Eruditorum Press

We don’t need AI to hallucinate.

Comics Reviews (September 16th, 2015)

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Some quick site announcements, by which I really just mean “yes, we know there are still some things that are a bit wonky and we have our entire IT team on it, but our entire IT team is better known as ‘Anna,’ so it goes at the speed it goes.” Working on the remaining layout and formatting problems now – those on smaller screen resolutions should be having a much better experience than they were yesterday, and we’ll have it even more improved later tonight. Then we’ve got some backend stuff that nobody but me is going to notice like making it so I get comments sent to me via e-mail, and sometime next week or so we’ll start working on redesigning the comment system.

For now, comic reviews. As always, ranked from worst to best of what I paid money for. And tomorrow, Jane’s back with the second part of her look at Doctor Who Season Twenty.

Guardians of Knowhere #4

It is in some ways difficult not to simply feel angry at this book. Four issues gave nothing that could meaningfully be recognized as a plot. Deodato’s artwork shows all of his worst problems, namely a tendency to prioritize mood over storytelling (I had no shortage of trouble figuring out when characters were being killed or just knocked out here). But more than that… what’s the point of this? I mean, there wasn’t even a self-contained plot or arc to speak of, save for a debate about the ontological validity of Battleworld between Gamora and Angela. It was just four issues of Deodato mood pieces and contrived fight scenes. Utterly horrible miniseries, and emblematic of the way the initial promise of Secret Wars is just being squandered in the most cynical and wallet-draining ways imaginable. 

The Infinity Gauntlet #4

Despite my increasing reservations about Secret Wars, this is continuing to be a real treat. Duggan caught my eye with his tie-in to the dreadful Black Vortex crossover, or whatever the hell that thing was called – I’ve already forgotten – and this is the second thing of his I’ve read, and his skill at writing young characters in emotionally mature drama with lots of spectacular punching is really impressive. This issue’s a bit sloppier than some – I admit I lost the plot of the fight scene for a chunk of it – but the character beats are still enormously strong, and I’m genuinely invested in how it ends, which is way more than you can say for most of Secret Wars.

Sex Criminals #12

Hilarious in the way that only Sex Criminals is, which is to say that within the first seven pages the phrases “translated from some kind of weird cum angel language” and “are you just saying that because I booped your clit” have both appeared. So has the beginning of a really good discussion of the way in which female sexuality is historically treated as a form of monstrosity. So, yes, this is basically perfect and wonderful. …

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Solid Dick

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NOTE: This article has been amended to correct factual mistakes and clarify arguments.

 

Iron Man (2008), starring Robert Downey Jnr. and directed by Jon Favreau, is objectively one of the most evil films ever made. Possibly the most evil, actually.

 

Boilerplate

 

I’ll get around to justifying that opening statement in a bit. But first, I just want to say… ahem… fuck Tony Stark. Seriously, fuck him. The arrogant, smug, privileged, sexist, immature, selfish, capitalist prick. The rich, preening, self-satisfied asshole. The callous, self-involved, vainglorious, narcissistic wanker. This guy isn’t charming or funny or lovable. He’s scum, masquerading as humankind’s best friend. He’s the 1% as saviour of the world, at a time when the 1% are directly and knowing destroying the world. He’s the smiling face of the anthropocene (or rather capitalocene) extinction. He’s genocidal imperialism as (lone) humanitarian intervention. He’s neoliberal capitalism and neoconservative foreign policy as a series of bad-boy quips. He’s private capitalist industry as heroism. He’s mega-wealth as heroism. He’s white male privilege as heroism. He’s militarism, imperialism and American exceptionalism as heroism. He’s the War on Terror as heroism. He’s everything sick and twisted and rotten and filthy and evil and insane and false about our world, presented to us as aspirational role-model. He’s Donald Trump in a Robert Downey Jnr. mask… no, scratch that… Robert Downey Jnr. is a rich, reactionary dick too, isn’t he… so we might as well say that Tony Stark is Robert Downey Jnr. in a Robert Downey Jnr. mask. In any case, Tony Stark is everything we need to tear down, ruthlessly demolish, trample on and bury, presented to us as the best of humanity.

 

There’s no secret about this, of course. I’m not expecting any awards for searing, original insight. Everybody knows who and what Tony Stark is. He is, quite literally, stark. The films themselves make no secret about any of this. On the contrary, they loudly and proudly boast of it.

 

This stuff is baked into the character. It’s part of him by design.

 

I don’t pretend to know much about the Iron Man comics, original or contemporary. Generally speaking, I’m not a comics guy. I intend no disparagement of comics; they’re just not my can of Tizer, on the whole. So I come to these Marvel Cinematic Universe films (as I come to most films adapted from comics) as someone with little knowledge of the source material. But I’m not going to apologize for that, or seek to remedy it, for several reasons:

 

a) I can’t be bothered,

 

b) I don’t think it’s necessary, since the comics cannot possibly fundamentally alter the meaning of the films that stem from them, and

 

c) the vast majority of the audience – target and actual – are, like me, coming to these films without knowledge of the comics.

 

Having said that, I was told – by Holly B., during Shabcast 9, in which we chat about Iron Man, amongst other things – that Stan Lee’s original goal with Iron Man was to create a hero whom the hippies would hate but also be unable not to love.…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Part 2 – Wave 1 Aliens

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Any self-respecting toy collector knows you’ve got to have bad guys for your heroes to fight against. And yet this is Star Trek: The Next Generation, and in spite of what certain creative figures might thing, fighting is pretty much the last thing we ought to be considering. And so we see another manifestation of the curious dual role the Playmates line must play: Fun enough for kids to want to play with and bang together, and sophisticated enough to engage adults.

Playmates knew the Enterprise crew had to meet some people while they were out there exploring space, so as part of the first wave of releases they included a handful of aliens you could either speak or spar with: A Borg drone, a Ferengi, a Romulan commander and Gowron. In hindsight these are sort of interesting picks; the first wave came out in the wake of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s fifth season and was clearly meant to capitalize on it-Just take note of how Captain Picard is wearing his “captain’s jacket” and, of course, the Star Trek 25th Anniversary branding. But while these aliens are in many ways the iconic ones for Star Trek: The Next Generation, none of them played especially major roles in the fifth season (with the notable exception of the whoppers that were “Redemption” and “Unification”): If anything, you’d at least expect a Cardassian to be among the initial releases, but nope. Presumably Playmates figured that since this was the first set of Star Trek: The Next Generation releases, it’d be best to start with the recognisable staples.

Even so, the inclusion of a Ferengi pirate, particularly one who looks like this, is an unexpectedly pleasant surprise. Although they were intended to be Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s primary antagonists, they were supplanted at the beginning of the third season by the Romulans, and they haven’t really played any significant role in the TV series’ plot in three years. But Playmates’ Ferengi is explicitly modelled after the ones in “The Last Outpost”: He’s got it all, from the animal skin uniforms to the fur boots to the crackling energy whips, down to the fact he looks eerily like Armin Shimerman’s Letek. Even the clip-and-collect card cites the same Federation intel the crew went over in “Encounter at Farpoint” and “The Last Outpost”. Furthermore, this Ferengi is most assuredly not meant to be a joke, with the card making numerous references to how cunning, dangerous and ruthless his people can be.

Here I am finding myself talking out of two sides of my mouth again. Because I have to write this with the conceit that I’m just now discovering this toy and the Playmates line now, when in truth this guy was one of the very first pieces of Star Trek anything I ever got. To me, this is *always* how the Ferengi have looked and acted, and this figure gave form to the half-remembered dreamlike imagery from half a decade prior I could only hazily recall.…

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The Arc of Alchemy (Doctor Who: Season Twenty)

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What is it about anniversaries? We made another circle around the sun, that’s all. Well, not a circle. An ellipse. There are no perfect circles in the universe. There is no perfection in the Universe, let alone in Doctor Who’s twentieth season, back in 1983.

But perfection is so much more boring than messiness, than the chaos that lies at the heart of all truly surprising art. Perhaps that’s why we love Doctor Who so much, why it even works—the mercurial element of the show feeds on chaos, on messiness, on constant change, which is truly the natural arc of history, not to mention the unfolding of the cosmos.

Back in Season Eighteen, we had something resembling thematic unity for the season, and on a cosmic scale: Entropy. Yes, it’s explicit in Logopolis, a force that only psychomathematics can shunt into a box for safe keeping. But it’s present throughout the season. You’ve got it working on the Argolins in The Leisure Hive. Its perniciousness is what prompted the Logopolitans to create a CVE through which the Doctor and Romana fly in the third episode of the season. The “state of decay” they later find in E-Space. The collapse of the Warriors’ gate. The dying of the Keeper. The gobbling up of Traken. And, of course, the fall of the Doctor. The Arc of Entropy: death comes to us all.

Entropy is a state of decay. It is vampiric, sucking away order and producing chaos. But look what entropy actually produces in Season Eighteen—it’s not all doom and gloom. There’s still a circle. The Argolins are renewed. The Alzurians have their evolutionary circle. So too do the lion-men of the Gate. And, of course, there’s the resurrection of the Doctor, at the “Pharos” project, no less. So while entropy is a metaphor for death, it is trumped by the Eternal Return implicit in the structure of the show.

With all that in mind, let’s take a look at a similar thematic resonance that permeates Season Twenty, the first self-conscious “anniversary year” of the show. Because it’s fascinating. There’s more here than anniversary appearances and the nostalgic trotting out of old memories. But let’s get past the reverie of the past. When dipping into those memories, let’s bring them up from the deeps and look at them with free eyes, fresh feelings, that we might better understand Season Twenty’s “arc to infinity.”

 
Arc of Infinity
 
First up is Arc of Infinity, which is a telling phrase in of itself. I posit that the “arc of infinity” is in fact a descriptor of Season Twenty, insofar as the season’s “arc” is one oriented around themes of “infinity” in juxtaposition with “death.” There’s more than one kind of infinity, of course.
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Eruditorum Press: A Manifesto

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People of the universe, please attend carefully. The message that follows is vital to the future of you all.

Welcome to Eruditorum Press, a group blog and small press dedicated to innovative and intelligent cultural criticism. I suspect most of you, at least right at the moment this posts, have come from Philip Sandifer: Writer. Hi, I’m still Phil Sandifer, and whatever it is you came here for is still here and will continue to be here, unless you came for that monochrome paisley, in which case your life will now be an endless sea of disappointment. I’ll still be doing weekly comics reviews, Last War in Albion, and a rotating project a la The Super Nintendo Project, as well as hosting Weird Kitties. There’s also going to be a lot more.

We, or at least I, am acutely aware that there is no shortage of pop culture analysis sites on the Internet, all of them claiming that they’re different and unique. We, however, think that we are different and unique. For one thing, we’re a somewhat more personal affair. We’re still funded by the same Patreon the site has been funded for a year now by you, dear readers, although some of that money will be going to people other than me now. (Everyone is either paid a modest sum or stubbornly refusing my money here.) And there’s a new milestone goal called “Phil stops losing money on this idea” that I’d love to hit, by the way. But more than that, I think we offer a perspective that’s unlike what you can get from any of the other sites in this vein. And that perspective is… well… hmm.

One of the most absolutely satisfying things about my blogging career over the past few years has been the fellow travelers I’ve met and befriended. I’ve become a part of an intellectual circle of critics, not through any active attempt to create a critical empire, but just because I’ve had the honor of meeting cool and brilliant people doing cool and brilliant work. Which, now that I think of the implications under late capitalism, is appalling. I should absolutely have a critical empire, dammit, and so now I’m making one.

More seriously, I don’t want to be so crass as to define the terms of this intellectual circle or anything. I’m sure that if you asked the other contributors what the vision or mission statement of Eruditorum Press is, you’d get different answers, which is as it should be. Indeed, you’ll get different ones, of varying degrees of sincerity and coherence, every time you refresh the page. But it’s traditional, when christening mad endeavors like this, for the editor-in-chief (oh fuck, that’s me) to offer some sort of confident mission statement as to what it’s all about. So here’s a faltering attempt at, if not a manifesto, at least a description.

Obviously, we’re most easily united by common interests. This is not a Doctor Who blog, and some day I may even hire someone who doesn’t like Doctor Who, although it is obviously always going to have something of a special place within Eruditorum Press, as will British culture in general.…

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You’re On the Global Frequency (Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge)

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Comments are going to be temporarily disabled across the site for a few hours this evening due to some site maintenance. Relatedly, you should be sure to check back here tomorrow.

I had three great loves in childhood, and though I have forgiven them, they all betrayed me. Doctor Who I have, of course, written about at length; it turned on May 12th, 1996, the day before Super Mario RPG came out. Comics, a topic relevant to this game, were a more gradual process, with no clear moment the line was crossed from a certain tension between us to outright betrayal. The beginning of seventh grade, in any case; around my twelfth birthday. Mortal Kombat II, perhaps, or Final Fantasy III. And then there are video games. 
It’s hard to count how many times I’ve been betrayed by video games. There is, after all, a high potential for it. We’ve discussed already how the basic model of business games relies on the idea that they’ll be fun for a decent number of hours. There is nothing, then, quite as awful as the phenomenon of the shit video game. To buy a game is not a small thing; there are ultimately a finite number of moments in a year where you’ll get to do it. Picking a bad one is awful.
Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge is an example – a crushing, awful disappointment waiting to sting anyone foolish enough to be seduced by its branding. It is as though they took two-level demos of five games deemed unworthy of further development, reskinned them to include Marvel characters, and released them as an omnibus. The connections between levels and the five playable superheroes are often tenuous at best. Cyclops is randomly thrown in a mine-cart level. Storm is trapped underwater, seemingly mainly so nobody would have to figure out how to get good controls for a flying character. Wolverine is fighting evil clowns. Controls are sloppy and imprecise.
But in another sense, video games betray you from the start. It’s how they work; their central dynamic. The resistance of rules to will. We bind our very nervous systems to them, and they twist away and sever us, leaving us staring at the sudden amputation of the Game Over screen. Even today, Spider-Man and the X-Men: Arcade’s Revenge exists within me. I have not touched it in a decade at least, but when, in the first level, I drop down a shaft and find three paths that I can go down, there is an deep instinct, beyond even a memory, of what order to go in. In yet another, then, it’s only ever one big betrayal: an ongoing process of being repulsed by what defines you. 
I am about fifteen minutes from most of the places I grew up, halfway up Morris Ridge, overlooking downtown. Summer is breaking on the shores of the shrinking days, but retains the high ground for now. The sense of oddness that has permeated the weather for years persists; it feels as though it didn’t used to be this hot in early September.
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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Part 1 – Wave 1 and the Bridge Crew

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Alan Moore teaches us that reality begins with fiction. “The idea of a god is a god”. But fiction can not just be written, it also must be read. And when we read things, according to Shoshana Felman, we are not uncovering hidden meaning, but generating truth. And the truth that we generate will be different for each person, for each person is different themselves. My truth will not necessarily be your truth, and yours will not necessarily be mine.

If this project has taught me one thing, its this: Reinforcing my conscious intellectualization of the reading process by forcing me to undergo it at an intimate and primal level so that I may attempt to convey what I’ve seen to all of you. It’s a shamanic process; travel inside and out (because they’re the same thing) and try and share the experience through art for the benefit of others. It’s no great arcane secret-I’ve always helped that by my doing it, it would demonstrate that you could do it too.

When we talk about a work of art having a transformative effect on us and leaving a lasting impact on our lives, what we’re really talking about is the experiential meaning the work evoked in us, not the physical work itself. The material artefact is important, obviously, but that meaning only manifests when creators and audiences both react to it, and any meaning inherent to the text itself by necessity undergoes a process of translation. I can say Star Trek: The Next Generation has been a huge influence on my life for decades, but I’m only ever going to fixate on specific things about it that resonate with me personally: My positionality and perspective define what I take out of it and how I react to it.

And then what happens when ideas, characters and themes migrate? They travel, and are shaped and reformed by their travels just like the rest of us.

The Wave 1 line.

The second line of Star Trek: The Next Generation toys and action figures debuted in the fall of 1992. Playmates Toys received the license this time, after the failure of Galoob’s earlier stab at adapting the show to the 3 1/4 inch plastic scale. Marketed, of course, as part of Star Trek’s 25th Anniversary (indeed, the only part of the two-year celebration apart from The Star Lost and The Return of Okona officially and specifically dedicated to Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: The Next Generation alone), Playmates’ auspicious first wave featured the toyetic likenesses of Captain Picard, Counselor Troi, Lieutenant Commander Data, Lieutenant Worf, Commander Riker, Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge, a Borg, a Ferengi, a Romulan and Gowron.

As fans we sometimes talk a lot about “our” Star Trek (or whatever your pop culture mythology of choice might be), or at least those of us who were exposed to the show sporadically on initial run broadcast TV do.…

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Weird Kitties Reviews, Batch Two (Frankenstein, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Full Disclosure, The Race for Space)

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I do not anticipate needing any more Best Dramatic Presentation reviews in the immediate future.

 

Frankenstein, by the Mechanisms
Reviewed by William Shaw

Eligible for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, and available here.
 
If you’ve ever thought that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein would have been better as a prog rock ballad, this new song from the UK-based steampunk folk band The Mechanisms looks to have you covered. Retelling the classic gothic tale as a ten-minute song about a rogue AI, Frankenstein, while perhaps the least grandiose of the Mechanisms’ projects to date, is still a wonderful piece of work, and crackles with the same energy as their lengthier albums. 
 
The story is told in one long song, with linking narration putting one in mind of a geekier version of Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds. The tale concerns a far-future world where a scientist named Victoria Frankenstein creates a revolutionary AI, and… honestly, you know how the story goes from there. 
 
Initially it might seem a bit of a disappointment, after three albums of giddy textual play in established musical genres and mythical traditions, to see the Mechanisms doing a straight pastiche of a specific text. But the band, to their credit, seem to realise the dangers of this approach, and turn them to their advantage. At ten minutes long the song is tight and focused, avoiding the slightly slipshod nature of their longer and more complex albums, and dialling back a bit on the usual self-indulgence. There’s also a genuinely clever twist at the end, which manages to convey a sense of shock as well as ironic inevitability.
 
But what really sells it is the technical side of things, which is excellent. The singing and instrumentation are both top-notch, with the shifts in tone handled deftly by the introduction of new musical techniques as the song goes on. As ever, the Mechanisms manage to turn what could easily have been a one-gang premise into magnificent entertainment by sheer skill and chutzpah. 
 
 

This is a song which has clearly had a lot of thought put into it, as well as an awful lot of effort and talent And it’s that sense of passion which makes this song such a worthwhile piece of storytelling. These a clearly a group of people who care deeply about what they do, and long may they continue to do it. 

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Reviewed by James Wylder

Eligible in Best Novel, and available here.

Fanfiction as a genre is barely appreciated as an art form, so its hard to go too far stating exactly how Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality needs to be read and appreciated, as it has opened up the genre in a bold new way. Eliezar Yudkowsky has crafted a massive work that redefines the relationship of fanfiction to the work it stems off from in exceedingly fascinating ways.

The premise: that Harry Potter is not raised by the abusive Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia, but by Petunia and a different man she married: an educated man well versed in science, who does not mistreat Harry, but provides for him as well as instilling the scientific method deep into his worldview.…

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Weird Kitties: Best Short Story Open Thread

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Got an interesting batch of reviews up for you tomorrow, including a number of candidates in Best Dramatic Presentation.

Here’s a couple of novels that got mentioned more than once in last week’s thread. I’d love reviews of any of them if you’ve read them – send those to snowspinner at gmail: 
  • Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings
  • N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season
  • Terry Pratchett’s The Shepherd’s Crown
  • Jo Walton’s The Just City and/or The Philosopher Kings
  • Naomi Novik’s Uprooted
  • Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest
  • Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora
  • Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant
  • Aliette de Bodard’s The House of Shattered Wings
  • Elizabeth Bear’s Karen Memory
  • Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown
  • Max Gladstone’s Last First Snow
  • Joanne Harris’s Gospel of Loki
Meanwhile, tell me of good and Hugo-worthy short stories you’ve read. I’m monstrously behind on this category – I’ve not even gotten to the eligible Charlie Jane Anders or to pouring over China Miéville’s Three Moments of an Explosion to pick something. (Actually I’ll probably just read whichever one Jack tells me is best and nominate it, and save the rest for later.) 
Ooh, and I should see what, if anything, of Trigger Warning is eligible. 
Check back tomorrow for reviews. 
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She was just somebody who felt cramped by the confines of her life. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Nine: Mr. A and Superfolks)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: In its earliest development at DC, Watchmen was based around a set of fairly generic superheroes DC had acquired from the defunct Charlton Comics, leading many people to suggest that Moore’s claims to the book’s originality are overstated. But this accusation misses the ways in which Moore transformed and commented on the Charlton characters, most obviously the Steve Ditko-created character the Question and, indirectly, Ditko’s Mr. A, whose ruthlessly Manichean worldview is echoed by Rorschach in lines such as “there is good and there is evil, and evil must be punished. Even in the face of armageddon I shall not compromise in this.”

Figure 872: A 1972 color page of Mr. A, with Mr. A himself remaining, inevitably,
in black and white. 
But there is more to this than might be immediately apparent. Mr. A, as a character, reflects Ditko’s larger investment in the work of Ayn Rand; his name, for instance, is a reference to her emphasis on Aristotle’s maxim “A is A.” Rand was a novelist and popular philosopher whose overt and insistent pro-capitalist position (forged when her wealthy Russian family lost their businesses during the October Revolution prior to her emigration to America) gave her considerable success among the political right; a New York Times article the same month that the first collected edition of Watchmen was released, for instance, talked about how the incoming Secretary of Commerce was an admirer of Rand’s work, as was newly installed chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, calling her the “novelist laureate” of the Reagan administration. (Rand, the article notes, was not a fan of Reagan, saying that “since he has no program and no ideology to offer, his likeliest motive for entering a Presidential race is power-lust.”) 
 
Figure 873: Two differing visions of humanity. (By Steve Ditko, from Blue
Beetle #5, 1968; panels not consecutive in original)
Rand’s influence plays a significant part in Ditko’s work on both Mr. A and The Question – the second Mr. A strip, for instance, opens with a monologue about the absoluteness of good and evil before segueing into a lengthy discussion of how “only fools will tell you that money is the root of all evil” because “money is the tool of exchange” and how “for people who can exchange their abilities for an equal value – money and that money is exchanged for an equal value in products and services provided by other men’s abilities,” a viewpoint with clear roots in Rand’s vehement pro-capitalism. And the Question story in Blue Beetle #5 focuses on two paintings one described as representing “man’s inhumanity to man” by showing a man sitting in a gutter next to a used cigarette butt, and the other showing a strapping laborer standing near some jutting rocks. The plot tells of an art critic who hates the second picture for the way it “keeps accusing” him and reminding him of some unpleasant past experience, and of the criminal lengths to which the critic goes to try to destroy the painting (which Vic Sage has bought, in spite of the critic’s denunciation), a plot that has clear roots in Ayn Rand’s sense of aesthetics and the nature of man.
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