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Fear Makes Companions Of Us All (Listen)

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ur handwriting sux 

It’s September 13th, 2014. Literally; the bulk of this post is a lightly revised version of my initial review, which I cheekily declared would be its TARDIS Eruditorum entry without really considering how I’d feel about that three and a half years later. (Answer: I have some regrets, mostly about providing a satisfying experience for my Patrons, but I figured out how to address them.) Lilly Wood and Robin Schulz are at number one with “Prayer in C,” while Iggy Azalea, Sam Smith, and Script also chart. In news, Oscar Pistorius has been found guilty of culpable homicide, the US has been finding a new way to announce that it’s at war with ISIS, and it’s down to the wire with the Scottish Independence referendum.

While on television, Doctor Who does Listen. At the moment, and I’m writing this paragraph about ninety minutes after transmission, this seems set at near universal praise. 85% rating it an 8-10 on GallifreyBase, with a staggering 42.6% giving it a ten out of ten. The immediate post-episode reviews all seem to love it. Blog and Twitter comments are raving, although people who tend not to like Moffat’s stuff seem to really hate this one. Which is to say, ladies and gentlemen, that we seem to have an instant classic. I’ve watched this twice now. And it deserves that and more. It is undoubtedly a “big Steven Moffat statement” of an episode, conceived on the level of The Day of the Doctor or Deep Breath. It is ostentatious and meticulous in the way that Steven Moffat at his best is. This is a writer who knows that he is at the height of his professional career and is cackling madly about it. It is also, unmistakably, him writing the cheap and disposable one with no budget – and doing it, by his own admission, because he wanted to “prove he could still write.” 

He’s used the production schedule of Doctor Who very slyly here, doing a story that a twelve episode season requires, as a piece of BBC-produced drama, if it’s going to throw a whacking big CGI dinosaur into the opening three seconds of the season premiere for no reason other than to set up some jokes and a death scene for the Doctor to start investigating a mystery. It’s just that he then wrote it like it was The Big Finale. It draws all its structural tricks from Nick Hurran and Ben Wheatley, and shares its approach with Time of the Doctor and His Last Vow. Except there’s no actual monster – it’s all creepy edits and lighting changes. It could be the Silence. Maybe it is, and we’ll pay that off in some future episode, because this is only episode four and Doctor Who has plenty of surprises left in its back two-thirds. We’re still in the “introduce Peter Capaldi with episodes by the old hands” phase of things. The actual new writers and experimental phase comes later.…

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Review: The Impossible Has Happened: The Life and Work of Gene Roddenberry, Creator of Star Trek

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When I was writing my first volume of Vaka Rangi, I was faced with a dilemma on how to frame the book. I have little to no personal or nostalgic connection to the original Star Trek or its animated sequel so my episode-to-episode reactions were by definition going to be mostly as I saw it. But I still wanted to come up with something unique to say about this most important period of Star Trek history, so I initially decided to structure the book around telling as “real” a story about the franchise’s formative years as I could, with a careful eye towards historical mythbusting in general, in particular how it pertained to the shows creator, the ever-mythologized Gene Roddenberry. I soon realised, however, that this was a task far too massive for me to undertake given the scope of the project I had cast, and quickly found myself intimidated and overwhelmed by the sheer scale of conflicting stories and seemingly deliberate disinformation surrounding Roddenberry and Star Trek. While I still hoped to convey a general idea for what Star Trek actually was and was envisioned as being (and I do feel, and hope, I managed some degree of success), the behind-the-scenes stuff became far too complicated a topic for me to tackle with any aspirations of genuine comprehension.

Thankfully, the task was not too overwhelming and intimidating for Lance Parkin, whose new book The Impossible Has Happened: The Life and Work of Gene Roddenberry, Creator of Star Trek, is an unauthorized biography of the man in question that sets about clearing the air and getting at the heart of what sort of a man Gene Roddenberry really was, and how he both shaped and was himself in turn shaped by what Star Trek came to represent. Readers of this blog will no doubt know Parkin for his work with Doctor Who, but for those who might not know he’s also an accomplished writer and chronicler in other genre fiction circles. He’s previously written a similar biography of Alan Moore, as well as series guides for both Alias, His Dark Materials and the *entire* Star Trek franchise up through the third season of Enterprise. He’s also contributed to Star Trek Magazine and written a number of interesting critical analyses of the series independently, so he’s well poised to take on the task of retelling the life story of the man who perpetually seems to be at the centre of it all.

The problem, as Parkin himself outlines it in his Introduction, is that there have traditionally only been two ways of looking at Gene Roddenberry. Either he was a prophetic visionary messiah who dreamed a wonderful dream of a utopian future who fought and died for the ideals it stood for, or he was a lying, cheating, manipulative scumbag and self-promoter who saw that a passionate group of fans had taken a throwaway idea of his and turned it into something special and then set about revising history and making everything about himself so that he could cash in on it.…

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All the Birds in the Sky Review

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All the Birds in the Sky can be pre-ordered on Amazon here. Doesn’t look like UK pre-orders are available yet, which is sad.  The first four chapters are online, starting with chapter one here.

So, with the eligibility period for the 2017 Hugos just four months from opening, I think it’s time to talk about the clear frontrunner for Best Novel, which is Charlie Jane Anders’s All The Birds in the Sky.

In some ways, it’s tricky to articulate just why this book feels so fresh and necessary. Its component parts, after all, are aggressively familiar. The “there’s a science side and a magic side and they have a bit of a rivalry” setup is a standard mash-up post-Harry Potter, and the overtly eschatological bent is pretty standard issue as well. There are, one suspects, dozens of really lousy novels with the setup “a witch and a boy genius team up to avert the apocalypse.” The thing is, All the Birds in the Sky is not any of those novels. Instead, it’s the debut novel of Charlie Jane Anders.
Anders has been buzzing about the short story market for a few years now. She won a totally deserved Hugo in 2012 for “Six Months, Three Days,” a novelette whose first sentence serves as a perfectly adequate description: “The man who can see the future has a date with the woman who can see many possible futures.” And if there’s only one thing you criticize the Sad Puppies movement for, it should probably be that they’re a bunch of fascist shitheads, but if you go for two the fact that they kept “As Good As New” from the 2015 ballot because they preferred to nominate John C. Wright is absolutely the correct second choice. It’s a post-apocalyptic story in which the last survivor (a playwright and pre-med student) finds a genie’s bottle with an ornery ex-theater critic and goes about figuring out how to save the world and get it right this time. 
In both cases, the appeal is similar – the stories take hoary old chestnuts of genre fiction and put them into the material reality of the present day. It’s sci-fi/fantasy that’s at once firmly rooted in the history of the genre and both from and about a world where young women’s social lives are organized via a device in their pockets that’s in many regards far more advanced than a Tricorder. 
And that’s what’s fresh and vibrant about All the Birds in the Sky. Its standard genre tropes are well-chosen tools for doing a story that’s about growing up, realizing who you are in the world, and then, far more importantly, realizing that the entire narrative of growing up and realizing who you are in the world is complete and utter bullshit and that the world is a terrifying and confusing place comprised entirely of people who are trying desperately to fool each other into thinking they aren’t total fuckups. The magic/science opposition is there to be a binary opposition, with all the useful truth and false dichotomies implied.
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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Episode 3: The Education of a Magician

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There we go.
It’s perhaps ironic that, having spent two episodes building up the Jonathan Strange/Mr. Norrell dualism that’s the core engine of the series, it’s the act of splitting them back up that drives it to its most emphatic heights thus far. 
In strict dramatic terms, this works because of Lady Pole. Even though Strange and Norrell are in different locations and pursuing entirely divergent interests through most of the episode, the dynamic of Arabella trying to uncover what is wrong with Lady Pole and Norrell working to keep the matter secret links events up well. It’s in some ways surprising this works so well – the plots really are quite separate in terms of what happens, with Strange entirely insulated from events in London, and vice versa. 
The linking moment is instead entirely symbolic – Strange being pushed to attempt ancient magic, and learns of the ways in which this magic is tacitly dangerous. On rawly symbolic terms, of course, it’s significant that Strange’s spell is a lesser version of Norrell’s original sin – both spells involve undoing death. 
But there’s curious nuance underlying this – up to this point the danger of ancient magic had largely been expressed in terms of the Gentleman as an essentially Faustian danger. Old magic involved trafficking with faeries, and faeries are dangerous and untrustworthy. But Strange’s spell to make the dead speak does require any such deals. And yet it is nevertheless clearly dangerous magic, with Strange unable to get the dead to stop speaking again. The danger, in other words, is not merely something that can be tied to the peculiarities of the Gentleman, but rather to something more primal within that sort of magic, having to do with the way in which the magic involves traversing between worlds. 
This is, obviously, unsurprising ground for a story of British fantasy. It seems all but inevitable that we’ll be getting an actual portal to faerie before this tale is done. And it’s striking that Strange’s horror at the consequences of his magic is fundamentally a horror of the uncanny – the fact that the consequences of his magic are monstrous.
The key cut, then, is from Strange cowering from the speaking dead to Norrell’s appalling callousness as he visits Lady Pole, in which he bluntly informs her that she is an innocent casualty of war and of the development of magic, and simply informs her that she will suffer for seventy-five years without respite. The cruelty of it, especially coming after nearly two straight episodes of consciously building sympathy for Lady Pole’s plight, is genuinely shocking, and it is only Marsan’s performance, which emphasizes the extent to which Norrell is aware of how monstrous his actions are, that keeps him from simply becoming an outright villain of the piece. (Note also, of course, the cut back to Strange, unable to extricate himself from the consequences of his own spell.)
The sense of ancient magic as an object of uncanny horror finds resonance in the scenes featuring the Gentleman himself, which begin to make textually explicit the way in which his character is drawn to the marginalized members of society.
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Comics Reviews (June 24, 2015)

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Please be sure to stop by tomorrow for a very important post that will have some severe repercussions within the Doctor Who fan community.

From worst to best of what I paid for.

E is for Extinction #1

You can’t go home again, and certainly can’t by just hiring some Grant Morrison collaborators and hoping for the best. Perfectly adequate, I guess, if all you want is nostalgia. But you know what’s better? The Grant Morrison run on New X-Men.

Crossed Badlands #79 (aka Homo Tortor #5)

Not a bad comic, to be clear, but one that’s spinning its wheels a bit. There’s no new concepts to introduce, it would seem, but plot to resolve before the end, resulting in an issue that’s functional. I suspect coming out at the same time as the other “Crossed in a different time period” book is not doing Gillen any favors here, not least because the other one is written by Alan Moore. Really, one kind of has to pity Gillen; he must have assumed, starting his career when he did, that “having your book come out alongside an Alan Moore book with which it is inevitably going to be compared” was a fate he’d be spared.

Batgirl #41

Competent, fun, but man, Convergence killed the momentum here. I like the dynamic introduced for Batgirl by Gordon becoming Batman, though. That should be a fun story. And the scene where Gordon reveals his double identity to his daughter is delightful. Basically, a book I look forward to being excited about again.

Daredevil #16

Waid makes a slick turn into his final arc, setting up a suitably epic Daredevil/Kingpin showdown that doesn’t feel like any we’ve seen before. I admit, I’ve not sat down and watched the Netflix series, but I really do hope that Waid’s approach here reinvigorates the character in the long-term and gets him away from the banal and repetitive noir take that he’s been stuck in for decades.

Where Monsters Dwell #2

Garth Ennis at his hilarious best. This is not a complex or subtle comic, just a very funny one with lots of monsters and a ruthlessly mocked protagonist. The final twist caused the sort of intensive laughter that gets you weird looks at Starbucks.

Loki: Agent of Asgard #15

Pleasantly, this is increasingly obviously just ignoring the actual Secret Wars aspects of the plot and just sort of doing a side Norse apocalypse in which they react to Hickman’s. Verity’s life story is delightful in a classic Al Ewing way, and the cliffhanger’s solid. Going to enjoy the final lap here, I think.

The Infinity Gauntlet #2

Very glad I forgot to drop this, as this is absolutely wonderful now that it’s successfully trained the audience in how to read it. Ridiculously inaccurate cover, or, at least, one that ignores what most of the comic is. But family Nova Corps is a brilliant take. Is Zigzag the best new character of 2015? I think she is.

Annihilator #6

This frustrated me through much of its run, and I suspect that Morrison could have made it work better in four issues than six, but no matter; the finale is a triumph.…

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Comics Reviews (June 17th, 2015)

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Old Man Logan #2

Well this went off the rails fast. After a first issue long on potential, this is a chain of scenes, all of them interrupted before anything interesting is allowed to happen so that Logan can be dragged to some new potentially interesting scene that won’t play out. Sorrentino’s art is very pretty, but it’s unclear as all hell, and Bendis is in his “let the artist do most of the storytelling” mode, a mode he puzzlingly only ever takes when working with abstract and hard to follow artists, as opposed to when he’s working with Bagley or someone who draws pages so that you can tell what’s going on.

Blackcross #4

A rarity: a Warren Ellis book I’m just not digging at all. None of the characters stand out to me, I don’t know the superheroes being referenced, and this is mostly vague implications in search of a plot for me. Not only do I not remember what’s going on month to month, in the three hours between reading it and writing this review I’ve already forgotten most of this book.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #13

The plot advances, and there are some very good Eleventh Doctor monologues, but this is a resolutely average issue of this comic. Still, we’re into the “I actually enjoyed reading this” segment of the list.

Stumptown #6

The start of a new arc. I’m not entirely sold – the start was awkward as we have to sit through an explanation of civet coffee, which is on the one hand something that probably does need exposition and on the other feels a bit cliche and overdone. Still, Stumptown is a PI book, not a mystery book, so the setup isn’t the interesting part, and this has enough funny bits to be an entertaining way to spend five minutes, albeit a bit steep at $3.99. But what comics aren’t these days.

Thors #1

A Thor cop book. Aaron proves good at writing this, which is nice – he’s hit and miss for me, to say the least. But the procedural suits him, apparently, and the sheer absurdity of it wrings out a smile at least one every few pages. Throg, in particular, is a delight to see. And with the last page, it even gives a sense that this will matter when we get back to the main Thor book. The only pity is having to go back to that book eventually, really.

Ms. Marvel #16

Wilson makes the smart decision to keep this focused on Kamala and on her plots, picking up heavily from the last arc. The final page is promising. It is in places predictable, but this book always has been – its charm is its ability to find new spins and perspectives on things. Such as a school/refugee center defended by weird turquoise monster things created by Loki. (“To be pwned by Loki is a great honor,” one says, in the week’s best line.) As I said, I have low hopes for these Last Days books, but this is quite good.…

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Comic Reviews (June 10th, 2015)

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Hello all; as of this week, my comics reviews are being crossposted to ComicMix, so I suppose I should tack a paragraph introducing myself onto the start. I’m Phil Sandifer, a blogger covering various forms of pop culture and media with my own idiosyncratic long-form analysis. I’m responsible for TARDIS Eruditorum, my now-concluded history of Doctor Who, and the still-ongoing The Last War in Albion, a sprawling history of the most important magical war of the last century, the rivalry between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.

Everything reviewed is something I willingly paid my own money for, whether wisely or foolishly, organized from my least favorite to my favorite of the week.
Weirdworld #1

Snagged because it seemed to be taking the Secret Wars premise to an interesting extreme. But while this seems a functional mash-up of Frazetta-esque pulp action and superheroes, nothing in the first issue seems to rise above the basic “nobody’s done a big Frazetta homage lately” appeal, and the whole thing ends up leaving me a bit cold. I’m sure this scratches someone’s itch, but it doesn’t scratch any itches of mine, or at least, doesn’t provide $3.99 worth of scratch.
Gotham Academy #7

Two months away from this book have, as I feared they might, not really added much to its luster for me. I still like the aesthetic a lot conceptually, but nothing has forged any attachment to the actual characters for me. It’s something I find myself hoping other people are enjoying a lot, because it’s a book I want to exist in the world, but not something whose magic is quite firing for me.
Silver Surfer #12

This feels like a book out of another era; one where Secret Wars #5 was still coming out in July, for instance, at least based on the ads. This isn’t a book that has ever been inclined towards the subtle exploration of a premise, and indeed the content of this one is telegraphed ages in advance. The big moment, the Surfer and Dawn snogging, is compelling in its own right, but one of those things where Secret Wars kind of cannibalizes its impact; one assumes the Slott/Allred Surfer is not going to be surviving into All-New All-Different Marvel, which means that Dawn Greenwood is probably a fascinating implication about to be thrown aside in a quasi-reboot. Which leaves this feeling very disposable.
Spider-Gwen #5

The alternate universe nature of this book is tough; it’s never as strong when it’s fleshing out the AU. The appeal is Gwen Stacy as Spider-Woman, and the book falters when it’s outside of her head. Which it is for a lot of this issue. I should love the sort of WicDiv “superpowered pop star punchdown” feel of this, and I do, but there’s too much of familiar Marvel for it to stand on its own feet and too much difference from the usual concepts of “Matt Murdock” and “Felicia Hardy” for their associations to quite carry it through, which is leaving the central appeal of this book lacking for me.
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Furiosa and Furiosa

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Well, it’s basically a two-hour chase sequence with a few pauses… but yes, it’s amazingly well done.  Old hand George Miller takes advantage of all the modern techniques – hyper-fast editing, CGI, etc – but he uses these things for storytelling purposes, not to show us how fast he can edit or how good his CGI is.  He never sacrifices the clarity of the visual storytelling.  The production and costume design has a gnarly, knotty detail and complexity.  The brazenly ironic and stylised salvagepunk visual world of the movie makes it like an 80s auteur film made on a vast budget and with modern techniques.  The result is jaw-droppingly good.  It instantly makes just about every other blockbuster movie of recent years look quaint and windy.  Mad Max: Fury Road makes Avengers: Age of Ultron look like a Cameron Crowe movie in which the assembled twee, privileged assholes play with action figures and make “boom” noises.

I’m not going to go into much political detail.  I’ve junked most of what I’ve been trying to write about this movie, largely because of this article at Jacobin, which says everything I was groping for, and lots more of interest.  It’s really good… though there are bits where I think the writer, Stephen Maher, goes too far.  (There are also a few snafus which suggest he didn’t quite pay enough attention to the plot.)

Read it?  Okay, then here are some caveats:

I don’t think Maher gets it exactly right.  The film certainly does buy into an orientalist narrative about the supposed sins of pre-modern and/or anti-modern civilisation, and yes this is inevitably tinged with Huntingdonism and Islamophobia.  In the film, patriarchy comes complete with a built-in death-cult, tribal masks, and a harem of the type sheiks always have in racist, orientalist Western fantasies.  But I think the film is less a defence of ‘our’ modernity in the face of such things and more an attempt to implicate modernity in the same supposed sins.  The death cult of the suicide bombers uses Northern European religious ideas (Valhalla), urges itself on with thrash metal music, and Joe decorates himself with Western-style military medals, etc.  Plus the Mad Max movies’ usual anxious appropriation of the camp and performative hyper-masculinity of biker culture.  It’s like the film is saying “see how awful we’d become if we degenerated in the face of a civilisational crisis… it’s buried inside our civilisation, waiting to creep back out… the seeds are already there, around us”.  This is all problematic in itself, but maybe not quite as bad as the review above makes it sound.

It’s still an awesomely entertaining movie (reason enough to see it and enjoy it) with reasonably good gender politics.

Much of a meal has been made of the gender politics of the film, usually through the medium of stories about assorted reactionary bumwipes crying about how it’s a feminist lecture instead of a manly movie filled with manly masculine manliness.  Firstly, this is crap.  Max gets to be incredibly masculine in all those stereotypical ways. …

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Comics Reviews (May 13th, 2015)

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From worst to best of what I bought.

Thor #8

The odds that this was going to win me back in the final issue were low, and sure enough, it didn’t. It’s as I complained with #7 – if it’s Solomon, it’s obvious, if it’s not, it’s a cheap diversion. And by building it up as a mystery, Aaron opens space to not like the outcome. Which I don’t. At least, not compared to Solomon. Ros Solomon as Thor would be more interesting than Jane Foster is Thor, but being Thor makes her breast cancer worse, a setup that is mainly notable for making her expiration date and the restoration of Man-Thor inevitable. And I still don’t understand why anyone thought a mystery arc was the way to go. What was this supposed to accomplish? Why is this better than just debuting the concept eight months ago would have been? All in all, a disaster – will probably buy Thors, but can’t see myself returning post-Secret Wars.

Saga #28

Man, I’m cooling hard on this book. It’s good and I see all the very smart stuff it does and… I just don’t remember the characters or plot well enough month to month. Still, this is in with Chew and the other books of the Sunk Cost Fallacy club, and maybe one day I’ll dig up all the floppies and reread it and enjoy it. Or, more likely, I’ll torrent it even though I own it.

Darth Vader #5

That this is third from bottom is a mark of how good a week this is. I’m not entirely convinced of the plot twist, which, for me, runs into the axiomatic problem of a licensed comic like this, namely that it’s introducing better ideas than anything in the source material, but it’s going to have to put all of them back in the box at story’s end. But equally, it’s an interesting and cool plot twist, and I’m perfectly happy to follow it.

Blackcross #3

As with many an Ellis book, this was a slow burn, and it finally gets to where it’s doing interesting things. Still far from my favorite Ellis work, but at least I’m not just buying it out of obligation now.

Angela: Asgard’s Assassin #6

Well this certainly kicked off very nicely. Love the final twist, and yeah, Gillen and Bennett have built Angela into a usable and interesting Marvel character, which is no small feat. Curious where this will go as Gillen recedes into the background and Bennett takes over, but definitely on for the ride.

Ms. Marvel #15

Exactly what this book is for, through and through. Really enjoyed this arc when all was said and done. Look forward to the next.

Secret Wars #2

OK, I’m won over, at least for now. The basic operating principles of Battleworld are clever, and this strikes an ideal balance between “it’s an alternate world” and “it’s the Marvel Universe. Good high concept stuff, and Hickman’s philosophical ramblings work well in this context.…

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