Eruditorum Press

The trap at the end of the clickbait

Myriad Universes: Separation Anxiety Part 2: Bone of Contention

, , , 0

With the Sztazzan demanding they leave the area based on territorial claims that are questionable at best and Geordi, Worf and Data stranded on the artificial moon due to its alloys blocking communication signals (and the distinct possibility it is in fact no moon at all, but a superweapon), the Enterprise is faced with a difficult set of options. Captain Picard eventually decides to separate the saucer, with Commander Riker taking the saucer section to safety while he stays behind with a skeleton crew on the battle bridge to deal with whatever the Sztazzan decide to throw at them. Joining him in playing the waiting game are Ro Laren, Deanna Troi and relief officers Solis, Burke and Thorne. Commander Riker will take Doctor Crusher, Jenna D’Sora, conn officer Dooley and Terry Oliver with him along with the civilians to Beta Cangelosi.

It’s nice to see the battle bridge again. It’s also nice to see Deanna Troi on it instead of twiddling her thumbs off screen in the saucer section with the civilians and “non-essential personnel”. Not that I should be surprised by this of course, as Michael Jan Friedman is the single best author ever to write for Deanna Troi, and her expertise with extraterrestrial cultures would obviously be needed during what amounts to a diplomatic incident (also, I should hasten to add, it’s not like Friedman would be so incompetent as to completely ignore the action on the saucer section, especially as he has one of his narrative prime movers aboard it). I dig Pablo Marcos’ rendition of the battle bridge: It strikes me as a cross between the set we saw in “Encounter at Farpoint” (and that we haven’t seen since as it’s been scrapped and repurposed so many times it’s by this point in various states of disrepair) and the main bridge redress from “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, which I find to be appropriate.

(I also quite like Captain Picard’s little aside observation in his internal monologue that “it’s been a long time” since they last separated the saucer because it’s an intricate and complicated maneouvre that requires an annoying amount of preparation; a nice meta nod to how laughably impractical saucer separation has always been from both a narrative and material TV production reality perspective.)

Story-wise this issue is a bit of a holding-pattern one, serving mostly to present the key saucer separation scene itself and recap the miniseries’ major story arcs. It’s handled fairly elegantly, though, with Worf and Geordi bringing their respective subplots up with each other as conversation to pass the time. By interesting contrast, Laren exposits not to a friend, but directly to us through an internal monologue. This is noteworthy because while Captain Picard isn’t the only character in the series to have the internal monologue as his explicit signature, he is the one who uses it the most frequently, typically as an extension of his captain’s log entries. As a result, on rare occasions you could slip into the mistaken assumption that he might be Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s narrator.…

Continue Reading

Vox Day’s Next Move

37

An image from Vox Day’s forthcoming SJWs
Always Lie, depicting him as Grant Morrison atop
a throne surrounded by his friends and a frankly
alarming number of subliminal penises.

Vox Day (who we’ll be spending a bit of time on this week; look for my review of his forthcoming SJWs Always Lie on Thursday) is making much of the question of what he’s going to do next. Including a private conference with his readers to serve as a “strategy meeting” for next year.

This is, like almost everything to emerge from the Day Bunker, largely bravado. Day’s tactics, which are really little more than what you’d get if you handed a fifteen-year-old on 4chan a copy of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, are in fact eminently predictable. So here’s your 2016 Hugo Awards preview.

First, the thing to realize is that Day’s tactics are shaped by one massive and fundamental constraint: there’s not actually a huge pool of people who want to follow a racist, misogynistic fascist lunatic. He boasts 440 “vile faceless minions,” his self-effacing term for the mob that has actively signed up to follow his orders. That’s consistent with the data from the Hugos this year, which suggested around 500 Rabid Puppy voters. More interestingly, the proportion of Rabid Puppy supporters in nominations and voting is about the same. In other words, it really doesn’t look like Day can wield more than 10-20% of the total voting pool, assuming that anti-fascist fandom (both moderate and hardline) holds their nerve and keeps up the fight.

Second, the thing to realize is that we don’t actually have to do that for all that long. Nomination reform passed at Sasquan. Another year spent cleaning dogshit off our yard is only going to make ratification of it next year easier. Which means that as of 2017, the effect of slates is going to be heavily, heavily muted. Day will have an easy time getting one or two works on the ballot, and a nearly impossible time controlling the entirety of it. At that point, the Hugo Awards will go back to something more or less like business as usual, only with, I suspect, a long-term suspicion of overtly conservative SF/F born from the memory of what utter cockmongers conservative SF/F fandom has been in the past.

Which means that 2016 is going to be the year Vox Day tries to burn it to the ground so that he can declare victory and walk away, conveniently exiting the fight as the “winner” right before the rule changes to blunt his flaming sword go into place.

Given this, I think we can safely assume that the Rabid Puppy slate in 2016 is going to consist of five nominees in every category, to try to maximize the number of categories with no non-Puppy nominees. I suspect he’s also going to pointedly include nominees that exist to dare the left to vote against them. Frankly, given his past praise of him, if he doesn’t put something from Miéville’s Three Moments of an Explosion up in short story, he’s a moron.…

Continue Reading

The Award of Cruelty

, , , , , , , 11

Diversity and social justice issues were creeping into the Hugo Awards, or rather into the cultural artifacts they celebrate, as such issues creep into the culture generally.  It happens because people are getting more and more interested in them, more open to them, and caring more about them.  This is, by the way, the product of material struggles for recognition and equal rights by people who are marginalised by mainstream culture in the West (i.e. racist, sexist, transphobic, bourgeois-hegemonic culture).  It must be stressed that such claims are not only valid on their face but also are represented, in artistic terms, by valuable work that deserves recognition.

The Puppies saw this trend and it infuriated them.  Just as they are doubtless infuriated by any such progress, by the increasing volume of the voices they used to be able to talk over and down to with impunity, by the increasing – and increasingly recognised – validity of these voices, not only in themselves but in their abilities.  The Hugos are, the Puppies think, their turf, just as the rabble of GamerGate, and the constituency they pander to, imagine that video games are their turf.  They took the gradual changes occuring in an institution that has always reflected a seam of progressivism in SF/Fantasy (just as it has always reflected other seams) and blew the phenomenon up out of all proportion.  (Seriously, I wish their distorted view of Hugos, and culture generally, were really true, and the voices they hate and fear really were as ascendant as they fantasize them to be.)

They saw this smidge of progress and imagined that it constituted some kind of attack upon their freedom.  They imagined it, and believed it, having chosen to imagine and believe it… because it’s amazing how sincerely and passionately people can believe ridiculous things that further their interests, confirm their prejudices and pamper their privileges.  They did this because that’s what reactionaries always do.  It’s a classic maneuvre when you’re rallying around the defence of established privilege and entrenched power relations (which is what reactionary politics always is, at base): paint yourself as the victim.  It’s great camouflage.  And they love it too.  They love the smell of the victim paint on their bodies, drying on them, crusting and cracking, leaving a trail of victim flakes everywhere they go.  Conservatives and reactionaries and fascists and ressentimentalists are as fond of being the victim as the whingeing, entitled, self-pitying minorities that live in their imaginations.  (There is probably something psychological to be made of the right-wing love of victimhood, and the way they always portray themselves in much the same terms that they complain about in their confabulated enemies and hate-figures.  I remember how, at school, bullies would always howl “But he started it!” and “It wasn’t my fault!” when caught, and then pout self-pityingly at the injustice of being told not to bully.)

But yeah, they interpret the struggles of the marginalised and mocked, their demands for justice, as an attack.  Moderate demands. …

Continue Reading

The Mouse and the Gun (Super Scope 6/Mario Paint)

12

The Gun
The first light gun was a 1936 amusement park game called the Seeburg Ray-O-Lite. Its design mirrored that of the technology’s most iconic form, the NES Zapper, at least in practice: you hunted ducks. In theory, however, they worked quite differently. The Ray-O-Lite was accurately described: it was a gun that emitted light, which was in turn detected by a target-mounted sensor – a vacuum tube, in its case. But with the turn to screen-based games, as opposed to the physical targets of the Ray-O-Lite, the technology shifted. Light guns such as the Zapper are, in fact, essentially cameras – pulling the trigger causes the screen to momentarily cut to black and then flash white in the valid target areas. If the photosensor within the gun’s barrel sees the flash, it registers a hit.
On one level, the Super Scope is simply explained as the SNES equivalent of the Zapper. And this is a true story; given that the Zapper was an iconic part of the NES experience, a Super version of some sort was effectively inevitable. But there’s more to the iconography here. The Zapper was an oversized handgun, and its defining game, Duck Hunt,  was about shooting cartoon ducks and being laughed at by a dog. (Duck Hunt was covered by the Nintendo Project here.) The Super Scope, on the other hand, is a fucking bazooka. 
This is not a decision justifiable in any sort of gameplay or design sense. The Zapper was an easy to use item. The Super Scope, on the other hand, was physically exhausting; it was not as though it was too heavy to lift or anything, but hefting the thing on your shoulder for an extended time was genuinely tiring. There was far more of it than there needed to be, for reasons that had nothing to do with anything other than the idea that a shoulder-mounted gun seemed cool.
The aesthetic continued into the packed-in game, Super Scope 6, a return to the multi-game cartridges sold with the bulk of NES systems, which were either Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt if you bought the Action Set, or Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt/World Class Track Meet if you bought the Power Set. In each case, however, the setup was basically that of a pop single – a clear a-side in Super Mario Bros that had hours and hours of replay value, and a pair of peripheral-centric b-sides that were generally fun for a few hours.
Super Scope 6, on the other hand, is all peripheral based, and lacks any sort of headlining game, instead offering six disposable minigames in two categories, called LazerBlazer and Blastris. The former is the headlining category, with all three of its games demoing first if the game is left to run without starting. All three are about fending off an alien invasion, shooting down missiles in the first, and spaceships in the other two, and match the general aesthetic of the Super Scope with hard, angular, metallic designs.
…

Continue Reading

Myriad Universes: Separation Anxiety Part 1: Bridges

, , , 0

Saucer separation. It’s always been kind of a weird concept, if you think about it. Presumably the Enterprise is a capable enough craft on its own such that it could defend itself without the cumbersome process of politely asking the bad guys if they would be so kind as to hold their fire for a minute whilst the ship does the splits, yes? Andy Probert didn’t even design the Galaxy-class to separate: He had to chop the ship up after the fact when word got to him late that Gene Roddenberry wanted the saucer to come off, because that was apparently something he always wanted the ship to do in the Original Series. And of course, it was prohibitively expensive for the VFX team to shoot a saucer separation scene every week, so that particular plot thread got promptly dropped (probably in hindsight wisely) after the first season.

But what if you did a story overtly about a saucer separation? One that uses the technobabble gimmick of the show not as a plot device, but as an actual level of textual metaphor? A story where the Enterprise is quite literally divided in half, with families and communities kept apart from each other by a vast expanse, with a symbolic reunification at the end?

This is essentially the backdrop for the event miniseries I call Separation Anxiety, spanning issues 39-44 of DC’s version of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Between the Enterprise returning Captain Okona to his ship and now, we’ve had a few smaller serials one-off adventures, none of them especially noteworthy. Q came back in a rather embarrassing trilogy about turning the crew into Klingons, and the comic book line has tried to redeem a few more one-shot characters from the TV series-Sonya Gomez and Ardra, namely. While those were more or less functional tales that once again demonstrate the spin-off series’ better mastery of its source material than the actual source material, and generally cleaning up the various messes it occasionally makes of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s world, they’re above par for this line’s truest pinnacles and I can’t really recommend them to a casual fan (though the Adra miniseries boasts what has got to be the most terrific title in the entire book line: “Shore Leave in Shanzibar!”).

As for Separation Anxiety itself, it’s actually not a typical summer event miniseries mainly because it starts in October 1992, which means we’re well into the TV show’s sixth season speaking strictly chronologically. However, I read it as a far more fitting coda to the stories and themes of the fifth season, and the summer event series for 1993 is likewise a perfect fit for where the show will have just recently left off. So there’s really no better time to look at this story than here, and in Star Trek’s two-year 25th Anniversary year, such temporal chicanery seems more than appropriate. The separation itself doesn’t happen in this opening issue, but it is effectively and ominously foreshadowed.…

Continue Reading

Hugo Commentary

41

Oh, fine, let’s just make this the Hugo thread, as apparently I want to say stuff.

First of all, Vox Day lost, and that feels fucking amazing.

Second of all, the “burn it all” No Award position lost, which means I did too. And frankly, that feels fucking amazing too. I mean, don’t get me wrong; I don’t regret voting No Award in every category. I stand by every word.

But I want to go back to something I said in “Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons,” which was that the thing I have always loved about the Hugos is their capacity for weirdness. The Hugos are a great literary award because they have a wonderful unpredictability that happens with surprisingly few outright bad and unjustifiable winners. There aren’t a lot of awards like that. The Oscars and the Emmys are littered with far more flatly undeserving winners and clear travesties, and never do anything nearly as weird as give awards to XKCD and Digger.

So yeah, my side only won five categories. What a crushing defeat; we only doubled the total number of No Awards in history in the course of a near complete repudiation of the Sad Puppies, with the only Puppy winner being something that would have made the ballot anyway, and helpfully shutting down the argument that the electorate only voted on politics, as opposed to considering politics alongside other things. (Even if I freely admit that I did vote on politics, clearly the electorate didn’t.)

Meanwhile, we had Laura J. Mixon, who exposed a loathsome troll within the progressive science fiction community, and who used her acceptance speech to speak out for #BlackLivesMatter. We had a beautiful refusal to obey the “don’t clap until the end” rule for Terry Pratchett. We had the beautiful moment of Robert Silverberg telling stories of the 1968 Worldcon in Berkeley, a date and place that speaks volumes about what the actual heritage of science fiction is, as opposed to the ahistorical lies peddled by Brad Torgersen. We had a win for Orphan Black, one of the most self-consciously diverse shows on television, and a good one to boot. We had, over and over again, voice after voice raised in support of that heritage. And we even had a Dalek on stage, so the Puppies can’t complain they weren’t represented.

But most beautifully of all, we had all the prose awards given go out to works published in translation, which is a genuine victory for diversity.

That’s the award I love and respect. That’s why the Hugos were worth fighting for in the first place.

This was an enormously good night. Thank you to each an every one of you who stepped up, bought supporting memberships, and made it happen.

I lost; we won.

EDIT (Sunday morning): And the good news keeps coming. The fairest and most effective plan to reform the nomination process, aka “E Pluribus Hugo,” just passed at the Business Meeting. It’ll need to be ratified at next year’s Worldcon, but it looks like next year will be the last year of fending off fascist entryists, and like come 2017 we can get back to being fans.…

Continue Reading

No Crime and No Punishment

, , , , 0

Aww, don’tcha just love the bourgeois mainstream?  I mean, ain’t they precious and priceless?  Isn’t their disingenuous, blithe, untroubled faith in recieved opinion; and their unquestioning belief in the fundamental goodness and honesty of the world they live in; just kind-of adorable?  Like toddlers who treat Mummy and Daddy like all-knowing, ever-protective gods.  And aren’t they sweet the way they get all serious about pondering the eternal verities they take for granted, like the way little kids are when they get all serious about a let’s-pretend game they’re playing.

I mean, look at this…

Dostoyevsky’s characters “justify murder in the name of ideological beliefs” which, according to the BBC, means he “foresaw the rise of the totalitarian state”.

Because it goes without saying that ‘democratic’ states never ever justify murder ideologically.  Nuh-uh.   The idea. 

Mindless, vacuous, unconcerned contentment of this type is sort-of cute, like the way cattle just mooch aimlessly around fields taking in the same sights over and over again, and happily munching on the cud.…

Continue Reading

I think it’s Kinda funny, I think it’s Kinda sad

, , , , , , , , , , 0

I just realised I forgot to post a link to the commentary tracks Phil Sandifer and I recorded for ‘Kinda’ as part of Phil’s ongoing series. 

There’s a zip file you can download which includes all four episodes, here.

Apologies about the poor quality of the audio in my sections.  I was, for various complicated reasons, temporarily forced to use my laptop’s integral mic.  Which is, as you will discover, shit.

In other news, Pex Lives has recently released a special episode – here – in which James Murphy chats Orson with Gene Mayes.  Lots of fun for orsonians like me.  Gene will be my guest for Shabcast 10, out next month.  Here‘s a link to his new blog, which I heartily recommend.

Holly and James’ most recent episode of City of the Dead is here.

And Phil Sandifer has just interviewed Peter Harness, writer of ‘Kill the Moon’ (which I still haven’t seen) and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I did see and thought was fantastic.  The interview can be downloaded or listened to here.

Phil and I will be shabcasting again soon, and we’ll be back with commentary tracks for ‘Vengeance on Varos’ before you can say “Zyton-7”.

Oh, and you’ll have noticed that Shabgraff’s URL has changed to www.shabogangraffiti.com.  The old blogspot address will still redirect you, but it’s just possible you might need to update your bookmarks, RSS feeds, etc.  So get on it.…

Continue Reading

Saturday Waffling (August 22nd, 2015)

13

In case you missed it, I interviewed Peter Harness.

On to new business, the Hugo Awards will be announced this evening, so let’s just call this a thread to talk about those, even if that does mean things won’t really pick up much until Sunday.

In any case, a brief note about them, made in advance of any actual outcomes. The Puppies, and particularly Vox Day, have insisted that widespread victories for No Award would constitute a victory for them.

Bullshit.

You know what would constitute a victory for the Puppies? What they actually campaigned for, which was their slate. If their slate gets roundly and rejected and defeated, that’s called losing.

In fact, this is pretty straightforward. If Puppy nominees win, it’s a victory for fascist scum. If No Award wins, it’s a victory for SJWs. If non-puppy nominees win, it’s a victory for moderates like George R.R. Martin who put value orthodox sci-fi fandom for its own sake and independently of what it actually does.

Two of those outcomes mark a defeat for my position and my view. One doesn’t. Just about the only exception is the Dramatic Works categories, where the Puppy slates were mostly not that different from what would normally get nominated, and even there, I’m inclined to view it as a category where there’s just less to gain for the Puppies compared to the other two sides.

But either way, the winners are going to be, you know, the ones who win.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 157 158 159 160 ›»