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My Feet Erase the Path of All Arrivals (Soul Blazer)

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Soul Blazer forces us to confront a simple question: is it better to have a world or not?

At its most elemental level, this is a simple question of whether existence is desirable. This is also easy to answer: of course it isn’t. Non-existence does not long for existence. It does not long for the continuation of its non-existence either, it is true, but it is… content. It wants for nothing. Existence, meanwhile, wants non-existence. It may evince a certain contentment with its existence, and even a sort of crazed and paranoid desire to cling to this state of affairs, but its actions over the long game reveal a clear desire for annihilation. Such is the way with games; they constantly work towards their own end.

But this is not the question Soul Blazer asks. Indeed, it’s a meaningless choice, offered only to God on the occasion of the Big Bang. The reality is that existence has been chosen for us. The cartridge has been jammed into the top-loading slot of the universe and the power switch has been thrown. We may prefer otherwise, but it is not so. The only version of the question that can be asked given that is whether the continuation of existence is desirable. And given the nature of existence, this question is in practice whether the world should be destroyed or not.

At first glance this would appear to also not quite be the question Soul Blazer asks; the Freil Empire has already fallen to Deathtoll in it, after all; the world’s destruction is as inevitable as its existence. It would also appear that, despite this, the game has a straightforward answer: Deathtoll is, after all, named Deathtoll, and is the unambiguous villain of the piece. His consumption of the world is presented as an act of evil to be undone. The world, evidently, should not have been destroyed. But this is not as obvious as it might seem.

In truth, much as existence is generally a process of protesting one’s desire for existence while working inexorably towards its termination, Soul Blazer, for all that it suggests destroying the world is wrong, is fundamentally a game about doing so. The main action of the game is the systematic clearing out of six dungeons; dungeons that are created by Deathtoll as an alternative world to the one he destroyed. This already calls the straightforward analysis into question; Deathtoll is as much creator as destroyer.

But more than that, it casts the player as world-destroyer. A dungeon is just as much a world as a town, after all. Indeed, the main mechanic of the game – monster spawning tiles that the player must seal – combined with a sword swing that takes the side-swiping of A Link to the Past even further – means that dungeon clearing becomes a sort of tactical assault. One explores the dungeons and unlocks paths while endlessly finding places to stand whereby monsters can safely be picked off as they emerge.…

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“Trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them”: Time’s Arrow, Part II

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I’ll be honest. I do not get the criticism of “Time’s Arrow” and “Time’s Arrow, Part II” at all.

As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the most solid and effective stories, two-part or otherwise, Star Trek: The Next Generation has done on TV in a very long time. This makes me doubly happy, as “Time’s Arrow” and “Time’s Arrow, Part II” together also make up one of the most iconic stories in the series to me and a personal favourite, and I was delighted to see it completely lived up to my memories. As I get further and further entrenched in the process of coming to terms with how much I’ve projected onto Star Trek: The Next Generation over the course of doing this project, it’s nice to get the occasional reminder that there really is genuinely something about Star Trek, and this version of Star Trek in particular, that stuck with me and inspired me to project my imagination in the first place.

For me, part 1 was more about mortality, with Data’s predetermined death being treated as a touching metaphor for terminal illness. There’s a sense of always wanting to live in the moment, and mortality returns as a theme here when Captain Picard is temporarily stranded alone in 19th century San Francisco after the rest of the crew chase the Devidian hunter back to the 24th century. Part 2 shifts the narrative focus a bit, however: One thing it does do is double down on the time travel mechanics and bootstrap paradox plot points introduced in the first part. I suppose you could read this as overly self-indulgent and gimmicky Hard SF speculative trickery that has little to offer beyond its own cleverness. I think there’s more you could tease out of the story than that though: Although a stable time loop is by definition anticlimactic (as all Star Trek time travel at this point must by necessity be, although even now forces that lie beyond the pale outside of history conspire to change all of that), the time travel in this story seems to exist more for the purpose of avoiding material death.

For time is not, in fact, an arrow, even in this story: It’s a circle (as Guinan said in the last part, things have come “full circle”), perhaps even a spiral or a Möbius strip. Materially, this manifests itself in the text’s own existence: “Time’s Arrow” and “Time’s Arrow, Part II” came about as a direct result of a perceived ontological threat in the material realm of production, namely, the existence of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. With the new show’s premier officially slated for January, 1993, there were widespread and persistent rumours that Star Trek: The Next Generation would end in June, 1992. So the producers commissioned a cliffhanger finale, even though one wasn’t originally planned, to reassure audiences that this wasn’t the case. So in effect, the “Time’s Arrow” two parter becomes partially a performance about Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s longevity and continued lasting influence in the face of an expected slide into irrelevance.…

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I Wanted To Save The World: Mr. Robot

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It is almost possible to dismiss Mr. Robot. It’s on USA, a honed brand of basic cable drama that used to summarize itself as “Characters Welcome,” a tagline that more or less accurately described the set of cookie cutter House-style eccentric genius procedurals that it churned out. It features an ugly and pointless fridging at its midpoint, a crass angst-generating murder of a female character by a guy previously implied to have raped her that is as contrived as it is pointless. And its big reveal is that Mr. Robot, the eponymous revolutionary leader played by Christian Slater, is in reality a figure of the main character’s imagination – a hallucination in the shape of his father. It should, in other words, be a show that’s very easy to get a handle on and put into a box, so much so that even its pleasantly anti-capitalist leanings feel staged and fake; anarchism recuperated into just another demographic.

And then, in the ninth episode, something incredible happens. The show has just revealed Mr. Robot;s identity. Following this Elliot, the hacker main character played by Rami Malek (a longtime supporting player making his debut as a leading man here), is quasi-kidnapped by the closest thing it has to a straightforward antagonist, the sociopathic tech executive Tyrell Wellick, who demands to know his plan. A simple two-note piano line begins playing. The scene cuts to the Coney Island headquarters of Elliot’s revolutionary hacker group, fsociety. The lights go on, and a series of brightly lit old arcade games illuminate: Skeeball tables and Space Invaders cabinets. The piano moves to a different chord. Elliot is about to tell him everything; his whole plan to erase the debt record of the world. And then you realize what the music is; a chintzy piano version of the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”

It is, of course, one thing to crassly rip off Fight Club. It’s quite another to nick its musical cue while you’re at it. It’s the fine line between eyeroll and raised eyebrow. The former is depressing in its obviousness. The latter, on the other hand, is intriguing in its brazenness. Much like Fight Club itself (which really pioneered the sort of high-engagement visual style that’s become the signature of the Golden Age of Television that we are mercifully just past) it feels deliberate and thought about. It ostentatiously announces itself as a conscious dramatic decision, as does everything else in Mr. Robot. Indeed, so did its Tyler Durden reveal; “you’re going to make me say it, aren’t you,” asks Elliot in voiceover before the actual line, one of the many voiceovers intriguingly framed as direct addresses to the viewer, whom Elliot invokes before the show has even had its first image, saying, “Hello friend” and explicitly establishing that we are an imaginary friend he will be talking to.

“Hello Friend,” of course, is itself a play on “Hello World,” the first program anyone writes in a given computer language. That’s savvy.…

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Weird Kitties Reviews, Batch Three (The Vorrh, The Goat Variations, Aurora)

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 The Vorrh, by Brian Catling
Reviewed by Phil Sandifer
 
Eligible for Best Novel and available for purchse here. 
 
In many ways, I just want to link to Alan Moore’s introduction, since it is not as though I’m going to write a better review than it. And if one wants to be brief about it, “the sort of novel Alan Moore would call ‘the current century’s first landmark work of fantasy'” serves as a perfectly good description.
 
Which is to say that this is dense, literary fiction. It is tempting to call it magical realism as opposed to fantasy. But this would obscure more than it reveals. Its main plot (although it has many subplots) is the story of a man with a magic bow who is trying to cross the enchanted forest of the Vorrh. Its world is flecked with reality – another major character is Eadweard Muybridge, whose life plays out mostly as in our world – but is unmistakably a fantastic landscape, a world anchored by the hallucinatory forest and the monstrosities within.
 
What makes the book remarkable is in many ways the juxtapositions within it. The Vorrh is both medieval forest and colonial jungle, and the book draws from both iconographies, giving it a vibrant and intriguing heft. It is a book where things never quite become clear, and are all the more enticing and rewarding for it. It is labyrinthine and strange.
 
Catling is a sculptor by trade (The Vorrh is his debut novel), and the book has the heft and weight one would expect from this. It is intricate and carved prose that rewards attentiveness. This can make slow going at first, although the book becomes faster and easier once the vagaries of its structure and approach are known. It never becomes a page turner, but is instead one to savor; a structure of shifting viewpoints makes it easy to read one or two bits a night, allowng its strange tapestry to unfold. It has much to reveal. 
 
The Goat Variations, by Jeff VanderMeer
Reviewed by Eric Rosenfield
 
Eligible for Best Short Story and available here.
 
Jeff VanderMeer’s story “The Goat Variations” fuses together some fairly hoary science fictional tropes: the government keeps psychics alive in dream states to predict the future (ala Minority Report), a time machine, a man who sees versions of himself across alternate realities. As with much fiction, originality is produced by the peculiar alchemy of how the tropes are mixed, melded and remixed, and this is a stellar example of how that is done.
 
Told chiefly in half-scenes and flashbacks, we find a strangely familiar president ruling over Anglo-America (the touch of his crown during coronation like an  “iron kiss from the mouth of God”), reading to children in a dilapidated school while his country is attacked. It is not Islamic fundamentalists attacking, however, but Christian ones in the rebellious heartland of the country. The president can’t focus, does not know what to do.
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The Magician’s Apprentice Review

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Well, you can see why the promotional campaign was structured like it was. There’s really no way to describe The Magician’s Apprentice without just calling it a trailer. It’s a forty-five minute slab of raw plot designed to set up whatever The Witch’s Familiar is going to be, which looks like something involving Davros setting up a trolley problem with Missy and Clara on one track and every Dalek ever on the other.

In one sense, then, it’s a pretty faithful imitation of Dark Water. But where Dark Water was a moody eleventh episode think piece that got to pay off a season’s worth of character and theme, The Magician’s Apprentice has to basically start from scratch. Accordingly, it’s built almost entirely out of bombast and spectacle. To say that the episode is stuffed to the gills is an understatement: six Doctors (unless they used a McGann Big Finish bit I missed, which at this point you wouldn’t bet against), Missy, UNIT, Davros, every Dalek ever, the Maldovarium, an Ood, the Shadow Proclamation, Karn, and a joke about the different versions of Atlantis.

This is a familiar approach for Moffat at this point, and one he’s good at. Sure, those inclined to play “spot the recycled bits” will not be short of options, but there’s no inherent reason to focus on the fact that the setup is just The Impossible Astronaut with a hint of Name of the Doctor over the fact that a guy who’s made of snakes, hand mines (what the actual fuck), and all the planes stopping are all new and clever ideas. As is the guitar/axe battle, although I think you’d be hard-pressed to say that scene worked. (Still, Peter Capaldi as Doof Warrior is one of those things you don’t want to argue with as such.) It’s not the best iteration of this particular style of everything and the kitchen sink setup that Moffat’s done, but it’s not the worst either.

I recognize that my tone here is that of a long lead-up to a paragraph beginning with the word “but,” but that’s unfair. The “but” I’d build to is simple enough: that this is basically raw spectacle with minimal actual substance. And it’s not that this is untrue (although I’m sure Jane will come up with some spectacular stuff); it’s just that it’s more than faintly ridiculous to ask anything else of a season premiere. Its job is to bring back the state of being where one thinks of every day of the week primarily in terms of its proximity to Saturday. And so this sort of massively high-speed tour through the series’ strengths and default tropes works.

But it is, necessarily, more a summary of what the show’s strengths are than a demonstration of what it has to offer going forward. And for the most part, those strengths come in the form of the cast. Jenna Coleman, for instance, is at this point reaping the full benefit of being the most richly characterized companion in the history of the series.…

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Weird Kitties: Best Graphic Story Open Thread

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It looks like I forgot to actually name this week’s category last week, so let’s do a fairly easy one, at least in terms of this site’s readership: Best Graphic Story. 

This is the category I’ve got the most locks in already – with the publishing calendar pretty much set for the year, I’ll be nominating The Wicked + The Divine, Bitch Planet, Crossed +100, and Questionable Content for sure. I’m still not sure about the fifth slot. The frontrunner is probably Trees, but I mean to go actively looking for work by people who aren’t white before I commit to that.

Here’s the Hugo Nominees 2015 Wikia’s list of eligible stuff. So, what are you thinking you’ll nominate?

And tune in tomorrow for another batch of reviews, including one from me of Brian Catling’s The Vorrh. Still room in that batch, so feel free to lob something to snowspinner at gmail.

Next week, let’s discuss… Best Professional Artist. That’s a fun one. 

Oh, and there’s apparently some TV show about a magician and his apprentice on tonight? I dunno. Check back later today I guess. …

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Interview with Pulpozaur

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The lovely folks at Pulpozaur asked me to do an interview with them, which went up today, and is particularly cool to my mind in that the site is a Polish site, and so the interview has been translated, which I believe marks the first time I’ve been translated. I always love seeing which bits of interviews people pull title quotes from – this one’s “Elusive in the same ways as the secret truths of the universe,” which I have to admit, sounds like the sort of quote I’d pull to title something. Here’s the bit of the interview that’s from:

I think criticism really has to show you things that weren’t necessarily obvious. And for all that these approaches fall short in terms of strict empiricism, I think they retain a lot of attraction. I’m not sure Freud did a great job of understanding many actual people, but man, he understands Hamlet well. And for all the failings of Marxist governments – and obviously a Polish readership is going to have a more acute understanding of that than I do – I think he captures what it feels like to be a relatively poor worker under capitalism like nobody else. So they’re good for finding new ways of looking at things, especially art, which isn’t bounded by empiricism anyway.

So I’m drawn to occultism, as an interpretive method, for many of the same reasons. There’s something about the idea that there’s some sort of lost, hidden order to things that’s just immediately compelling. Even if it’s just the human instinct for pattern recognition firing blindly at the random noise of an ultimately meaningless universe, which I don’t rule out, the sense of some almost present truth that slips out of reach whenever you grasp at it is fundamentally compelling. And so it’s a useful way to get at stories; especially because art tends to be elusive in exactly the same way as the secret truths of the universe.

The full interview is available here, although I imagine most of you will prefer the English-language version, available here.…

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She was just somebody who had to get out. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part 10: Burroughs)

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Figure 876: The revelation of Mr. Mxyzptlk’s villainy is one of several shared plot points between Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow and Superfolks. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger, from Action Comics #583, 1986)

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Among the commonly cited influences on Watchmen is Superfolks, a novel by Robert Mayer that shares several plot beats with it and other superhero stories Moore wrote in the 1980s. Moore has generally resisted this comparison, pointing to other texts that influenced him more.

This gestures towards a larger issue with treating Superfolks as a major antecedent to Watchmen, which is that very little of what Moore allegedly drew from it is actually all that innovative. Indeed, Pádraig Ó Méalóid, in a thorough analysis of Morrison’s claims, found that in almost every case either the similarities were overstated or an earlier antecedent could be found. (The sole exception was the use of Pxyzsyzgy, Mayer’s analogue for Mr. Mxyzptlk, as the ultimate villain behind everything, a plot point shared with the resolution of Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow.) But in many ways it’s more helpful to take a step backwards and look at what both Superfolks and Moore’s work are attempting, and situating it in a larger context. Ultimately, both of them are engaging with superheroes in a manner familiar from the New Wave of science fiction spearheaded, in the UK, by J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, and in the US by a broader group of writers including Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delaney, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

The defining aspect of the New Wave was a turn away from pulp adventure and a focus on plausible extrapolation of science and towards using the tropes of science fiction and fantasy to explore human experience, applying the approaches of literary modernism and postmodernism to the genres. One major approach to this, pioneered by Michael Moorcock, was to rework pulp genres into new forms, asking, in various ways, what the subjective experiences of a character in a pulp adventure story might be like. In many regards, it was inevitable that this would eventually be applied to superheroes; that it took until 1977 for the first one to be released is mainly down to the fact that the companies producing the overwhelming majority of superhero stories, Marvel and DC, were fundamentally conservative in their publishing. But with a concept as historically inevitable as this, a priority dispute is almost beside the point.

Indeed, what’s most revealing about the priority dispute is the degree to which Moore’s influences largely leapfrog Mayer and go back to the larger New Wave tradition. The central idea of Superfolks comes from the New Wave, but its scattershot approach of random pop culture namedropping is just the Mad Magazine sight gag approach translated to text. (Indeed, Superfolks, with its focus on a barely disguised Superman and Captain Marvel, owes no small debt to Kurtzman and Wood’s “Superduperman,” which Moore has always cited as the primary inspiration for Miracleman.)…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Part 3 – Wave 1 Vehicles and Role Play

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The USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D is one of my favourite designs for anything ever. I have been fascinated by this starship and the way it looks for *literally* almost as long as I can remember to a degree that borders on outright obsession. I cannot fully put into words what the Enterprise means to me because even I’m not sure I fully understand the true depths of that meaning myself. Whenever I look at it I’ll sit entranced its curves, the vibrant colouring of the panels and the deflector dish or the slope of the stardrive section as it flows elegantly into that giant saucer. I don’t even think there’s just one thing about it that makes it so incredibly beautiful; it’s a genuine work of art in the sense everything about it sings together in perfect harmony such that you could stare at it forever.

The Enterprise is the centrepiece of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s iconography for me. It’s the one piece that sums up everything that I found so powerful and captivating about this series’ look and feel. When I would get merchandise for the show, I would often cut apart the various boxes and hold onto them: To me, the artwork and iconography was so beautiful and it so consumed my imagination I wanted to somehow be able to physically *hold* it, as if that would bring me closer to the emotions and atmosphere they conveyed, or that I might perhaps be able to channel that through me and bring some of it into my own being. My room would be littered with various carboard effigies of the Star Trek: The Next Generation logo or Playmates’ own space art that adorned their packaging: Dissociated, scattered signifiers of some ethereal confluence. And there always was that azure tinged Enterprise.

When I finally got the Playmates Enterprise toy it was an absolutely monumental moment in my life. Here finally was my very own spirit totem of this ship of the imagination, in three dimensional plastic instead of cardboard. My constant exposure to various representations of the Enterprise and my obsession with its design meant that I had become an expert on its every detail, but not in the classic Star Trek Nerd sense of memorizing deck blueprints or anything like that: My resources were disjointed publicity stills, toyetic caricatures, half-remembered effects shots and ViewMasters. What I knew best was the Enterprise‘s *soul*, not its body. And even then my intimate familiarity with every detail of the Enterprise‘s vibe allowed me to make some specific observations about this new toy.

First of all, even I could recognise Playmates’ Enterprise was based on the four-foot shooting model, not the six-foot one. This may sound like pedantic nerdery, but it’s actually hugely important to me because there are significant and noticeable visual differences between the six-foot and four-foot models and I think the six-foot model best captures the Enterprise‘s divine essence.…

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Shabcast 10 – Gothic!

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Okay, so the Iron Man thing seemed to go down well.  Thanks to everyone who read, commented, retweeted, etc.  I get the sense that my audience has just more than quadrupled in size, which is nice.

People new to my stuff may be unaware that I produce a regular Shabogan Graffiti podcast (or Shabcast, as I’m smug enough to call it).  (In fact, it’s increasingly irregular, but in the sense of turning up more often that it should rather than less, so that’s not a bad thing… unless you hate it.  But then you don’t have to listen to it, do you.  Nobody’s forcing you.) 

Pex Lives, my new Eruditorum Press colleagues, host the Shabcast for me and you can find my previous episodes archived here.  There are chats about Doctor Who, the Mckellen Macbeth, the Jonathan Miller Alice in Wonderland, the Hugo Awards and the Sad/Rabid Puppies, etc.

And here’s a new one.  This time, I’m joined by the lovely and incredibly erudite Gene Mayes – of various Pex Lives appearances and his own excellent new blog Being and Time Lord – to chat about the Gothic. 

We also focus specifically on the movie A Field in England, Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump’s masterpiece of English Civil War-era madness, magic and mushrooms.  There be spoilers here, by the way. 

We range pretty freely and get on to all sorts of other stuff including (but far from limited to) alchemy, John Dee, Hammer movies, Gothic novels, Marxism and Anarchism.  It’s a long one (just over 3-hours, so feel free to listen in fits and starts) but I hope worth your time. 

Here‘s Gene’s blog post about A Field in England.…

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