Eruditorum Press

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New Year’s Eve Waffling

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I realized I didn’t mention the end-date for the Boxing Day sale on ebooks. That’s January 2nd, so you’ve got two more days if you’re interested in picking up any of our books for cheap.

I posted something to this effect on Twitter a few weeks ago, but didn’t get that many responses, so figured I’d make it a New Year’s Eve waffling topic, as I’m genuinely interested in how people respond to it. My suggestion was answering these two questions in lieu of New Year’s resolutions. Certainly I think they’re important questions to have answers to right now.

1) What would your government have to do to lose its legitimacy in your eyes? (Define roughly as “you would consider its overthrow outside the normal democratic procceses to be a good thing.”)

2) At what point does violence become an acceptable tactic for resistance? (Please note that unless you are an outright pacifist the answer “never” is cowardice.)

Happy New Year, everybody. This isn’t going to be easy, but we’re all in it together.…

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Spirit Tracks: The Elder Scrolls Chapter I

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Just in time to see out the year, it’s the debut of Yet Another Eruditorum Press Podcast! A show I have tentatively decided to entitle Spirit Tracks, because reasons. I’m really excited to be able to share this new series with all of you: It’s a project I’ve been working on for a great deal of time and it’s gone through a number of different conceptual phases and incarnations. In its current form, I expect to be mainly doing commentary tracks on assorted bits of visual media, but I also hope to build a stable of regular guests and topics as the show evolves. I’ve already got a great series of co-hosts lined up for the first block of episodes, and I can’t wait to introduce you to each of them.

Tonight, for our first regular broadcast, I’m joined by friend of the blog, and my own personal friend, Ben Knaak, to talk about something that has been almost indescribably important and formative to both of our lives: The Elder Scrolls series. Because this is such a broad (and rather inaccessible) topic and Ben and I can (and have, as you are welcome to see) talk about it for hours on end, this particular episode is going to be Part 1 of at least two shows, looking at The Elder Scrolls from two different angles. In this part we take a more straightforward games journalism/video game historian approach to the series: We examine each major series entry to date in chronological order, talking about what made them historically important, what these games meant for us personally and what they contributed to the unfolding lore that makes The Elder Scrolls so utterly unique among large-scale video game franchises. Next time, we’ll go into more detail about precisely what that lore is, what ramifications it has for the act of reading narrative fiction and perhaps, expose a little of the lineage-magicka that is The Elder Scrolls’ biggest open secret.

Check out the episode here, over at the Pex Lives Libsyn site. The show clocks in at just over three and a half hours, average length for a standard radio talk show, but there are plenty of places to pause, take a break and come back to should you feel the need to do so. Also, do please note we had some issues first recording and then editing the myriad of audio files we generated: In particular, I ran into a series of rather gnarly audio sync problems. I did my best to get everything flowing together properly and, while it’s not perfect, I remain quite proud of my first official podcast editing job. Thanks in advance for listening, and hope you enjoy!

A few liner notes to keep in mind as you go through the show-Just some things I neglected to mention during the recording, or slightly misquoted to the point it made me feel like a bit of an idiot when I went back and edited it…

 

  • It was Ken Rolston, lead designer on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, who stated that he started The Elder Scrolls I: Arena “at least 20 times”, and only managed to get out of the first dungeon *once*.
…

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Faeces on Trump 4

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So, farewell 2016.  But don’t worry.  Plenty of nasty shit is going to happen next year too. 

Plenty of nasty shit went on this year, and has especially been going on since Trump was elected.  Next year won’t be better.  It’ll be worse.  The question isn’t whether it’ll be worse (it will), the question is how will it be worse? 

As many predicted, the most immediate danger is probably going to be the emboldening effect of Trump’s election upon the vast army of resentful bigots who – like bullies in every schoolyard – suddenly feel a lot braver in the shadow of the really big bully. 

Moreover, despite apparently immediately falling prey to incompetence, lack of preparedness, and a tendency to prioritize the settling of scores with Republican enemies, the Trump team has managed to make some appointments, and moot more… and they range from the routinely scary to the frankly terrifying.  One of the worst so-far, almost everyone seems to agree, is Steven Bannon, former head of crazed, ultra-reactionary internet rag Breitbart, online hub for white supremacists, anti-semites, misogynists, conspiracy theorists, and most fervid and febrile flavours of the ‘alt-right’.  Bannon himself is every bit the distasteful specimen you’d expect from such a background.  He’s another of the ‘fascists without a uniform’ who seem to be proliferating in Trump’s bloated shadow.  As an indication of what Trump plans to do with his presidency, it’s pretty unmistakeable.  He plans to surround himself with a cloud of extreme reactionary dogma, and at least sound PR notes centred on denying and denigrating progress, attacking womens’ rights, stoking white ressentiment and paranoia, feeding Islamophobia, smearing Black Lives Matter and any such movement, and relentlessly attacking anything that looks like ‘the Left’ to the kinds of people who think the new Ghostbusters film is a Marxist plot (it wasn’t, by the way… or at least, if it was, they forgot to tell me.)

However, to once again be pedantic and lay myself open to misunderstanding, I find it implausible that Bannon and Trump will be instituting a Nazi-style round-up of anyone to the Left of them into camps, or a new political police force to arrest people for questioning the regime.

What does worry me is the idea that, on the look-out for such things, people – and I include myself in that, because god knows I’m prone to missing important shit going on under my nose – miss the incremental ramping-up of what we might call ‘normal extremism’ to the point where ‘fascism’ becomes entirely obsolete, because the system simply no longer needs it.  That is what I see starting here: the beginning of a final burst of speed for normal extremism as it sees the victory line in the distance.  The contours of fascism return as normal extremism speeds up.  People notice the increase in speed and ferocity, but fascism as we have known it fails to appear.  But before anyone notices, every function fascism has historically played in the service of capitalism – the burying of the left, the smothering of resistance, the disempowering of the working class, the slavish servicing of the needs of big capital, the reinforcement of the hierarchies of race and gender that capitalism finds so conducive to stability, the ruthless imperialism in the service of domestic capital, etc – can be achieved without fascism.…

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Myriad Universes: The Deceivers Part 2

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Vaka Rangi Volume 1 is currently 33% off on Smashwords as part of the Eruditorum Press Holiday eBook sale with the coupon RT654, now through January 2, 2017. If you’ve got an eBook reader, are a fan of Vaka Rangi’s take on Star Trek and haven’t yet checked out the first volume of the revised version of this project, now might be a good time to do that!

 

The Geordis introduce themselves and exposit to one another. Our Geordi begins by recapping the events of last issue (or at least the parts of it pertaining to his and Deanna’s subplot), while Bearded Geordi claims his team was on an urgent mission to intercept a rogue star that had entered the Beta Argotha system on a collision course with its host sun. In their universe (because of course they’re from an alternate universe: Why on Earth would you ever suspect otherwise?), Beta Argotha has six planets instead of the five in our version of it, and the sixth is an inhabited world with no spaceflight capabilities and no way to divert the rogue star. On top of that, Bearded Geordi’s Enterprise had only *discovered* the Beta Argotha system a few days prior to the events of the story, thus giving them next to no time to react.

There is some technobabble explanations for why Bearded Geordi and his crew couldn’t have delivered the necessary payloads via remote control, or contacted their Enterprise for help after they crash-landed, and Bearded Geordi angsts that by the time his ship figures out what happens it will be too late. Unless, he says, our Geordi lets him use our Runabout (which wasn’t as badly damaged as the alternate Yutcan) to try and finish the job. In fact, he doesn’t say, or even ask: He demands our crew turn over the Yutcan, arguing that the mission must be completed no matter what. Geordi, however, flatly refuses.

Back on the Enterprise (that is, *our* Enterprise), Captain Picard has brought up Gul Erak’s charges with Tavorok. The fugitive Romulan naturally (and flippantly) denies them, says he has no idea what the Cardassians are talking about when they say he “committed a heinous crime against them”, and reasserts his claim that what the Cardassians want is access to the dilithium-eating virus he had been working on while in the employ of the Romulan Star Empire. Tavorok is thus certain that the Cardassians are lying, though Captain Picard remains guarded. At that moment, Commander Riker calls him: Another ship has just turned up-A Romulan Warbird. The Enterprise hails the Romulans and, after exchanging the usual pleasantries about the dangers of trespassing in the Neutral Zone, the Romulans request the Enterprise extradite a known criminal currently in their jurisdiction: Namely, Tavorok.

The Romulan Commander says Tavorok is a murderer, though denies Gul Erak’s claim that he has committed some atrocity against the Cardassian people. According to the Romulans, Tavorok was indeed a scientist “at the forefront of a number of scientific breakthroughs”, though he dismisses the fugitive’s story that his work had anything to do with creating an artificial dilithium virus to be used as a superweapon to cripple Federation starships.…

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The Return of Doctor Mysterio Review

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Fluff, but in a generally “good Christmas fun” way. Those looking for any sorts of tea leaves regarding Series 10 are essentially out of luck save for the trailer, but those interested in having an entertaining hour of television watching on Christmas were well served, and are surely the more important audience.

Obviously the tagline is “Doctor Who does superheroes,” which is an enticing approach that the series really hadn’t tackled before. And yet there’s something strangely out of sync about it. You’d expect something in which the show riffs on the Marvel movie formula. Instead we get Superman. And (unsurprisingly, really) not the cynical Snyder Superman, but an utterly unreconstructed Superman rooted in old-fashioned sentiments like “the real hero is Clark Kent” that would never pass muster at today’s DC.

In hindsight, strange as this ends up coming off, it’s hardly unexpected. Of course Moffat, who hasn’t exactly done anything that signals him as a big comics guy, was going to go for a straight-up Clark Kent-Lois Lane-Superman love triangle. And all things being equal, he does a pretty good job with it. This isn’t exactly a surprise, given how squarely up his alley it is, and he doesn’t do a particularly surprising or innovative job with it, but again, the goals for a Christmas episode are different, and an entertaining and amusing formula well-executed is what the job calls for. And it’s not as though there aren’t small pleasures. Grant’s status as a nanny and Lucy’s interrogation are enough to give this its own distinct flavor, and are charming touches in their own right. On the whole, it’s sweet – a take on superheroes that’s not particularly fresh, but is still out of pace with the rest of the badly oversignified genre that it’s still refreshing.

The biggest problem is simply lack of space. Everything goes fairly well until the Doctor and Grant’s storylines diverge, and even the dinner scene is good farcy fun, but once the story starts working its way towards resolution it becomes obvious how poorly it fits into its hour-long container. It’s safe to say the plot isn’t really the focus here, and that’s fine, but equally, everything after the Doctor makes it to the spaceship hits that weird note where so much is happening that it feels like nothing is.

It’s also a structure that ends up reducing the Doctor to something of a bystander in his own show. This is firmly an episode about Grant and Lucy. The Doctor gets some fun larking about in the cold open, and there are some decent lines scattered throughout (the Pokemon one, most notably), but this is Doctor Who in its “excuse to do something else” mode, which when the show’s been off the air for a year, is more than slightly frustrating.

Which makes it, in the end, all the more puzzling that the episode opts to end on the note of “the Doctor’s been gone for a long time being with River Song and now he’s very sad.”…

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The Annual Boxing Day Sale

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EDIT: Now with an added sale on Vaka Rangi Volume 1.

Do people still get e-readers for Christmas? Well whether or not they do, it’s time for Eruditorum Press’s annual post-Christmas sale, in which I merrily slash prices on a bunch of books for a week. As always, sale books are distributed via Smashwords – just click the links below and use the coupon codes provided at checkout to get the books at the listed prices.

First we’ve got the marquee sale – a 20% discount on Eruditorum Press’s brand new release, The Last War in Albion Volume 1 to take the price down to $3.99. That’s available with the coupon FV43Q, and has a download link at the end to get the version with added images free of charge. 

Second of all, we’ve taken $4 off on both Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, my collection on science fiction and fascism in 2015, and A Golden Thread, my history of Wonder Woman. 

Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: $2.99, coupon code HB53S

A Golden Thread: $3.99, coupon code JU28D

Finally, we’ve got all six volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum at $2.99 each. 

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 1 (William Hartnell): Coupon code ER93J

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 2 (Patrick Troughton): Coupon code CH66F

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 3 (Jon Pertwee): Coupon code WD76X

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 4 (Tom Baker Part 1): Coupon code BX77K

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 5 (Tom Baker Part 2): Coupon code KP89K

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 6 (Peter Davison & Colin Baker): Coupon code HX33W

Enjoy, and thanks again for another year of support. Eruditorum Press wouldn’t be what it is without you. Which, arguably, you should feel bad about. But I certainly don’t. 

Should have a Doctor Mysterio review up some time tomorrow. 

EDIT: Josh has also kindly thrown Vaka Rangi Volume 1 up for sale at 33% off, via the coupon code RT65R.…

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Boxing Day Q&A

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Happy Boxing Day to all. Hope your hangovers aren’t too bad. I’ll have the annual ebook sale up around noon. 

Andrew Morton: I very much enjoyed A Golden Thread. Is there any other superhero you think you could do a similar book for?

I’m sure there’s loads of superheroes you could do a survey history of. Anyone who’s been around for 50+ years ought to work at this point. But I don’t think I’d find much interest in ones who don’t have a sort of broken utopianism at their heart. And I’d probably want to do Marvel instead of DC if I were to ever do it again, just so I don’t have to retrace much.

The obvious place this all points is the X-Men, and there were moments when I considered that project, but I think it’s pretty clear at this point that the world does not actually need X-Men criticism above and beyond Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men. Which I haven’t actually listened to because I don’t really listen to podcasts, but which I just sort of assume is as awesome and comprehensive as everyone says. Which is fine – I’m pretty unlikely to take on a second big comics project while still writing Last War in Albion, and that’s clearly not ending any time soon.

 

Artur Nowrot: Reading TARDIS Eruditorum, I unexpectedly found out that we both studied abroad at the University of East Anglia, so: what did you think of Norwich? (and UEA’s brutalist campus?)

UEA was my first real experience to brutalism, entirely outside any sort of cultural context for why anyone would do that, so I remember finding the buildings very striking, and being intrigued by the way you could cross campus entirely on elevated cement walkways, but also finding something distinctly depressing about the entire place. Norwich wasn’t much better – I spent a lot of time going to the movies and generally resenting the difficulty of doing anything other than eating out when you had to take a mildly lengthy bus journey to and from the grocery store. Although I have fond memories of wandering out around the campus fields at night. There’s probably some early foundational experiences of my magical life in there.

 

Evan Forman: You tweeted recently that your leftism will be full of gothic horrors or it will be bullshit. Leftism and Weird horrors?

The weird and hauntological/gothic are, of course, if not interchangeable at least substitutable with effort, as China Mieville points out. So yes, leftist weird horrors are absolutely a thing. But I feel like the hauntological is more on point at the current moment. The weird apocalypse is self-evident, emerging naturally out of any serious thought about climate change. So I don’t think we need weird horrors per se. Whereas gothic horrors seem currently underserved. On a very basic level, one of the things Trumpism is about is repression. It seeks to repress specific, easily identified perspectives and narratives. As a matter of basic, inevitable reality, these perspectives are going to reassert themselves.…

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Myriad Universes: The Deceivers Part 1: A Matter of Conscience…

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The Enterprise is on routine patrol of the Romulan Neutral Zone. Perhaps that should be left to speak for itself.

Ironically enough, while making small talk with Commander Riker, Captain Picard says that the Romulans have been “rather well-behaved lately”. Just then, Geordi calls up with a request: Since it’s expected this patrol mission will be rather uneventful, he’d like to take a small science team to investigate Beta Argotha One, which the Enterprise‘s route will take it in very close proximity to. Beta Argotha One is known as “Darwin’s World”, because the species on that world evolve at an incredibly accelerated rate such that every time it’s researched, it’s effectively a whole new planet. Since it hasn’t been surveyed in the past year, it is thus likely unrecognisable from the last time Starfleet checked it out. Captain Picard grants his request, and has Geordi prepare the Runabout USS Yutcan for launch.

As Geordi gets his ship ready, he’s paid a visti by Deanna Troi. Her father participated in the very first survey of Beta Argotha One, and she was fascinated by the stories he would tell her about it as a little girl. If it’s not too much trouble, Deanna would like to accompany Geordi as a member of his team, but she doesn’t even have to ask: Geordi tells her she’s more than welcome, and signs her up then and there. And with that, they’re off: Aside from Deanna, Geordi is joined by a rookie Benzite science officer named Haspan, and two grizzled old command officers and best friends named Smithers and Gilette. As the two old timers rib each other to the young Benzite’s utter confusion, the Yutcan blasts off.

Back on the Enterprise, Worf reports that he’s detected another ship on their side of the Neutral Zone and, funnily enough, it appears to be Cardassian! The bridge crew conclude it’s a transport of some kind, and that it’s been through a rough time. There’s only one survivor, so Captain Picard has the transporter chief lock on and has Doctor Crusher meet them on the pad. Though it’s a bit tricky, the chief gets the survivor aboard and, to everyone’s astonishment, he turns out to be a Romulan. Doctor Crusher looks the man over in sickbay and reports his condition to Captain Picard: He’s doing rather well, given the condition he was found in. Though Bev wants to look over him a bit longer, the Romulan insists to speak to Captain Picard as soon as possible.

The Romulan tells Captain Picard his name is Tavorok, and, until recently he had been one of the Romulan Star Empire’s top research scientists. He had been working on a top secret project that, had it been completed, would have toppled the balance of power in the galaxy permanently: A project to develop an artificial virus of sorts that would eat away at dilithium crystals. The idea would be that the virus, which could be effective in very small quantities and was completely undetectable by Starfleet bio-filters, would be discreetly smuggled aboard Federation starships, thus fairly instantaneously blasting them 400 years back into the pre-warp stone age.…

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