Eruditorum Press

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Comics Reviews (December 16th, 2015)

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Ultimate End #5

Even had this come out alongside the rest of the series it would have been a flaccid non-ending to a non-story – the end of the Ultimate Universe that does not actually take place in the Ultimate Universe or quite actually involve the characters from it. Months late, it’s yet another “oh yeah, that book” from Marvel to go with the general pissing away of any good will they’ve had in recent memory. A staggeringly inept comic – look at the complete randomness of Wolverine’s entrance or the utterly arbitrary-seeming choice to have the final monologue co-narrated by two Spider-Mans and a 616 Iron Man. Basically shit, and everybody involved should feel actively bad that people spent $4.99 on it.

Batgirl #46

A somewhat untidy issue in which the whole is less than the sum of its parts – I enjoyed almost every scene of it, but was left with a distinctly unsatisfied feeling simply because there were too many plots and not enough connective tissue. Still, under the hood, a wonderful and fun book, but this was definitely an off month for it.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #3

This dragged for me a bit; Nancy/Doctor Doom just didn’t quite cohere as a comedy concept for me, although the “it’s just cosplay” gag was fantastic, and the back half didn’t pick up enough to make up the slack, resulting in a flaccid-seeming issue. Compelling cliffhanger, though, which is something, and as with Batgirl it seems important to stress that a middling issue of this is still fundamentally delightful. 

Darth Vader Annual #1

Lenil Yu turns out to be a strong artist for Vader, and Gillen writes a nice self-contained issue. I was wrong about the Star Wars Annual cliffhanger picking up here – apparently these both feed into post-Vader Down stories instead. But this is a good issue that actually feels like a done-in-one, tracing Vader and his droids on a mission to an entertainingly courtly society long on ballroom dances and royal succession. It’s a good setting, and a solid single issue introduction to the sort of thing Gillen does with Vader. 

The Wicked & The Divine #17

A very odd end to an arc, though in some ways the only way it could have worked, as it had to exist in contrast with the first two arc-enders. Which is to say that this is decidedly not a mindblowing issue. The Sakhmet story is quiet, borderline plotless, and probably the most emphatically interstitial of the Commercial Suicide arc. The one-page McKelvie backup, on the other hand, is fascinating, was probably inevitable, and makes the wait til April before this starts up again look absolutely agonizing. 

Klaus #2

The snap and cleverness of the first issue is gone, and we’re left with a book it’s somewhat hard to see how gets to six issues if this is how it works. Still interesting and fun, and probably the best work Morrison has done in years, although I’m somewhat hard-pressed to imagine being passionate about the secret origin of Santa Claus come April, especially if this doesn’t have more issues that bring a big stupid grin to my face like #1 did as opposed to “yep, same comic as last month.”…

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O brave new webhost, that has such capacity in’t!

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Hey everyone, websquid here. I apologize for the unplanned outage! The site was barely working anyway, so hopefully this is much much better.

Things got… untenable, with our previous host. It is my sincere hope that that is now over. If you do continue to have problems loading the site, *please* reach out to me, directly, and not Phil or any of the other lovely people who actually write things for the site. You can reach me at websquid@eruditorumpress.com.…

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Cover Reveal: Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons

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I just uploaded the final versions of the ebook files to Amazon and Smashwords, which means that I finally have the official cover to share instead of the low-res version I previously had. So here it is (and you can click on the image for the full 4 MB version of that if you want to). As ever, credit goes to James Taylor, at least for the front of the book. Pre-orders remain open – here it is on Amazon, and here on Smashwords (where it’s available only in epub format because of some idiosyncratic rules on file size; the Amazon .mobi is DRM free, however). Print will be available to order sometime next week, with a slim chance of it being up in time for last minute Christmas orders.

And we’ve got an official book description too:

2015 was a messy and contentious year for science fiction, dominated by the Sad Puppies controversy, in which fascist entryists led by Vox Day, the pen name of Theodore Beale, exploited flaws in the Hugo Award nomination process to dictate the nominees, selecting works that favor his politics in an attempt to, in his view, save western civilization from people who poop wrong.

This anthology of essays written by acclaimed Marxist occultist critic Philip Sandifer during 2015 starts from the Puppies controversy, presenting an alternative vision of science fiction grounded in progressive politics and the ability of the genre to explore strange and unthinkable ideas – one that holds that its primary value is its ability to do new things, as opposed to being in permanent debt to antiquated ideas and styles.

The book includes:

Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, an epic takedown of Vox Day.
A transcript of a debate between Sandifer and Day about the relative merits of Iain Banks’s classic novel The Wasp Factory and Puppy nominee One Bright Star to Guide Them.
Essays on Orphan Black, Hannibal, True Detective, Janelle Monáe, Ex Machina, Mr. Robot, and more.
A lengthy essay on V for Vendetta excerpted from the forthcoming first volume of The Last War in Albion.
Recursive Occlusion, a non-fiction novella about Doctor Who and occultism.
An exclusive interview with superstar Doctor Who writer Peter Harness.
Many other weird things.

I’ll post again on the 26th when it officially launches with a more substantial musing on the book, but I think it’s pretty much the best one I’ve written.…

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“There are usually two sides to a story”: Second Chances

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Wait…Didn’t I already cover this one last season? Oh well, it was a great issue worth hyping up again, even if talking about it here almost a year later loses a lot of the context of reading it as part of its story arc. Anyway, so this is issue four of the story arc I dubbed Separation Anxiety after the title of issue three. The story on the whole deals with the saucer and stardrive sections of the Enterprise being flung to opposite ends of the galaxy after an encounter with a mysterious alien relay station. All the while, the crews of both ships are engaged in combat with a territorial race called the Sztazzan, who new transfer officer Terry Oliver has had tragic prior dealings with.

A major theme of this story are bridges, both actual starship bridges and structures that can either bring people together or keep them apart. Terry Oliver hates the Sztazzan for a previous skirmish she was involved in that resulted in the destruction of her former ship and the deaths of its crewmembers, and she’s paralleled with both Chief O’Brien (this was originally released before Star Trek: Deep Space Nine premiered, you understand) and Ro Laren, both of whom have had similar traumatic experiences with enemy combatants, but whom have been able to deal with their grief and trauma in more positive and constructive ways. But this issue was a turning point for Terry, because on an away team mission led by Doctor Beverly Crusher, and following a conversation about moving beyond hate with Chief O’Brien, she finds a wounded Sztazzan officer and…

Fuck, that’s not the right “Second Chances” is it? Dammit.

Unlike the comic book that shares its name, this “Second Chances” is about a transporter accident that split Will Riker into two halves during a mission on one of his old ships. And also unlike the comic book “Second Chances”, this episode is a piece of shit.

It’s never sat quite well with me, even back in the day (“back in the day” here referring to the early 2000s, as this is another episode I didn’t watch on original transmission) how the show felt the need to jump through a bunch of rhetorical and technobabble excuses to come up with a second Riker who could be more rakish and insubordinate for a *lot* of reasons. Firstly, it once again smacks of conflict-for-conflict’s-sake childishness, but it also idolizes the wrong parts of Will’s personality (or what people seem to think Will’s personality is). And don’t you for one minute think this writing team didn’t 100% prefer writing for Thomas over writing for Will: There was even an idea floating around early in this episode’s pre-production that Will would be killed off and Tom would take his place (or rather Data’s, who would have been promoted to first officer), because nobody was going to expect it and it would have shaken up the crew dynamic.…

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Clara Who: The Impossible Narrator

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I was not as entranced with Series Nine as I’d hoped, but that may well be due to events in my own life and the kind of work that’s been on my plate this fall. I realize I haven’t written nearly as much about the show as I have in years past. So, this is to kind of rectify that, somewhat, and to encapsulate my thoughts on the series as a whole, and particularly in the context of Clara’s overall arc in the show.

This is in large part inspired by a conversation on Tumblr the last day or two, where Caitlin (abossycontrolfreak) properly tore apart the problematic Claudia Boleyn’s objections to Clara in Series 7. Mind you, there are other dynamics in this interchange involving Claudia’s style of critique, which erases or belittles countering views, and this is really the least of my concerns; both Caitlin and Julia (tillthenexttimedoctor) have effectively addressed this already, imho. At the heart of the mistake, though, was the belief that Clara wasn’t properly characterized in Series 7.  But I’ve seen this a lot.  It has more to do with the storytelling than the stories themselves. And even more than that, it has to do with how we read stories.

So what I really want to talk about is the role Clara plays as a storyteller, as a narrator, and how that intersects with the narration of the show as a whole. It is no secret, of course, that the nature of storytelling is one of Moffat’s main themes in his tenure of running Doctor Who, made plain in the “We’re all stories in the end” speech at the end of The Big Bang. But as we’ll see, this is also something that occurs in RTD’s handling of the series; furthermore, Clara marks a significant departure from other “narrators” as far as Companions are concerned.

 

A Bit of Theory

Before I get into that, I do want to briefly discuss the kind of background I’m coming from when it comes to narratology. It’s a bit of a hodge-podge, really, from deconstruction, death of the author, close reading, and all that, but I always find myself returning to Story and Discourse by Seymour Chatman, who’s a fairly significant Structuralist. Not that I fully subscribe to his theories, just that I find them a useful framework to start with.

Like many structuralists, Chatman begins along the lines of Russian Formalism by distinguishing two aspects of narrative. The Russians used the terms “fabula” (the actual events of a narrative) and “syuzhet” (the organization of those events); Chatman uses “story” and “discourse,” but in a much broader sense, with “story” encompassing events, character, dialogue, setting (the “stuff” or “contents” of a narrative) and “discourse” including all the different ways the narrative is “told” – not just the organization of the text, but the narration of it as well. Cinematically, “discourse” would also include camera angles, cuts, lighting cues, the soundtrack, and things of that nature.

I actually find certain Impressionist paintings a really useful way to illustrate this difference.…

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Cultural Marxism 1: Consider Phlebas

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Consider Phlebas is not generally considered to be the best way to start the Culture series, and in fairness it’s not how I did, having previously read Use of Weapons and The Player of Games. And by almost all standards these are better books, and surely more likely to hook new readers. But Consider Phlebas has one significant thing over both of them: it is by far the best introduction to the Culture, which is to say to the specific idea of Iain M. Banks’s peculiar society.

It is not quite a Marxist society, although this is mostly because the notion of labor within the Culture has been so thoroughly upended that large swaths of Marx simply fail to apply. But it is blatantly a society a Marxist would love, along with numerous other stripes of western leftism. And inasmuch as “Marxist” is the standard epithet for “further left than we want to admit to the Overton window,” whatever that might be for a given speaker (and note, of course, that “cultural Marxism” is a phrase designed specifically to tar feminism and anti-racism with that brush), a post-scarcity liberal utopia that indulges near limitless sexual perversities and where everybody has a “drug gland”  offering highs on demand would certainly seem to qualify in an, if you’ll forgive me, cultural sense.

And it is certainly true that Banks’s underlying premises of the Culture are distinctly Marxist in tone; not merely his declaration, in his 1994 essay “A Few Notes on the Culture,” that he believes “a planned economy can be more productive – and more morally desirable – than one left to market forces,” a statement he follows with an extended critique of capitalism, but also his declaration that “the Culture, in its history and its on-going form, is an expression of the idea that the nature of space itself determines the type of civilisations which will thrive there,” a fundamentally materialist worldview that in many ways leads inexorably to certain Marxist and utopian premises, at least when coupled with Banks’s (seemingly emphatically untrue) supposition of a galaxy teeming with life.

The result is, as Banks has said in interviews, his idea of an ideal society, and this is clearly its appeal to no small number of its readers as well. But, crucially, that’s not the point. Nor is the point some “serpent in the garden” explanation of utopia’s fall or inadequacy. Rather, the point is that the utopia of the Culture is positioned in a world in which other civilizations exist, some very much hostile to the Culture, and the Culture, as a result, has the same interference-heavy quasi-imperialist policy as the Western liberal tradition that it elsewhere takes to its logical conclusion. Or, perhaps more broadly, that utopia is not dependent on any particular assumption of some sort of inherent goodness in human nature (“A Few Notes on the Culture” offers several explanations of what the Culture does with its megalomaniacs), nor is the utopia itself innately “moral.”

This, at least, is a point upon which Consider Phlebas remains topical.…

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“What war hasn’t been a war of fiction?”: The Storyteller

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One of the big advantages Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has, regardless of whether or not Star Trek fans think it’s actually an advantage or not, is, as we have established, its stationary location. But this asset doesn’t just apply to the titular space station, it also applies to the nearby planet: After all, the whole point of setting this show so close to Bajor in the first place was to allow for development of one specific planetary society above and beyond what just having a representative as part of our crew would facilitate.

The biggest problem Star Trek has from an ethical anthropological standpoint is its well-known predilection to fall into the “planet of hats” issue. In less netspeak terms, this means Star Trek has an annoying tendency to depict extraterrestrial civilizations as monocultures in service to metaphor and allegory. Star Trek isn’t the only sci-fi-fantasy work to have this problem (in fact I’d argue it’s effectively endemic to the genre) and I don’t even think it’s anywhere near the worst perpetrator of it, but it is a problem Star Trek is famous for having. There are a number of reasons for this, most of which have to do with the inherent problems of using people or groups of people as dolled-up metaphor in this way, but the one that’s relevant to tonight’s discussion is the inescapable fact that a voyaging starship can’t stay in one port of call long enough to flesh out any given society to the realistic extent they really deserve. Because in theory this is something Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is primed to alleviate and another huge reason why it’s such a necessary second perspective on the Star Trek universe. With our city’s proximity to Bajor, there’s really no functional narrative reason why it need be depicted in the traditionally shallow and superficial sci-fi-fantasy way.

(Actually I tell a lie for the purposes of argument. Star Trek’s biggest problem from an ethical anthropological perspective isn’t the planet of hats issue, it’s the Prime Directive. But I’m not about to dig up that old chestnut again.)

“The Storyteller” is the first episode to really grapple with the potential this setup offers the show, and it succeeds with flying colours. We get not one, not two, but *three* different representations of Bajoran culture that differ from what’s been established thus far across both the A- and B-plots and the story even throws us Kira in specific opportune moments to further the contrast. There’s of course the village of the Sirah that Julian and Miles visit, but also the Paqu and Navot delegations that Commander Sisko has been asked to mediate between. In each case, we get to see glimpses of folk belief and cultural norms and attitudes that differ just enough from established dogmatic Prophets theism that it’s uniquely memorable: The first Sirah obviously talks a lot about destiny and chosen ones being sent from on high wand whatnot, but it’s obvious this is mostly rhetorical bluster and the village has a special set of folk spiritualism all its own based around the Dal’Rok and the telling of the tales that’s found nowhere else on Bajor.…

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Saturday Waffling (December 12th, 2015)

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Exciting things afoot, as ever; recording a commentary for Paradise Towers with Jack tonight, another podcast on Monday, and setting up some more of those for the future. The neoreaction book is at 30k, and looking like it’ll be ready to do a thing in early 2016. (Doing a thing being different from “be published,” of course.) I have some fun essays lined up for the near future. Last War in Albion Book Two Chapter Four is going to be very, very fun.

And I’m really happy with Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, which gets the finishing touches put on it this week. I think it is my best book, in a sort of raw quality sense. It feels like it hangs together as a book, which is always a risk with a kind of disparate essay collection, and this is a very disparate essay collection. It’s very much the “demonstrate what I do” book, anchored by three novella-length pieces: the title essay, Recursive Occlusion, and the V for Vendetta chapter of Last War in Albion, with a series of shorter and more discursive pieces in the middle. A winning move in my ongoing war with 2015.

What’s been the highlight of your year? …

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“Jesus! Jesus is here!”: Rightful Heir

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I don’t know how you screw up a concept like “Klingon Ice Monastery”, but they do.

You know, I think I’m just done listening to stories about Worf and Klingon heritage. Especially as told by Ron Moore.

Here’s another episode I vaguely remember liking that completely turned me off on the rewatch. It’s not one I have really fond memories of from back in the day-This was an episode I only caught once TNN started rerunning Star Trek: The Next Generation in the early 2000s. Consequently I’m not super broken up about having “Rightful Heir” fall flat for me as I don’t have any particularly potent nostalgia affixed to it and this season has been strong enough it can afford to give us a few duds at this point in the year….Even if we do seem to have, since “Suspicions” (and looking ahead to next week), crossed over into the Enterprise variant of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s month and a half long water-treading session.

None of you need to hear my reasons for being alienated by this episode. I most certainly do not need to go into my litany of disagreements with Ron Moore’s philosophy, writing style and approach to characterization again. My issues with “Rightful Heir” are the same ones I had with “Redemption”, only magnified to an even greater extent because I no longer have the time or patience to humour them. Worf is by now cripplingly overexposed as a character and has had way, way too many showcase episodes, even just this season alone. And the only reason he is so overexposed is because he’s the only character (on either show, frankly) that Moore actually enjoys writing for because he’s also the only character Moore knows how to write for. That’s a big problem for a showrunner, and an ever-present one.

(Moore isn’t the sole showrunner of The Next Generation by a longshot, but given Rick Berman and Michael Piller’s promotion to franchise overseers, the complex web of the producer/writer relationship and Jeri Taylor’s position, he definitely is one of them. He’s certainly the most senior staff writer by this point. This does not, however, make him the best.)

I mean should I even make an attempt to derive some erudition about the Klingons from their depiction in this episode? What more is there to say? It’s Moore-type Klingons. Ridiculous cartoon Viking/Dwarf stereotypes who like to eat, drink and stab in no particular order. Even the monks. Especially the monks. There’s a ghost of an interesting idea where the Kahless clone calls out the Klingons at the monastery for forgetting the reason why they fight and it almost seems like the story is going down a kind of jihad route by framing this in terms of a righteous struggle. And then it doesn’t, because of fucking course it doesn’t. I should have given up my hopes to see non-warrior caste and non-cartoon Klingons after the first season ended.…

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Hell Bent Podcast

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For our season finale (until Christmas) I’m joined by the legendary Kate Orman, writer of an appallingly large number of very good Doctor Who books. The first half is interview about her Virgin Books novels and her recent Faction Paradox anthology Liberating Earth, the second (starting at about the hour and twenty minute mark for those with no interest in the Wilderness Years, which is to say, wrong people) on Hell Bent. You can get it here, and I recommend you do, cause it’s lovely.…

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