On ‘The Ark in Space’.

 

“And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” – Genesis, 3:7, KJV

“…a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” – Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.1

“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars…” – Charles Darwin, letter to Asa Gray, 22nd May 1860

As I’ve said before, I think SF is fundamentally the reiteration of mythology in the idioms of modernity, particularly the age of science and technology brought in by the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and their legacies. Christian stories of creation and apocalypse are probably the most important mythological narratives reiterated by SF because the genre originated in the West, and is fundamentally concerned with the implications of the modern epoch which began in Western Europe. But there’s more to it than that. There is a deep link between Christianity and the experience of the rise of technological modernity. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.  You don’t need to buy Weber’s bass-ackwards, cart-before-horse notion of capitalism born from Protestantism to see the connections.

The Eden story is about the end of one way of life and the start of a new one.  It is about the expulsion of humanity from pre-History into History. It tells this tale twice, on two tracks.

Contained in Genesis, right at the start, there is the garden.  The garden we had to leave because we acquired knowledge.  In the book, the knowledge is of good and evil, and consequently of pain and death.  It is the moment of our emergence from the animal world of sensation into the human world of consciousness.  Animals, after all, do not ‘know’ that they will die.  That is the curse of the conscious.  Here, in the first book of the Bible that the literalists so abuse by their crass slavishness, is a Darwinian acknowledgement of the emergence of the human mind from the blurry thoughtworld of the beasts.  The near-immediate legacy of Adam and Eve’s little picnic is the creation of the tool.

It is almost as though Genesis contains an ancestral memory of how the use of tools drove the rise of the big brain, which in turn powered the biological emergence of humanity.  It also seems to ‘remember’ the role of language in the creation of consciousness, and the role of consciousness in the adaptation of the environment to our needs.

In Genesis, the deadly tools, the tools that see us kicked out of our idyllic biological pre-History, are the words with which to conceptualise ourselves, with which to become self-conscious and conscious of the other human selves outside us.…

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Invincible Iron Man #4

A very standard-issue Bendis issue, with all the attendant virtues and flaws. The amount of hide-the-ball as to the basic premise continues not to much appeal, but I expect that’s just going to be an attendant condition of Marvel through to the end of Secret Wars, and I’m grudgingly going to wait through it. As usual, Bendis cares not for the cover accurately describing the contents of the book – Mary Jane is in it, but doesn’t get to do anything, and is basically introduced as the cliffhanger. But Bendis does clever things with Iron Man; “Moonlight Ninja Fight Beach Party” is genuinely funny, for instance. But no real sparks here.

All-New All-Different Avengers #2

Waid is doing a clever semi-rewrite of the original Lee/Kirby Avengers intro here, complete with what looks like it’ll be the new Loki. But decompression turns out not to entirely be his forte, and one suspects this team is going to be a lot more fun when it’s assembled than when it’s being assembled. Which is to say, same problem with all the Marvel stuff right now.

Star Wars #13

This is fun. Some truly great R2-D2 stuff, a great Han Solo/Aphra face-off that promises to continue into the next issue, and a good cliffhanger that also promises to do interesting things next issue. I admit to reading the Star Wars issues of this more because they set up what Gille is going to do, but Aaron enjoys the zaniness of the Star Wars universe, and does good stuff with it.

Miracleman #5

Another interesting vignette of the Golden Age, though I’m definitely ready to see Gaiman move into the Silver Age stuff and eventually towars actually new stuff, just because I’m fascinated by the prospect of the suture here. But this is very good; another clever use of a bit of the Miracleman mythos to tell a strange and fractured sort of story. Nice backing material for once too – another issue that fully justifies its price tag.

James Bond 007: Vargr

The promise of “Warren Ellis does Bond” finally takes lift, with a profusion of stuff only Ellis would ever do with the character. Which is coextensive with “the stuff Ellis always does with this sort of character,” but that is after all the point of the exercise. It’s a gloriously smart fit, with the bits of James Bond and the bits of Ellis dovetailing perfectly into something that’s classic and fresh all at once. Tremendous fun, this book.…

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We don’t usually do breaking news at Eruditorum Press, but the initial reports I saw on this one were disturbing enough that I dug into it. The result, thankfully, appeared considerably less disturbing than first glance, but I’m going ahead and running the story anyway, if only as a reminder of the constant sexist background noise that pervades fandom.

Sunday afternoon, at a panel at the Chicago TARDIS convention, moderator Elliot Serrano made an extended joke about how Kingston’s “characters always seemed to have a thing for doctors” before presenting her with a fictitious doctoral certificate and asking “if Elizabeth Corday would like to have a cup of coffee some time.” Kingston, with the look of apparent disgust documented in the photo (posted to the Chicago TARDIS Facebook account with the caption “Alex Kingston reviews Elliot Serrano’s doctorate”), replied “what am I supposed to do with this?” Serrano went on to note that Kingston had been wearing Necomimi Brainwave Cat Ears, which nominally reflect the wearer’s mood, and said “I wonder what they’d be doing if you were wearing them today.” Kingston’s response: “Probably running away.”

Chicago TARDIS’s anti-harassment policy proclaims that they are “dedicated to providing a harassment-free convention experience for everyone” and “do not tolerate harassment of convention participants in any form,” specifying that “harassment includes verbal comments that reinforce social structures of domination related to gender” as well as “unwelcome sexual attention.” 

Contacted via Twitter, Serrano stressed that the exchange was “meant to be a comedic bit to liven the panel,” and noted that, upon being told backstage that people had taken exception to the joke, he approached Kingston to apologize, and that she took no offense and did not even realize what he might be apologizing for. He also stated, “I can see how some would find that type of bit inappropriate, and I won’t be doing that again out of respect for Chicago TARDIS and the fans.”

I am certainly heartened by the fact that Serrano clearly grasps the seriousness of what happened, and that the convention acted quickly in talking to him after the panel. All the same, things like this shouldn’t be happening, not least because of the message they send to convention-goers both about what behavior is considered acceptable and about how complaints of harassment might be treated by staff. To his credit, when I put this to Serrano he agreed that it set a bad tone. But I wish he’d realized that before sticking his foot in his mouth in front of an audience of fans. And more than that, I wish fandom weren’t a place where reports of Alex Kingston being sexually harassed at a convention sounded more like business as usual than like a shocking and appalling abberation. …

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Another preview essay from my end-of-year collection Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, available for preorder at this link (and in the UK here). There it will be accompanied by a book-exclusive interview with Peter Harness about The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion. And to answer the question that people have asked in comments every week, yes there will be a print version; it’ll go up closer to release.

One of the most exciting talents to emerge in science fiction and fantasy recently is undoubtedly Peter Harness, who, over roughly a thirteen month period, put his name to ten of the best genre scripts on television in the form of the Doctor Who episodes “Kill the Moon,” “The Zygon Invasion,” and “The Zygon Inversion” and the entire run of the BBC’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell adaptation. Any one of these would make him one of the most compelling voices of the past few years; their aggregate is as extraordinary a creative run as exists.

Or at least that’s generally been my opinion, which I’ve spouted on the Internet a few times, leading to the amusing consequence of Mr. Harness getting linked to my blog and reading it and enjoying some of the bits that weren’t about how clever he was as well. Which led to him sitting down for two interviews about his work, transcribed in the two chapters following this. So consider this the annoying bit where the interviewer talks for too long before getting to the good stuff. I’ll try to make it a really sprawling set of remarks that offers something approaching a general theory of how politics and science fiction interact, so as to really give the authentic “shut up and get to the interviews” experience.

I think the obvious starting point when talking about Harness’s work is that it is overtly and consciously political. It’s equally obvious at this point that Harness’s politics are at a minimum leftish. Despite this, however, both of his Doctor Who stories were, to varying degrees, embraced by right-leaning chunks of fandom, generally in the belief that their political views were being supported by the episodes. In both cases I think this is straightforwardly based on inattentive readings of the episodes, but it’s nevertheless striking, especially in a year where discussions of politics and science fiction have become increasingly split into two camps neatly mapping the left/right divide, a process largely driven, let’s be clear, by Vox Day and his inane “pink vs blue SF” rhetoric.

A key phrase in all of this, and generally one slung around with reckless imprecision and universal contempt, is “message fiction.” At this point the mere inclusion of any sort of diversity in the cast seems to qualify as a “message,” such that even stories like Rachel Swirsky’s “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” in which a group of drunks who beat a man into a coma in the mistaken belief that he’s gay or Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, which features a genderless species as “message stories.”…

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As I’ve said many a time, what I want out of Doctor Who is something I’ve never seen before. And so I’m not going to argue with anybody who puts this among their masterpieces. If you want to claim it as the equal of Listen or Blink then be my guest. For me, it’s a solid 9/10, and won’t be ahead of The Zygon Inversion in my rankings, so the result is that we’re going to start defensive and then move to the positive.

I suspect the crux of my disagreement with those who will put it higher is simply how much one values the basic idea of the “experimental” in Doctor Who. Which in some ways brings us back to Sleep No More, and in others back to In the Forest of the Night, two episodes that were distinctly experimental and also distinctly flawed. In both cases I value them considerably more than the consensus, and specifically for the odd things they did. And moreover, yes, obviously anyone who’s read any of my work on Doctor Who recognizes that I love its weird tradition, which has always been a huge part of the show, from The Edge of Destruction on. I’m definitely in the general camp of fandom that thinks The Mind Robber, The Deadly Assassin, Warrior’s Gate, and Vengeance on Varos are all cool just for being what they are.

But equally, the “experimental” field is crowded these days. At even the stingiest definition you’ve got to tag Listen, Last Christmas, Sleep No More, and Heaven Sent as experimental episodes in the last two years, and I’d be inclined to widen the net, and count bits of relatively non-experimental episodes like the Beethoven’s Fifth bits of Before the Flood and the two-hander first half of The Woman Who Lived, as well as much of In the Forest of the Night and the direct to camera bits of Kill the Moon. By and large this is why I’m loving the show so much right now. But it causes a small but distinct problem for something like Heaven Sent, which is that the fundamental limitations of how experimental Doctor Who can be really become visible when they’re run up against as often as they are these days. Doctor Who can do brilliantly experimental takes on all sorts of genres: western, Vikings, Restoration comedy, political thriller. But it can’t do an experimental take on experimentalism. That’s just not what it’s for.

This isn’t helped by the fact that the fundamental limitations of how experimental Moffat can be have long since become visible, and for the admirable reason that he keeps punching away at them with glorious stubbornness. This is, somewhat flagrantly, the basic concept of Time of the Doctor done as the show-off sequence in the middle of His Last Vow, with a middle finger emphatically raised at the entire “Moffat fetishizes the Doctor and this is a problem” crowd.

All of which is a very long way of saying that, slightly depressingly, this manages to be a hugely experimental one-hander that doesn’t actually do anything new aside from be a hugely experimental one-hander.…

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Indeed, no proper post today.

Here’s a free and legal copy of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, though, which American readers will probably find a necessary tonic to Black Friday, and everyone else will just enjoy on its own merits.…

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