Eruditorum Press

The Coalition of Chaos

You Were Expecting Someone Else: The Writer’s Tale

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On 1 Mar 2014, at 21:01, Philip Sandifer wrote:
Ben –
So, cards on the table, I have no idea what I’m doing. Honestly, this just seemed like a neat idea. “I know Ben Cook’s a fan, I wonder if he’d like to help with the Writer’s Tale entry so it can mirror the structure of The Writer’s Tale.” But from there I’m not sure where to go. I have a vague set of themes and ideas I’d love to wander by, and stuff I’m mostly unconcerned about (if I ever ask “what’s Russell like?”, please just spike the whole project), but it’s all in the Maybe, as the book would put it.
Why don’t I start with my experience of the book? I paid money for it during my last semester in grad school, which was not a point in my life when I had a lot of money to pay for a hardcover. But I kept hearing good things about it… I’m not even sure where from, since I wasn’t hugely active in fandom. But it sounded fascinating, and I remember just losing an entire workday to it. I absolutely inhaled the book, and it was the exact book I needed then. I was over the immediate shock of my wife leaving me and my father’s stroke, but I was living alone and trying to finish up a PhD. And I remember an overwhelming sense of just… getting it. Of reading this weird and confessional document where Russell (it’s so weird to go with a first name there, incidentally, but it seems appropriate for this book) is at times visibly laying out more than he’s comfortable with. And of, over and over again, either thinking “yes, that is exactly what working long hours on a creative project in solitude feels like” or “yes, that’s an excellent explanation of why that is or isn’t a good idea,” both of which are thoughts that came fairly naturally to someone in the final stages of a dissertation for a PhD in English.
And I’ve never really talked about the book with anyone. To the point where I’m not sure if my romance with it is normal or not. I mean, it’s obviously a well-loved and successful book, but I’ve always wondered why other people love it, since my love for it is so intimately tied to when I read it. And people who spend a year holed up in their apartment alone more nights than not and working feverishly on a book that only a half-dozen people are ever going to read aren’t normal. So I’ve always been afraid that other people are really enamored with the behind-the-scenes gossip or the writing advice, which is good, but was never the heart and soul of the book I loved.
What about you, though? You must have realized you were working on something absolutely golden well before the end of it. What was that like? Especially as a massive fan. I mean, you’d obviously been close to production before because you were on DWM, but you were seeing pages before Julie Gardner or anybody.
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Sensor Scan: Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

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If I need to explain to you who Mister Rogers is, this can only mean one of two things. You either hail from somewhere that isn’t North America or Hawai’i or something has gone badly wrong with the universe. Because the only thing that needs to be said about Mister Rogers is that he was one of the greatest television personalities, if not one of the greatest human beings period, to ever live. For almost forty years, he asked generations of children and children-at-heart to be his television neighbour for a half an hour each day. And, anyone who took him up on his invitation knew that for that time they would feel welcome and safe and enjoy sharing the company of someone who truly cared about them and was interested in what they were thinking and feeling.

The more pertinent question is why now? I could have looked at Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood at literally any point in this project, that’s how important Fred Rogers was to our collective memory and for how long. But I wanted to take just a little time to talk about him, his show and his legacy here, in the mid-1980s for a number of reasons, one of which is because in an era so deliberately and self-consciously steeped in artifice and performativity, it’s important to keep in mind that all this spectacle isn’t just for its own sake. There are real, genuine truths we’re trying to talk about here, even if we’re approaching them from odd angles, and we must never lose sight of that. Performativity and artifice do not equate to vacuousness and falseness, and nobody understood that better than Mister Rogers.

The Neighborhood only ever existed on TV, and Mister Rogers was well aware of this. There’s a reason he always called us “television neighbors”, after all. It clearly operates by televisual logic, and most certainly hails from a time when television was seen as disposable theatre. The show always opened with an aerial pan over the Neighborhood, which is very obviously conveyed through miniatures.We then cut to inside Mister Rogers’ house, where he hasn’t arrived yet. Then we pan over to the front door, and Mister Rogers comes in singing “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”, taking off his coat and shoes and putting on his sweater and sneakers. Likewise, the show always ended by doing the opposite, panning away from Mister Rogers’ house and retracing the steps in reverse.

I always got the sense that the show’s intro was meant to depict each one of us coming to the Neighborhood from different places: Mister Rogers probably hitched a ride on the Neighborhood Trolley, which you can always see making the rounds in the street, and then walked the rest of the way. As for us, perhaps we flew because we exist on the other end of the television and can travel via camera angles. Each episode then is a different visit to the Neighborhood, which is a place we all come to from somewhere else at the same time, even Mister Rogers himself.…

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Some Hastily Sketched Thoughts On Amazon and Hatchette

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First, some context for those unaware of this particular issue – Amazon and Hatchette Book Group are having themselves a bit of a spat over ebook pricing, and Amazon is retaliating against Hatchette’s failure to agree to their terms by refusing to take pre-orders on Hatchette books, raising prices on them, and lowering their on-hand stock of physical books so that they take 2-3 weeks to ship. This has been widely criticized as being a massively dick move. Which isn’t inaccurate. But…

Thus far in my career I have not done a lot of work with traditional publishers. This is not because of any principled opposition to them, but mostly because thus far in my career I’ve consistently looked at manuscripts I’ve had and thought “I can make a couple grand off this right now or I can spend months or years trying to find a publisher with whom I may or may not make much of anything.” That may well change in the future, particularly as I slowly maneuver towards trying fiction, where self-publishing is much trickier.

For writers who have thrown their lot in with traditional publishers, this is a very scary time for understandable reasons. Greg Rucka – a writer I absolutely love – has a book out in July. Second part of a series, first one was a very fun little thing, very exciting, and you can’t pre-order it on Amazon right now because they’re fighting with his publisher. This is going to gut his first week sales, which will have knock-on effects for the entire book’s sales, and I can’t imagine he’s not terrified about the implications of that, because lord knows I would be. J.K. Rowling’s pseudonym’s second book is caught up in it too, which must make that the book with the most mangled promotional campaign ever. These are real and horrifying prospects. 
It’s also the consequence of the entire system under creative labor takes place in 2014, and complaining about it as an isolated case is absolutely ridiculous. 
Why is Amazon in the position they’re in? The answer is simple: because twenty years ago they risked a lot of money on a bet about what bookselling would look like in 2014, and they were right. Then they made another in 2007, and they were right again. That’s literally it. They guessed that people would buy books online, and they guessed that they’d be happy to read them on digital readers instead of buying dead trees that they’d have to store somewhere. 
And I honestly don’t want to diminish Amazon’s contributions here. They got online retail right where a lot of companies didn’t. As for ebooks, who remembers the Rocket eBook, which, for several hundred dollars, could hold ten books on a machine the size of a hardcover, which was actually find, because I don’t think there were actually ten books available for it? Amazon got the ebook to be a usable format, in no small part by actually getting skittish publishers who were nervous about piracy onboard selling the damn things, but also by actually making a good reader in the first place.
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Short Out The Time Differential (A Christmas Carol)

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In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as a carrot.
It’s December 25th, 2010. This year it’s The X-Factor setting the Christmas #1 again with “When We Collide,” with Take That, The Black Eyed Peas, and Rihanna also charting, the latter twice. In news, since we said goodbye to Sarah Jane Smith researchers at CERN captured antimatter for a sixth of a second, the Eurozone bailed Ireland out, Wikileaks released a quarter-million American diplomatic cables, and a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia, setting off a wave of protests that would eventually jump to several other countries and become known as the Arab Spring. 
While on television, Steven Moffat has his first Christmas special. In some ways, at least, A Christmas Carol seems designed to confound expectations. In hindsight this seems like Moffat starting the 2011 run of Doctor Who as he meant to go on, although at the time it just seemed surprising. Russell T Davies had often made Christmas specials slightly offset from their seasons, typically through the use of guest companions, but the stories tended to be about the larger emotional arc of Doctor Who. The Christmas Invasion, of course, wasn’t offset at all, instead being in every sense the first episode of Season Two. The Runaway Bride is largely about dealing with Rose’s departure. Voyage of the Damned is less enmeshed in its immediate context, but then, it doesn’t really have any context beyond “Kylie.” And The Next Doctor is firmly about the denouement of the Tennant years.
A Christmas Carol, on the other hand, has nothing whatsoever to do with anything going on around it save for its trick for moving Amy and Rory to supporting roles. Actually, that’s not quite true. Little details flit about and haunt the narrative – the emphasis on the word “silence” in the story’s bespoke pop song, for instance, and the way in which the ending reads in light of the whole “Doctor’s death” plotline. But these details don’t even connect to anything – they just add a slightly unsettling pall to the entire affair for the sorts of obsessives who might notice them. For the most part, this is what it appears to be: an almost entirely bespoke Christmas special that unabashedly and unsubtly pulls its entire structure from the single most recognizable Christmas story in all of literature and, for that matter, television/film.
This gets at the other significant shift since the Davies era. Davies did Christmas specials in which Christmas was essentially a bit of decoration. The extent to which Christmas matters to a given story varies a bit, but the truth is that any of the Davies-era Christmas specials could have been done as non-Christmas episodes with only a minimum of changes. This story, however, is inconceivable in any context other than Christmas. It’s not just a story set at Christmas, it’s a story that’s very much about Christmas, and, more broadly, about Christmas stories. 
In terms of the overall health of the show, it’s a masterstroke.
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Sensor Scan: Blade Runner

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People are going to argue with me, but I think it’s a pretty safe bet to say Blade Runner marks the beginning of cyberpunk in Western science fiction, at least in terms of mass mainstream pop consciousness. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say Blade Runner is likely the film that codified at least the visual style and iconography associated with the genre and is even probably what most people think of when they think of science fiction in the 1980s (well, this and Tron).

And although the anime, which defined much of the look and feel of the franchise, wouldn’t debut for another two years, the fact is we’ve already covered a great deal of Blade Runner‘s most important innovations by introducing Dirty Pair in the last post. Yes, Dirty Pair owes a great deal to Golden Age science fiction too, but by virtue of the specific tradition it comes out of it is very much what we’d now call cyberpunk. Which means that, from my perspective at least, going from “The Case of the Backwoods Murder” to Blade Runner does feel like something of a rather large step backwards. But this is not entirely fair, given the fact that even though they’re in some sense comparable, the fact is these two works ultimately come out of two different cultures and traditions.

Blade Runner is of course loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but I’m going to leave Dick’s work out of the analysis here for the most part largely because it has nothing to do with it. Dick’s stories were famously extensively altered before they were adapted into movies, and Blade Runner is no exception: The original novel was an exploration and defense of empathy, while the movie, well, isn’t, mainly. The one major theme of Dick’s the movie leaves more or less intact is his exploration of the Self and personal identity theory-We talked about this a bit in the context of “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, but as this is pretty much the single thread Blade Runner‘s entire plot hinges on, it’s worth talking about again here. Breaking the issue down into its component parts, we get two horns: “The Self” refers to theories about what, if anything, we fundamentally, essentially are, which is oftentimes liked to the idea of consciousness, while “personal identity” refers to more to how these said essential personalities persist over time and how that can be used to categorize and describe us.

None of the works we’ve looked at so far that have tackled personal identity have handled this exceptionally well: Gene Roddenberry’s big rebuttal to the persistence of the self argument and why the androids in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” (namely Doctor Korby, who beamed his consciousness into an android body) shouldn’t be considered sentient extant beings basically amounted to “because robots”, but thankfully Blade Runner gives us something a tad more nuanced-The Tyrell Corporation’s main argumentative premise, and the one Deckard initially holds to, is that Rachael’s memories are inauthentic; implanted into her positronic matrix to maker her more human-like and thus more controllable (this, incidentally, brings up another interesting train of thought in regards to both corporatism and transhumanism, but I honestly don’t think the writers thought the ramifications of these motifs all the way through).…

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Saturday Waffling (May 31st, 2014)

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So, the Last War in Albion Kickstarter wraps today. If you’ve not contributed, please think about doing so.

All of which said, thank you. I say this often enough, but it really does bear repeating. I have a phenomenally cool job. The reason I can do this job, though, is that all of you are repeatedly willing to support me, whether by buying books or backing my periodic Kickstarters. (And I already have one in mind for 2015 that I think I can guarantee everyone will be very excited about.) You’re an incredibly generous, lovely bunch of readers, and I’m proud as hell to have earned the respect and love from people as fantastic as you.

I won’t lie, this Kickstarter was a bit scary for me. I’ve had the sense that Last War in Albion was starting to go well, but I didn’t really know if it was a project that was going to make it. It needed to find a way to start earning money, and I really wasn’t sure how much it could earn. And while it’s clearly not as popular as my Doctor Who stuff (which is unsurprising, given the relative size of television’s audience versus comics’ audience – in the US, Doctor Who at its lowest-rated episodes are seen by more people than buy the highest-selling comics several times over), it’s also clearly a project that has legs, which is heartening given that I absolutely adore writing it.

So here I am, about ninety minutes into what is technically Saturday morning, having wrapped up writing up A Christmas Carol (my buffer on Eruditorum is not what it used to be) and about to grill some burgers in a midnight drizzle before sitting down with them, a bottle of wine, and… actually, it would be spoiling things to tell you what the next episode I’m going to watch, wouldn’t it? Everything I get to write about for the next month excites me. Sometimes it terrifies me (the Swamp Thing chapter is 11.5k already and is not even vaguely in the neighborhood of almost done. I think that chapter is going to end up being longer than the Flood book), but it thrills me. I’m astonishingly blessed to get to do all of this work. Astonishingly.

So thank you. No clever discussion topic or anything like that. Just thank you. Thank you so much.

-Phil…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 30 (The Coming of the Terraphiles)

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The Last War in Albion Kickstarter ends tomorrow. 
In November of 2009, it was announced that Michael Moorcock would be writing a Doctor Who novel. This was something of a big deal. Moorcock, after all, is a proper writer, as opposed to one who came up through Doctor Who itself. He was a contemporary of J.G. Ballard, one of the most influential figures in the British side of the 60s new wave of science fiction, and the writer of countless series in various flavors of fantasy, most famously Elric of Melniboné, his angst-ridden answer to Conan the Barbarian, and most acclaimedly Jerry Cornelius, his polymorphously perverse secret agent. He’s one of those sci-fi/fantasy authors to have successfully gained a non-trivial measure of respect from the literary establishment, due largely to the sheer number of writers he was a major influence on – a venerable old man of the genre, and a celebrity writer of the sort that the Doctor Who novels had simply never seen anything like before. 
In other words, he potential audience for a Michael Moorcock-penned Doctor Who novel is by any measure quite large, incorporating as it does both Doctor Who fans and Michael Moorcock fans, both of which exist in significant quantities, and, more to the point, with non-trivial overlap. And yet the question of exactly what one would want from such a cultural intersection is, at the very least, complex. Michael Moorcock and Doctor Who are both massive cultural touchstones, not just in popularity but in sheer size. Fans being fans, there’s a certain desire for nods and in-jokes, something Moorcock and Who have both courted over time, Moorcock by regularly crossing over his own series, Doctor Who through several periods where it was kept afloat by die-hard fans alone. But balancing this is tricky – what expectations do you fulfill? What ones do you let down gently?
Still, a poll of the potential audience for The Coming of the Terraphiles would almost certainly not have settled on a book based heavily on Moorcock’s Multiverse, with very little Doctor Who lore, that’s substantially a P.G. Wodehouse pastiche full of clueless socialites. This is, however, what Moorcock delivered, to mixed reviews. 
It is clearly a Moorcock book, for better or for worse – indeed, it’s on the whole more Moorcock than Doctor Who. It is, as mentioned, a book about the multiverse, with Moorcock’s standard themes of law and chaos in full view. The entire premise – fans of Earth (the eponymous Terraphiles) playing a poorly reconstructed set of Earth games – is visibly a few doors down from Dancers at the End of Time. There’s a Jerry Cornelius analogue – an interstellar pirate named Captain Cornelius – who is presumably yet another incarnation of the Eternal Champion and who flits intriguingly at the edges of the narrative. Various other things appear that certainly seem like they belong to Moorcock’s mythos and are suggested as such in various reviews also appear, but to be honest, I’m not enough of a Moorcock buff to catch them all, so they are left as an exercise for the reader. 
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Advent of the Angels: The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair

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It seems at first glance obvious that I should cover anime and manga at this point in the project. After all, isn’t the breakout of Japanese media in the United States a major part of the 1980s entertainment landscape and a defining event in the history of Nerd Culture? Well…not exactly.

Firstly, according to the observations and inferences I’ve personally made studying Nerd Culture, the foundational moment as it pertains to anime and manga didn’t happen in the early 1980s and wasn’t even due to the rising popularity of people like Hayao Miyazaki: Instead, it can be traced to the 1990s and Neon Genesis Evangelion (which was already a unique and transformative piece of anime in Japan) if you were a part of proto-Nerd Culture, or shonen (boy’s action entertainment) stuff like Dragon Ball Z if you were everybody else (though some bleedover did occur).

And secondly, the Dirty Pair franchise, of which The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair (actually, a compilation of the first two Dirty Pair stories serialized in science fiction magazines) is the inaugural work, is at once neither anime nor manga and both them and many other things all at the same time. Dirty Pair concerns the continuing adventures of two scantily clad female secret agents named Kei and Yuri who solve cases in the 22nd Century after mankind has become a sprawling alliance of a thousand star systems as part of a tag-team partnership aided by their giant hyper-evolved sentient pet cat alien and chief engineer Mughi, but who also have the dreadful misfortune of leaving trail of utter devastation in their wake. It is also a massively important part of this project because it leaves an indelible mark on the history of science fiction from this point on.

At this point, you presumably have (at the very least) two questions. “What even is this? This sounds insane” and “Why in the name of the Prophets are you covering this on a *Star Trek* blog?” spring immediately to mind. To the second question, the truth of the matter is, believe it or not, Dirty Pair is the secret history of Star Trek in the Long 1980s: The two franchises are so intertwined and interconnected during this period and reference each other so breathtakingly frequently that it’s actually impossible to talk about one *without* also talking about the other.

This is famously due in part to two particular members of the Star Trek: The Next Generation creative team who were profoundly inspired by Dirty Pair. Namely, Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda, who are *massive* anime fans, ran an anime CompuServe group and who would show imported Japanese films on VHS to the rest of the Next Generation creative team whenever a shoot dragged on into the wee hours of the morning, which it frequently did. But Dirty Pair itself has very strong ties to Star Trek as well, to the point it’s been called the Japanese version of Star Trek: The anime based on the book series makes regular, screaming obvious shout-outs to the Original Series and the first Dirty Pair movie is *actually called* Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture.…

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The Terror Answered: I Am Orc (The Last War in Albion Part 46: William Blake, Captain Britain in The Daredevils)

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The Kickstarter to fund continued production of The Last War in Albion ends Saturday. It is currently $69 away from funding Volume 5 of the project.

This is the sixth of ten parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections. 

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s engagement with the question of Britain’s fundamental nature evoked the past efforts of William Blake to do the same thing. 
“The terror answered: I am Orc, wreath’d round the accursed tree: The times are ended.” – William Blake, America a Prophecy

The year before he finished adding Songs of Experience to Songs of Innocence Blake published two further works using the word “Albion.” First was America a Prophecy, which was followed up in 1794 by Europe a Prophecy. These “continental prophecies” adapted and repurposed American and European history to talk about revolution in a more absolute sense, exploring Blake’s character of Orc, the furious spirit of revolution who is both the eldest son of Los and Enitharmon and the fallen form of Luvah. In these poems Albion is simply used to describe Britain. While Albion has princes, angels, and guardians, and while it is described at one point as growing sick, it is nevertheless clearly a land possessing a shore and cliffs.
Figure 340: “Albion Rose,” by William Blake,
from A Large Book of Designs, 1796.
But in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, also published in 1793, Blake sets up a different relationship. Albion itself does not appear in the poem, which would gesture towards reading Albion as simply a metonym of Britain, with the daughters not being biological offspring so much as British women in general. But the fact that the main character of the poem, Oothoon, is explicitly described as “the soft soul of America” suggests at least some measure of personification, a viewpoint that Blake confirms – while making clear that Visions of the Daughters of Albion is, in his view, an “early, minor work” characterized by his being “too timid to say what he means” while simultaneously “not meaning much of anything anyway,” he admits that Albion is “not entirely passive” within the prophecy. This would suggest that his daughters – whose only real role in the poem is to serve as witnesses to the story of Oothoon – fail to do ever more than “hear her woes, and echo back her sighs” not because of a rejection of Oothoon (who transforms over the course of the poem from traumatized rape victim to a triumphant advocate of freedom who calls for people to “arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy!
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 79: Downton Abbey

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For all that the story of the Moffat era is (as we’ll see over the next season’s entries) one of the series breaking out as an international hit, it is hardly the only, or even the biggest international export in British television. Indeed, even domestically, it’s worth noting that Doctor Who’s status as “the biggest hit on television” was emphatically usurped not long after the fifth season wrapped. As of the end of 2010, it was Downton Abbey’s world.
This is not a surprise, of course. Nothing’s the biggest thing in culture forever. Even Downton Abbey has been unseated by Call the Midwife by now, and something’s sure to unseat that any day now. The massive status that Doctor Who had at the end of the Davies era was always going to falter, and there’s nothing to conclude from that in and of itself. What is interesting, however, is the nature of the transition. Yes, Doctor Who was always going to be unseated, but by what?
It is easy to point out that Downton Abbey is a conservative show. Indeed, it is literally a Conservative show – its creator and sole writer, Julian Fellowes, was made a Baron Fellowes of West Stafford not two months after the first season of Downton Abbey wrapped, and he now sits in the House of Lords as a Tory. But tempting and in many ways justifiable as it is to simply demonize the show on those grounds alone, it is frustratingly unfair. The nature of writing and language, after all, is that texts routinely subvert and distort authorial intent. Given that he wrote a TV story grousing about his tax bill less than two years before the 1979 general election it would hardly be surprising to discover that Robert Holmes supported Thatcher, and yet, as Jack Graham has repeatedly demonstrated, there’s practically no writer in the classic series whose work better supports Marxist readings, and that includes at least one actual Marxist. Meanwhile, Mark Gatiss is demonstrably and committedly a leftist and yet seems chronically unable to avoid writing stories with awkwardly right wing leanings. It is, in other words, cheap and beneath this blog to criticize Downton Abbey just because it happens to be written by a Tory peer.
Instead, let’s criticize it for being exactly the sort of television show you’d expect a Tory peer to write. It is not, to be clear, that Baron Fellowes is a bad writer. Downton Abbey is, in almost every technical sense, very, very good. It’s got an astonishingly strong cast, the writing does a solid job of revealing and unwinding characterization at a satisfying pace, it’s lush and beautiful, and is well-directed and shot. It’s not even a little bit hard to understand why people like this show: it’s really, really good. It’s one of those nice examples of a piece of television succeeding through good old-fashioned quality.
But it is hopelessly ethically bankrupt. If one takes the 2010 election as signifying a shift in the national mood beyond “Labour’s been in power for a long time and Gordon Brown is a complete wanker,” and the truth is that at this point we’re too close to the history to really narrativize it that emphatically, then this essay would straightforwardly argue that Downton Abbey’s ascent reflected a national mood – a shift back towards a culturally conservative vision of Britain based on the nationalistic valuation of past glories.
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