Eruditorum Press

Fashionably late capitalism

“Need not apply”: Sanctuary

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Here’s an episode I always remember being ambivalent about. It’s one of those situations where it always seemed like it was something I should like, but somehow it never quite clicked with me for one reason or another. Each time I would rewatch this episode (or, given where it falls in the year and the fact it’s a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode more generally, re-read) I would expect it to be good given my mental sorting algorithm filed it away as part of a stretch of episodes I’d just accepted as classic outright, and then I would always leave it feeling vaguely unsatisfied for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Well, the same thing happened this time, except now I know exactly why this episode has never struck a chord with me.

“Sanctuary” is ostensibly trying to Say Something Important about the plight of refugees, a humanitarian crisis that’s sadly just as pressing as I write these words now as it was in 1993, if not more so. This means of course it’s an “Issues” story, and we’ve just come off of a stretch of episodes that have proven pretty conclusively that “Issues” stories simply do not work in Star Trek in spite of what everyone thinks. Even though its cause is a just and noble one, “Sanctuary” doesn’t work any better than “Force of Nature” or “Melora” (indeed, those episodes’ respective causes were every bit as just and noble as this), and in fact it’s “Sanctuary” that casts into light even more stark why this kind of morality play is a bad fit for Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

It’s not, it should be stressed, that the depiction of a refugee crisis in this episode is a poor or ill thought out one: Indeed, the depiction is, if anything, depressingly realistic: Deep Space 9 becomes a staging ground for millions upon millions of starving and displaced refugees escaping oppression in their homeland. They’ve made a harrowing journey across great distances and the only thing that’s kept them going is the hope that their new home will afford them the realised dream of freedom denied them where they come from. But once they arrive, they find locals whose attitude runs a gamut between reluctant to help and outright bigoted and contemptuous. There’s even the reveal that the Skrreeans (which, as an aside, is a name for a fictional culture right up there with BeBeBeBeque in terms of sheer trollishness) see Bajor as their own holy land, a forsaken planet they are prophesied to bring light and hope back to. Which is of course a plot point clearly reminiscent of a certain real-world political situation in the middle east.

But though there are parallels between the plight of the Skrreeans and the great western identity crisis that is the Israeli-Palestinian-Christian conflict, the clearest connections are to the history of the United States, which “Sanctuary” has pegged depressingly well.…

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A Teaser For An Upcoming Project

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Jane’s taking the week off, so here’s a 3000 word preview from near the middle of Neoreaction a Basilisk, which will have a Kickstarter in May

And to be clear, the vicious little shit qualities of your garden variety neoreactionary are clearly part of the point, at least for Nick Land. In part 4d of “The Dark Enlightenment” he constructs an extended metaphor around the word “cracker,” in its sense “as a slur targeting poor southern whites of predominantly Celtic ancestry,” describing them as “grit in the clockwork of progress,” and as Qabbalistic forces of “schism or secession” based on the power of cracks “to widen, deepen, and spread.” His meaning is clear: racist hicks are awesome forces of abstract horror. He tacitly reiterates this in “Phyl-Undhu,” which notes, in a variety of ways, that strong tribal affiliations and hostility to outsiders is likely the soundest survival tactic in most practical eschatons.

He may well be right in this, although one gets the sense that he’s rather glad not to be a part of that American culture; elsewhere in the labyrinthine Part 4 of “The Dark Enlightenment” he remarks fondly about how “there is no part of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, or very many other East Asian cities where it is impossible to wander, safely, late at night. Women, whether young or old, on their own or with small children, can be comfortably oblivious to the details of space and time, at least insofar as the threat of assault is concerned.” Instead, it always seems as though he views the bulk of neoreactionaries as a sort of petri dish in which he can observe the spasming collapse of the technosingularity. Perhaps they are a suitable microcosm. But in this regard, at least, Moldbug has a point. In the “Gentle Introducion,” he praises the 18th century loyalist Massachusetts judge Peter Oliver, essentially suggesting that reactionaries like him are better than revolutionaries like John Adams because Oliver “is a man you could have a beer with.” And he notes, “you can’t actually have a beer with Peter Oliver, but you can read his book.” The truth is that, despite Land’s evident fascination with them, the bulk of neoreactionaries are not people one would want to have a beer with, and there’s not a great case for reading their books either.

But if I might be so bold as to suggest, there are other ways of saying “no” at this point in the argument that don’t require hanging out with banal edgelords who get off trying to see how close to saying “Hitler was right” you can actually get without losing the ability to semi-credibly say “but I’m not a Nazi or anything” afterwards. Indeed, when it comes to recasting philosophy as horror it is safe to say that the sort of immediate lurch to the most dramatic form of negation to hand is in most regards the least interesting. The obvious truth of horror philosophy is that there’s an aesthetic; one based on a tightrope balance between the initial “yes” that one is fleeing from and the eventual “yes” that interrupts the series of “nos.”…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 3.08: Second Sons

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If I’d seen Deadpool I bet I could make a really good joke here.

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:

Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Tywin Lannister

Dragons of Yunkai: Daenerys Targaryen

Bears of Yunkai: Jorah Mormont

The Ship, Davos Seaworth

The Burning Hearts, Stannis Baratheon and Melisandre

Roses of King’s Landing: Margery Tyrell

Stags of King’s Landing: Joffrey Baratheon

Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark

The Direwolf, Arya Stark

Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly

The Stag, Gendry

Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae

The Dogs, Sandor Clegane

Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys

Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn

Winterfell lies abandoned and in ruins, Riverrun is silent, Harrenhal is vacant, Dragonstone is inexplicably not in the credits.

The episode is in ten parts. The first part runs three minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The opening image is of a rock, with Arya out of focus behind it.

The second runs five minutes and is set outside Yunkai. The transition is by image, from the Hound riding to the horses of the Second Sons.

The third runs six minutes and is set in Dragonstone. The transition is by hard cut, from Barristan to Melisandre landing.

The fourth runs two minutes and is set in Yunkai. The transition is by hard cut, from Stannis to the walls of Yunkai.

The fifth runs seven minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Dario to Sansa in the mirror.

The sixth runs seven minutes and is set on Dragonstone. The transition is by hard cut, the wedding scene to Gendry.

The seventh runs eleven minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by dialogue, from Stannis magickally killing Joffrey to Joffrey at a wedding.

The eighth runs four minutes and is set in Yunkai. The transition is by hard cut, from Tyrion and Sansa to an establishing shot of Daenerys’s camp.

The ninth runs one minute and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by image, from the drapery on Daenerys’s tent to the similarly patterned grate in Tyrion’s chambers.

The tenth runs seven minutes and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Tyrion smiling thinly to a landscape shot. The final image is of a Full Web of birds.

Analysis

With “Second Sons,” at last, the fundamental limitations of the emphasis on episode structure over season structure that has dominated for the past few episodes stands revealed. The heart of this episode – everything but the first and last scenes – cycles among three plots selected and unified by the title phrase. Two – Tyrion and Stannis – embody it in its literal sense, while the third contains the actual title drop. This is, by any standard, a motley assortment – you can just about argue that Tyrion’s plot, by dint of focusing on his relationship with Tywin at several turns, at least vaguely related to his status as a second son, but Stannis’s plot essentially doesn’t touch the topic.…

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“What Are We?”: Inheritance

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Last week on Star Trek: The Next Generation we talked about the counterintuitive reality that Star Trek is at its creative peak, yet has also run out of ways to tell Star Trek stories. And last week on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine we talked about how I’ve reached a critical impasse with accepted discourse surrounding the show. What I want out of Star Trek and what other people seem to want out of Star Trek are two completely different things, and it’s this episode that finally clarified it all for me.

Basically, I seem to like Star Trek best when it’s being anything other than Star Trek. “Inheritance” is not a Star Trek story, not really, but it’s exactly the kind of story this show should be doing.

Near as I can tell, “Inheritance” has a reputation ’round about that of “Dark Page”. That is, everyone hates it except me, and I naturally love it. “Inheritance” seems to get a lot of the same criticisms levelled at “Dark Page” too, namely that the story is predicated on a heretofore unknown bit of backstory for one of the main characters that strains credulity beyond the breaking point. And my response to that line of argument this time is about the same as it was then: I don’t understand how you can claim any sort of backstory development for a character in an episodic television series in unbelievable (certain Cousin Oliver-type panderings possibly excepted), because in polyauthored episodic television backstory is by definition created cumulatively. It’s not that far-fetched to posit Doctor Soong had an assistant who he fell in love with and who, consequently, served as Data and Lore’s “mother”. At least, it’s not any more far-fetched than some of the other stuff this franchise expects us to swallow from time to time (like, say, I dunno, an arbitrary Warp 5 speed limit). And it should be noted “Inheritance” seems to be aware of the reception “Dark Page” got and hedges against it, with Data being highly suspicious of Doctor Tainer’s story until the climax: It’s almost as if Data himself is standing in for a fickle, easily bored implied science fiction audience.

(There’s some potentially worthwhile ground to be covered in exploring that metaphor further, especially in lieu of what this story reveals about Data’s character, but I don’t much care to pursue it.)

Aside from being a genuinely sweet, touching and astonishingly well-acted character piece (shout-out to the incredible Fionnula Flanagan, who plays Juliana Tainer, fresh off her equally outstanding stint on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as Enina Tandro in last year’s “Dax”), I really love the idea “Inheritance” raises that all of Data’s positive qualities, his creativity, inquisitiveness and affably polite demeanor, come from a female role model: His “mother” instead of his “father”. Not that Star Trek: The Next Generation has necessarily valorized Doctor Soong-There’s always been some darkness lurking around his paratext. But equally, there have been moments where that story has taken on a whiff of The Great Man and His Works about it, and “Inheritance” is a much needed counterbalance to that.…

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Saturday Waffling (March 12th, 2016)

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I got a request on Tumblr to bring back Saturday Waffling, so here it is. First off, and totally unrelated to anything, there’s a Comixology sale on Gillen and McKelvie’s work that means WicDiv collections are going for $5 a pop. If you haven’t read WicDiv yet, I am jealous of the things you get to experience for the first time.  

Let’s see. Vague update on things. The Patreon has undergone the slight deflation that it always does over a few months to where I stopped breaking even on the site expansion again. Not a huge deal – it’s not like we’re bleeding money or things are unsustainable or anything. But it’d be nice to get back to that threshold, so I spruced things up a bit over there, including redoing the milestones to reflect Patreon’s decision to base everything on net income instead of pledged income. And there’s a goal now for Game of Thrones S6 reviews, if you’re into that kind of thing. Anyway, if you can spare a buck a week or whatever, that’s here.

The next Last War in Albion chapter continues to be like pulling teeth. Consider this my wry joke about massive delays as an in hindsight inevitable consequence of going “let’s mirror Watchmen.” Anyway, the opportunity to knock off some one-off pieces to fulfill Patreon requests, which I was lax on for a while anyway, is nice. Hoping to have that going by the 25th.

Further out, I’m currently expecting the Neoreaction a Basilisk Kickstarter to be in May, and Last War in Albion Volume 1 to be in July.

As for discussion, I’ve not really touched the Retro Hugos part of my nominating ballot beyond joking that the Puppies should be able to find lots of German sci-fi to their liking from 1940. So what actually is eligible and worth nominating there? …

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Fantasy Worldbreaking

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Consider this a belated postscript to Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons. (Which, by the way, has no Amazon reviews, so if you hated it you can totally sabotage its sales by giving it a one-star review, just like you can support the site on Patreon and join the backers who voted to bring you this post. I’ve just set up new milestone goals, including Game of Thrones Season Six reviews.) That, after all, is my book about science fiction and fantasy in 2015. And whatever the major awards might say, N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season is the best SF/F book of 2015.

Let’s go one further, in fact, and make it clear that its quality is inseparable from what might banally be called its “commitment to diversity,” and slightly less banally be called its “politics.” For instance, its central fantastic concept, the practice of orogeny, defined in the glossary at the back of the book (it being a fantasy novel and all, and it is a proper fantasy novel of the sort that starts with a map and ends with, well, a glossary) as “the ability to manipulate thermal, kinetic, and related forms of energy to address seismic events.” Or, perhaps more accurately, its central fantastic concept, orogenes, the people with this ability, upon whom the stability of the empire depends, but who are second-class citizens, allowed to live only under the despotic supervision of the Fulcrum, and often murdered in childhood by angry mobs before they even get the chance to be given to the empire.

If one wanted to read The Fifth Season as allegory, it would not be hard to decide what orogenes represent. The most blatant clue is in the derogatory term for them: rogga. Its real-world phonetic analogue is self-evident, doubled down on when one of the major characters, Alabaster, the famously mad ten-ring orogene, reclaims the slur in the course of explaining a particularly horrifying degradation: “they only reason they don’t do this to all of us is because we’re more versatile, more useful, if we control ourselves. But each of s is just another new weapon, to them. Just a useful monster, just a bit of new blood to add to the breeding lines. Just another fucking rogga.”

The link can readily be sharpened. The larger rhetoric by which the orogenes’ treatment is justified is based on the degree to which their powers are dangerous combined with their inherent lack of control. A mixture, in other words, of emphasizing their inherent strength – indeed “physical prowess” would be a justified term based on the ways in which Jemisin focuses on the bodily experience of orogeny – but coupling it with a suggestion that they are inherently predisposed to violence. This is familiar as the logic that explains why a black man acting in a manner that can even plausibly be described as “threatening” needs to be gunned down by cops in a way that a white man does not. And I want to stress, this is not some strained analogy.…

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“What is it that does not cease when the vision ends?”: Second Sight

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This is the moment where I finally break with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine establishment. I mean, not that it hasn’t been obvious over the past year and a half that I have serious disagreements with this creative team about what this show is fundamentally about and even what constitutes good basic storytelling, but “Second Sight” is where whatever bridges span the rift between us vanish forever and it becomes obvious we have two irreconcilable conceptions of what this show is about and something is going to have to give: I think this episode is a defining classic, but the creative team hates it and I have a feeling the majority of fandom agrees with them.

Just like “Necessary Evil”, “Second Sight” is about elements from the past returning to have an impact on events in the present and, also just like “Necessary Evil”, it’s about finding positive, constructive ways to make peace with them and continue our lives. It’s the four year anniversary of the Battle of Wolf 359, and thus of Jennifer’s death, and Commander Sisko almost forgot. The guilt he feels upon this realisation is genuine: At some point we have to move on with our lives, but through the grieving process it’s not uncommon for people to feel like they’re betraying the memory and legacy of their loved one by not keeping them in their thoughts 24/7. But of course, we always have to remember that our loved ones would want us to move on and have healthy, fulfilling lives, with our without them. This is the conclusion Commander Sisko reaches, and he reaches it fairly early on in the story, even if the cause is a woman who’s not quite all there, if you know what I mean.

And make no mistake, “Second Sight” handles this with unabashed utopianism. The whole narrative is pushing Ben to go talk to Fenna, even in spite of that business about unconscious psychic projections I’ll deal with a little further down. The show could have taken the trite and clichéd path by using the romance as an excuse to drive a wedge between Ben and Jake for some good old-fashioned conflict-You can just imagine how the scenario would play out in your head with Jake petulantly complaining that his father beginning a new relationship isn’t fair to him and is an insult to his mother’s memory or something equally stupid (in fact, the normally sensible Michael Jan Friedman does precisely this in a couple years on Star Trek: The Next Generation, astonishingly with the thirtysomething Will Riker). But no: Here, Jake is the *first* one to say that if his dad has found love, he’ll support him all the way. So does Jadzia Dax, though Ben keeps dancing around addressing the topic with her.

Speaking of Jadzia, her role in this story, and Ben’s evasive behaviour around her, is somewhat revealing. Like “Rules of Acquisition”, “Second Sight” is another episode that very strongly defined my interpretation of Jadzia Dax: Once again she’s playing a support role to another character, and this is the most important one for her because it’s with Commander Sisko.…

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Shabcast 17 – It’s So Stimulating Being Your Hat

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As promised, hot on the heels of Shabcast 16, here’s Shabcast 17 … hopefully making up for our regrettably Shabcast-free February.

As also promised, this episode festures special guest Shana Wolstein of the Oi! Spaceman podcast.  Oi! Spaceman is the best Doctor Who podcast I’m not directly financially linked to… though I am the podcast’s official boyfriend (which is not something I ever expected to say). 

Back on the subject of Shabcasts, this episode is plenty-minutes of Shana and I chatting about two of her favourite films (and mine) the 80s Jim Henson fantasy masterpieces The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

Also, if you didn’t catch it, remember to check out Shabcast 16 from last week, in which Kevin Burns (of Pex Lives) and I spend plenty-minutes attacking The Matrix trilogy… amusingly, I hope.

On that subject: I now slightly regret the timing of that last Shabcast, for obvious reasons.  But I hope it’s obvious that disliking some of Lilly Wachowski’s films doesn’t mean Kevin or I have anything but best wishes for her personally.

Podlings of the world, unite!

 …

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Comics Reviews (March 9th, 2016)

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Guardians of the Galaxy #6

The good part of this thin and uninspiring week is that even the lowest ranked book is pretty good, especially for this largely disappointing All-New All-Different relaunch. A nice two-hander that focuses on the relationship between Peter Quill and Kitty Pryde, it provides Bendis the space for the sort of hyper-talky character work he excels at. It’s artful, but often heavy-handed, not least with Kitty’s tear-stained shout of “it’s a concentration camp.” Although “chag sameach, mother-#$@#$@!” almost makes up for it. Still seriously minded to drop this, but at least I can see why someone else would enjoy this issue.

Ms. Marvel #5

A very silly premise is allowed to get a bit out of hand here, and while numerous parts of it are thoroughly delightful, perhaps most obviously the stunning line “what, Tyesha gets to be a Muslim but my anarch-atheism is a phase?” the whole feels like markedly less than the sum of its parts, and like this story is more an opportunity for everyone to be silly and let their hair down than anything else. I suppose after an apocalyptic Secret Wars arc and a big reintroduction that’s deserved, but equally… meh.

Radioactive Spider-Gwen #6

A strong issue long on good character beats, with genuinely fantastic exchanges between Gwen and her father, Gwen and Captain America, and Gwen and Harry Osborne. The last of these is probably the most interesting, providing one of the book’s characteristically clever reworkings of the standard Spider-Man relationships and offering an insight into some of the ways in which Gwen is better at this than Peter. Not exactly thrilled that we’re headed into a crossover next month, but I’ve been curious about Spider-Woman and am at lest game for it. …

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“I Can’t Drive Warp 5”: Force of Nature

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Now this one is interesting to me because it’s an episode that’s always been very memorable to me, but also one that’s sort of bad, however, it’s not memorable to me because it’s bad.

For some reason, the Warp 5 speed limit is a concept that really stuck with me. I have no idea why, it’s no less outlandish then some of the other artificially out-there concepts this franchise plays with on occasion, but for some reason this one connected with me. When rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s earlier years back in the day I would *always* self-correct whenever Captain Picard had the Enterprise go somewhere at over Warp 5: “Well, they didn’t know any better at the time”, I kept telling myself. For some reason. Because, famously, this is a plot thread that is pretty swiftly abandoned and the speed limit is a rule that has more exceptions and gets broken more frequently than the Prime Directive. I would always let this one through in my personal headcanon, even though I didn’t particularly enjoy watching it, because to me it introduced a critical piece of worldbuilding: A “Datalore” for the latter years.

Except it’s not critical. At all. The warp speed limit is only mentioned I think like three other times, so I have absolutely no idea why this struck me as such an important piece of Star Trek universe worldbuilding. I can tell you why I think it’s important to talk about today though: “Force of Nature” is attempting, albeit clunkily and embarrassingly, to address environmentalist issues, which don’t get considered anywhere remotely near as much as they should. Environmentalism is a fundamental part of my political philosophy because I believe in a holistic utopianism that would reunite all forms of life energy in the universe. Connection to our land is an extension of empathy, of course, and perhaps the highest form of it because at that stage you’ve finally shed all the artificial boundaries you have erected between the self and the perceived other. A great deal of my most formative intellectual background is actually in the fields of zoology, ethology and natural history (my interest in genre fiction media studies is honestly a kind of aberration, albeit a big one) and I’m a big supporter of Donna Haraway’s conception of ecofeminism and multispecies ethnography, although that’s best saved for a look in a specific essay down the road a bit.

(Apart from the weird warp speed limit thing, as I looked at “Force of Nature” this time some of the effects shots with the space rift and scenes with Data and Geordi in the Jeffries tubes felt familiar to me: This may have been an episode I saw way back when, or it’s at least a part of the same landscape of visual memory.)

It’s important that Star Trek: The Next Generation adopt ecology and environmentalism as part of itself, but sadly, the way “Force of Nature” goes about doing it is fairly terrible.…

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