Eruditorum Press

Beneath the stones, the beach; beneath the beach, Cthulhu

“They live, we sleep.”: The Cloud Minders

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“My beloved, let’s get down to business/Mental self defense fitness”

Well. This, I did not expect.

There are quite possibly no bedfellows stranger than Dave Gerrold, Oliver Crawford and Margaret Armen. Gerrold is at this point still an energetic young Star Trek fan and beginning writer, albeit one who, with the help of Gene Coon, penned arguably the single greatest episode of the Original Series. Crawford was an experienced Hollywood screenwriter who miraculously recovered his career after being blacklisted for refusing to disclose names of supposed communist sympathizers, but his only Star Trek credits have been co-writing “The Galileo Seven” with Shimon Wincelberg and somewhat misreading Gene Coon in “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”. Armen, meanwhile, is one of my least favourite writers in the entire series and a compelling candidate for one of the worst as well, with the two spectacular turkeys that were “The Gamesters of Triskelion” and “The Paradise Syndrome” to her name. The prospect of a story jointly written by all three of these wildly disparate talents is quite frankly inconceivable. But hey, we got Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop last week, so stranger things have happened.

Actually, “The Lights of Zetar” is a good point of comparison because like it, “The Cloud Minders” is absolutely a flawed masterpiece, which took me completely by surprise: This one is properly excellent. I mean, it’s not perfect-It has some worryingly serious flaws which, although customary for the third season, are still really annoying and keep “The Cloud Minders” from completely going the distance. But there are moments of genuine greatness in this story, and it crackles with an energy and passion the show hasn’t seen since John Meredyth Lucas was running the show. This is most likely the part of the episode inherited from Gerrold, who wrote the original story pitch, entitled “Castles in the Sky”. Thankfully from my perspective, Gerrold gave a quite lengthy and detailed comment about the differences between his story and the episode that made it to air in his book The World of Star Trek, which both gives me ample fodder for discussion and saves me having to summarise the plot:

“It was intended as a parable between the haves and the have-nots, the haves being the elite who are removed from the realities of everyday life – they live in their floating sky cities. The have-nots were called “Mannies” (for Manual Laborers) and were forced to live on the surface of the planet where the air was denser, pressure was high, and noxious gases made the conditions generally unlivable. The Mannies torn between two leaders, one a militant, and one a Martin Luther King figure. (Mind you, this was in 1968, shortly after King was assassinated, and just before the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.)

In my original version, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Uhura were captured by the Mannies when their shuttlecraft was shot down by a missile. (The Enterprise desperately needed dilithium crystals. This planet was one of the Federation’s biggest suppliers, and Kirk’s concern was to restore the flow of crystals.

…

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Midge walks into the Gym.  You get the sense that it’s not the sort of place the old Midge would’ve visited.  The old Midge would’ve been scared of the self-defence crowd.

The new Midge is all swagger, in his shades and his shiny jacket.

“Waiting on the Sarge?” he asks the room full of silent, watching, bemused, singlet-and-sweatpants-wearing blokes.  “He’s been held up. He asked me to have a little chat with you.”

This is a lie.

“I learned a secret today. The secret of success. Thought I’d share it with you.”

Midge has been learning all sorts of things.  He’s been quarry in a quarry, hunted through a rocky wilderness on another world, stalked by carnivorous beasts.  He chose to survive at all costs.  He killed… not just to survive but for fun, for revenge, for a feeling of power that – one senses – is entirely new to him, a new experience in a stunted and powerless dead-end life.  Of course, in the process, he adopted the viewpoint of the beasts.  The logic of tooth and claw.  The logic of ‘fuck you, I’m all right’.  The logic that makes you escape the lions by feeding them your friends.

“It’s common sense, right?  It’s just the way of the world, right?  Survival of the fittest.”

And he’s right, in a way.  It is the way of the world.  Everyone in his sleepy little home town, his pokey little corner of Thatcher’s Britain, is obsessed with the survival of the fittest.  It has seeped all the way through society, into every nook and cranny.  It’s in the shops, where Hale and Pace are scared of being driven out of business.  It’s in the suburbs where the net curtains twitch.  It’s in the Territorial Army training sessions where the Sarge says young men have to be taught to fight.  It’s in the housing estate where Midge comes from.

It doesn’t matter that it’s one logic among many in nature, or that sometimes we see it in nature where it isn’t because we often mistake mirrors for windows, or that it may be fitting for the beasts but applying it to people is vacuous and specious and destructive.  Truth is: for the purposes of the people who benefit from it, the more vacuous and specious and destructive it is, the better. 

“Get rid of the deadwood, let the wasters go to the wall, and the strong will inherit the earth. You and me.”

Why do I suspect that some of the lads in this room used to bully Midge when they were at school with him?

“Do you hear what I’m saying?” he demands, furiously, enraged by their failure to respond to his glib soundbites, “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

He takes off his shades.  Beneath them, his eyes are the yellow, mindless eyes of an animal.  But that’s what he chose.

The Master is there.  A stalking, diseased old man, seething with resentment and malice.  Through Midge, his slavering pet, he casts his hypnotic spell over the young men in the room. …

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“My goodness…” says the Doctor as yet more fine fare is brought to the Tharils already-laden table, “You live like kings.”

“We are kings,” says Biroc impassively.  He merely states it as a fact.  He is both part of this feast and an observer of it.  He was at it, and now he returns later in his personal timeline.  He can travel along his own trajectory.  He sits at a table he once sat at long ago, in the same seat.  He acknowledges this past life and does not disown it, yet he does not embrace it either.  His tone is neutral.  Truthful.

Meanwhile, at the same table many years later, after history has revolved, men – who make their living capturing, chaining and shipping creatures like Biroc for sale and industrial use – are sitting down for their lunch break.  They pass round sandwiches, pickles, thermos flasks.

Their boss, Rorvik, regards them with the wary contempt that only a truly stupid person can feel for those slightly more stupid than he is.  He has so little success trying to make them listen to his inanities that he has to wave his blaster pistol at them. 

Back in the ‘past’, back at the other meal, the Doctor asks where all the Tharils’ luxury and variety comes from.

“The universe is our garden,” says Biroc simply.  Again, the abrupt tone of factual statement.

“Ah. So this is what it was all like.”

“At the height of our empire, before the Tharils became the slaves of men.”

The mention of slaves turns the Doctor’s mind instantly to the servants moving around the table.  He responds to Biroc’s barely-implied complaint by calling him out on his apparent hypocrisy.

“I notice you don’t do too badly for staff,” says the Doctor.  “This garden of yours, the universe… how do you manage it”

“We use our power.  For those who travel on the time winds, the vastness of space is no obstacle.”  The Tharils have the power to travel where they will – the basic requirement of any imperial project.  “Everything is ours.”

The serving girl by the Doctor makes a mistake, spilling the wine that she is pouring into a goblet.  The Tharil whose goblet it is knocks her to the floor, as one swipes irritably at a fly.  The Doctor glares at him and gets up to help the young woman.

“Including her?” he asks.

“They’re only people.”  Again, Biroc’s tone is flat.  He does not endorse or condemn… except in so far that simply saying such things is its own condemnation.  He simply recites the truth of how this system operated.  To the Tharils, their slaves were only people… just as, to Rorvik, his slaves are only Tharils.  But there is no self-justification from Biroc.  He makes no pleas, and gives no excuses.  Rorvik is losing control of his present.  Biroc owns his past. 

“So you’re the masters the Gundan spoke of, hmm? The enslavers?”

“The weak enslave themselves, Doctor. You and I know that.” …

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John offers the Doctor some sugar for his tea.  John is a black man with a Caribbean accent.

“Ah,” says the Doctor ruminatively, regarding his sugarless tea, “A decision. Would it make any difference?”

“It would make your tea sweet,” says John, humouring this strange customer.

“Yes, but beyond the confines of my tastebuds, would it make any difference?”

“Not really.”

“But…”

John is suddenly strangely interested.  “Yeah?” he prompts, wanting to hear more.  (I used to think of John as a manifestation of the ‘magical negro‘ stereotype… but actually he’s just an ordinary Londoner who meets a magical Scotsman.  As such he’s one of the better examples of the Cartmel era representing black people.  Sadly, those years often saw black men cast simply because the character was a rapper or a blues musician.)

“What if I could control people’s tastebuds?” suggests the Doctor, “What if I decided that no one would take sugar? That’d make a difference to those who sell the sugar and those who cut the cane.”

One person making a little decision doesn’t change much.  Lots and lots of people making lots and lots of little decisions, however…

“My father, he was a cane cutter,” says John.

“Exactly. Now, if no one had used sugar, your father wouldn’t have been a cane cutter, would he?”

“If this sugar thing had never started,” says John, “my great-grandfather wouldn’t have been kidnapped, chained up, and sold in Kingston in the first place. I’d be a African.”

In British Jamaica, as in Brazil and French San Domingue, slavery was at its most brutal.  Slaves were literally worked to death.  The horrors of Caribbean slavery – virtually unrepresented by the mainstream capitalist culture industries – equal anything seen in the Nazi camps (which are endlessly dramatized and documented in popular culture as a warning against ideological extremism and a foil for the moral courage of the British and the Americans).  The connection between these horrors – that both were caused by capitalist empires grabbing land and profiting from racialised slavery – is still less often made.

John is lucky to exist at all.  For a long period, death rates for slaves in Jamaica were considerably higher than birth rates.

Slavery is not only one of the foundations of capitalism, funding and propping it up in the lands of the free, but it is also the origin of modern racism.  ‘Race’ is a fundamentally unreal concept when it comes to humans; a social construct… and a relatively recent one in its current form.  ‘Races’ were made socially.  It was, for instance, far from clear to the dominant ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture in 18th-19th Century America that the Irish or the Poles were ‘white’.  The idea that ‘negroes’ were an inferior ‘race’ arose with the need for millions of people who could be used as farm machinery in the plantations of the ‘New World’.  It was a get-out clause against the universalising promises of the bourgeois revolutions.  The American Declaration of Independence stated “all men are created equal”. …

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The Five Wonder Woman Comics You Must Own

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As promotion for my forthcoming book on They Might Be Giants’ Flood (out this Thursday!), my co-author and I are guest-editing the 33 1/3 blog at 333sound.com this week. That’s right, you get double the blogging from me this week. Our first post is here, featuring bits of our interview with the band that didn’t fit into the book.

So, you’ve bought A Golden Thread, my critical history of Wonder Woman. And you’re one of the readers who hasn’t read any Wonder Woman comics – which is fine, as I wrote the book assuming a reader who hadn’t. But now you want to go read some because you’re interested.

Or perhaps you haven’t bought it yet because you don’t know enough about Wonder Woman, but you’re curious why I think the topic is so interesting.

Either way, here are my picks for the five Wonder Woman collections/eras somebody interested in knowing more about the fascinating history of the character should read. Or just the five Wonder Woman collections anyone looking for a good comic should read. Really, just read them. Then go buy A Golden Thread. Even if you’ve bought it already; just buy another copy. They make great Christmas presents.

The Wonder Woman Chronicles (Volume 2)

Volume 1 of this series is currently out of print, but the original William Moulton Marston/Harry G. Peter stories don’t really require chronological ordering anyway. What’s important is that this is nearly two hundred pages of World War II era Wonder Woman by her creators themselves. This is the era of Wonder Woman in which she was a propaganda figure for her creator’s imagined female supremacist bondage utopia.

What jumps out about stories in this era is twofold. First is their weird inventiveness. Marston was completely barmy, and his stories are packed with strange and wonderful ideas. Second is the fact that Marston has a radical vision of the world that is as idiosyncratic and sweeping as that of William Blake or Philip K. Dick. Wonder Woman is a part of a larger philosophical and intellectual system for him, and though the full nature of that system isn’t clear from the strips alone, they sparkle with a sort of mad passion lacking in any other superhero comic I’ve read. These are some of the weirdest comics ever to have a major cultural impact.

Diana Prince: Wonder Woman (Volume 4)

One of my favorite parts of A Golden Thread is the two chapters devoted to the so-called I Ching era, a period in the late 60s/early 70s in which Wonder Woman lost her superpowers and adventured as an ordinary human being. This era was pilloried by Gloria Steinem, whose objections were used as a pretext for sacking the creative team and replacing it. In practice, though, the creative team was a bunch of fabulous writers and artists, headed by Denny O’Neil, whose angry leftist take on Green Arrow remains one of the iconic comics of the 1970s. For the last two issues of the era they had Samuel Delaney writing, who was doing one of the most serious-minded feminist takes on the comic ever, before or since.…

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The Doctor, Polly and Jamie have been condemned to the pits, to the ‘Danger Gang’, for the crime of proving to the Pilot that his world is run by secret things that constantly order him to not notice them. 

The trio are entering the pithead to begin their work as miners, mining the deadly gas that the Colony collects for its unseen masters.  One of the Colony’s jolly little work ditties plays in the background.  A loud, insanely chipper voice sings lyrics about how happy everyone should be to work and serve the Colony.

The Doctor groans as if in terrible pain.

“What’s the matter?” asks Polly.

“Ooooh, dreadful!” exclaims the Doctor, “Did you hear that rhyme? The man who wrote that ought to be sent to the Danger Gang, not us!”

Jamie laughs.

The Doctor’s concern isn’t for the danger of the mines.  It’s for the ugly, crass, aesthetic banality of tyranny; for its kitsch horrors; for its lack of imagination.  This might seem like a failure of proper priorities… until you remember that such crassness is a symptom of the infection in the social wound, the same wound in which the macra teem.

In a society that demands you work for hidden, secret, ineffable, insane masters that you never see and can’t control, the mass-produced art that surrounds you is always going to be so much slop.  Its function is to soothe, to reassure, to distract.  It may not be consciously crafted to do these things, but if it doesn’t do them it simply doesn’t get mass-produced in the first place.  In a world so riddled with secrecy and injustice that psychosis becomes a necessary feature of social life, the songs you hear on the radio are always going to hide repressed lunacies within their mindless platitudes.  When you are expected to never question and never stop smiling, what chance is there that culture will be anything other than bland, safe, comforting pap?

And shitty, rubbishy, worthless, careless songs hurt us.  Songs that side with power are injurious, especially if they’re dripped into your ears day after day after day.  Songs that are just ugly and dull, because they are made in the same way as spam, are just as bad.  They hurt our hearts and souls and guts.

The Doctor’s priorities are just fine.…

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Enlightenment and Persuasion have walked in on the Doctor and his friends.  They now look human.  A man and a woman, created from a sketch Tegan drew.  Pale, impassive, handsome, impeccably-groomed people in clothes that Tegan thought fashionable.  They look like she modelled them on First Class passengers on Concorde.  The Jet Set. 

Persuasion hands round drinks.  Nothing more persuasive than that.

Enlightenment is explaining her transformation from frog to aspirational 80s princess.  She speaks in cut-glass vowels and icicle consonants.

“We enjoy the most advanced technology in the universe,” she claims, her voice suffused with nonchalant arrogance.

She was kissed by technology.

“The dominant emotion on planet Earth is fear,” says Persuasion suavely.  Yes, that’s always how the ‘natives’ look to the ‘explorers’.  Fearful little things.  “When last we were there, our reception was hostile.”

Tegan, a woman from a nation built on the destruction and subjugation of ‘natives’ by ‘explorers’, is not fooled.

“Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me,” she sneers.

“Well, we must read your history books,” says the Doctor.  There is no better way to learn about the mindset of the rulers of any civilisation than to read their official history books.  You can read a lot between the lines.

“You will be welcome to do so,” says Enlightenment, “but first it will be necessary for me to instruct you in our computer languages.”

There is, it goes without saying, no conceivable possibility than a non-Urbankan might already have the ability to read Urbankan books.

“One couldn’t wish for a more enchanting teacher,” says the Doctor.  He almost seems to be flirting with her.

“A very elevated one,” adds Persuasion, regarding this insolent bug with lofty amusement.

“Enlightenment,” says the Doctor.

“Minister of Enlightenment,” Persuasion corrects him.  Just so you know where you stand.

“Yes, of course,” replies the Doctor, his eyes icy with contemptuous understanding, “And you must be Minister of Persuasion.”

Of course, every ‘civilised’ nation that ever set about conquering the ‘primitives’ always thought themselves superior, always thought they were bringing the benefits of their ‘advancement’, always said they were helping the child-races to grow… or at least to stop being a hindrance in lands they were too inferior to use properly.

And such ‘civilised’ nations always aimed for ‘hearts and minds’, always brought their greater ‘wisdom’ with them as a justification and a gift, holding it before them as they invaded and conquered and slaughtered and enslaved. 

And they always needed – need – their Ministers of Enlightenment.  And Persuasion.…

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Tobias Vaughn shows Jamie and the Doctor into his office at the International Electromatics factory.

“Confusing, isn’t it?” chuckles Vaughn smoothly when he sees Jamie’s astonishment.

“It’s exactly the same as your office in London!” says Jamie.

“In all basic essentials, yes,” replies Vaughn, “That’s the secret of my success.  Uniformity.  Duplication.  The very essence of business efficiency.  My whole empire is built on that principle.”

In the script (but not in the televised story) ‘Doctor Who’ comments: “Mass production.”

Mass production of uniform duplicates.  From disposable radios to micro-monolithic circuits (tiny things that form a massive slab or wedge of power).  From identical offices to endless copies of Watkin’s ‘teaching machines’.

This is why the Cybermen have chosen Vaughn as a business partner.  This is why he is going to co-ordinate and distribute their troops.  This is why they arrive at his depot in packing crates, waiting to be activated.  His company is the perfect delivery system for their virus.  The synergy is obvious.…

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Lytton and Griffiths are wandering across a quarry.  It actually is a quarry.  Something is being dug up or mined there, by slaves watched over by Cybermen.

Lytton has a device that detects Cybermen.

“There are two very close,” he says.

“That’s right!” shouts a very human voice from behind him.

Bates and Stratton – two escapees from the Cybermen’s labour gangs – disarm and frisk Lytton and Griffiths.

Lytton has been looking for them, and they’ve been looking for him.

“Are they Cybermen?” asks the perplexed Griffiths.

“Almost,” says Lytton, amused.

“This is what the Cybermen do to you…” sneers Bates, removing his glove and sleeve to reveal a cybernetic arm, a chilly construct of steel and pulleys.  His metal hand closes on Griffiths’ fleshy one and squeezes.  Bates watched Griffiths’ pain with dead eyes.

“How much of you?”

“Arms and legs.”

Bates and Stratton are rejects from the Cyber-conversion process.  The Cybermen turn their rejects – the ones that cannot be entirely consumed – into labourers in their quarry.

So… the Cybermen start with the arms and legs.  The legs that give locomotion.  The arms and hands that lift and move and dig and manipulate.  The organs of physical work.

When the Cybermen catch Lytton and subject him to conversion, they start with his arms.

The original Cybermen had human hands.

The severed hand is a recurring motif of the gothic.

The gothic is about dead labour, the living death of alienated work, the physical invasion and evisceration wrought by capital upon the working body, and the occult process whereby wealth is created from labour.

The Cybermen – with their skull-faces – are gothic things.  Zombies, in the old fashioned sense.  People reduced to pure labour power.…

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Outside the Government: From Out of the Rain

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It’s March 12th, 2008. Duffy are at number one with “Mercy,” with Taio Cruz, Alphabeat, Westlife, and Flo Rida also charting. In news, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer gets wrapped up in a prostitution bust and resigns, Barack Obama wins some more primaries, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling unveils his first budget.

On television, meanwhile, it’s Peter J. Hammond’s other Torchwood story, From Out of the Rain. Hammond’s two Torchwood scripts are, by any reasonable account, oddities. Hammond, as mentioned, is a longstanding television writer. He’s the closest thing to a writer shared between the classic series and the new series, in that he has, in effect, near-misses for both; he had a script rejected for Trial of a Time Lord (Pip and Jane Baker were, alarmingly, preferred), and wrote two for Torchwood. And unsurprisingly, there’s something a bit dated and old-fashioned in his Torchwood scripts. Characterization is lax at best. Hammond is clearly interested in the fact that Jack is over a hundred years old, but this is about the only aspect of Jack that comes up in either of his stories. The other characters are interchangeable – there’s nothing about Ianto that makes him the sensible choice to be fascinated by old film, and nothing about Gwen and Owen that would make them likely to randomly tag along with Ianto to the cinema, even with the vague mutterings of some historical rift activity. Tellingly, every scene of this is about revealing plot information; nothing hinges on anybody’s character traits. The only thing that happens to advance the plot is people finding out new details about the Night Travellers.
All of which is to say that most of the advances in televisual storytelling since Sapphire and Steel was on the air are ignored here, at least on the level of writing. This is old-fashioned storytelling, and the closest thing to a good argument that those who wish Doctor Who were more like the classic series have. Because it does more or less work. It doesn’t have the spark and snap that Small Worlds did, but that’s mostly a factor of its more esoteric subject matter. Small Worlds was an efficient and compelling take on a longstanding and classic bit of mythology that took Torchwood’s basic premise and its specific connection to the Welsh landscape in a direction that was essentially inevitable. From Out of the Rain is far more idiosyncratic – evil early 20th century circus performers and the preservation of old filmstock is an interesting premise, but it lacks the straightforward hook of Small Worlds. 
Still, it largely works and ends up as one of the stronger entries in an admittedly weak season of television. This is largely for the reasons discussed last time. Whatever its idiosyncratic simplicity, it is very much its own story with its own focus and interests. There’s a sense of vision here. What happens is clearly happening according to a logic unique to this story, as opposed to according to the logic of Torchwood’s format.
…

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