Eruditorum Press

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An Open Letter to John C. Wright

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The tl;dr here is that Recursive Occlusion, my interactive occult overview of Doctor Who, is now available for just $8.99 from Amazon and Amazon UK. An altogether more impish version of this announcement follows:

Dear John C. Wright

I don’t think anybody should murder you. I just thought I’d open with that, since it seems like what passes as courtesy in your depraved sickness of a worldview. 

Also, my name is Philip Sandifer, with an I, and not an O, which I can’t imagine you don’t know, despite the fact that spell it as Sandofer literally every time you write it on Vox Day’s comments thread. You might like to know that my full name is Charles Philip Sandifer, and that my actual schoolyard bullies called me Charles. You know, just in case you want to up your game.

Anyway, I just wanted to respond to a couple of things you’ve said on Vox Day’s comment thread, like where you say of me:

As I suspected, he is not a real pagan, not old-school, but one of these modern post-Nietzsche types who regards the gods as instruments to be used, if not constructed out of his own thinking. He is playing with occultism as a diverting bit of entertainment. To him it is an abortive psychic technology: something he wants to get something out of, not something he wants to serve.
He would not die for Odin or castrate himself for Cybele.

Sir, a real pagan would kick your ass.

Mr. Wright, are you completely out of your skull? I mean, let’s be clear here: you are currently condemning me for not chopping my dick off for an Anatolian mother goddess. This is not a normal thing to fault someone for. I am reasonably confident that, out of seven billion people on this planet, you are literally the only one who, on June 12th, 2015, faulted anybody for not castrating themselves for an Anatolian mother goddess.

That said, I will concede the point, there are essentially no circumstances under which I would castrate myself for Cybele, or, indeed, die for Odin, who’s frankly an egotistical wanker better left to the myths. But I want to get at a larger issue here, because I really think you’re just not understanding me.

Of course occultism is not something I want to serve. The whole reason I hated One Bright Star to Guide Them was the fact that it was a heavy-handed and unsubtle paen to blind obedience of unseen forces you don’t understand. That is literally the entire point of why I started picking a fight with you and your overly vocal god: because I think your valorization of obeying orders whether or not you understand them is morally abhorrent.

So no, my occultism isn’t about unquestioningly serving pagan gods. But given that we both agree that serving pagan gods is a terrible idea (we just disagree about whether unquestioningly serving your god is also one), I’m not sure why you’re framing this as a criticism.
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Even Furiosa

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Further to some objections I’ve had to my description of Mad Max: Fury Road as having reasonably good gender politics.  Trigger and Spoilers, obviously.

What Mad Max: Fury Road does – with its depiction of Furiosa – is to refuse to make violence the exclusive province of men, or to make men the only ones who are any good at it.  (Not unprecedented – but quite good.)  Furiosa gets to do all the trad-masculine things that Max does.  She’s just as good at them as him.  This, apparently, is a big problem for those kinds of insecure, reactionary misogynitwits who drivel on about how women are weaker than men.  According to such douchenozzles, this is just a scientific fact, and it’s not a man’s fault if he just repeats the incontrovertible findings of Science.  In actuality, of course, what such bigoted ninnies are actually doing is regurgitating some half-digested sociobiologistic bullshit.  They then accuse feminists (who control Hollywood in their ideologically distorted, bass-ackwards bizzaro world) of playing a dirty, emasculating trick and oppressing men by spreading the vicious civilisation-eroding lie that not all women need a man to open jars for them.

The thing is, there is a rational kernal to some of these complaints (wait).  The complaint comes as a response to a genuine threat (I said wait).  The genuine threat which is correctly perceived by the bawling manbabies is a threat to their privilege.  You see, when Furiosa beats up some man just as well as Max can (including Max himself), or shoots a gun just as well as Max can, or drives a car just as well as Max can, what is being done is that these traditionally masculine behaviours are being completely detached from masculinity.  And what is being detached from masculinity is violence.  So the threat to male privilege is about as primal as you can get: male privilege is threatened with losing its monopoly on violence.  Given that violence, in one form or another, is at the root of how all systems of oppression function, this could hardly be more threatening (at least within the confines of a mainstream popular movie).

This isn’t some submerged theme in the film that you have to hunt about for.  It’s front and centre.  The violence Furiosa excels at it specifically and explicitly a violent response to a patriarchy which itself openly functions through violence.  Most obviously, there is the implied violence of rape (and kudos to the film for not directly and unnecessarily showing sexual violence).  But there is also the structural violence.  The system is literally patriarchal, in that Imortan Joe’s fertility seems to be inextricably linked to his rulership – either materially or ideologically, or perhaps both.  He rules partly through his family.  It is stated that several members of his ruling elite – and his Imperators (bosses-cum-generals) – are members of his family.  Brothers, etc.  Several are sons.  They all seem ‘disabled’ in some way.  One seems unable to breathe without a mask and oxygen tanks. …

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Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Episode 1: The Friends of English Magic

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Right, so, here we are; a seven week run of reviews of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that you didn’t even have to pay for on Patreon. That said, the Patreon has taken a couple hits lately  (some very generous backers have had to, for entirely understandable reasons, edit back to merely being… still very generous, actually), and I’m not going to lie, the last month or two has already been a bit tight finances-wise, so I could really use to see the number go in the other direction a bit. So if you can spare a bit, please consider backing. Really, even a little bit helps; you can set a monthly cap so that you’re only tossing in $1 or $2 a month, and it’ll still count towards all the goal totals, and it would be greatly appreciated. 
In any case, thanks very much to the kind folks at BBC America, who have provided me with screeners (I’ve seen the first three episodes at present), thus enabling these reviews to go up as soon as the episodes air. Or, in this case, early, since this episode got released on YouTube a few days ago, so there’s no embargo on reviews. Or, if you prefer to watch it on television, it’s on BBC America at 10:00 Eastern tonight.
So, for those unaware, this is the BBC-produced adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s novel of the same name, in seven episodes, all written by Peter Harness (of Kill the Moon fame) and directed by Toby Haynes (of The Pandorica Opens through The Day of the Moon fame). The tl;dr is “this is really quite good and worth following,” which isn’t really a surprise given the pedigree of everyone involved. As for this specific episode…
It is possibly just my own perception, but it feels as though the first episode, as a televisual institution, is an increasingly leisurely affair. This is slightly odd. Ratings-wise, first episodes are still the boffo high points of series. But of course, it is finales where the actual dramatic fireworks go, and the default style of television, especially arc-based prestige television, has become a slow burn towards a fiery and grandiose conclusion.
One can only imagine how much this frustrates the people responsible for publicity on television shows these days. I mean, it’s certainly not that “The Friends of English Magic” is a bad episode of television. It’s quite good and moves at a nice speed through what is, let’s be honest, a tremendous amount of exposition. But it lacks any moment that seals the deal, emphatically communicating what the pleasures of this show are going to be. Instead we have something more like a prologue to a show that seems likely to be interesting at some future point.
Much of this, it must be said, is inherited from Susanna Clarke’s book, which I’ve only read part of, but which is, especially in the opening sections, which take great care to establish the sense of a larger world, digressing regularly into expository footnotes about the history of English magic.
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John C. Wright Has Just Advocated For My Murder

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In the comments over at Vox Day’s blog, John C. Wright posted the following:

The first line is Wright quoting a previous post of mine. The second paragraph is him advocating for my murder. Because he disagrees with my definition of mysticism.

I am, to be clear, not particularly scared by this. I do not imagine that John C. Wright will now be hiding in my bushes, waiting for the opportune moment to strike. This is empty, vicious rhetoric of the sort that Day and Wright specialize in – sound and fury that, while not exactly signifying nothing, is still clearly told by an idiot. Hell, if I were a woman blogging about the stuff I blog about I’d get half a dozen far worse threats a day. The threat itself is not a big deal.

My goal has never been to make the very obvious point that Vox Day and John C. Wright are absolutely terrible human beings. If that’s not obvious to you, frankly, you’re beyond hope. But I have long been interested in demonstrating the depth and nature of their evil, which goes far beyond the most superficial and obvious horrors of what they say.

This is, after all, the man who wrote a story about how one must obey the dictates of god (or at least the dictates of god as relayed by a talking cat) whether or not one understands them or believes them to be right. This is a man who believes in the importance of blind and fanatical obedience. And his god’s dictate is apparently that people like me should be murdered because we use definitions of words differently than him.

So when I say that I believe the god he worships to be a monstrous, vicious tyrant that is nothing more than his own prejudices and hatreds projected into metaphysical grandeur, this is why. This is the vision the Sad and Rabid Puppies exist to advance. This is their true face. Not the constant spew of racist, sexist, and homophobic drivel. Not the Twitter bullying of anyone who disagrees with them. Not the bullshit campaign to fire Irene Gallo for a minor infelicity of phrasing on her personal Facebook page. This: a world in which god demands that anyone who doesn’t think like them be put to death.

In which case perhaps the saddest thing about them is that I don’t have anything to fear. Nobody is going to be showing up on my doorstep with a knife. They serve a mad tyrant who apparently demands that people like me be killed, and yet all they’re willing to do in his name is bitch on the Internet and fuck with literary awards.

We should thank God that such evil should also be so utterly pathetic.…

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Our Skullbabies (The Last War in Albion Part 100: Girls)

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This is the first of five parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Eleven, focusing on Alan Moore’s The Ballad of Halo Jones. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Essentially the entire early career of Alan Moore was covered, save for one work.

“Our skullbabies will always tight the day for peoplekind.” – Alan Moore, Crossed +100

Figure 794: The debut of Halo Jones.
This is The Ballad of Halo Jones, an ongoing strip for 2000 AD published in three separate runs. The first, published as Book One, ran for three months beginning in July of 1984, one month after Moore ceased work on Captain Britain, one before he ceased on Marvelman for Warrior, and alongside the publication of Swamp Thing #29, the infamous zombie incest rape issue. The second launched in February of 1985, the same month that Moore began work on American Flagg and that Warrior ended, and again ran for three months. And the third, Book Three, began in January of 1986, one month after Moore’s tie-in issue to Crisis on Infinite Earths and one month before Miracleman commenced in the US, running until April, two months before Watchmen debuted. 
The strip’s existence marks an obvious and in many regards overdue shift in Moore’s status within IPC’s roster of 2000 AD writers. Of the UK comics companies with which Moore worked, IPC was the last to give him an ongoing, waiting until after he was already writing Captain Britain and winning massive acclaim for his work in Warrior, and even then offering him nothing more interesting than “can you write us an E.T. ripoff,” an unpromising request that Moore shaped into the better-than-you’d-expect Skizz, alongside artist Jim Baikie, one of the many eternal journeymen of British comics. Subsequently, one of his Time Twisters, “D.R. & Quinch Have Fun on Earth,” done with frequent collaborator Alan Davis, got expanded to a series of recurring stories. But once Moore started making waves in the US market IPC, mindful of how it had lost both Brian Bolland and Dave Gibbons to DC, finally deigned to offer him a relatively free hand to create a concept of his own design.
Figure 795: Call me Kenneth as Jack Kirby
pastiche. (Written by John Wagner, art
by Ian Gibson, from 2000 AD #17, 1977)
Teaming with Moore for the new strip was Ian Gibson, who had worked with Moore on his early Future Shock “Grawks Bearing Gifts.” Gibson’s style was distinctive, mixing a cartoonish and exaggerated sense of figure and facial structure with dense line work. The result was particularly well-suited to humor strips, and indeed, prior to The Ballad of Halo Jones Gibson was most associated with the ongoing Sam Slade, Robo-Hunter strip, chronicling the adventures of a humorously taciturn bounty hunter on the trail of various robots.
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Myriad Universes: The Star Lost Part 5: Homecoming

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It’s not an epic conclusion to The Star Lost, nor is it an unexpected one. The ship works. Wesley figures out how to pilot it. Worf and Darios bring everyone home, even the “hostiles”. There’s a heartfelt reunion, and the family is “once again whole”. There is, you could argue, a teeny bit of playing for time and space as the ship travels so fast the crew ends up in Klingon territory, unable to communicate their intent and with their engines about to overload. Of course, the Enterprise happens to be the nearest Federation starship and is called in to investigate at the request of the Klingon High Command. But this is a serial, and serials end up getting stretched. It’s fine. It works.

But as we’ve been learning over the past few months, it’s not the plot itself, epic or otherwise, that’s what’s important here. In fact, The Star Lost seems to tacitly play against our assumption that it is-“Homecoming” opens up with the destruction of Lanatos by comet impact. Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher console the Lanatosian governor, who’s still sore about their decision to bring along the Skriiti instead of the Lanatosian monuments. Beverly says that “Planets are balls of mud – things. They can be replaced. When a person is gone, he’s gone forever”. And it’s here I might start to disagree a little bit with the story’s broad-strokes ethics. I get the sentiment Friedman is trying to go for, but from an animist perspective that’s simply an indefensible argument. Land, and “land” can come in many different forms, has life energy and we are all bound to it in some way. You could argue the book tries to hedge against this with the governor’s rebuttal, but he’s a racist and not at all sympathetic.

It’s not a huge issue and I’m surely nitpicking, but it’s not something my perspective allows me to let slide.

That aside, what’s interesting to me is that in any given TV episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, that scene on the bridge with Jean-Luc, Beverly and the Lanatosian governor would have been the *conclusion* to the story; the denouement. Here though, it’s just the lead-in and the meat of “Homecoming” is still to come (of course it is, as the Lanatosian stuff is and always has been a secondary story thread). That says something about not just the scope of the story we’ve been watching unfold for the past few months, but also where its heart is. One thing I really love about this issue from this point is where it places its little cliffhanger beats: As soon as the Lanatosian mess is resolved, Deanna Troi politely reminds Captain Picard to promote Data and Burke, the relief tactical officer who has been covering for Worf since the disappearance of the Albert Einstein. He’s interrupted when he tries to do this by the reveal of the plot twist with the Klingons and this is addressed at several points during the story.…

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The Vox Day Interview: Transcript

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Although this interview was not funded by my Patrons, I have the time and ability to pursue work like this largely because of their generous support. If you enjoy the work I do here and can spare a few bucks a month, please consider backing.

Below is a transcript of my interview with Vox Day, aka Theodore Beale, which you can listen to over at Pex Lives. I’ve lightly edited it to remove infelicities of language on both Day’s part and my own. I’ve also added a couple of footnotes clarifying aspects of the discussion. I am sure that Day would offer several clarifications of his own. Those interested in more of my thoughts on the interview should check out Jack Graham’s Shabcast 6, in which Jack and Kevin and James from Pex Lives sit down with me for a two hour chat about the interview and the proper course of action when talking cats tell you to kill. It is cheeky and irreverent in the ways that I expect my readers would prefer.

 

 

Thanks again to Kevin and James for hosting this, and to Sophia Hessert Braden for preparing the transcript.

 

 
Phil Sandifer: Hi, I’m Phil Sandifer and I’ve got with me today the man at the center of the whole Hugo Awards controversy, Vox Day. Hello, Vox.

 

Vox Day: Hey, Phil. How are you?

 

Sandifer: I’m doing alright. So, the idea behind this interview is that Vox and I mutually agreed upon two works, one that he thinks is a great story and that I think is terrible, and one vice versa. The first is going to be John C. Wright’s One Bright Star to Guide Them, which is one of Vox’s Rabid Puppies, it’s up for a best novella Hugo this year, and the other is going to be the late great Iain Banks’s 1984 debut novel The Wasp Factory. We’re going to start with One Bright Star to Guide Them, by John C. Wright, who you’ve called a contender for the greatest living science fiction writer. The book’s promotional text describes it like so:

 

As children, long ago, Tommy Robertson and his three friends, Penny, Sally, and Richard, passed through a secret gate in a ruined garden and found themselves in an elfin land, where they aided a brave prince against the evil forces of the Winter King. Decades later, successful, stout, and settled in his ways, Tommy is long parted from his childhood friends, and their magical adventures are but a half-buried memory.

 

But on the very eve of his promotion to London, a silver key and a coal-black cat appear from the past, and Tommy finds himself summoned to serve as England’s champion against the invincible Knight of Ghosts and Shadows. The terror and wonder of Faerie has broken into the Green and Pleasant Land, and he alone has been given the eyes to see it, to gather his companions and their relics is his quest.
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Comic Reviews (June 10th, 2015)

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Hello all; as of this week, my comics reviews are being crossposted to ComicMix, so I suppose I should tack a paragraph introducing myself onto the start. I’m Phil Sandifer, a blogger covering various forms of pop culture and media with my own idiosyncratic long-form analysis. I’m responsible for TARDIS Eruditorum, my now-concluded history of Doctor Who, and the still-ongoing The Last War in Albion, a sprawling history of the most important magical war of the last century, the rivalry between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.

Everything reviewed is something I willingly paid my own money for, whether wisely or foolishly, organized from my least favorite to my favorite of the week.
Weirdworld #1

Snagged because it seemed to be taking the Secret Wars premise to an interesting extreme. But while this seems a functional mash-up of Frazetta-esque pulp action and superheroes, nothing in the first issue seems to rise above the basic “nobody’s done a big Frazetta homage lately” appeal, and the whole thing ends up leaving me a bit cold. I’m sure this scratches someone’s itch, but it doesn’t scratch any itches of mine, or at least, doesn’t provide $3.99 worth of scratch.
Gotham Academy #7

Two months away from this book have, as I feared they might, not really added much to its luster for me. I still like the aesthetic a lot conceptually, but nothing has forged any attachment to the actual characters for me. It’s something I find myself hoping other people are enjoying a lot, because it’s a book I want to exist in the world, but not something whose magic is quite firing for me.
Silver Surfer #12

This feels like a book out of another era; one where Secret Wars #5 was still coming out in July, for instance, at least based on the ads. This isn’t a book that has ever been inclined towards the subtle exploration of a premise, and indeed the content of this one is telegraphed ages in advance. The big moment, the Surfer and Dawn snogging, is compelling in its own right, but one of those things where Secret Wars kind of cannibalizes its impact; one assumes the Slott/Allred Surfer is not going to be surviving into All-New All-Different Marvel, which means that Dawn Greenwood is probably a fascinating implication about to be thrown aside in a quasi-reboot. Which leaves this feeling very disposable.
Spider-Gwen #5

The alternate universe nature of this book is tough; it’s never as strong when it’s fleshing out the AU. The appeal is Gwen Stacy as Spider-Woman, and the book falters when it’s outside of her head. Which it is for a lot of this issue. I should love the sort of WicDiv “superpowered pop star punchdown” feel of this, and I do, but there’s too much of familiar Marvel for it to stand on its own feet and too much difference from the usual concepts of “Matt Murdock” and “Felicia Hardy” for their associations to quite carry it through, which is leaving the central appeal of this book lacking for me.
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Myriad Universes: The Star Lost Part 4: The Barrier

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This section of The Star Lost really does feel like it’s from another story. In fact, when I first rediscovered this miniseries, it thought it was another story: Stumbling upon the cover for this issue while browsing through the archives of DC’s Star Trek: The Next Generation immediately caught my interest and I picked it up out of curiosity, only to find it was actually Part 4 of The Star Lost.

In any other context, “Deanna Troi uncovers the mystery of a culture of mer-people and its thinly veiled institutionalized power structures of oppression and discrimination” would be grounds enough for a science fiction story unto itself-Indeed, even the Animated Series did an episode that was broad-strokes similar. But while that episode took its central sci-fi conceit (ocean planet inhabited by civilization of mer-people) and went no further than that, here it’s a subset of the far larger and grander tale we’ve been seeing unfold for the past few months. What this does is touch on a central divide in attitudes about how science fiction ought to be approached and once again shows how Star Trek: The Next Generation, particularly this Star Trek: The Next Generation, is transmuting the genre into something more holistic and universal.

The mere fact that one of this very series’ own predecessors took a similar conceit and expected it to carry an entire story is a revealing demonstration of just how much science fiction has changed in only the past 10-15 years or so. “The Ambergris Element” figured all it had to do was present a neat sci-fi concept (“Hey look! Ocean planet with mer-people!”) and its job was basically done. Now, the fact “The Ambergris Element” was also a spectacularly incoherent piece of shit penned by the single worst writer ever to job for Star Trek is actually beside the point here: What I want to focus in on here is the assumption that the most important thing was the central speculative idea and that everything else was just window dressing and irrelevant details. This is a very traditional (read Hard SF) way of going about doing science fiction, and that simply isn’t going to fly anymore for a lot of very good reasons. You can’t get away with this these days, and quite frankly, you shouldn’t be able to.

That’s not to say we have to abandon the speculative and the fantastic; this is still science fiction after all and there’s no point in doing science fiction if you’re not going to engage with that on some level. But what we’re learning now is that the speculative has to be treated as a manifestation of the themes, energies and emotions of the larger work, not the be-all and end-all unto itself. We’re getting right back to what was so terrific about “The Lesson” (or indeed Dirty Pair, or any other hallmark of Long 1980s storytelling), where abstract images and concepts are used to highlight new dimensions of stories instead of obfuscating them.…

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