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“Truthfully”: Thine Own Self

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Sometimes I wonder why I do this.

This is another episode I have vivid, fond memories of that left me sorely disappointed. It’s not that I think “Thine Own Self” is particularly bad, and in fact I’d go so far as to say there’s a lot to recommend in it. But it couldn’t live up to the position it had in my memory, and there’s some writing decisions made in it I’m pretty vehemently opposed to. I mean, just look who wrote the teleplay: I should have known. A lot of this season has surprised me by how little enthusiasm I can muster for it, especially on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where we’re at the tail end of a stretch of episodes that are all peerlessly iconic to me, but which I wound up writing some fairly mixed things about after I sat down with them again this time. This should be my absolute favourite era, and while there’s a lot of it I do like, there’s just as much, if not more, that I’m finding myself at more of a distance from then I ever expected.

I suppose in some ways this episode is a perfect microcosm for my entire experience with Star Trek: The Next Generation over the course of my journey with Vaka Rangi. It’s not an episode I recall watching during the original run, but I do distinctly remember seeing screenshots from it in calendars, guide books, magazines and that sort of thing. I saw it for the first time (that I can place) as part of TNN’s reruns in the early 2000s and thought it was utterly beautiful. I remember the subplot about Deanna Troi taking the Bridge Officer Exam and getting promoted beat-by-beat, but it’s Data’s story on Barkon IV that was the most iconic. The makeup work on the Barkonians is some of the most striking in the series, and shots of them, alongside Data in rustic mountain clothes with part of his circuitry exposed, are among the defining moments of this whole year.

Some of the writing here is nothing short of poetic (the title, for one): Talur’s speculation that the amnesiac Data is an “Ice-Man” from the “Vellorian Mountains” whose superhuman strength is an inherited trait amongst his people to help them “fight off the wild beasts that roam the mountains” is an absolutely spellbinding bit of worldbuilding. It’s evocative and haunting in a way Star Trek hardly ever is, and it captures the imagination in a way typically reserved for, let’s face it, superior genre fiction franchises. “Thine Own Self” also boasts one of the single greatest lines in the entire series, if not the franchise, bar none: When Gia comments that her mother passed away, she tells Data “Father said she went to a beautiful place, where everything is peaceful and everyone loves each other and no one ever gets sick.…

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Promises of Lace That Rend Us in Shadows After Lust Evaporates (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Thirty: The Turning Point)

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Figure 950: Ozymandias rejoices at saving the world. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, from Watchmen #12, 1987)

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Part of what made Watchmen so successful was that its sense of apocalyptic grandeur was a good fit for the mid-80s. And speaking of apocalyptic grandeur, there seems to be this weird sense that the chapter is progressing towards some sudden and decisive turning point. Wonder what that’s about.

But the most chilling part of Moore’s labyrinth is not the sense of doom that hangs over it. Rather, it is his exploration of what, at first glance, would seem to be an innocuous, even optimistic line of thought. A core element of superhero stories, after all, is that superheroes save people. So how might that apply to the nuclear eschaton looming over Watchmen? To pinch a framing from Grant Morrison, if the bomb is an idea, what better idea could superheroes possibly offer to counter them? But far from offering any sort of hopeful, utopian vision of superheroes averting atomic crisis (that hardly being an original notion, after all), Moore, thinking about this question, came up with a genuinely chilling answer. He did not take the obvious route that he would eventually explore in Miracleman of simply having the superheroes destroy all the nuclear stockpiles by force. Instead he comes up with a far more cracked and strange idea – Ozymandias’s mad scheme to slaughter the population of New York.

Figure 951: Ozymandias’s television viewing is explicitly presented as using the same nine-panel grid as the comic itself. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, from Watchmen #11, 1987)

It is, famously, an absolutelybonkers plot involving faking an alien invasion with a giant squid monster designed by a committee
of artists and scientists that would be teleported to New York with a
 malfunctioning teleporter that
 would kill it on arrival, releasing a massive psychic shockwave that would kill everyone. But beneath the basic ridiculousness is a dark and ominous vision in the form of Ozymandias’s animating obsession. There is something fundamentally unsettling about the image of a man who can intuit the pulse of the world deciding to take action to change it. Especially in the context of Watchmen, where Ozymandias’s Burroughs-inspired television watching is naturally allied with the way the world works. And Ozymandias’s plan, ridiculous as it is, hinges on a grim structural joke. The world of Watchmen consists largely of superheroes – Moloch is the only corresponding supervillain to appear, and the discussions of “costumed criminals” in the Under the Hood excerpts make it clear that these are fairly generic criminals who dress up in the same way that Hooded Justice or Captain Metropolis did. There’s no villainous equivalent to the sort of high-tech adventuring of Nite Owl, little yet anyone who displays actual or even quasi-superhuman powers like Doctor Manhattan or Ozymandias. Except, of course, for Ozymandias himself, whose plan is a dead ringer for the sorts of elaborate world-spanning schemes of super-villains like Doctor Doom, Lex Luthor, or Ra’s al Ghul might come up with.…

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“Two Cheeseburgers”: Paradise

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OK, this one’s absolute rubbish.

I’ve had my philosophical disagreements with this show this season, but at least those were on episodes that were basically well-constructed and where there was room for a nuanced discussion about different interpretations. “Paradise” is just hot garbage and the first Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode since “Invasive Procedures” I simply can’t defend or come up with any interesting tangential topics to venture forth into. It’s a directionless parable about cultism and the relationship the Star Trek universe has with its technology that can’t make its mind up about what it wants its actual point to be and plays out as a hideously boring rehash of “The Apple” from the Original Series and “The Masterpiece Society” from the fifth season. No amount of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine‘s lovely purple prose or Block and Erdmann’s praise for how how Commander Sisko “radiates” defiance in their Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion is ever going to upsell me on this story or convince me it’s anything other than some alien looking crap-on-a-stick.

I said I didn’t have any tangents to go off of here, but, now that I’ve said that, I actually think I do. It’s not a major theme in this story purely because of the fact the episode can’t take a stand one way or the other, but “Paradise” remains another example of a worryingly Luddite motif that’s been creeping into Star Trek: Deep Space Nine this season and that will become more of a problem on the next series. Apart from Alixis’ tyrannical anti-tech cult in this story, there’s also stuff like Major Kira’s disparaging remark to Dax in “The Siege” that Starfleet officers have forgotten how to use their “natural instincts” because of their reliance on technology (and before anyone comments, we’re absolutely meant to sympathize with Kira here: This is from her Big Damn Hero making scene and that Dax comes across as well as she does is purely due to Terry Farrell). There seems to be the beginning of an idea that Star Trek (really Star Trek: The Next Generation, as all Star Trek from now in is going to be in some way a reaction to Star Trek: The Next Generation) is too overly sanitized and technologized, and that this is a serious problem that needs to be addressed and that the show needs to be taken to task for.

This is the brainchild of Ira Steven Behr, who has gone on the record numerous times stating his open disdain for technobabble, his belief that it’s a dramatic crutch that hinders actual storytelling and that he “tried very hard to take the tech out of DS9”. But let’s unpack this concern a bit. First of all, let’s remember what the actual point of technobabble in Star Trek really is-In truth, it serves two primary purposes. The first, and most important, is to make the crew seem competent.…

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Thursday Shaboganing

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Bit of a loose collection of bits and bobs this week. I’ve been both sick and very busy.

Firstly, I was recently a guest on the excellent They Must Be Destroyed On Sight! movie podcast, chatting with hosts Lee Russell and Daniel Harper (who is also, as you all must surely know by now, the co-host of the Oi! Spaceman Doctor Who podcast, and an online mate of mine). Check out my episode here (and check out TMBDOS’s other episodes because they’re worth it). In my ep, we chatted about the 1983 Coen Brothers debut Blood Simple (thus making the podcast kindasorta another bit of Eruditorum Press’s now recurring but irregular ‘Minnesota’ series… even though Blood Simple takes place in Texas) and the 1986 David Lynch masterpiece/freakshow Blue Velvet.

Blue Velvet is 30 years old this year, and a restored print is currently enjoying a limited theatrical re-release. It’s almost as worrying, baffling, and brain-frying as it ever was, though obviously it now exists in the context of three decades of subsequent American cinema at least partly shaped by its impact.

On that subject…

 

Blue Velvet (Just Some Stray Thoughts I Wish I’d Been Able to Develop in the Abovementioned Podcast)

One line of criticism praises the film as an expose of the dark, secret heart of American life. Lynch opens the film with white picket fences and other evocations of suburban American dreaminess. Eventually, of course, we are drawn into much darker and deeper waters. Another line of criticism critiques the film for keeping the dark world and the light world so separate. There are areas of interpenetration, but generally all the evil happens in the seedy, slummy, dark places where disreputable, sleazy, criminal people live. The nice people from the nice neighbourhood nearby might be fascinated by the darkness, but it is fundamentally alien to them. They go to it; it comes to them… but the darkness is not of them, or of their world.

And it’s true, Blue Velvet is not about the hidden horrors of a small town per se. But nor is it quite true to say that the horrors are entirely alien to the middle class and suburban people who discover them. First and foremost, the ‘nice’ characters are irresistibly drawn to the ‘nasty people’. Secondly, they dabble in the same vices… just in their own prettied-up, gentrified, morally-secure, arguably hypocritical ways. Thirdly, they seem less alive than the people in the nasty side of town. Fourthly, they derive their fullest and deepest senses of self from their interactions with the darkness, and the darkness suffers at their hands… though Dorothy ends up better off for her contact with Jeffrey… but then that’s part of the exaggeratedly happy, almost sarcastic, Sirk-esque happy ending.

There is a deeply-rooted ambiguity, much as there is in a film from which Blue Velvet obviously draws, Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. (Shadow of a Doubt, by the way, features Agent Jack Graham, coming to Cutesville, USA and loving it, much like Special Agent Dale Cooper coming to Twin Peaks.)…

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Comics Reviews (April 6th, 2016)

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Spider-Man #3

A bit of a mess. I saw a Tumblr post complaining about last issue’s “I don’t want to be the black Spider-Man” bit and arguing that Miles should identify as Latinx, not Hispanic, concluding that Bendis shouldn’t be writing these topics because he’s too white, and kind of eyerolled at its “my vision of minority experiences is the only right one” tone. After reading an issue of browbeating Latin American grandmother stereotypes, however, I’m rethinking my eyeroll. Further points off for a desperately pointless Kamala Khan cameo. Seriously, two characters as great as Miles and Kamala and literally fucking nobody can write a good scene between them. Argh.

Digital code: FCMXQ647JZSM

Invincible Iron Man #8

Apparently this road leads to Civil War II. How exciting. That’s not actually true. This is not very exciting. This is Bendis-by-numbers with generic tech ninjas. Were it not for the big “The Road to Civil War II” banner at the top the plot would seem utterly disposable. Deodato continues to have never met a quantity of black he thinks is too much. Thoroughly meh.

Digital code: FCMCRPH2D2VB

Spider-Women Alpha

Picked up because I don’t intend to drop Spider-Gwen due to this crossover, or at least I hoped not to. And I won’t be – this is fun, sets up a nice premise with deftness, and has three solid and distinct leads. I’m particularly really liking this take on Spider-Woman, and would invite people reading her series to let me know if it’s worth checking out in comments. This doesn’t look set to be earth-shattering, but it looks set to be good superhero fun with three characters who aren’t so done as to seemingly only be capable of self-parody. Speaking of which, wickedly good Tony Stark joke here.

Digital code: THMN246PTTNH

Black Panther #1

No surrpise that there’s some roughness here; Coates is still learning to do comics, and ends up using the entire issue to set the stage instead of getting off to a storming start, which feels like a kind of archetypal “brilliant writer unaccustomed to twenty-two page comics format” mistake. But everything you want out of Ta-Nehisi Coates on Black Panther is here – the deep regard for the history of what he’s doing and the probing, demanding mind that insists on making the book a big and dramatic statement about the very idea of an African hero-king. This is going to be one to watch. And I hope things happen next issue. That said, seriously, Marvel? $4.99 for twenty-two story pages? Fuck you.

Digital code: FCMJ0ZVXTAGW

Batgirl #50

With the news that this creative team is off the book with Rebirth, this ends up being something of a viking funeral for their take – an oversized conclusion to an arc that celebrates a particular configuration of DC female Bat characters. It’s big and fun and a solid reminder of why the Stewart/Fletcher/Tarr run has been such a revelation – those big “X vs Y” splashes were particularly great. This has a good team coming onto it for Rebirth, and I’ll probably still buy it, but man, I’m going to miss this era.…

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“The Handbags and the Gladrags”: Lower Decks

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This is the one episode that seems to unite all sides of the fanbase. In a rare moment of nonpartisan respect and consensus, hardcore Star Trek fans and the more heretical voices who have been raising their tone in the discourse for the past few years both unanimously agree that “Lower Decks” was A Good Idea. So naturally, I’m going to be the contrarian dissenter who casts doubt on that assumption.

It’s odd, if you think about it, that this would be the one episode from this season that would be universally beloved because it’s so drastically different from everything the party line says is good about Star Trek: The Next Generation. It has next to nothing to do with any of the regulars, and hangs the entire dramatic crux of the story on a bunch of one-shot guest characters (excepting Alyssa Ogawa), including one character who only showed up once in a episode three years ago. Indeed that Michael Piller greenlit this story in the first place earned him more than a few double-takes from the writing staff because it flagrantly violates the first hardline rule he established at the beginning of his tenure: That every episode had to be about one or more of the main characters and that guest stars should not be allowed to carry a story, because that would be “overshadowing” the regulars. The reasoning employed by both Piller and this episode’s fans for letting “Lower Decks” through is that the story shines a light on an important and all-to-often overlooked perspective: The nameless and faceless workaday junior officer who walk in the shadows of giants.

Perhaps it does. Indeed, when I first saw this episode as part of TNN’s reruns in the early 2000s, I loved it for those very reasons: I thought it was terrific how we got to see what the Enterprise looked like from a different vantage point, and I found myself really invested in the day-to-day concerns of the crew’s junior officer contingent. You’d think, if anything, “Lower Decks” would be absolutely right up my alley, what with my constant contention that Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine reject anything it might have inherited from the action sci-fi genre. However, as I came to revisit it for this rewatch, my opinion of it cooled significantly. In particular, I think it’s worth considering exactly whose viewpoint is truly being examined here, and what that says about how people are reading the overall climate of this series’ environment.

To those looking for a glimpse at the Star Trek universe’s underclasses, those left behind by master narratives of history and grandiose tales of war, conquest, glory and political heroism, you’ll certainly not find it in “Lower Decks”. These are all Starfleet officers (or all but one), just not bridge officers. Our hero is even Sito Jaxa, disgraced one-time Academy cadet whose presence here (and story arc) is an explicit callback to “The First Duty”, an episode which, regardless of your feelings on it, you must at least grant is controversial.…

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Tuesday Muffining

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I like muffins.

Jane’s going to be taking a vacation for the next few weeks; a literal one, I’m frantically editing the middle chunk of Last War in Albion Volume 1 so she can work on it on the plane. So starting next week I’m going to gear into book promotion mode for Neoreaction a Basilisk, which will have a Kickstarter to fund it in May, and running excerpts from the book on Tuesdays. Super Nintendo Project is also coming back in a couple weeks. A nice spring regearing against the alt-right, I suppose. Fun times at Eruditorum Press. 

The Last Tournament in Albion has a few hours to run, but the outcome seems pretty clear, so I figure I’ll offer some broad thoughts. First, the apparent winner, From Hell. Jed Blue and I were talking on Twitter about it; he had not been struck by the book when he read it, and wondered about its popularity. And I think that’s actually fair; it took me an age to get into it too. I’d actually already started writing Last War in Albion when I gave it what I consider its first proper read, and really felt like I got the book. But holy shit once I did. The comic basically invented psychochronography. I literally owe my entire literary and critical approach to it, even if that approach largely developed prior to my reading it as such. Which is utterly consistent with the critical approach it lays out, of course. Utterly brilliant. I didn’t know I was rooting for it going in, but I’m thrilled it (probably) won.

V for Vendetta‘s also a great one, of course, and a nice runner-up that I would not have been the slightest bit bothered by winning. It says something that we got an all-Moore final – something that’s probably true about the War as well. It’s a hell of a writer who pens these two works. Not for nothing is V for Vendetta getting two chapters, with another to come in Book Three; its weight in the War is comparable to few. That said, I am surprised that it was such an apparent blowout, especially given how dominant V for Vendetta was in what I had thought a fairly tough division. Phonogram was perhaps an easy quarterfinal opponent as such things go, propelled forward due to recentism, but it’s also a damn fine comic that was nice to see go on a run over genuinely good stuff like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Miracleman. This was, I think, a category hampered by obscurity in many cases, but quality-wise perhaps my favorite.

In proper bracket fashion, the semifinal that should have been a final was Watchmen vs From Hell. A couple people wondered what Watchmen was doing away from the superheroes while Sandman was in with them; the answer is just that the easiest way to define the superheroes division was “is it Marvel or DCU.” The result was a deliciously brutal division – I don’t think anything had as many heartbreaks as it did for me.…

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Review: The Black Archives (Dark Water/Death in Heaven)

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It’s a small club, and more than anything it’s nice to see a quality new contribution. I’m not going to say that the world is lacking in studies of Doctor Who because it’s manifestly not, but the aca-fandom corner of things is, as fields go, not one where it’s hard to keep track of the major players. So welcome to Philip Purser-Hallard, editor of and contributor to The Black Archives, Obverse Press’s new line of short book treatises on individual Doctor Who stories. They launched just last month with four books, on Rose, The Massacre, The Ambassadors of Death, and Dark Water/Death in Heaven, the latter of these by Purser-Hallard himself, and the one Obverse Books sent me a review copy of. (They’ve got four more planned over the rest of 2016, including Andrew Hickey’s take on The Mind Robber and Lance Parkin’s on The Pirate Planet, incidentally; it’s a hell of an exciting line.)

Let me start by saying this is a brilliant idea; a perfectly considered level of granular focus that has loads of room to find new things to say about tired old stories without sacrificing readability or approachability. The obvious analogue is the 33 ⅓ series of short books on music albums, which provide similarly appealing balances of depth, breadth, and the potential for idiosyncrasy. These are the right books at the right time, and it’s genuinely a thrill to have them join the conversation.

That said, as a fellow traveler in the aca-fandom waters who has also written a book for the 33 ⅓ series, there’s not really a way for me to approach a book like this without immediately jumping to either ridiculous talking shop about critical approaches or early efforts to contextualize it in the larger discourse of Doctor Who criticism. I mean, this is the sort of book where my reactions include things like “oh, hey, he quoted Anna’s piece on Missy and trans issues.” (“Was it a good quote? Do I sound like an idiot?” Anna asked when I told her. She does not, unsurprisingly, though Purser-Hallard doesn’t buy her claim that the Master was dysphoric, historically. “Lol, I don’t either,” notes Anna. It also cites Jack for the claim that Revelation of the Daleks has vaguely implied necrophilia, incidentally.)  Neither of which is the natural fit for a book series that’s aiming at a general enough audience that it starts with an overview of the episode that includes transmission dates and a fairly detailed plot synopsis. And while I could try to turn all those instincts off and just enthusiastically review it as the interesting and compelling guide that it is, well, what’s the point in that? Especially when Purser-Hallard argues, quite brilliantly, in the book’s epilogue that “one day everything in this book will be wrong (if indeed it isn’t now, which is certainly a possibility). And that is the magic of Doctor Who.”

So let me instead pay Purser-Hallard’s Dark Water/Death in Heaven a much higher compliment than a mere “hey, this is worthwhile, check it out” and say that when the time comes to write the Capaldi stretch of TARDIS Eruditorum, I cannot imagine discussing this story without using it the way I used About Time so often in the classic series, which is to say pushing back against and expanding upon its conclusions.…

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“Entangled freedom”: Whispers

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Colm Meaney is an immense acting talent. We all know this. Chief O’Brien was elevated from a nameless bit part who was little more than an extra to become debatably the most lasting and memorable character in the entire series because it was evident to everyone from Day 1 on “Encounter at Farpoint” that this was a guy who had some serious chops, even before bringing in quite extensive and illustrious motion picture career outside of Star Trek.

How you respond to a talent like that probably says more about you than it does them. When you write material for a specific actor, you’re more than likely envisioning a specific subset of their range you’d like to see them give when they perform your script. On Star Trek: The Next Generation, the creative team responded by giving Colm increasingly larger and larger parts until they could hang an entire story off of him, usually emphasizing his everyman characteristics by giving him a unique insight on or offhand reaction to the topic at hand. On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, they invented an entire new hyperlocalized genre of story entitled “Let’s Torture O’Brien”, and actually called it that internally. This probably ought to say it all, but in slightly more nuanced and descriptive terms for the newcomers, a “Let’s Torture O’Brien” story entails coming up with a relatively strangled science fiction premise that allows the writers to put Miles O’Brien through a psychological wringer so that Colm Meaney can masterfully convey an everyday, likable, relatable person enduring extreme, oftentimes traumatic events while we watch on with rapt attention.

I’m not going to say too much more about this approach and the mindset that might attract a creator to it. You all can fill in the blanks by this point. I would ask, however, that you at least reflect amongst yourselves upon why in particular someone might think this is the best way to showcase an actor’s range. Is it not possible that an actor could potentially convey powerful emotions that aren’t extreme mental and emotional trauma? Does the category of “good acting” by definition require that he do so? But neither will I deny that “Whispers” is a damn corker of an episode or that Colm Meaney is heartbreakingly formidable in it. Though it’s frequently cited as such, this isn’t actually the first “Let’s Torture O’Brien” episode, at least not by my count. In fact, that’s a minor issue I have with it, considering it comes immediately after “Armageddon Game”, which I find to be a more down-to-Earth and relatable way of making us connect with a character’s pain: The Chief’s workmanlike honour in the face of death is unbelievably moving, and is light years beyond anything that has ever been done with the Klingons ever.

Speaking of “Armageddon Game”, I almost wonder if Doctor Bashir wouldn’t have been a better choice for this story. Sure, Siddig El Fadil may not have the pedigree of Colm Meaney as an actor (at least not yet), but he’s still damn good himself and its his very youthfulness, both as an actor and as a character, that I think would have added a layer to the story here.…

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The Wreckage of Love, Our Regard Lies White and Broken (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Twenty-Nine: Apocalypse)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Watchmen seemed not born so much as ground like pigment from its time; something that could only possibly have been created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in 1986, at that point in their career, out of the specific interests they had at the time.

Figure 947: Eroticized war in Watchmen. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, from Watchmen #7, 1986)

Moore has often made the joke that Watchmen was the result of a “bad mood” that he was in during the period. This is by and large understating things. In interviews from the time, Moore seems genuinely convinced that the world is going to end, certainly during his children’s lifetime, if not during his, and probably in some sort of nuclear explosion. In one interview, for instance, he notes that “in forty years the rain forests will be gone. If the rain forests are gone, we can’t breathe. Simple as that. There’s nothing that’s more simple than that: no trees, no air. One of my children is eight. She said to me the other day, “I’ll only be forty-eight, won’t I?’ and I said. ‘Yeah’. It’s a pretty depressing thought. What a horrible thing to have to think about. I mean, we brought these children into the world and it might not have that much longer left. Nuclear reactors, for another thing. They can’t be decommissioned because nobody knows how to do it. But they keep building them. We are going to have a Chernobyl every four or five years from now on. And more, because those reactors weren’t built to last for twenty-five years in the first place; and they were built thirty years ago. One of those reactors is going to go up every few years.” Obviously this proved unduly pessimistic, although to be fair Leah’s still only thirty-eight. But nevertheless, it was the world Moore saw in 1986, and with no surprise. It was the peak of the Reagan/Thatcher years, disarmament talks were failing, Chernobyl happened. A wealth of immediate threats to human survival loomed, and the political situation looked actively disinclined to even acknowledge them; indeed, the US government seemed at times to almost eroticize the notion of nuclear war. Apocalypse felt just around the corner.

Figure 948: The June, 1947 issue of Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, introduciing the Doomsday Clock.

It is impossible to fully understand the density of Watchmen absent this context. The point is not simply to be a comic that rewards reading and rereading at great length; the point is to be a comic with such density as to generate an inescapable gravity. Through its massively layered resonances and nonstop foreshadowing it conveys a constant sense of inevitability. This is, of course, flagged in one of the book’s most basic structural metaphors, the advancing clock on the back of every issue. This, in turn, alludes to the Doomsday Clock, a periodic feature of the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences that declares the Bulletin’s assessment of the current danger of global disaster in the form of a clockface approaching midnight.…

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