Eruditorum Press

Wicked.

Have a Bonus Post (Alif the Unseen)

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You will, of course, forgive me for a digression. I’ve not done one in a while. But as this is the biggest and loudest platform I have, it seems the best one to do a meandering review. And since I’m being almost totally ineffectual at thinking (or more to the point writing) about things that aren’t this right now, I figure I may as well just write it, post it here, and call it a bonus post.

So, there’s a book that just came out: G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen. And it’s the first book I’ve read in a while that has required a substantive reordering of my thoughts – one of those books that requires me, after reading it, to live in a slightly but substantively different world than the one I was previously living in.

The pithy description is “this is the book Neil Gaiman would write if he were an American-born convert to Islam who split her time between the US and Egypt.” And if you’re sold on it with that, you may want to just go buy it, read it, and come back, because the rest of this is a spoilerish discussion of why I think it’s a terribly important book. If you’re not sold, well, here’s a spoilerish discussion of why I think it’s a terribly important book, and maybe that will convince you.

So, obviously a big fascination for me is the interplay between the world of metaphors and material social reality. The secret of alchemy is material social progress and all. Wilson has been mining this vein for some time, and quite well. One of her starting premises – a solid enough one, I should think – is the standard post-colonial perspective that the Middle East has had its self-identity eaten by the west.

In some ways, then, it’s odd that she’s using her “western convert” status to write a western-style contemporary fantasy novel about these problems. Contemporary fantasy is a thoroughly straightforward genre these days. All neatly Campbell-structured and shop-worn. Create some clever juxtapositions of recognizable myths and contemporary tropes and you’re good to go. Play your cards right and you can get a decent movie or HBO series out of it. It’s not done to death, but it’s a very well-developed, well-defined western genre. And nobody is going to mistake Alif the Unseen as being anything other than an example of that genre.

But it’s not a straightforward one. At virtually every turn it finds ways of resisting itself. Rescuing the princess proves not so much pointless as facile. Using the magical powers gained by understanding of the hidden world is both impossible and disastrous. There’s even an absolutely hilarious embedding of Twilight within the book as an obvious author surrogate marries a vampire and has his half-jinn baby. But even here the book ducks and weaves around the cliche – the character quietly drops out of the narrative just before the climax.

This is, actually, instructive for a way in.…

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Prometheus Underground

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Warning: Triggers and Spoilers.  And waffle.

Sex & Monsters

In Prometheus, the Engineers are ancient Titans who created humanity… and, it is implied, seeded the galaxy with their DNA. There is something very noticeable about them: they are all men. Meanwhile, there is a definite vaginal look to a great many of the alien bio-weapons they created and which then subsumed them. However, I don’t think its really possible to read the battle between Engineers and their bio-weapons as a battle of the sexes. The weapon creatures are also phallic and penetrative, as in previous iterations of the Alien universe. All the same, it’s true that presenting the creators of life (in their own image) as exclusively dudes does imply that generative power resides in the male alone. It is enough for one Engineer to dissolve his DNA into the waters of a planet to kickstart the process that will lead to animal life (if that’s how the opening scene is meant to be read). The Engineers are male but apparently sexless, capable of asexual reproduction. The deadly runaway bio-weapons, which seem hermaphroditic, look like the intrusion of sex into a male but sexless world. Sex is thus a terrifying eruption that destabilises a male utopia. The sexual nature of the weapons suggests that the Engineers – we might even be tempted to facetiously re-christen them the ‘Mengineers’ – find sexual reproduction to be inherently threatening. They set about devising weapons of mass destruction and what do they come up with? Biological goo that sets off a chain reaction of tentacle rape, fanged vaginas and violent monster pregnancy.

Foz Meadows at her blog Shattersnipe (which I heard about from Jon Blum) has made some apt observations about the film’s dubious concentration upon highly impractical female underwear, grueling ‘ladypain’ and forced impregnation. She goes on to say:

Insofar as the alien attacks go, I’ll give Scott some credit for trope subversion: twice in the course of the film, male characters are violently orally penetrated – and, in the process, killed – by phallic alien tentacles. This is visually disturbing on a number of levels, but given the near universal establishment of tentacle rape as a thing that happens to women, I’m going to give him a big thumbs up for bucking the trend. That being said, what happens to Shaw is awful on just about every level imaginable.

And so it is.

One of the interesting things about the original Alien is that it is a man – Kane (John Hurt) – who is the victim of the facehugger rape and the violent birth of the phallic infant Alien. So, although the alien pregnancy also suggests infection, cancer, parasitism and other horrors attendant on life, there is clearly a way in which the original Alien is a personification of sexual violence. This violence is directed at both sexes and emerges through the violation of a man and a subsequent male pregnancy… however, the creature itself is also intensely male. It has that famously phallic head and yet another phallic symbol springs out of its mouth, this one complete with a snapping set of teeth.…

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Reimagined Moments #2

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“Why don’t you just call me Doctor?”

“Zat ist not a name.  I vant your full name.”

“Oh very well.  Dr. John Smith.”

“Goot.  Now ve are gettink somevhere.”

“I realise our presence behind you lines must seem rather strange.  And suspicious?”

“No.”

“No?  Oh, I was rather expecting you to accuse us of being spies.  Everyone else does.”

“I know you’re not spies.  Ze vun sink you definitely can’t be is spies.  After all, if ze British had sent spies to infiltrate our lines, zey vouldn’t send two officers in British Army uniforms in a British Red Cross ambulance vith sree people in civilian clothes, all speaking English.  Zey’d send people in German uniforms in a German vehicle, all speaking German vizout an accent and all claiming to be German.  Zat’s how spyink vurks, you see.”

“It could be a double bluff?”

“No, zat is just stupid.”

“Well, if you’ll just put down your gun, I’ll prove that I’m from the future by dismantling it.”

“No.”…

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When Titans Clash

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Spoiler Warning

Prometheus tries to evoke the aesthetics of Alien in a way that is borderline obsessive. Even down to making sure there are cream-coloured leathery/cushiony pads on the spaceship corridor walls. Still greater attention is paid to replicating H.R. Giger’s design concepts for the derelict alien ship, cockpit and pilot from the original film. The really weird thing is that, even as Prometheus deliberately and slavishly tries to evoke and/or copy the aesthetics of Alien, it completely overlays them with an entirely different, clashing aesthetic sense.

Look, why is this image so powerful?

There are, I think, a number of reasons.

Most importantly, it’s because it is just explicable enough to make sense while also being inexplicable enough to unnerve.  We are plainly looking at a navigator or pilot in a cockpit.  We understand this.  We are also looking at something inhuman and estranged, something that evades any attempt on our part to relate to it directly.  The ‘Space Jockey’ (as it is sometimes called) is a pilot, evidently, but it is also a giant, a fossil, a mammoth, a skeleton, a statue, a cyborg, a petrified outgrowth of flesh embedded within a colossal machine.  We cannot separate the entity from the artifact.  The ribs of the creature flow outward into the cables of the chair.  The trunk of the face flows down into the workings of the mechanism.  We cannot disentangle organism from system, animal from engine.  They are fundamentally akin, interchangeable, interpenetrating, symbiotic.  This was always the intention: to suggest something that was inextricably both biological and technological.  The cockpit and the pilot are not discrete things but are conjoined to the point of identity.  They were one flesh, until the flesh peeled away.  It’s entropic in both an organic and mechanical way simultaneously.  It’s the ossified cadaver of a wrecked bio-machine.

It’s also beautiful, but not in a straightforward way.  It’s not pretty.  It’s hideously, ominously, unnaturally, grotesquely beautiful.  It’s beautiful in the same way as a scorpion, or the bleached skull of an ox lying in a parched gulch, or a pile of rusted flywheels that was once a graceful machine.  It has the troubling, terrible beauty of wreckage, of the predator, of the insectile, the dead, the decayed, the destroyed, the deadly.

And it’s fucking scary.  It’s a great big skull-faced monster in a huge black room made out of what looks like loads of bones.

Now, look at this:

This is pretty.  It’s the cockpit from Alien… decorated with shimmering CGI lights and swirls and spirals and graphics and glowing planets. It’s like someone stuck gold stars all over one of Goya’s ‘black paintings’ or inserted some watercolour daffodils into a Max Ernst canvas. Well, why am I dancing around this? It’s like putting pretty, computer-generated patterns all over a picture by H.R. Giger. The design and CGI rendering is perfectly nice in and of itself, but in this context it looks like a tawdry, clashing embellishment. It neutralises the uncanny effect of the setting.…

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I Just Want You to Like Me

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Shabgraff now has a Facebook ‘fan page’, here.  At the moment, the number of ‘Likes’ it has garnered is 11.  And two of them are me.

Now, I don’t have very many regular readers, but I definitely have more than 9.

If you are a regular reader of this blog and have not yet ‘Liked’ its Facebook ‘fan page’ then please take a moment to do so.  Apparently when it gets 30 ‘Likes’, I get access to some kind of special information.  The credit card numbers of people who’ve ‘Liked’ it or something, I dunno.

Help me out here comrades.  You will be doing wonders for my barely-concealed narcissism fragile self-esteem.

Thanks.…

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Reimagined Moments #1

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“Hurr hurr… You think this is the real Quaid?”

Well it might be, thought the guard.  Then again it might not.  It might be Quaid using his hologram thingy… or it might actually be Quaid pretending to be a hologram in order to trick us.  I have no way of knowing, really… unless I wait to see if it flickers in that way that really makes the hologram projector next-to useless as a weapon.  But that would take time.  Time in which I might get shot if it turns out not to be a hologram.    So I think I’ll shoot it anyway.  Just in case. After all, better safe than sorry.

Luckily for the guard, this train of thought only took him a split second.  What with him having been highly trained and everything.…

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Victory of the Icon 3

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I have a massive, endlessly-lengthening list of books, old and new, that I want to get around to reading.  Donny Gluckstein’s new book A People’s History of the Second World War just went straight in near the top of the list.

Gluckstein’s argument seems to be that WWII was actually two wars, fought in parallel.  One was an imperialist squabble between established empires and up-and-coming imperialist nations that were set to clash with them.  Britain, France, Russia and America (which was already a continental empire and was ready to expand globally) found themselves violently competing for hegemony with Germany, Italy and Japan.  Running beneath this conflict there was a people’s war against fascism (the form taken by the new empires) underpinned by dreams of freedom and democracy.  The imperialists running the first war knew that had to appeal to the priorities of the people fighting the second war in order to enlist their support, hence the democratic rhetoric.

I mention this here because Gluckstein has done an interview for New Left Project, in which he has some things to say about Winston Churchill, the subject of my irregular ‘Victory of the Icon‘ posts.

Churchill was always very clear that his mission in the war was to defend the British empire, not promote the interests of ordinary citizens. He was not ideologically committed to destroy fascism. He made statements such as the following when he met Mussolini in 1927: ‘If I had been an Italian I would have been with you from the start in your struggle against the bestial passions of Leninism’. During the Spanish civil war he backed Franco (whose survival depended on Hitler and Mussolini’s massive material support), and afterwards he defended Franco when some argued that his regime was the unfinished business of WWII. Churchill also backed the Japanese invasion of Manchuria before the war.

During the war itself Churchill was very resistant to the notion of opening a second front (a landing in France) to relieve pressure on Russia. The focus of British strategy until 1944 was to avoid confronting the Nazis in Europe, and instead defend the imperial routes. That is why the main fighting was in North Africa (Tobruk, El Alamein). When the tide turned on the Eastern Front and it looked like Russia would sweep across Europe Churchill suddenly threw his efforts into the D-Day landings.

For ordinary British people the war had a very different meaning. It was a war against Nazism and fascism, for liberation and democracy. Churchill was fighting to defend the status quo of 1939 which, at home, had meant mass unemployment, appalling poverty and deprivation. The majority were not going to put their lives at risk to continue with that. Nor would they be duped with the sort of propaganda issued in the First World War (such as Lord Kitchener’s famous poster – ‘Your country needs you!’) They had seen what imperialist war meant.

And:

Churchill was an important figure in the sense that the British ruling class was divided about what to do with Germany.

…

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New Adventures: Draft List For Discussion

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The big document in which I keep the schedule for upcoming stretches of the blog is rapidly getting short (by which I really just mean that it only goes out to the end of July, but by the standards of the document that is, in fact, short). And since we’re in the midst of a big section of not-television anyway, it seemed like a good time to have the talk about what novels I cover in the Virgin era. I’ve got a draft list below. But I want to get input from the rather delightful community that’s sprung up on this blog as well.

The list is already a bit larger than I’m happy about, so while suggestions for what to add are more than welcome please note that some argument as to why I should add it and, better yet, an argument for something I should cut will help the case tremendously. (Of course, so will raw populist appeal – if I get a wave of comments demanding I cover Shadowmind then I will. Weeping.)
I also want to be clear – this is not a list of the best NAs or of the most important ones. They’re the ones I think I can get the most interesting and thorough coverage of the Virgin era through. So there are choices that are there because I think I’m likely to have a fair bit to say about them, and important books like Death and Diplomacy that are left out because I think I’ll struggle to get to 2000 words. 
That said, here’s the tentative list:
Timewyrm: Genesis/Exodus (as one entry)
Timewyrm: Apocalypse/Revelation (ditto)
Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible
Cat’s Cradle: Warhead
Love and War
Transit
The Highest Science
Deceit
Lucifer Rising
White Darkness
Birthright
Blood Heat
The Left-Handed Hummingbird
Conundrum
No Future
All-Consuming Fire
Blood Harvest
First Frontier
Warlock
Set Piece
Sanctuary
Human Nature
Original Sin
Head Games
The Also People
Warchild
SLEEPY
Happy Endings
Christmas on a Rational Planet
Return of the Living Dad
Damaged Goods
So Vile a Sin
The Room With No Doors
Lungbarrow
The Dying Days
I want to also nod at some of what I’m imagining will be the obvious comments and questions. To wit:
Nightshade: Yes, it’s Gatiss’s first published piece of Doctor Who and the first NA to be written by someone who went on to write for the series. Honestly, though, I just don’t like Gatiss enough to want to cover another book of his. I fear running out of things to say about Gatiss on the basis of his four episodes. Adding a book doesn’t thrill me. That said, I remember very little about the book – is it interesting on merits beyond being by Gatiss?
The Pit: I know William Blake is in it. All I would have to say is that this is a terrible portrayal of William Blake that completely misses everything about why a Blakean Doctor Who is interesting. Having already written infamously on why a Blakean Doctor Who is interesting, I don’t see 2000 words here.
…

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Skulltopus 11: Changing States

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Before the Skulltopus series moves on to the Baker years (and beyond), I feel the need to settle accounts with the Pertwee era, particularly with Peladon.  Also, I need to clarify something about the way capitalism is portrayed and perceived in – and by – Doctor Who.

The maggots in ‘The Green Death‘ are the Pertwee era’s last gasp of the Weirdesque.  ‘Green Death’ is also the last Pertwee story to properly notice capitalism.

Admittedly, there is some riffing on ‘greed’ in ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’; and ‘Monster of Peladon’ regurgitates (in a reduced form) the political semiotics of its parent story.  However, in these stories, while class is in evidence… class struggle even!… there is no tracing it back to anything recognisable as capitalist social relations.

I’ll get to this, but first I want to loop back to address something about ‘Carnival of Monsters’ that I should’ve mentioned previously: Vorg as an entrepreneur and how this relates to the society in which he finds himself.  Firstly, Inter-Minor isn’t recognisably capitalist.  The latent revolution in ‘Carnival’ – the imminent revolt of the Functionaries that President Zarb (the panicky social democrat) is trying to placate and Kalik (the fascist) wants to crush – tracks back to race (the story does some heavy riffing on race) but stops there.  It comes close… at one point mentioning a strike… but we get no sense of particularly capitalist relations.  There are no wages, no profits, no recognisable industrial workplaces and only the barest suggestion of a market at the very end.  Vorg, like other Robert Holmes creations, can be read as an embodiment of a more likeable version of free enterprise.  Like Milo Clancy or Garron, Vorg is a private operator, a colourful chancer, an individualist, a guy on the make who seems vital and amusing when stood next to grey statist authoritarians.  But Vorg’s polari version of laissez faire is ultimately judged harmless, or even constructive.  He gets some stick for keeping “livestock” in the scope… and it’s possible to read the scope itself as a metaphor for commodity fetishism, displaying how commodification of living people involves their compartmentalisation and alienation from proper awareness of the endless rut in which they circle.  However, I think this is far more about race as an artificial construct than it is about commodification (I’ll try to address this in another post some time).  And, ultimately, Vorg’s carny capitalism seems to be a potential force for change, progress and reform in the insular, ultra-statist backwater of Inter-Minor.  He ends the story fleecing Pletrac… but the tone the story takes with this implies that a dose of Vorg is just what the Inter-Minorans need.  To the extent that capitalism appears in ‘Carnival’, it does so through the rosy lens of Vorg.

Now, back to the post-‘Green Death’ Pertwee era.

‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ is a densely political text, hugely ambivalent and needing a great deal of unpacking.  There is, as I say, some harping on about the evils of ‘greed’ and an implied anxiety about industrial pollution… but, ultimately, the story essentializes the social dystrophies of capitalism into malformations in human nature, which are (it is implied) exacerbated when people go around believing things.…

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