Eruditorum Press

We don’t need AI to hallucinate.

“Trust no one. Question Everything.”: Conspiracy

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Rightly regarded as a high-water mark for the first season, “Conspiracy” is praised and fondly remembered by a certain kind of Star Trek fan for its unexpected gore-filled climax straight out of a splatterhouse horror flick or one of the Alien movies, and by less frightening Star Trek fans for its shocking perversion of the heretofore untouchable Starfleet Command. Of course it’s not really. It was, as is so often the case with this sort of thing, just aliens after all. And yet even so, “Conspiracy” does push the envelope noticeably for Star Trek: The Next Generation, even if its overall impact is arguably more muted than it perhaps could have been.

The idea of something rotten afoot in the hallowed halls of the supposedly incorruptible Starfleet Command should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following this season with any degree of care or nuance. The seed was planted arguably as early as as “Too Short a Season”, where Admiral Mark Jameson’s flawless execution of Starfleet’s hero archetype plunged an entire planet into a four decade long world war. Then we had this episode’s direct antecedent, “Coming of Age”, where Admiral Quinn and Dexter Remmick interrogated the Enterprise crew under concerns something very big and very grave was about to happen that would “threaten the very core of Federation society”. Both of those episodes were, in one respect or another, about showing how the Enterprise was very likely the last bastion of progressive hope and idealism in an increasingly hostile and uncaring universe, and that’s not even touching on the direct diegetic and extradiegetic challenges to its ethics and values the show’s seen elsewhere from characters like Q, the Ferengi, the Tkon Empire, the Microbrain and even, debatably, Lwaxana Troi. If Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first season has been about bringing Star Trek back for the Long 1980s, it’s also been about forcing it to prove it deserves to exist in the Long 1980s.

And “Conspiracy” is the moment where this all comes to a head…or at least, it should have been. Because while it does build on these themes and neatly, satisfyingly wrap up the story arc introduced in “Coming of Age”, it doesn’t exactly do so in the way writer Tracy Tormé had hoped it would. The original plan was to reveal the Conspiracy to be just that: An actual conspiracy orchestrated by Starfleet Command’s higher-ups to instate martial law across known space and rule the Federation as a military junta. It would have been the deliciously perfect logical end result of Starfleet’s thinly veiled militarism: It doesn’t take much for someone surrounded by that kind of rhetoric and ideology to suddenly decide the world would be better off with them in charge. Couple that with the troublesome Philosopher King overtones Starfleet and the Federation have always had, and you get a recipe for a truly terrifying mixture of imperialism and grandiose self-entitlement.…

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Welcome to Night Vale – “The Librarian” Review

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Abigail Brady would like to talk to you about Welcome to Night Vale.

Have you listened to Welcome to Night Vale?  It’s a podcast.  That doesn’t explain it.  Podcasts are usually chat shows – Night Vale is a dramatic presentation, in the form of a talk radio show, presented by a chap we eventually find out is called Cecil Palmer (played by Cecil Baldwin).  It is set in a small desert town called Night Vale, a place where every conspiracy theory is openly acknowledged to be true.  I tried to condense it to a two-word pitch the other day, and the best I could come up with with was “Innsmouth FM”.  A four-word pitch would be “Innsmouth FM.  With jokes.”  Mind, they distance themselves from Lovecraft, pointing at plenty of other contemporaneous weird fiction authors, who are less massive racists, as influences.  As a writer, what I admire most about it is its ability to change tones so rapidly and yet so completely, between the comedy and the horror, without either undermining the other.  It has a highly enthusiastic and growing fanbase, gained through word-of-mouth rather than any marketing-led push.   A lot of it is that it it’s an ideal fit for tumblr’s combination of humour and politics.  But it still seems pretty amazing for it to go from nothing to a small media franchise just through personal recommendations.  Even more amazing for this to happen in a format – the audio drama – that is new to most of the listeners.  It really is that good.


I asked several people who attended the October London shows how exactly they go into Night Vale, and nobody could really remember.   I mean, I can’t even really remember how I got into it.  My only hard date is that I nominated episodes for the 2014 Hugo Awards, so that’s certainly by the end of January 2014.  Night Vale fandom this time wasn’t organised enough to get an episode on the ballot. “The Sandstorm” (a two-parter with a season-finale feel that I didn’t think to put down) picked up 30 nominations, only eight fewer than “The Name of the Doctor”.  Maybe next year the second anniversary episode, “Old Oak Doors”, will make it through.  Guys, let’s remember that, yeah?


“Old Oak Doors” was exceptional, and not just in its the way it used its status as a season finale to kick you in as more teeth than Buffy’s “Becoming” did.  It was a two-parter, at the end of the second year of the podcast, it was recorded live in New York in June 2014.  And I have to confess, I found that… it didn’t entirely work recorded?  Particularly the bits where it is obvious Cecil or someone is doing something funny on stage, but we don’t get the joke because we can’t see him but we have to listen to the crowd laugh anyway.  Night Vale live is a different thing to the podcast.  Podcasts are typically a solitary listening experience.  How you engage with the material is entirely up to you.
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A Wilderness of Tigers

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The opposition between town and country is a perennial obsession of modern Western narrative art.  The idea of the division becoming diffuse and permeable, of the one bleeding through into the other, appears to be deeply threatening.  For Titus Andronicus, in a play in which precisely this bleeding effect occurs, Rome’s degradation leads it to become a “wilderness of tigers”.

This obsession is one that began at around the same time as modern map making.  

What people don’t realise is that maps lie to us.  They present a geographical landscape which is profoundly at odds with human psychic landscapes.

We think of the town having borders, beyond which there lies the country.  No matter how we nuance this, it is untrue.  We think of the country as a great field of emptiness between cities and towns.  No matter how we nuance this, it is untrue.

What actually happens is that the further you venture into the country, the more country you find.  The country isn’t a two-dimensional field, it is a three-dimension well which stretches ever downwards into more of itself.  Like the fractals generated by the Mandelbrot Set, the further you go into the country, the more it expands out ahead of you.  The more you sink down into it.  The towns get smaller, the desolation gets more and more desolate, the isolation gets more and more isolated.  The sinister vibe gets more and more sinister. 

The city, meanwhile, has no borders.  It is carried across all borders inside the mind of the city-dweller.  And all cities are connected.  If you walk far enough into London you will eventually find yourself in Paris or New York or Rome.  The more you walk into any city, the more you walk into its history, and the history of every city is the history of its relationship with other cities.  Walk far enough into modern London and you eventually find yourself in ancient Rome.…

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The Abandoned Line

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All disused London Underground stations are connected via ghost trains that traverse conceptual topography. It’s called the Abandoned Line.

 http://www.smashinglists.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/aldwych.jpg

London’s Abandoned Line is in a state of perpetual Cold War with Metro 2, the secret parallel underground system in Moscow which was used to transport Party officials around the place. One of the many ideological differences between Metro 2 and the Abandoned Line is the very question of Metro 2’s existence. The Abandoned Line insists that Metro 2 exists. Metro 2 itself stubbornly denies this.…

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UNIT, a History

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A commissioned essay for Assad Khaishgi.
Since Doctor Who first hit upon the idea of doing stories set in the present day, a fundamental aspect of its mythology has been the question of how civil authorities might respond to the bizarre events that take place in the Doctor’s wake. The most enduring answer to this question is UNIT, the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, formerly the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce – a military organization specifically focused on unexplained events, particularly aliens. This, in turn, is most iconically connected to the Jon Pertwee era of Doctor Who, in which the Doctor was at one point a full-time employee of UNIT living on Earth, and throughout his tenure treated UNIT headquarters as a sort of home base on Earth to which he would regularly return. But while this is the most iconic iteration of UNIT and thus of officially sanctioned responses to alien threats, it is not the only version of either, and must be taken in a larger context.
At first, the governmental response to crises was imagined to be ad hoc. Part of this can be explained by the fact that the first two present day crises – The War Machines and The Faceless Ones – took place on the same day. The government simply responds to them to the extent that they find out about them, and they are treated as, in effect, freak occurrences. Where this begins to shift is The Web of Fear, which also introduces the character with whom UNIT is most associated: the Brigadier. Well, sort of. As we said back at the time, The Web of Fear is clearly not trying to introduce a major new character, nor for that matter an official and consistent answer to how the government will handle alien attacks. Instead, it assembles a military crew straight out of a bunch of standard war movies, and then drops a character named Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart in as a commander midway through. Lethbridge-Stewart is notable as a relatively realistic, sensible military commander – quite unlike the cliches he’s generally surrounded by. He’s an effective officer put in impossible circumstances, and he acquits himself well considering. 
On his second appearance, however, in the next year’s The Invasion, Lethbridge-Stewart has seen a promotion to Brigadier, and is now in charge of UNIT. This constituted a major shift in his character. Where before he was a reasonably straightforward military character who got dumped into a strange situation, now he was the person designed to lead a human response to the unknown. This still required being imperfect, not least because the entire point is to have the Doctor be the person who gets things right, but he’s nevertheless a character who is designed for the purpose of doing extraordinary things. This is, in and of itself, a major shift. The first three big “a threat to contemporary Earth” stories are all based around the idea that this is out of the ordinary. But from The Invasion on, threats to contemporary Earth are sufficiently common that there are standard responses to them.
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“A Night on Pegos Minor”: We’ll Always Have Paris

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Most people tend to remember “We’ll Always Have Paris” as the episode where Michelle Phillips guest starred in an odd bit of celebrity casting (this being the second documented connection to the Phillips family and The Mamas and the Papas in Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first season). I remember it as the first episode where Tasha Yar wasn’t on the Enterprise.

There is, of course, a bit more to it than either of those interpretations might lead you to believe. Not much, I’ll grant, but some. “We’ll Always Have Paris” is essentially Star Trek: The Next Generation doing Casablanca, with Captain Picard as Humphrey Bogart, Michelle Phillips as Ingrid Bergman and a great big fuck-off mad science experiment with time distortion in place of World War II and Nazis. This is all, of course, fairly standard operating procedure for the show at this point: The Manheim Effect, which causes one specific point in time to repeat itself, is rather transparently supposed to be a metaphor for Jenice meeting Captain Picard again and the latter’s subsequent re-examination of his past life choices. In this regard, it doesn’t bring much new to the table in terms of maturation themes then the likes of, say “The Battle”, “Too Short a Season”, “Coming of Age” or “Heart of Glory”. It does, however, handle romantic relationships a hell of a lot better than “The Naked Now” did.

What I love about this episode is how emotionally honest everyone is, especially Captain Picard. There was room here for the character to be played very gruff and uncomfortable, as if he’s unwilling to own his past mistakes (“Enough of this self-indulgence!” springs immediately to mind for me here), but Patrick Stewart, as usual, plays against this, and infuses his lines with a delicate balance of remorse, nostalgia, affection and acceptance. But due to the script’s stronger moments and the actors’ considerable skill (Michelle Phillips is, perhaps surprisingly, quite good as well), “We’ll Always Have Paris” comes across as a very emotionally mature story about two adults coming to terms with their past lives and past selves. In that sense, while it doesn’t particularly *add* anything to the themes Star Trek: The Next Generation has been working with over the course of the past year, it does very clearly build upon them. It’s a story the Original Series not only wouldn’t do, but was flatly incapable of doing, and its another sign that in spite of its occasional missteps, Star Trek: The Next Generation genuinely has transformed Star Trek into something newer, fresher and better in its inaugural season.

There’s a lot of subtler moments outside of Patrick Stewart’s and Michelle Phillips’ turns that make this clear as well. The fact that we *can* so casually and dismissively say the sci-fi plot and the human story are meant to be allegories for one another means we’ve reached the point where we can take that for granted, and that’s extremely telling.…

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In the Forest of the Night Review

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Thanks as ever to my 168 backers on Patreon.

Let’s play the Kill the Moon game again and put aside the question of public opinion, not look at comments, and just go straight out. Not because I’m about to go on another rave about how this is a transcendent piece of Doctor Who, although it basically is. You can basically fairly accuse it of being Kill the Moon as if it were the Olympic Opening Ceremony, and that’s a fair criticism, so, spoilers, I’m going to put it in second. Well, though you can fairly accuse Kill the Moon of being a pro-life parable. So I guess in the end it goes down to the aesthetics of the thing, and personal preference. I think the ending of Kill the Moon is paced a bit better. So still second, but damn, that’s close.

But the real reason I’m putting public opinion aside is that this is, as many thought possible, the Blake episode. And I should set that reading up quickly, because it’s tremendously important to the episode and how I’m going to read it. If you’re a Blake geek, this is a hell of a thing. So. The Doctor suggests that the forest comes from the manipulation of time, and specifically mentions the date 1795. That is the year Blake began printing the combined volume Songs of Innocence and of Experience, from which his famed poem “The Tyger” emerges. This is the poem the episode’s title is taken from, and the tacit reason that the Doctor, Clara, and Maebh are menaced by a tiger. 
This connection is reinforced by Maebh’s description of seeing and hearing “ideas” flying around her, a description that consciously evokes Blake’s biography. Blake, and there’s not really another way to put this, had visions. These visions directly inspired and shaped his work, which was often an attempt to express the revelations he experienced. His famed miniature The Ghost of a Flea is, for instance, an illustration of a literal ghost he claimed to see. There is very little reason to think Blake was a charlatan in this regard. Certainly if he was, his act was terribly ineffectual. He lived in poverty his whole life, stubbornly clinging to his visionary art despite clearly being talented enough to fashion a career if only he were more disciplined. If he was a charlatan, the adaptability needed to craft so convincing an act failed him in every other aspect of his life. No, any reckoning of William Blake as a great artist and writer must accept up front – his art was the product of visions. Numerous hypotheses exist as to the nature of these visions, but they genuinely motivated his work. 
So when Maebh Arden stands within a forest from 1795, and says she sees ideas, she is in explicit communion with whatever strange source was tapped to produce Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion and America a Prophecy. She communes with the hand that dared seize the fire.
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Hai! (The Power of Three)

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It’s basically what watching this feels like.
A reminder that I’m doing a launch party for the latest TARDIS Eruditorum book at the Way Station in Brooklyn tomorrow at 3:30 PM. It’s at 683 Washington Ave. I hope to see you there.

It’s September 22nd, 2012. Script is at number one, with Ne-Yo, Pink, Flo Rida, and Fun also charting. In news, Dale Cregan kills two police officers and is arrested, and the NHL begins a player lockout. While on television, it’s Chris Chibnall’s second effort for Season Seven, The Power of Three.

The Power of Three has its faults, most of them seemingly fairly broad, and few of them actually the objections usually raised. Yes, the villain is a bit rubbish, but that’s largely the point. This isn’t actually a story about alien invasion, it’s a story about the Ponds. It’s the first time we really start to see the narrative acceleration of Season Seven used with some purpose and deliberateness – the resolution of the plot is sped through because it’s not actually the part of the story that matters. The beats are all there, they’re just not given room to breathe. Really, the only two solid criticisms are that “the year of the slow invasion, when the Doctor came to stay” is rather badly undermined by him going away for the bulk of the year, and the closing monologue, with its painfully ham-fisted integration of the title, is absolutely wretched.
But on the whole, we have a story where the oddness of the previous three finally starts to be justified. I mean, in its own way it was in Asylum of the Daleks, which was at least a generative and productive hot mess. This is a simpler thing, though – a story that uses the sped up narrative to fit unusual things in the margins of a Doctor Who story. It’s not, obviously, the first time we’ve played in the margins of Doctor Who stories – that’s what Love and Monsters and Blink were for. But it’s the first time we’ve done it without largely removing the Doctor Who story from focus. Instead of looking at a Doctor Who adventure an odd angle, we’ve got a Doctor Who adventure playing out at an odd speed, so that we get to put the emphasis on different parts. However stuttering the execution, in hindsight, this is the first time they actually show us where this is all going, creatively. 
More interesting, however, is the title. Under the fan nomenclature that sprung up around the new series, The Power of Three refers clearly not just to the numerical operation of “cubing” a number, nor just to the Doctor-Amy-Rory triad, but to the iteration of the Doctor played by Jon Pertwee from 1970-74. And true enough, Three looms large over this entire story. As he looms large over any “invasion of Earth” story, that being the format that defines his tenure. This is somewhat odd if one stops to think about it for too long – over his five years and twenty-four stories, only Spearhead From Space, Terror of the Autons, The Claws of Axos, and Planet of the Spiders are actually alien invasions as such.
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Comics Reviews (10/23/14)

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And at long last, we’re back. As ever, in ranked order, best of the week at the end, with the caveat that I liked everything enough to pay money for it. And I just trimmed my pull account by 25%, so that means I like everything that little bit more. Or that it’s nearly finished. Would have picked up AXIS #3, but ended up not actually picking my own books up today, and forgot to ask Jill to grab it from the rack. I bet I wouldn’t have liked it, though. I didn’t like the first two.

The Amazing Spider-Man #8

I’ve not been loving this title since it came back, and it almost got cut, but I’ll give it at least through Spider-Verse. So, six more issues, apparently. This at least has Ms. Marvel in it, which improves anything.

The Unwritten Apocalypse #10

As I have often said, I am sure this will all ready very nicely as a collected edition, much like the same team’s run on Lucifer did. There too, I bought the comic for years after I no longer had the faintest clue what the fuck was going on, but read it all in the end and enjoyed it. Here, I even sort of can remember the plot issue to issue, so it must be even better, right?

The Multiversity: The Just #1

The long-awaited return of Bloodwynd. Past that, this is a fun little romp through a particular corner of DC’s history, but I admit, I found myself looking forward to the ending – this felt like it moved rather slowly. More broadly, Multiversity isn’t quite fitting together for me yet. Though at this stage, neither was Seven Soldiers, so the jury’s still out. But thus far… this feels a bit flat.

Stumptown #2

Not a ton of movement in this one – we spend most of it rejecting what is, to my mind, a fairly uninspiring theory anyway, namely that of European soccer hooliganism coming to America. I like the cross-team rivalry PI dynamic, though, and I trust Rucka. A slow second issue isn’t a major problem. And even when slow, this book is a lot of fun.

Lazarus #12

An issue of characterization between major plot swings, held up somewhat by the fact that Malcolm is playing his cards so close to the chest that it’s impossible to actually know what’s going on. We’re in a passive role watching puzzle pieces slot into place, which is fine, but I doubt can be sustained over an entire arc. We’ll see, I suppose, bot whether Rucka tries to, and whether it works.

Avengers #37

So, we know this is building to Secret Wars, which is almost disappointing, inasmuch as it means it’s not building towards the end of a story. But two months into this timejump, Hickman is spinning the plates well. The inherent mystery about what goes in the gap between these books and the present-day of Marvel works well. I like the twist with Sue Storm.…

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