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Myriad Universes: Whoever Fights Monsters Part 3: The Impostor

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Well, obviously it had to be, right?

The question was never really whether or not there was someone going around besmirching the good name of the Enterprise, but who exactly was doing the impersonating and why. We still don’t know that yet, there’s one more issue yet to go. But we do get to meet our adversary, and it’s a bit unsettling how dead-on their recreation truly is. Before any of that though, the story opens on a genuinely disturbing scene of yet more brutal carnage. Our foe has beat us to Alpha Sarpeidon and murdered another starship, this time the USS Merrimac. And no punches are pulled this time, with the whole gruesome aftermath laid out for us in a lurid full-page spread right when you open the book, complete with lifeless bodies floating in space.

The crew, accompanied by Admiral Rosenstrum, retreat to the observation lounge to discuss their options and come up with a way to track down the killer before it strikes again. This is going to prove difficult, as there’s been no obvious pattern in its behaviour to date and Geordi can’t pick up a traceable ion trail. Data eventually posits a theory that, if true, will allow the Enterprise to hunt down its evil doppelganger. He suggests that the ship is following the Enterprise‘s exact flight path from a specific mission several years ago (which also explains why it was in Ferengi space: When the Enterprise initially visited that sector of space, it was under Federation jurisdiction, but the boundary between Federation- and Ferengi-occupied territory has shifted since then). Should this pattern hold, the Bogus Enterprise (and yes, this is actually what they call it for the remainder of the story. Prophets, I love the 1980s) should next be headed for a defenseless colony on Beta Tarsus IV. Captain Picard immediately orders Wesley to proceed there at maximum warp to intercept.

We might expect that once we reach part three of a story of this magnitude, the plot would start to tread water a bit. We had a first issue laying some subtle hints about what’s to come, a second issue of rising tension and we know the big climax is coming next month. By all accounts, this should be a filler issue as we kill time before the big showdown, and perhaps a lesser creative team would have done that. But not Michael Jan Friedman and Pablo Marcos: The majority of the plot-related stuff is taken care of at the very beginning and very end of the story (and there’s even a brief but requisite shootout with the Bogus Enterprise in the issue’s final third to keep us hooked), leaving the bulk of the story to be taken up with character moments. One thing that Michael Jan Friedman is quickly proving himself to be a master hand at is vignettes where people just sit around and talk to each other.…

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The Day Fandom Ended

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The Hugo Award Nominations have just been successfully hijacked by neofascists.

I want to pause, before I make any comments on the implications of that statement, and make it unambiguously clear that this is what happened. There were, this year, two organized and overlapping slates of proposed nominees – the Sad Puppies, promoted by Brad Torgersen, and the Rabid Puppies, promoted by Theodore Beale, who writes under the pen name Vox Day. Of these slates, the latter was the more successful and influential, with 87% of its proposed nominees ultimately getting nominated, forming 68% of the total Hugo nominations. Every single work nominated in the categories of Best Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Related Work, and Editor (both long and short form) came from those two slates, including two nominations for Theodore Beale himself, one in each editor category.

Theodore Beale opposes women’s suffrage, saying, “the women of America would do well to consider whether their much-cherished gains of the right to vote, work, murder and freely fornicate are worth destroying marriage, children, civilized Western society and little girls.” He believes that black people are less human than white people, saying of a black woman that “genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens.”

I admit that these two quotes leave me slightly uncertain as to what to say. They are, obviously, preposterously vile things to say. But they are so vile that they defy the usual rhetoric with which we respond to loathsome views. They are not positions or claims that polite society is really equipped to engage with. They are so far outside the bounds of what is socially acceptable in 2015 that it is difficult to imagine many forums in which they would even be permitted to be aired. I’d go with something glib like “even Fox News would sack someone who publicly expressed those views,” but even that seems insufficient. Truth be told, I have trouble thinking of any mainstream groups or organizations where someone who publicly espoused those views would not be ostracized.

Except, apparently, orthodox sci-fi/fantasy fandom, in which Theodore Beale has sufficient clout within orthodox sci-fi/fantasy fandom to select 68% of the Hugo Award nominees.

The question of how this happened is simple enough – the Hugo nomination process is fairly easy to game if you’ve got a bit of organization and followers willing to splash out a bit of cash. It only took about 250 people to stuff the ballot box to this effect – about 12.5% of the overall people who sent in nominations, though closer to 25% in some of the smaller categories.

More significant is the question of what this means.

To be frank, it means that traditional sci-fi/fantasy fandom does not have any legitimacy right now. Period. A community that can be this effectively controlled by someone who thinks black people are subhuman and who has called for acid attacks on feminists is not one whose awards have any sort of cultural validity. That sort of thing doesn’t happen to functional communities.…

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Saturday Waffling (April 4th, 2015)

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This edition of Saturday Waffling is brought to you by Nathan Brownback, one of my backers on Patreon, who has picked the indisputably worthy Alexandria-Arlington Coalition for the Homeless as his link of choice, the sort of choice that I assume would get him dismissed as a “sjw” by certain people.

Speaking of those people.

So, yesterday I used the #gamergate hashtag on Twitter to ask about an argument made by supporters of the movement that puzzled me, namely the one that suggests that contributing to a Kickstarter for something and then reviewing it is a conflict of interest, since there does not seem to be any comparable view that buying something in a store and reviewing it creates a conflict of interest. (The answer seems, unsurprisingly, to be that the argument is stupid beyond belief, with multiple people arguing that not only is supporting a Kickstarter or a Patreon a conflict of interest, but that receiving free review copies of things is not.)

In any case, based on twenty minutes or so of mildly adversarial engagement entirely over this point, here’s some highlights of the tweets I got.

Magic Villages (The Last War in Albion Part 90: The Hogben Stories, Steve Parkhouse)

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This is the first of a currently unknown number (ten-ish?) of parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus will be available as soon as possible – probably by next Friday, but the world is full of surprises. 

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: Among the many things that The Bojeffries Saga has been compared to is the work of the alternative comedy scene of the early 80s, particularly The Young Ones, a TV series that featured, among others, Alexei Sayle, who was vocally leftist in his politics, and saw alternative comedy as a vehicle for advancing those politics, occasionally leading him to butt heads with other members of the scene.

“See, this is my point. It’s like all the small towns up here all think they’re magic villages.” -Warren Ellis, Blackcross

Figure 686: Ade Edmonson as Vyvyan Basterd in The Young
Ones.
Sayle’s shock is not entirely fair (and it should be stressed that Sayle is clearly poking fun at his own political intransigence as much as he’s offering a serious history of the alternative comedy scene, describing how, upon turning up at the studio to discover the guest stars, he “railed at the writers,” saying, “The whole point of what we were doing was surely to challenge the smug hegemony of the Oxford, Cambridge, public-schoolboy comedy network, as well as destroying the old-school working men’s club racists,” to which, in his telling, the writers replied “that was just you, we never subscribed to your demented class-war ravings”). It is, after all, not as though the alternative comics were by and large from less privileged backgrounds than their similarly transgressive predecessors in Monty Python. Rik Mayall (who wrote for the series and played the entitled anarchist asshole Rick) was born to a pair of drama teachers, while Ade Edmonson (who played the sociopathic punk Vyvyan Basterd) had an international upbringing living, among other places, in Bahrain, Cyprus, and Uganda before attending a private school, and both attended the University of Manchester, as rigorous an academic institution as exists in the UK. 
All the same, the cultural differences between the University of Manchester and Cambridge are genuine, and speak to a larger difference in approach between The Young Ones and Monty Python. The Young Ones is not, by and large, a show that concerns itself at all with the notion that there might be such a thing as the sane world. Its conflicts are generally between equally absurd figures, such as the eternal hatred between Rick and Vyv. Indeed, this gets at the heart of the comedy in The Young Ones, which is often about the ruthless mockery of the excesses and pretensions of the very left-wing politics that animate it. Instead of being a show that pokes fun at the absurdity of the larger world, it is a show that pokes fun at the absurdity of its own audience, skewering the punks and hippies that the show appeals to.
…

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Myriad Universes: Whoever Fights Monsters Part 2: The Noise of Justice

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In the past, I’ve expressed my disdain for courtroom dramas (in fact, the last time Star Trek: The Next Generation did a major story of this type, no less). I think they’re a cheap way to artificially introduce drama while at the same time potentially dangerously misleading people when it comes to actual legal jurisprudence. Media has power because so much of what we perceive about how the world works is gleaned from it, and it is thus media’s responsibility to be accurate should to choose to be realistic (whether it should choose to or not in the first place is another discussion entirely). Deliberately faulty and inaccurate legal information for the sake of conflict is but one way media can do harm and add to the world’s darkness-A comparatively small one in the grand scheme of things, but a no less noteworthy one.

So thankfully, even though “The Noise of Justice” is split almost entirely between a hearing room and a holding cell, this isn’t actually the kind of story it is. Captain Picard and the rest of the Enterprise crew are obviously innocent, and, more to the point, we know they’re going to be cleared pretty quickly: There’s two more issues in this story arc and it would be absolutely tortuous for Michael Jan Friedman and Pablo Marcos to drag a courtroom plot out that long in a comic book. The central hook of this issue comes firstly from speculating about what might be going on and if someone is out to destroy the careers and reputations of the Enterprise crew for some reason as we move away from the diversionary plot last month to the main meat of the miniseries, although we figure that’s all going to get cleared up in the coming issues as well. Secondly however, it comes from watching the crew do battle with Starfleet Command over the allegations levelled against them. And it’s altogether fitting that the chief prosecutor is our old nemesis Phillipa Louvois as “The Noise of Justice” is a compelling rebuttal of “The Measure of a Man”.

As is standard for Friedman by now, each character (save the Cushers: While Wesley is thankfully absent, we can assume Beverly is still recuperating from her ordeal last time) is afforded a spotlight scene, and he’s once more nailed their voices. In this story, these spotlights manifest by giving each character time on the witness stand to face down Louvois’ relentless assault of legalese and leading questions. Were this a television episode, we’d call it a bottle show as it largely takes place on one set, which is a praiseworthy dedication to good storytelling sense as we might expect the comic book to be flashier, more colourful and feature far more explosions and fisticuffs. Instead, the bigger “effects budget” goes into things like the look of Starbase 104, which is pleasingly futuristic and abstract-looking, and flashback sequences for Captain Picard that reveal bits of his history as he examines his life choices as he faces the risk of losing everything he’s lived for.…

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Comics Reviews (April 1st, 2015)

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From worst to best of what I voluntarily paid money for.

Cyclops #12 (aka The Black Vortex Chapter 10)

Once upon a time, Greg Rucka wrote this book. Now it’s a book in which a major plot twist is “Cyclops was just imagining his father’s voice in his head, but it was really his own self-belief.” And then the entire series ends with a heroic shot of Cyclops, who has submitted to the Black Vortex, flying off, ready to save some planets, because apparently the book has decided to celebrate April Fool’s Day and decide this is a good thing.

The Amazing Spider-Man #17

I admit, I think I’m just bored of the ultra-traditionalist Spider-Man as served up by Dan Slott. He’s been the major writer on Spider-Man for eight years now, and I think it’s probably time for a change. This is perfectly fine, but I found myself completely unable to formulate any sort of meaningful investment in any characters in it.

Blackcross #2

Oddly paced, with an ending that had me looking through the house ads at the end because I wasn’t confident there wasn’t another page. Effectively moody, but this looks set to be a very minor Warren Ellis work.

Avengers: Ultron Forever #1

Odd timing for this – it’s a book that clearly just exists because of the movie. But that means it’s doing “mash up alternate timeline Avengers in a big smashy book” right in sync with Secret Wars, which is not a great time to be doing that. But Al Ewing and Alan Davis are a fun pair, and it’s hard to fault things like the last reveal, or casually decapitating the Hulk. Or sassy Vision. Very much a silly Marvel book, but enjoyable.

Spider-Gwen #3

A weak issue here, long on fights and short on character, although the detail of Gwen being unmasked (but not, seemingly, recognized) is interesting. Not bad, certainly, but not particularly entrancing either. Still, even mediocre Spider-Gwen is a treat.

Avengers #43

It’s easy to like the return of Tony Stark to the plot, his absence having been a tangible lack in the Time Runs Out story. This is on the one hand clearly deliberate, but with so much of Hickman’s Avengers hinging on the Tony/Steve dualism, it’s also made every issue feel like shuffling pieces around the board waiting for payoff, which is already a problem with a “countdown to EVENT” storyline. In any case, Tony’s back, and it’s kinda marvelous.

The Dying & The Dead #2

Hickman’s working with tight, effective characterization, on a story that’s long on scope but still narrow enough to feel focused and deliberate, and it’s frankly marvelous two issues in. There’s a whole lot of hand still to tip, but thus far, at least, this is the most I’ve enjoyed a new Hickman series in… erm… ever?…

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Myriad Universes: Whoever Fights Monsters Part 1: The Pay Off!

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One of the big appeals of the comic line back in the day was that because it was a monthly series that ran year ’round, this meant you could get a regular stream of new Star Trek stories even when the show was on summer hiatus. And I’d be willing to be that in Summer, 1990, in the gap between “The Best of Both Worlds” and “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II”, the comic line filled a very desperate demand indeed.

Perhaps that’s the reason why the Summer Event miniseries came about. It’s odd to talk about such a thing at first, considering pretty much every story in this line belongs to some kind of multipart serial: That’s the entire nature of the medium we’re dealing with, after all. During the summer months, however, DC would go all-out with a particularly extensive serial that sometimes lasted well into the fall, oftentimes far more heavily hyped than any of their usual fare. These miniseries tended to have big, imposing-sounding titles and could even be collected in trade paperbacks after the fact, while few of the books that came out during the other seasons were. Even though Star Trek: The Next Generation was a licensed book, whenever summer rolled around it felt as if DC was treating it like a top tier title that not only deserved to stand alongside its TV namesake, but the rest of DC’s stable as well. So while there’s good stuff in the other months to be sure, including some excellent standalone tales, given the gravity they exert over the line we’re going to be talking primarily about the Annuals and the Summer Event miniseries here.

Given that, the serial that ran during the crucial summer of 1990 is a peculiar one. It didn’t have the hype of some of the later miniseries, and doesn’t even have its own unique title (I’ve chosen to call it Whoever Fights Monsters after the final issue in the story because it quite frankly sounds cooler than the titles of any of the other issues). Even so, it’s definitely a milestone for the book because even though it doesn’t upsell itself to the extent some of its successors will, it marks the moment where Michael Jan Friedman and Pablo Marcos’ take on Star Trek: The Next Generation finally and definitively arrives in full. They weren’t around for the first volume, of course (well, at least Friedman wasn’t) and while the second volume has had some nice bits here and there, it hasn’t yet quite had its first real knockout story that can be called a bona fide classic from its actual creative team: The big highlight so far in my view, if you’ll recall, is John de Lancie’s “The Gift” that ran in the 1990 Annual.

But even now, this arc is shaping up to be the one that does it for Friedman and Marcos. “The Pay Off!” pulls no punches out of the gate delivering blow after blow: Captain Picard receives an eyes-only from a furious Admiral Rosenstrum (who amusingly looks a bit like a raging Gene Roddenberry), demanding to know if he’s planning on starting a war with the Ferengi.…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 1.08 (The Pointy End)

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As always, thanks to my backers on Patreon. By the way, you do all know I post updates a week early there, right?

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:
Direwolves of King’s Landing: Eddard Stark, Sansa Stark, Arya Stark
Direwolves of the Eyrie: Catelyn Stark
Lions of King’s Landing: Cersei Lannister
Dragons of the Dothraki Sea: Daenerys Targaryen
Bears of the Dothraki Sea: Jorah Mormont
Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Direwolves of Winterfell: Robb Stark, Bran Stark
Kraken of Winterfell: Theon Greyjoy
Stags of King’s Landing: Joffrey Baratheon
Dogs of King’s Landing: Sandor Clegane
And the Lion of the Eyrie, Tyrion Lannister
The episode is in thirteen parts. The first runs eight minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The opening shot is of Arya and Syrio sparring. It features the death of most of the Starks’ guard, killed by the Gold Cloaks, Septa Mordane, killed by the Gold Cloaks, an unknown stableboy, stabbed by Needle, and presumably Syrio Forrell, killed by Meryn Traint. The cliffhanger is resolved five minutes in when Varys visits Ned Stark in his cell. 
The second runs three minutes and is set on the Wall; the transition is by family, from Ned Stark to Jon Snow.
The third runs two minutes and is set in King’s Landing; the transition is by family and dialogue, from Jon Snow talking about his sisters to Sansa. 
The fourth runs two minutes and is set in Winterfell; the transition is by family and causality, from Sansa beginning to write a letter to Robb to Robb reading the letter.
The fifth runs six minutes and is set in the Eyrie. It is in two sections. The first is two minutes long; the transition is by family and image, from Robb reacting to the news of what has happened to Catelyn doing the same. The second is four minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Catelyn to Tyrion.
The sixth part runs three minutes and is set on the Wall; the transition is by hard cut, from Tyrion to Jon and other men of the Night’s Watch preparing a meal.
The seventh runs six minutes and is set in the Dothraki Sea; the transition is by family and image, from Jon Snow setting a wight aflame to the fires as the Dothraki sack a village before Daenerys’s eyes. It features the death of Mago, killed by Khal Drogo in combat. At the episode’s halfway point, Daenerys is being called to explain her actions in preventing the rape of the captured women.
The eighth runs six minutes and is set in Winterfell; the transition is by hard cut, from Mirri tending to Khal Drogo’s wound to the bannermen in Winterfell. 
The ninth runs one minute and is set on the Wall; the transition is by dialogue, from Osha talking about the coming White Walkers to the burning of the wight.
The tenth runs four minutes and is set in the North; the transition is by image, from the Wall to a smaller keep as Catelyn arrives at Robb’s camp.
…

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Sensor Scan: Quantum Leap

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I remember quite well when the first trailers for Enterprise debuted. I’ll save talking about exactly how much of an event it felt like for me (that’s two books from now, after all), but one thing in particular caught my attention straight away: There were these two guys (in *baseball caps*) sitting in what I assumed to be some form of shuttlecraft talking about how the new Warp Drive engine would allow them to go to “Neptune and back in six minutes”. One of those guys looked awfully familiar-Was that…was that who I thought it was?

Omigish it is! It’s Scott Bakula! The guy from Quantum Leap is on Star Trek! And he’s the new captain! 

Quantum Leap is a show I have fond memories of. It was never something I followed religiously; I was only ever a casual viewer. But it was a show that seemed to always be around, it eventually developed a kind of comfort blanket appeal for me and, in retrospect, seems actually sort of lovely and wonderful. I remember Starlog Magazine covering it back in the day when it was on the air, talking to Bakula, Dean Stockwell and the show’s creative team, so it was one of those shows that was one of my early introductions to science fiction. In much later years, I remember it primarily as the lead-in to the Sci-Fi Channel’s reruns of the Original Star Trek in the late-1990s and early-2000s. Sometimes I would tune in early to watch a whole episode, while other times I’d just catch the tail end of one before TOS came on. Either way it was something I always enjoyed and appreciated whenever I managed to see it: It always seemed a rather pleasant and charming little series.

A great deal of Quantum Leap‘s appeal for me comes from Scott Bakula’s character, Doctor Sam Backett. He’s a quantum physicist heading up a research programme looking into the possibility of time travel, and when the government threatens to shut the project down Beckett protests by throwing himself into the quantum accelerator, “leaping” through the time-space continuum. Thus begins the series’ central gimmick: Every episode Beckett “leaps” to a new point in time and *into* the body of a different person. Soon, Beckett and his friend Al Calavicci (Dean Stockwell’s character) and their AI friend Ziggy (series executive producer and narrator Deborah Pratt) discover that Sam’s leaps through time are caused by his behaviour in his present time: In particular, his efforts to right a wrong or correct an injustice that subtly alter the course of history. Upon this revelation, Sam is emboldened to keep leaping through the timeline to do what he can to change history for the better.

It’s this simple, unpretentious conviction to do good, to be a good person and to do what you can, no matter how humble the act, to make the universe a better place in your own small way that makes Sam such an endearing character for me.…

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Saturday Waffling (March 28th, 2015)

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This week’s Saturday Waffling is sponsored by Jed Blue, who has a new book out called The Very Soil: An Unauthorized Critical Study of Puella Magi Madoka Magica that you should go check out.

Meanwhile, over here, I find myself working on the Super Nintendo Project in amidst finishing up the Bojeffries Saga chapter of Last War in Albion. So, as I work on that, what are your memories of the Super Nintendo? Or, if you were from the other side of that generation’s console wars, of the Sega Genesis?…

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