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Weird Kitties Reviews, Batch Five (The Dark Forest, Ghost Champagne, The Gospel of Loki)

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The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
Reviewed by Philip Sandifer
 

Eligible for Best Novel and available for purchase here.

I had some reservations about The Three-Body Problem, although they’re as much sour grapes as genuine objections, and its merits were considerable. This, I think, is a stronger novel, and a strong candidate for my ballot. Liu constructs an interesting conceptual structure; an alien fleet is 450 years away from Earth and bent on destroying it. A MacGuffin exists whereby Earth is under constant and total surveilance by the aliens and unable to produce any scientific advancements in theoretical physics, thus more or less locking technology more or less into variations of what’s on contemporary Earth (with a few exceptions when it furthers the plot such as cryonics). 

The novel follows a couple of cunning plans unfolding over about 250 years of future history, the main one of which also unfolds along a novel explanation of the Fermi paradox that doubles as a theory of interstellar relations. This is not to say it’s a theory original to Liu - I’ve no idea there – but it’s not one that’s been overdone in stories about aliens. And that’s the basic and real appeal of this, I think. Throughout it, there’s just a genuine feeling of innovation. There’s a fresh feeling to even the hoariest of old sci-fi tropes here. It feels fresh like one imagines Asimov and Clarke did in their days. One suspects – though it’s outside my area of expertise to conclude – that a fair part of this is that we haven’t really seen a Chinese perspective on these genre conventions before, but whatever the reason, it works well.

The book’s heftier than it’s predecessor, and probably doesn’t work well if you haven’t read it, but it’s a solid and interesting science fiction novel in the grand and classical sense, which is a nice thing to see. It never drags in its length, and Liu comes up with a fresh idea often enough to keep things moving. I ended up wolfing the bulk of it down in a nice autumn evening under the blankets with a few pots fof tea and absolutely loving it, and can’t wait for the last book of the set in January. 

Ghost Champagne by Charlie Jane Anders
Reviewed by William Shaw
 
Eligible for Best Short Story, and available here
 
I mean, the title is brilliant just on its own.
 
‘Ghost Champagne’ may well be the best short story of Charlie Jane Anders’ career so far, which, as our host has pointed out in the past, is really saying something. Anders is fond of dusting off old storytelling standards, and so it becomes tempting to fall back on old reviewing standards when describing her work; I laughed, I cried, I was moved unlike anything else I have read this year, etcetera, etfuckingcetera. But while that may be an accurate summation of my reaction, the fact is that no review of this story can possibly be as engaging as the story itself.
…

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Under the Lake Review

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It’s tempting to call it ruthlessly traditional Doctor Who. I don’t think it is, mind you, but it’s certainly tempting to call it that. What it definitely is, however, is oddly procedural Doctor Who. There’s very little time spent on theme-building; even the big Doctor/Clara scene that the episode contrives to have them nip back to the TARDIS for is more just a character piece than something that feels like a heavily built thematic piece. And there’s not a heck of a lot of time spent building characters – the base crew are pretty underdeveloped compared to, say, Last Christmas, The Rebel Flesh, or The Impossible Planet, to the point where the Doctor rallying them to stay and explore the church feels slightly unearned as a scene. There’s not even a ton of plot. I mean, lots of things happen, but it’s no The Magician’s Apprentice or Dark Water, nor even The Rebel Flesh. Actually, one really has to rack one’s brain to think of the last time a whole episode was used to set up a premise this straightforward. The Sontaran Stratagem?

No, even that has more moving parts than this, an episode that is more interested in lengthy scenes in which characters watch grainy green-tinged footage on a computer monitor or an extended corridor relay race than in what we normally describe as “doing anything” in television. I don’t think I’ve ever wondered so much what the Tumblr gifset crowd is going to make of an episode.

The real answer to the question, then, is probably… ooh, Curse of Fenric 1? (Survival has a pretty complex premise.) Or hell, the last actual proper base under siege, Warriors of the Deep 1? Certainly you have to look to the classic series to find anything as willing to spend quite this long on people fiddling with machines on a BBC soundstage. It’s just not something Doctor Who does much, as television. For the most part this has generally struck me as a good thing, although there’s certainly a brand of traditionalism that would say otherwise.

And yet there’s no obvious reference point for this in the classic series. It doesn’t feel like a McCoy story or a Davison story. It’s tempting to call anything that’s a base under siege a Troughton story, but no, this isn’t how one of those works or feels either. Indeed, its basic formula is unmistakably a new series standard – the action-heavy setup to a premise-changing cliffhanger.

The result makes a credible claim to being Whithouse’s best work in years, and I think actually shows a really interesting perspective on the series. Recall that Whithouse, when he debuted on the series nearly a decade ago, noted that he’d not been a classic series fan. Indeed, and this is a fact that I don’t think has been remarked upon much, he was the first new series writer for whom their episode was the first Doctor Who they’d ever done; the literal first of the new school.…

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Weird Kitties: Best Fancast Open Thread

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Ah, Best Fancast. Or, as literally anyone that isn’t the Hugo Awards would call it, Best Podcast. I’m sufficiently bad at listening to podcasts that I miss the majority of the stuff Eruditorum Press puts out, personally, although I’m dead certain to be nominating Verity! this year, and might well go for Welcome to Night Vale, although I’d generally figure they’re a better fit for Dramatic Presentation. (They were among the runners up in Fancast this year, though.)

So what’s good?

Also, I’ve got outright nothing to run tomorrow review-wise, so once again I beat that drum. snowspinner at gmail. If someone sends me something, I’ll write up a review of The Dark Forest so that we at least have two things. Otherwise, it’ll be the return of Sunday Pancaking. 

Next week… I dunno, Dramatic Presentation Long Form? Aka the category where the thing everyone knows will win isn’t out until December? Sure. Let’s go with that.

But for now, tell me what podcasts I should add to my list of things I won’t get around to listening to.…

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Shabcast 12

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Welcome to Shabtober everybody.  Here’s another Shabcast for you.  You lucky people.

An unexpected edition, suggested by Holly.  It’s mostly about the whole Kesha / Dr Luke thing (so Trigger Warnings) and the #FreedomForKesha hashtag, very much from a pro-Kesha perspective. 

We also chat a bit about the latest Doctor Who (so Spoiler Warnings).

Compared to previous monstrously long Shabcasts, this one comes in at a positively brisk hour-and-a-bit.

Holly guests, and kindly does most of the talking, alongside Josh of Vaka Rangi.

Bet none of you saw this coming.…

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She saw places that aren’t even there any more! (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part 12: Pax Americana)

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Figure 885: The eight panel grid and recurrent figure eight motif in Pax Americana. (Written by Grant Morrison, art by Frank Quitely and Nathan Fairbairn, from The Multiversity: Pax Americana, 2014)

Previously in The Last War in Albion: When it came out, Watchmen was generally hailed, along with Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns as the vanguard for a more “mature” taken on superheroes – one marked by a great degree of cynicism and violence, an approach Moore would later come to repudiate, and that would lead him towards a profound ambivalence about Watchmen as a work.

It would be ridiculous to suggest that Moore did not want Watchmen to succeed, but equally, it’s clear that the terms on which it did succeed were intensely upsetting to him. In a fundamental sense, the book he wrote and the book people read were two very different things. And the gulf between those two versions of Watchmen is a huge and fundamental part of the reaction to the book.

It is also a gulf explored by Grant Morrison in his 2014 comic Pax Americana, part of his larger Multiversity series of semi-connected one-shots exploring alternate Earths in the DC Multiverse he had helped restore in 2007. The comic was explicitly modeled after Watchmen– indeed, Morrison had been hyping it since 2009, describing it as rooted in “that sort of crystalline, self-reflecting storytelling method” and an attempt to capture what would happen “if Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons had pitched the Watchmen now, rooted in a contemporary political landscape, but with the actual Charlton characters instead of analogues.” In this regard, what is perhaps most significant about it is that it is not an imitation of Watchmen as such. Where many comics overtly following from Watchmen adopt its nine panel grid, Pax Americana is based around an eight panel grid, albeit significantly more loosely than Watchmen is around its grid. This is in turn reflected within the comic, which uses the figure eight as a recurring visual motif. But Morrison slyly plays on the image, using it not just to represent the number 8, but as an infinity symbol, a figure that tacitly invokes Doctor Manhattan’s line shortly before the end of Watchmen, “nothing ever ends.”

Figure 886: An assassination in reverse. (Written by Grant Morison, art by Frank Quitely and Nathan Fairbairn, from The Multiversity: Pax Americana, 2014)

Indeed, the complex notion of time implied by this iconography manifests throughout Pax Americana. Like Watchmen, it engages in considerable non-linear storytelling, but where Watchmen has a clear forward-moving narrative that runs from the beginning of issue #1 to the end of issue #12, albeit one punctuated by a number of clearly designated flashbacks, Pax Americana is simply told non-chronologically, with the reader left to piece together the actual sequence of events within the narrative. Its opening section, depicting the assassination of the President of the United States by the Peacemaker (shot in an open-topped motorcade, a tacit reference to Watchmen’s suggestion, made explicit in the film, that the Comedian was involved in the Kennedy assassination) in reverse over the course of three pages, a clear sign that this is not a comic with a straightforward relationship to time.…

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“Eternity is in love with the productions of time”: True Q

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“Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.”
-Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin

Every once in awhile Star Trek: The Next Generation does throw me an episode that seems custom-tailored to my chosen reading. “True Q” is one of them.

René Echevarria is another one of those writers with whom I only agree about 50% of the time, but he did work on a number of my favourite episodes. One of these happened to be “Transfigurations”, with which “True Q” certainly seems of a piece: Both stories can be read very easily as being about characters who undergo spiritual apotheosis and transformation and what happens to them afterward. “True Q” also bears some similarities with “The Nth Degree”, in which the character who experiences said apotheosis is guided through it by the Enterprise crew and must figure out for themselves how to carry those lessons with them on a mundane everyday basis. Any follower of this blog should know by now that a central guiding figure of this project is the shaman: Someone who travels the outer realms, learns from the gods and spirits and returns to Earth to make art about what they’ve seen in the hopes this improves the lives of the community.

This also gets us a nice redemption of Q that distills a few of the more dissonant and conflicting aspects of his character. Q is an expert trickster and manipulator, setting up situations or positing himself in the narrative just so to test us to see if we’ve got what it takes to go the next step. In fact tester and experimenter (and performer!) might be a better metaphor to explain what he does on the show than judge, which invokes the other half of Avital Ronell’s “test drive”: A “drive” akin to Freud’s eros and “death drive” to constantly “put ourselves to the test” to see if we measure up to our own standards. Q then becomes the embodiment of the benevolent form of Western modernity’s test drive to better itself and constantly improve. This drives home the notion that Q is something to aspire towards being, or at least a diegetic metaphor for something to aspire towards being. A divine role model in his own right, and thus someone not at all too different from us, who reminds us of the ideals we keep striving to live up to. He’s here to make sure we still do that and keep at it, which rather elegantly covers and combines his roles in “Encounter at Farpoint”, “All Good Things…” and “Q Who” with what he does here.…

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The Witch’s Familiar (Podcast/The Alchemist’s Pupils)

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Phil, once again atop someone else’s post to announce the second episode of the Eruditorum Press Doctor Who Series 9 podcast, this time featuring a conversation between me and Jane on The Witch’s Familiar. You can grab that here, and I hope you enjoy. Meanwhile, here’s Jane with her own take on the episode in our very own Eruditorum Press version of her famed mirror threads at GallifreyBase.

Jane’s Thoughts

First and foremost, I look at the various mirror-shots within an episode as a skeleton key for unlocking my interpretations. So, for The Magician’s Apprentice we start with shots of Missy reflected in her compact, and Clara reflected in the Doctor’s sunglasses; in The Witch’s Familiar we have both the Doctor and Davros reflected in an eye-shaped window in the Infirmary on Skaro.

Given the titles of these episodes, the mirror shots are strangely reversed. We’d expect the pairing of the Doctor and Davros in reference to The Magician’s Apprentice, in no small part because Bors refers to the Doctor as “Magician,” while the shots of Missy and Clara most easily translate to The Witch’s Familiar, both given the contemporary gendering associated with “witch” and how Missy likens Clara to a couple’s puppy, as pets are generally consider the “familiars” of witches.

But there are all kinds of student/pupil relationships in this episode, depending on your point of view. Clara could be the Doctor’s apprentice. So could Missy, given she steps into a Doctorly role here. Or maybe Kate is an apprentice to the Doctorly Clara. Hell, the Doctor could be Davros’s apprentice, given the cliffhanger, with the Doctor now wielding the Dalek equivalent of a sonic screwdriver. Colony Sarff, partaking of an animal motif, could be a “familiar” to Davros. And so it goes. All this is to say that I don’t think there’s any singular correspondence to elicit; rather, the general aesthetic of the Magician/Apprentice and Witch/Familiar relationships are highlighted here. Relationships which are rooted in a particular power dynamic, which we’ll get to eventually.

Anyways, the word “apprentice” is rather interesting, given the new monster that appears at the beginning of The Alchemist’s Pupils (my title for the two-parter as a whole). Here we see Hands with Eyes in their palms, which is actually a rather ancient symbolic motif: the Hamsa, primarily from Middle Eastern culture, is considered a talisman that wards off or protects against the Evil Eye. It’s particularly notable for being a matricentric symbol to ensure a healthy and successful childbirth. But in this episode of Doctor Who the monster is demonstrably portrayed as malevolent, sucking a soldier down into the ground.

But in mythology, which Doctor Who most certainly is, a trip under the earth isn’t synonymous with death. Rather, it’s symbolic (or more properly metaphoric) of a journey through the subconscious mind. So it’s in this context that I’m interpreting the story’s exploration of, for lack of a better word, nostalgia. For the story is obviously concerned with the past, from the plethora of continuity references to a classic time-travel trope whereby the Doctor is presented with the opportunity to kill boy-Davros well before the creation of the Daleks.…

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Comics Reviews (September 30th, 2015)

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As always, from worst to best of what I bought.

Sandman Overture #6

Ultimately, this fails under the weight of five previous issues spent going “well, maybe it’s all going to come together in the end.” Which, obviously, you know better than, or at least I do. No, the truth is that there’s no good reason for this miniseries to exist. It served mainly to waste J.H. Williams’s talents for two years on a mediocre and uninspired book, the result of which ends up being some of the worst work of his career simply because, for all its formal brilliance, it’s a pain in the ass to tell what’s going on, and usually what’s going on wasn’t worth the effort. None of the crackle or energy of Sandman is present here; it’s just a tired exercise of checking some boxes and getting to the end of the plot. What an utter disappointment of a book.

Young Terrorists #1

Picked up off the rack because it was a light week, and because I was intrigued by a book blurbed by Laura Sneddon (a critic I have great regard for, but whose taste differs pretty sharply from mine) and Julian Darius (a critic I have literally no respect for whatsoever, but whose taste runs close to my own) that used the tagline “get radicalized.” It’s messy – an eighty page opening issue that luxuriates a bit too much. Artist Amancay Nahuelpan is working in that messy, scratchy style of Daniel Žeželj or Riccardo Burchielli, which trades a degree of clear storytelling for impact, and the premise feels ever so slightly tired. I don’t want to say there are too many books that are taking terrorism seriously as a tactic instead of treating it as something to reflexively demonize, because there aren’t, but this mostly just leaves me wishing Bendis and Maleev were putting Scarlet out on anything like a reasonable schedule.

Providence #5

I admit to having a terribly large amount of fun with all the St. Anselm’s segments, that being my wife’s alma mater. (She was particularly tickled that her school motto was proposed by a bunch of Necronomicon-obsessed occultists.) This is a weird and deliberately unsettled issue based around dreams and time breaking down, and I’m curious how the transition into “Herbert West: Reanimator” is going to work in terms of tone from this heavily dream-inflected issue (mixing mostly “Dreams in the Witch House” and “Color out of Space”). But, perhaps as expected, this is transitional. Although Moore is clearly having a lot of fun with characters getting to explain things in ways that go over poor Robert Black’s head. “I’m more of a revivalist” indeed. 

Mercury Heat #4

I wondered when this would pick up a bit. Gillen finally provides the exposition drop that the book proper had been lacking, and as a result Luiza’s character comes appreciably more into focus. It’s funny, the plot kicks into a properly functioning gear, and for the first time we get an issue where all the parts seem to be working together.…

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My Hamster is February (or Jack Thinks About ‘The Witch’s Familiar’)

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1. Nostradidn’tus

Okay, the first thing to say is that I was totally wrong about how Missy and Clara would survive. I expected some sort of reappearance of the Nethersphere, with Missy having herself uploaded and then redownloaded, and bringing Clara along for the ride. Far too overcomplicated for Steven ‘Mr Simplicitypants’ Moffat to use, it seems. Instead we got something far more straightforwards which, while uninteresting in itself, allowed Moffat to do a scene in which Missy and Clara have a conversation rather than needlessly overcomplicated, self-referential plot tricksiness. Yay, etc.

 

I was also wrong about what ‘The Witch’s Familiar’ would do with the trolley problem cliffhanger. I predicted that it would take up loads of our time rehashing the Series 8 obsession with the morality of killing via a reiteration of the contentless ethical dilemma from ‘Genesis of the Daleks’… which it didn’t do. Instead it pretty much blithely said something sensible, i.e. “Yeah, kill fascists if you have to, and don’t worry about it, I mean they started it. In fact, get the contents of the sewer – the rejected, disavowed, lowest of the low – to rise up and kill the fascist ruling class. That’ll be funny.”

 

I thought we’d get loads of stuff about how the Doctor killed little Davros and that makes him a hypocrite, or didn’t kill little Davros and that makes him a hypocrite, or tried to kill Davros and in the process created Davros and that makes him a hypocrite… (and yawn because of course he’s a bit of a hypocrite, so what? Are we supposed to not be social actors because to get out there and do stuff means that we pretty much have to embrace a degree of ethical compromise? Fuck’s sake capitalist media, will you please stop flogging the dead horse of complicity in an attempt to paralyse people’s will to action?!?) …with the whole thing eventually side-stepped via a bit of narrative trickery which means the Doctor ultimately gets to not act either way, but without the redeeming virtue of ‘Genesis’, i.e. that the Doctor did reach a decision but was prevented from putting it into effect because of circumstances out of his control.

 

I also thought we might loads of soppy bollocks about the poor little Davros bonding with the Doctor, and feeling sad, and being a lonely scared child the Doctor bonds with, and all the usual attendent feels.

 

To Moffat’s credit, we didn’t get any of that. Though, sadly, he only dodges the soppy Doctor/Davros bonding session by making the whole thing incredibly brief and glib instead. Reminiscent of how the only way he seems able to avoid making Clara the butt of jokes about her appearance is to lock her in a Dalek casing for most of the episode.

 

 

2. Zombie Crap

 

I still love the handmines. I’m sorry, I’m still on about them. I was fascinated to learn from Jane (in her recent guest appearance on Pex Lives) that the handmines recall an ancient Middle Eastern symbol – the Hamsa – which brings protection against evil. …

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“Eternity waits”: Schisms

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The way I thought of time was I thought of it like a river. And so I thought of it as flowing toward its lowest level. And I thought of history as a river and Eternity as the ocean. So naturally history flows downhill to reach Eternity. I also like the fact that when the descent in elevation is rapid, the river runs faster, and when the landscape is almost flat, the river broadens out and meanders. So it was to preserve this idea of time as a fluid. The other reason is a mathematical reason. It has to do with the fact that if we have novelty moving downward, then the maximum of novelty is zero.”
-Terrence McKenna

Brannon Braga sells himself short when he describes “Schisms” as “just a garden-variety-UFO abduction episode”. Though only writing the teleplay, Braga’s signature stamp is unmistakably all over the place here, and it’s all for the better.

This isn’t the first time Star Trek has done missing time and alien abductions: The earliest I can remember is “The Mark of Gideon” in the Original Series, which was seeped in that imagery and iconography even if it wasn’t overtly about it. The Animated Series was similarly awash in all manner of 1970s New Age sci-fi spookiness. And actually describing “Schisms” that way similarly does it a disservice, Braga himself pointing out the story’s real appeal lies in the mystery underlying its initial acts. While its surrealism looks comparatively tame next to the sheer mind-breaking symbolic power of some forthcoming Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes (in particular, Braga’s forthcoming episodes) and it doesn’t help the big reveal is given away in the weekly syndication teaser trailer, “Schisms” remains unarguably compelling.

It also doesn’t help, sadly, that the aliens themselves are, shall we say, somewhat underwhelming as realised. Braga himself even describes them, rather bluntly as “fish monks” and complains, albeit correctly, that neither fish nor monks are scary. Their language of clicks, by contrast, is a testament to the kind of insane attention to detail that can go into shows like this: That’s not just random background noise, that’s an *actual fictional language of clicks* devised by producer Wendy Neuss and the sound team, and every sequence of clicks you hear has been painstakingly translated to Fish Monk from English. Yes, that’s *actual dialog* those dudes are speaking, and none of you would ever have picked up on that had I not told you.

One thing I do really like about the Fish Monks is their origin: A group of mysterious creatures from outside the normal space-time continuum who are trying to re-shape our universe for their own unclear motivations. They don’t just come from another universe, which would almost be blase in the kind of science fiction setting Star Trek: The Next Generation has, they come from an *entirely different* kind of space (in fact, if my understanding of how subspace works in Star Trek is correct, it’s literally a *liminal* space between).…

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