are Inspirational Drama?  I guess so, since the former is about boring stuff like public health and business ethics, while the latter is about interesting stuff like oooo i wuv my pwetty ickle baby.  Why are the British public assumed to need weekly reminders that love is a good thing?  Why, furthermore, must love always be reduced to a simple and unambiguously positive thing, as though it’s a kind of neurological Angel Delight?  And why is it thought that they need to be constantly reassured that it can conquer absolutely anything just by being felt?  What right to these fucking hacks have to inform us how we are obliged to feel in order to be normal and earn the Doctor’s gormless yawp of excited approval?  And isn’t this constant emphasis on love as something overpowering and perfect just an emotional version of the media peddling of body images?  Just as we are constantly told how we should look, are we not also being told that our feelings should be just as glossy and perfect and swaggeringly healthy?  There is a catwalk for the feelings, and yours must be capable of poseurising their way down it, looking just right.  Fuck off.

There is something repellently wholesome and healthy about garbage like ‘Closing Time’. …

Continue Reading

Kickstarter Wrap-Up

28

So, we’re in the final 24 hours of the Kickstarter. It looks like we’re going to fall just short of the goal of the illustrated version of the Three Doctors post  – though I suppose a last minute push is possible. Someone buying the Soldeed video, for instance, would put the goal in sight…

EDIT: Actually, we’re now just $600 from doing the Blake book. It could just about happen…

In any case, if you want to get in on the Kickstarter, you probably should get going – several of the reward levels are deals that I’m not planning on offering again at the end of the Kickstarter. Most notably, the $10 “starter kit” of ebooks is the only time you’ll be able to get the first three volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum at that price for the foreseeable future. And while I may offer commissioned essays and signed books through other means soon, I don’t intend to offer essays that will go into the books again at all.

Finally, a general answer to questions I’m sure I’ll be getting – I’ll be in touch with all of the backers through several means. First, I’ll send out a backers survey in the next few days to figure out the Kickstarter-exclusive essay topic (basically, I’m going to suggest the upcoming Marc Platt audio The Beginning, and unless there’s a sizable objection, do that) and to get everyone’s e-mail. At that point I’ll have a Soldeed-esque THREEEEEE ways of contacting you: your e-mail, Kickstarter updates, and this blog. I will basically use all three regularly when I need to update you with anything.

No, failing to meet the $15k stretch goal does not mean I will never do the Blake/Three Doctors book. It does mean that I’m going to wait until I see how the Logopolis book does, however, before I make plans.

Any other questions I’ll happily answer in comments. Or discourse at length about what I have or haven’t learned doing a Kickstarter.

In any case, I just wanted to use today’s post to say: whether you have donated, are about to, or just can’t manage it, thank you. The last month of running this blog has been an absolutely wonderful ride. I was hoping to be able to get to the original $1k goal that would let me pre-fund the Hartnell book itself, and was prepared to fund it out of pocket if I fell short.

I woke up the next morning clearly not having to worry about funding the Hartnell book again. And that’s just been the beginning. I get to do a special edition of the Logopolis post, to start selling t-shirts, mugs, prints, and other cool stuff, and to start in on the podcast commentaries, all of which are terribly exciting.

And perhaps most importantly, it formed the point where I really started thinking of this as my primary job and source of income, with adjunct teaching as a sort of hobbyist sideline. Which is a really nice and satisfying place to be.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 220 221 222 223 ›»