Eruditorum Press

The Coalition of Chaos

The Point is to Change the World (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part 5: Before Watchmen: Minutemen)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Actually, it basically just left off in the middle of More’s lengthy description for the first panel of Watchmen.
Figure 849: The ending of Watchmen is foreshadowed
by its first panel. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Dave
Gibbons and John Higgins, from Watchmen #12, 1987)
THE SECOND ITEM OF REMARK IS A 1” DIAMETER SMILEY BADGE, COLORED A VIVID SUNSHINE YELLOW AS IT LAYS THERE IN THE GUTTER SMILING UP AT US AGAINST A BACKGROUND OF LURID BLOOD RED. IT HAS SOMEHOW LODGED IN THE GUTTER SO THAT IT WON’T GO DOWN THE DRAIN, AND SIMPLY REMAINS STUCK THERE, STARING UP AT US WITH ITS JARRINGLY INANE EXPRESSION. A SMALL SPLASH OF CRIMSON STAINS THE FRONT OF THE BADGE. A SINGLE TINY SPATTER ACROSS ONE BLACK CARTOON EYE ON THE FACE OF THE BADGE. THAT’S BASICALLY THE WHOLE OPENING IMAGE, UNLESS YOU WANT TO STICK A CANDY WRAPPER THAT’S ABOUT TO FLOAT DOWN THE DRAIN, IN WHICH CASE WE HAVE A PACKET OF MELTDOWNS, WHICH ARE LIKE TREETS (ENGLISH) OR M&M’S (AMERICAN) ONLY WITH LITTLE BRIGHTLY COLORED ATOMIC SYMBOLS ON THE WRAPPING. ONLY INCLUDE CANDY WRAPPING IF IT DOESN’T DETRACT FROM THE SIMPLICITY OF THE IMAGE WITH THE GUTTER, THE BLOOD AND THE BADGE, THOUGH, BECAUSE THIS IMAGE IS PRETTY IMPORTANT. IT GIVES US THE BLOOD SPATTERED SMILEY-BADGE, WHICH IS A PRETTY WORKABLE SYMBOL OF THE COMEDIAN’S MURDER, WHICH RUNS THROUGH THE ENTIRE SERIES, AND IT ALSO GIVES US A FAINT SUBLIMINAL PREDICTION OF THE ENDING WITH ITS IMAGE OF THE GUTTERS OF NEW YORK AWASH WITH BLOOD. ANYWAY, SEE WHAT YOU THINK AND LEAVE OUT THINGS LIKE THE SWEET WRAPPER IF YOU THINK THEY’RE EVEN SLIGHTLY DISTRACTING. WE’LL HAVE PLENTY OF TIME TO GET ALL OUR CUTE BRAND NAMES IN LATER ON IN THE SERIES. THE ACTUAL TEXT UPON THIS FIRST PAGE IS ALL TAKEN FROM RORSCHACH’S JOURNAL, WHICH WILL BE A MORE-OR-LESS CONTINUING FEATURE OF THE NARRATIVE THROUGHOUT THE SERIES. I MENTION THIS IN CASE YOU THINK IT MIGHT BE NICE TO VISUALLY DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN RORSCHACH’S JOURNAL AND ANY OTHER CAPTION BOXES THAT MIGHT OCCUR BY GIVING IT A SPECIFIC COLOR A SPECIFIC SHAPE OR LETTERING STYLE OR SOMETHING. I SUPPOSE IT’D BE NICE IF WE COULD ACTUALLY GET SOME OF THE CHARACTER OF RORSCHACH HIMSELF BY THE WAY HIS JOURNAL IS WRITTEN, ALTHOUGH I SUPPOSE A SUITABLY WARPED-LOOKING STYLE OF HAND WRITING MIGHT BE OFF-PUTTINGLY DIFFICULT TO READ OR TIME CONSUMING AND DIFFICULT TO MAINTAIN. MAYBE YOU COULD SUGGEST A SORT OF SCRUFFINESS WITHOUT GETTING TOO ELABORATE, THOUGH. PERHAPS A MORE RAGGED EDGE OR A FAINT SPATTERING OF MESSY INK BLOTS INT HE BOXES HERE AND THERE AS IF THEY’D BEEN LETTERED BY A PEN WITH A SPLIT NIB OR SOMETHING. ANYWAY. THE OPTIONS ARE THERE, SO JUST DO WHAT YUOU WANT. IN FACT, IF YOU’RE ANXIOUS TO SEE ANYTHING THAT EVEN SMACKS OF VISUAL FLUMMERY THAN PLEASE FEEL FREE TO MAKE RORSCHACH’S BOXES THE SAME AS EVERYONE ELSES AND RELY UPON THE TEXT IN THEM TO SET THEM APART FROM OTHER NARRATIVE WITHOUT IMPOSING ANY VISUAL GIMMICKS NEEDLESSLY.
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“Now will never come again”: Time’s Arrow

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Writing fanfiction was probably the earliest way I ever dynamically or critically interacted with media. I guess I always found it the most intuitive and instinctual to express ideas and concepts through the voices of particular characters. Perhaps it’s something like Lwaxana Troi said in “Cost of Living”: All those little people who live inside of us, each of them voicing a different facet of ourselves. I suppose part and parcel of being the sort of person who undertakes a project of this scope and magnitude is that these particular characters, or at least versions of them shaped by my own perspectives, readings, interpretations and projections, are always going to live inside of me.

In a sense, this is nothing more than an extension of the way we read. The overall impact a text is going to have on you is largely contingent on the positionality you bring to the text itself. When we’re talking about speculative fiction, we’re talking about a genre that, perhaps more than any other, is designed to stimulate and inspire imaginations. And a hallmark of storytelling has always been its mutability: That multiple storytellers can and do take familiar characters and stories and tell them in different ways, bringing something a little bit new and different along with a piece of themselves into the tapestry of myth.

“Time’s Arrow” is a good episode. More of a straightforward adventure story than maybe some other episodes, but well done. The two things that have always stuck with me are the Devidians themselves and the part at the beginning when the time travel stuff is first introduced, which dovetails into what’s actually a quite good allegory for mortality for what it is (Deanna rather aptly uses the term “terminal illness”, and her cute little imitation of Data is another sign of her current status as a character because that’s not at all Deanna Troi, but it’s pure Marina Sirtis). It’s a fitting way to close off a season that’s dealt so heavily with time travel (indeed, time becoming unbound, which will return with aplomb next season), death, the afterlife and counterfactual alternate realities exiting simultaneously and coming into contact.

So here’s a small alternate reality of my own. When I was watching the scene where Geordi and Data are talking in ten forward about Data’s imminent death, I still had “The Next Phase” fresh in my mind, so my thoughts drifted back to Laren and how she might take all of this. And then all of a sudden, this exchange popped into my mind. Laren isn’t in “Time’s Arrow”, but this is something I thought she might say given everything that’s been going on lately. I imagine this scene taking place just before the one between Geordi and Data. I swear this isn’t even the kind of fanfiction I normally like to write-I typically couldn’t care less about filling in blanks in aired stories or adhering to the televised canon of events too terribly much, and I actually surprised myself that I came up with this.…

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Comics Reviews (August 12th, 2015)

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Years of Future Past #4

Rough going. There’s some novel plot twists, but everyone is such a cardboard cutout here that I have trouble caring. An exemplar of the sort of comic I really need to stop spending $3.99 on.

A-Force #3

Effective superheroics, with little more to be said. Art felt a bit uneven between two different inkers, and the plot is starting to lose me, though I’m not sure if that’s an A-Force problem or a Secret Wars problem. Either way, at best adequate.
Mercury Heat #2
Still not sparking; the underlying concepts are interesting, and get moments of good play, but I suspect this is one where I’ll like the second arc, once the cards are on the table, more than the process of laying them there. Luiza’s hatred for her own skillset is by far the most compelling aspect, but the book is being slow in establishing that in favor of a lot of worldbuilding, which isn’t bad, but isn’t quite amazing either.
Secret Wars #5

On the original release schedule, this sort of exposition slab of an issue, excluding almost all of the cast in favor of a tight focus on Doom and Valeria, would probably have been a bold and interesting more. Under the increasingly glacial pace of Secret Wars, I’m well past just checking my watch and wondering if it’s October yet, not least because the odds seem certain that the All-New All-Different Marvel relaunch will start before Secret Wars #8 ships.
Grant Morrison’s 18 Days #2

Morrison is now one of three writers, so we’re pretty clearly transitioning from stuff he actually did to stuff he at best has notes for. We’re also pretty clearly moving from where his overly elaborate work resetting the myth into a Jack Kirby knockoff is the focus to a retelling of a classic of world mythology. On the whole, then, an improvement.

Doctor Who: Four Doctors #1


An endearingly frothy summer event for Titan’s Doctor Who line. Cornell gets to business quickly and engineers a good cliffhanger, and the Keys of Marinus callback is a nice treat as well, but I’m less than convinced by his Tenth/Twelfth exchanges, which seem to capture neither Doctor particularly well. Still, fun. The “Clara is Slytherin” gag’s particularly nice. Edwards’s art is capable, though marred by occasionally excessive photoreference, which leads to a jarring difference between his everyday Tenth Doctor and the one who appears in a couple of close-ups. 
Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #15
It feels like this comic has done a few climaxes more than is earned, but as the proper, final issue of Year One (and Ewing’s final bow on the title) it’s a good one that shows how well sketched this set of companions is. I don’t pretend to understand the Source anymore, but this was fun and moving, and really is one of the best runs of Doctor Who comics ever.
Stumptown #7
As is often the case with Stumptown, I suspect it will read better in trade, but this is a lovely and world-grounded PI yarn that hums along entertainingly before sparking with real charm at the end.
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“Spirits Within”: The Inner Light

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There’s really nothing much to say. It’s simply one of the single greatest moments in the history of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and probably all of Star Trek. It deservedly won a Hugo Award back when the Hugo Awards actually meant something. If it’s not the single greatest episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation it’s a contender; the connoisseur’s pick for those who don’t want to tow the fandom line and pick “The Best of Both Worlds”. It’s damn near close to perfect. You don’t need me to tell you that.

It’s almost funny though that “The Inner Light” gets all the accolades, because to me it runs so contrary to everything we’re told makes “good drama” and a good episode of this series in particular. There’s no “conflict” about Captain Picard’s suppressed darkness and nobody learns a lesson about the lengths they’ll go when pushed and there’s no angsty, broody mediations about how life is pain. Rather, this is a story about performativity and storytelling. In fact, it’s a story so willfully about performativity that it’s not even really about Captain Picard at all, even though it was envisioned as a story about “Picard’s unlived life” and features some of Patrick Stewart’s very best acting to date. The probe is described as a form of “ancestor simulation”, and that’s such a wonderfully loaded term-One I’m obviously quite drawn to. It’s Eline’s (or rather, a manifestation of her’s) final words that spell it out: “Now we live in you. Tell them of us”. Words to remember and return to.

If you were for some reason inclined to be negative about this episode, it is possible to read it as a particular kind of “down to Earth” story, showing how travelling the universe in starships is less preferable to settling down to raise a family and spend the rest of your life with your soulmate in a quiet, sleepy little village somewhere. In fact this is bolstered by the one line in the whole production that does grate on me a little bit, namely when Kamin says “I always believed that I didn’t need children to complete my life. Now, I couldn’t imagine life without them”. As someone who is childless by design this stings a bit, smacking as it does of heternormativity and reproductive futurism. But the thing to remember here is that this is technically Kamin speaking, not Captain Picard: One of the reasons why this is such an oustanding Picard episode, possibly the definitive, is how it plays on the narrative role he’s always had. Since the very early days of the show being hamstrung, one of Captain Picard’s strengths as a character has been his ability to fill whatever narrative role the diegetic philosophical fiction requires (you could, actually, probably redeem “I, Borg” a bit by thinking about it in that light), and this episode simply takes that and writes it back into the text.…

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All the Birds in the Sky Review

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All the Birds in the Sky can be pre-ordered on Amazon here. Doesn’t look like UK pre-orders are available yet, which is sad.  The first four chapters are online, starting with chapter one here.

So, with the eligibility period for the 2017 Hugos just four months from opening, I think it’s time to talk about the clear frontrunner for Best Novel, which is Charlie Jane Anders’s All The Birds in the Sky.

In some ways, it’s tricky to articulate just why this book feels so fresh and necessary. Its component parts, after all, are aggressively familiar. The “there’s a science side and a magic side and they have a bit of a rivalry” setup is a standard mash-up post-Harry Potter, and the overtly eschatological bent is pretty standard issue as well. There are, one suspects, dozens of really lousy novels with the setup “a witch and a boy genius team up to avert the apocalypse.” The thing is, All the Birds in the Sky is not any of those novels. Instead, it’s the debut novel of Charlie Jane Anders.
Anders has been buzzing about the short story market for a few years now. She won a totally deserved Hugo in 2012 for “Six Months, Three Days,” a novelette whose first sentence serves as a perfectly adequate description: “The man who can see the future has a date with the woman who can see many possible futures.” And if there’s only one thing you criticize the Sad Puppies movement for, it should probably be that they’re a bunch of fascist shitheads, but if you go for two the fact that they kept “As Good As New” from the 2015 ballot because they preferred to nominate John C. Wright is absolutely the correct second choice. It’s a post-apocalyptic story in which the last survivor (a playwright and pre-med student) finds a genie’s bottle with an ornery ex-theater critic and goes about figuring out how to save the world and get it right this time. 
In both cases, the appeal is similar – the stories take hoary old chestnuts of genre fiction and put them into the material reality of the present day. It’s sci-fi/fantasy that’s at once firmly rooted in the history of the genre and both from and about a world where young women’s social lives are organized via a device in their pockets that’s in many regards far more advanced than a Tricorder. 
And that’s what’s fresh and vibrant about All the Birds in the Sky. Its standard genre tropes are well-chosen tools for doing a story that’s about growing up, realizing who you are in the world, and then, far more importantly, realizing that the entire narrative of growing up and realizing who you are in the world is complete and utter bullshit and that the world is a terrifying and confusing place comprised entirely of people who are trying desperately to fool each other into thinking they aren’t total fuckups. The magic/science opposition is there to be a binary opposition, with all the useful truth and false dichotomies implied.
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Me Gun Goes Click, Me Gun Goes Bang (Contra III: The Alien Wars)

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At its heart, Contra III is a game about guns. This does not particularly distinguish it within the world of video games, nor, for that matter, within the world of America. Nevertheless, it is firmly the sort of game Contra III is. Like Super Castlevania IV and Super Ghouls and Ghosts, its central mechanic involves offering players a variety of weapons, each with advantages and disadvantages suitable to particular moments in the game. Contra III’s twist on this mechanic is that Jimbo and Sully are insta-killed by any hit and lose their actively equipped weapon (you can have two weapons, one active at any given moment) upon death, which creates an inherent tension between the desire to have a strong weapon equipped for tricky bits and the desire not to lose a strong weapon to a tricky bit.
One way to put this, then, is that aliens are literally coming to take your guns. This is a crass and largely unhelpful reading, admittedly, although the fact that “losing your gun” means being reduced to a mere machine gun is, in this reading, terribly entertaining.
But equally, it’s impossible to quite separate the iconography of Contra III from the militarized paranoia implicit in it. The first two levels are indicative – bombed out cityscapes through which the player must run, eventually dodging fireballs that burst from the asphalt. This is the iconography of urban decay – the city as a collapsing, rotting space, often described in the fundamentally racially coded terms of the jungle, which was, notably, where the Contra series got its start. This, in turn, was a fundamental image of the Reagan era, where it served as an object of fear that justified the conservative project.
But it also served fundamentally as a fantasy. Like any jungle, the collapsed city is a place upon which fantasies of white militarism are projected. Its untamed wildness requires the puissant white man as a steady hand. Which, of course, Contra III is all too happy to provide via the sumptuously Aryan Jimbo, whose manly poses decorate the interstitial moments between levels.
Being a video game for a Nintendo system, however, some amount of this must be displaced. And so the bombed out city is destroyed by Gigeresque aliens, an all-purpose Other conveniently separate from any material entities, and defined entirely by its inhumanity. Enemies in Contra fall into two general categories – either they are overtly robotic, or they are creatures of grotesque flesh. In either case, the emphasis is on the fundamental antipathy towards the very idea of humanity, which makes the aliens a maximally nightmarish force for the manly heroes to assert themselves against.
This intensely xenophobic setup means that the unreconstructed macho fantasy at the heart of Contra III gets to carry on without undue complication. The resultant ethos is perhaps best captured in the game’s opening, where Jimbo and Sully, following the devastating alien attack, get their sole dialogue in the game, as Jimbo proclaims, “it’s time for revenge,” and Sully concludes, “let’s attack aggressively.”
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“No, it’s not ‘just a phase’”: The Next Phase

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Yes, it’s very, very good. Thank heavens. This is my favourite Geordi episode. It’s also my favourite Laren episode. It may well be my favourite Ron Moore episode. But I have to stop myself, because I’m perfectly liable to spend the entire essay just squealing about Geordi and Laren, and that’s going to entertain nobody but myself. So I’ll save that for the end and get all of the other things that are good about “The Next Phase” out of the way first.

And there are quite a lot. Dealing with themes of coming to terms with death and loss is nothing new for Star Trek: The Next Generation, and certainly not for Ron Moore. No surprises from him there. What *is* new, at least to this show, is the idea of looking it it from beyond the veil, so to speak: It doesn’t go too far down this path, of course, but even so “The Next Phase” does leave open a few tantalizing possibilities for those inclined to read what happens here critically and laterally. It reminds me in this regard a bit of “Power Play” (coincidentally another story where Geordi and Laren featured relatively prominently together, but again I’m getting ahead of myself) where a seemingly supernatural phenomenon (again, ghosts) is explained away by some form of technobabble…But the show never actually goes so far as to debunk the supernatural explanation or claim that the two forms of situated knowledge are not in truth describing the same thing.

And again just like in “Power Play” the story is very good about choosing which specific kind of technobabble to invoke. In the previous episode, the entity possessing Deanna’s body claims that consciousness can live on in the ionic storms of a planet’s atmosphere which, even though it’s technically a lie to mislead Captain Picard and accrue his sympathy so she can take advantage of him and the Enterprise crew, still opens up some particularly interesting avenues of thought. To me, it was a very appealingly animistic way of conceptualizing things fittingly translated into Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s blend of sci-fi fantasy. This time it’s a kind of “interphase cloaking device” developed by the Romulans that renders the user not just invisible but immaterial, existing on a different “phase” of being and therefore able to pass through solid objects, including people and particle beams.

Now, I believe there’s a special kind of significance in the fact that it’s the Romulans in particular who developed this kind of technology (as Geordi says, the Klingons were working on the same idea but abandoned it after deciding it was untenable-The Romulans didn’t) and it isn’t because the Romulans are sneaky backstabbing bastards, but this isn’t the time or place to properly go into my theory as to why. Instead I’ll talk about the ramifications being phased like this has for Laren as a character. One of the things that strikes me as interesting about her when compared to her kinsfolk, whom we’ll be meeting a great many of very shortly, is that she’s basically an atheist Bajoran, or at least starts out as one.…

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Further Thoughts on Hannibal

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This really is how these stories have to be done.  Not the faux-realism of the movie of Silence of the Lambs.  That approach jars with Anthony Hopkins’ (less than entirely successful) attempt to capture the uncanny and semi-demonic nature of Hannibal himself, who was always a creature of evil magic.  Look at Harris’ descriptions of him in Red Dragon, with his maroon eyes and his extra finger and his preternatural senses.

What the TV version of the stories has done is capture (with the proper ambiguity) the essentially magical nature of Hannibal and his world.  He lives in a twilight interzone between our world of quotidian normality and the deep, dark pit where human nature as brutish meat intersects with human nature as beset by devils and shades.

Yes, it glamourizes him and his violence, in contrast to real murderers… but that seems a superficial way to look at these stories, even if it’s a perfectly valid one which should be given its own space.  Below that, there is more to say.  Treating Hannibal as an uncanny creature who blurs our senses of place and time and knowledge is actually much better in this respect than the ‘realist’ approach, which ends up straightforwardly making him a glamorous monster.

I love that this show dances on the borderline between diegetic materialism and a diegetic acknowledgement of a supernatural world.  It leaves open to us the possibility that Hannibal truly is a demon, or a demon-inhabited man.  By refusing to foreclose upon the literal supernatural reading, the show leaves the incredible oneiric fertility of the supernatural story open to us.  It does what lesser works like The Babadook and The Innocents fail to do.  It respects the uncanny, and it also allows it a possible existence without making it anything less than numinous and ineffable.  It ultimately asks us to not care – but in a constructive way.  It asks us to recognise the essentially uncanny, weird, gothic, sick, twisted, irrational nature of reality itself as we live it.

Phil Sandifer (I suspect) enjoys the show in terms of Blakean visions.  I enjoy the show in terms of the Gothic Marxist insistence upon the really existing world as a twisted, phantasmagorical and irrational hellscape, but also as a site of the creative and expressive production of phantasms.

Season 3 is surely the fruition of this approach, as begun (falteringly) in Season 1 and continued (far more confidently) in Season 2.  And the great thing is that they’ve recognised this strain in the original stories, particularly in Red Dragon (which really stands above and apart from the other books), by placing the story of Francis Dolarhyde as the terminus of the season.

Dolarhyde is the figure who, through his Blakean-inflected hallucinations and his status as tragic and enmonstered outsider, allows the categories to crash into each other in horrific but visionary ways.  I love how Harris does all this in the book without ever losing track of Dolarhyde’s viciousness, or his essential patheticness. …

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Saturday Waffling (August 8th, 2015)

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You will recall that the Super Nintendo Project is a magical ritual to destroy Gamergate.

Less than twenty-four hours after the Lemmings post went up, Reaxxion, the neo-reactionary gaming site created by Roosh V (of Return of Kings infamy) created to try to get people to make the leap from Gamergate to literal, actual rapist announced that it would be closing.

You’re welcome.

The Great Leisure continues on Monday with Contra III: The Alien Wars. And then The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past the week after that, which I’ll be writing in the next day or two, and which will go up pretty much as soon as it’s ready for Patreon backers. Who have had the Contra III post since Monday. They live in the future. Or you live in the past. Hopefully the Kinda commentary track I did with Jack Graham will also go up sometime this week, along with an a review of Charlie Jane Anders’s All The Birds in the Sky.

I’m delinquent on last month’s Patreon bonus post, which is going to be about True Detective and Hannibal, I think mainly because I feel the need for at least one, if not both to end before I say anything about them. They’re both intense for me at the moment; True Detective less so, and I think it’s the inferior show at the moment (I’d have said the opposite last year), but I’m still very much enjoying the show. Hannibal borders on just too much for me, especially with the Blakean weirdness kicking up, but in a way I’ve seldom been invested in a show.

I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on either show.…

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