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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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Sensor Scan: Cosmos

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There are, in the history of television, extremely few moments like this one, where the heart and soul of an entire generation is swept up in the rapture of a shared experience that becomes the defining memory of an era.

Cosmos, which opens declaring itself to be standing “On The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean”, is on its own a watershed. This is the series that not only made PBS, but codified the documentary as at least I remember it and changed the face of not only the popularization of science, but of science itself. It really is astonishing to look back and see how so much of the discourse we now associate with science can be linked directly to Carl Sagan’s ethos and positionality. Because this is what makes Cosmos so special and why it remains relevant and valid over thirty years later when the world it came into and spoke to now belongs to some long-distant and half-forgotten mnemolic time-spacescape: And even though his perspective has been frequently misunderstood and his name invoked in vain by the many, many people to come in his wake, the fundamental and provocative radicalism of his voice still resonates, and is what allows Cosmos to remain so powerful.

Carl Sagan is a fascinatingly marginal figure, and in retrospect it’s sort of odd that he was the one to break out in the way he did. Famously too speculative, imaginative and spiritual for the scientific establishment, yet too grounded in hard science for UFOlogists and true believers, Sagan occupies a curious, and unenviable, no-man’s land in scientific discourse. But yet in many ways it’s this nomadic isolationism that helped him reach such a staggeringly huge audience: Sagan wrote and spoke with the voice of a poet and a mystic, yet fiercely committed to the scientific method, he was in many ways the only personality positioned to take science education in this direction. He’s of course far from the first to fuse science and mysticism: John Muir did it, and J. Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallée and Steven Spielberg accomplished it masterfully quite recently with things like Passport to Magonia and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Going all the way back, what were the ancient navigators if not science mystics?

But Carl Sagan was the first to take this approach and apply it to science education, at least on such a grand scale. Carl Sagan wasn’t just a science popularizer or even the greatest science popularizer-He was the science popularizer, all stop. Nobody who has tried to follow in his footsteps has come remotely close to emulating what Carl Sagan did. In some ways Robert Burnham, Jr. is Sagan’s anticipation in this regard, but, let’s face it, try as he might (and he did, mightily) Burnham’s Celestial Handbook was never going to be embraced outside of an extremely small subset of amateur astronomers. No, what Sagan understood was the power of television as not just a forum for teaching and learning, but as a medium where communal images could be experienced together.…

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Mega Man 3

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I am out of persuasive reasons why people who have not donated to the Kickstarter might want to change their minds, so today I offer an unpersuasive one: you might gain psychic powers.

Long-time readers may remember when I wrote about video games on a blog called The Nintendo Project. It turned out, however, that there was such a thing as a project too mad for me to complete. It also turned out, however, that there is such a thing as someone madder than me, as a gentleman named Frezno asked if he could take up the torch and continue the project, which he’s been doing at The Nintendo Project, Resumed.

A while ago, Frezno asked if I would mind doing a guest post for his blog on Mega Man 3. Since Mega Man 3 is a fantastic game that I find really interesting and have things to say about, I was very much willing. That guest post went up yesterday, and you can read it here.…

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Outside the Government: Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith

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It’s November 15th, 2010. Rihanna is at number one with “Only Girl (In the World),” with Adele, Take That, and McFly also charting. In news, there’s a G-20 summit in Seoul and Aung San Suu Kyi is released from house arrest in either Burma or Myanmar, depending on your preference in country names. And on the day the second part of this airs, the engagement of Prince William and Catherine Middleton is announced. 
While on television, the fourth and final full season of The Sarah Jane Adventures concludes with Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith. There exists a sense in which this is almost unbearable to watch. It’s the last television appearance of Lis Sladen before she died, after all. And it’s an episode whose plot is largely concerned with Sarah Jane falling ill and nearly dying, with lots of talk about whether she’s too old and whether it wouldn’t be better to just hand the job of protecting the Earth to someone else. It is in no way easy to watch in the context of hindsight. 
And yet.
Let’s read this in light of the larger themes of the late Davies era, since we are by this point in what we might call the late for its own funeral Davies era. Specifically, let’s bring up the theme of Children of Earth, a critique, of reproductive futurism. For those just tuning in, reproductive futurism is a term coined by the queer theorist Lee Edelman to describe the ideological practice of justifying things in the name of an idealized vision of “the children” with no material investment in actual childhood, with childhood being defined specifically as the absence of any political engagement. It’s not a good thing, and generally speaking people who produce children’s media that embraces reproductive futurism should be shot in the face.
So here’s a reality of the world instead. There are children who grew up on The Sarah Jane Adventures. Children for whom the hastily assembled “My Sarah Jane” tribute was an absolutely essential piece of mourning because the star of their favorite television show unexpectedly died. Children who still went back and watched the show after she died, because they had DVD sets, and who engaged with this story in exactly the same way that we all do now: as a story that’s about death and abandonment and the fact that people grow old, centered on a character played by an actress who, at the time of transmission, was five months from death. 
Surely this is a good thing. What, after all, is the point of children’s entertainment if not to help mediate learning about exactly these things. We’ve long asserted here that the value of children’s television and literature is inexorably linked to its capacity to scar children for life and thus to stick in the memory as something fascinating and impossible to quite process. This, surely, is why. Because people die and awful things happen in the world. There are crocodiles, as one children’s show put it once.
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