Eruditorum Press

Siding with bugs is praxis

50

, , , , , , , 0

Lesterson has brought his new toy, his reactivated alien machine, to Governor Hensall’s office.  He boasts of how it could revolutionise life in the Colony.  It can end their labour problems, their economic problems… all their problems.

“It can do many things,” agrees the Doctor, “but what it does best is exterminate human beings!  It destroys them… without pity…”

He continues.  And the machine speaks too.

“I – AM – YOUR – SER-VANT,” it says, an unconscious admission in its strange inflection.  It says this again and again and again.

The two voices overlap, trying to shout each other down.

The tool, the machine, the product, bellows that it is our servant, while one man desperately claims that it’s a killer, an apocalypse in waiting.

The two claims merge until they become one contradictory truth.

Later, the Dalek (I choose to believe it’s the same one) murders Hensall on Bragen’s orders.

It turns to Bragen.

It has a question.  The tool that kills, the dead labour, the mass produced thing, the weapon, the tank, the gothic monster, the repressed thing returning, the fascist principle that mirrors Bragen’s own, the social-Darwinist that embraces the idea of the racial struggle for survival against all other competing races… has a question for Bragen.  For humanity.

“WHY – DO – HU-MAN – BE-INGS – KILL – HU-MAN – BE-INGS?”

 Good question.  One of the few genuinely good questions asked by anyone in this story.

Bragen, of course, cannot answer.

He has no idea.

(UPDATED 21/11/13) …

Continue Reading

An Unused Can of Monster’s Cat Food (The Last War in Albion Part 16: Maxwell the Magic Cat, The Stars My Degradation)

, 18

This is the sixth of seven installments of Chapter Three of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work for Sounds Magazine (Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation) and his comic strip Maxwell the Magic Cat. An omnibus of the entire chapter, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. It is equivalently priced at all stores because Amazon turns out to have rules about selling things cheaper anywhere but there, so I had to give in and just price it at $2.99. Sorry about that. In any case, your support of this project helps make it possible, so if you are enjoying it, please consider buying a copy. You may also enjoy my newly released history of Wonder Woman, A Golden Thread. 
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s earliest works included not only his underground-inflected Roscoe Moscow, but Maxwell the Magic Cat, his attempt at a newspaper strip featuring a talking animal. What started as a children’s comic (at least in the editor’s mind) steadily drifted into something altogether stranger…
I fed her with an unused can of Monster’s cat food, which I spooned into Monster’s dusty cat bowl. – Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Figure 123: A late Maxwell the Magic Cat strip that plays with the formal
constraints of the comic medium (Alan Moore, as Jill de Ray, 1986) Click
to expand.

Before long any resemblance between Maxwell the Magic Cat and a children’s comic was gone, and eventually the Northants Post conceded the point and moved the strip off the children’s page entirely. It’s not that the strip was ever child-unfriendly as such, though after a few months it becomes hard to imagine any child particularly enjoying the jokes about pairing red wine with fish or Robert Mitchum. By the time Moore got to tins of cat food sitting on death row and the tragic end of Liver Chunks in Oyster Sauce any pretense that the strip was aimed at children was firmly out the window. Instead Moore turned the strip into a general gag-a-week strip that wandered through any number of interests: politics, complex formal play with the structure of the comics medium, bleak existential jokes (a captured mouse asks Maxwell what happens after death, and Maxwell describes cat heaven.The mouse admits that this doesn’t sound that bad, and asks where mice go when they die. “Oh, they go to cat heaven as well.”), and, of course, wonderfully dreadful puns. (Maxwell 4 page 30 for formally complex strip)

Figure 124: Alan Moore’s acerbic commentary on the Falklands War (Alan
Moore, as Jill de Ray, 1982)

By and large, this worked. Moore’s intensely structural approach lends itself well to comedy. This is something that even a cursory examination of interviews with him reveals: he is a terribly funny man. Even when Moore is working with a bit of a shaggy dog punchline he frames it in a precisely worked set of comic beats.

…

Continue Reading

Outside the Government: Reset

, 16

It’s… still February 13th, 2008. Torchwood has rejiggered its schedule slightly, showing next week’s Torchwood a week early on BBC Three immediately following the BBC Two broadcast. This has an interesting effect, as it moves the first airing of the show away from its main airing. Torchwood is still treated as a BBC Two show. But it now has a “for the fans” transmission a week early. It, in effect, makes Torchwood the opposite of event television.

Which is funny, because Reset is, in practice, an event episode. First and foremost, of course, is its ending, which features the shock death of Owen Harper. Although the contours of this are questionable since, again, once this goes out on BBC Two it’s immediately resolved by “Dead Man Walking” showing on BBC Three. (This seems to have basically worked, in fact – 849k of the 3.8m people who watched Adam tuned into Reset on BBC Three. The next week, one million of Reset’s 3.2m viewers went for Dead Man Walking. The total ratings, however, remained about level, making this a curious experiment.) But the other big event is that this is the first of three Torchwood episodes in which Martha Jones makes a guest appearance.

Bringing Martha Jones back is tricky business, to say the least. She has to be brought back, of course. The world of the new series forces that on you. Because companions never really leave and we get them bound into their home lives, returning them to their home lives isn’t a departure. This isn’t a complaint, though it does force a sort of ludicrous escalation of stakes on companion departure episodes as writers try to find bold new ways of stranding someone so that the Doctor can never see them again. The move towards companions who have lives outside the TARDIS is, on balance, a good thing, in that it allows companions who are more than just plot functions. Even the classic series had basically moved to that by the end, with Ace’s disconnection from her life on Earth becoming a factor of Ace actively wanting to get away fro her life, as opposed to just an incidental and unacknowledged fact.

This really is important. Because plot-wise, the companion’s job is fairly straightforward. They’re supposed to act in a particular way within the narrative. In that regard they’re fairly interchangeable. Most basic plots would work with any companion. Nothing about what Jo Grant does is that noticeably different from what Mel or Rose or even Romana would do in a similar situation. Yes, the flavor of it would change – the dialogue changes, and some of the mechanisms by which characters accomplish things change, but the basic shape they fill in a plot is the same. Which leads to a sort of diminishing returns – all you can do with them is switch the iconography around. A knife-wielding savage! A bossy Australian stewardess! Bonnie Langford!

By giving companions lives outside the TARDIS you get the ability to do different sorts of stories – ones in which who the companions are matters.…

Continue Reading

“They’re dead…They’re all dead…”: That Which Survives

, 0

“Monkey in the middle!”

“That Which Survives” opens promising to be one of the most creative and exciting episodes since “The Alternative Factor”, and that it doesn’t quite maintain that momentum for the whole of its fifty minutes is almost beside the point. We’re still in the curious mystical territory the show’s been exploring off and on since “The Tholian Web”, and here Kirk even uses the phrase “ghost planet” to describe an astrogeological impossibility: A planet too young to develop life and an atmosphere, yet which clearly has both. As the landing party is about to beam down, the transport sequence is interrupted by a woman who suddenly materializes, imploring them not to go down, killing the transporter chief in the process. She’s too late to stop the landing party, however, but as Kirk tries to contact the Enterprise Sulu informs him it’s simply not there anymore and that they’re stranded. Back on the ship, we learn the Enterprise has somehow been instantaneously flung to the other end of the galaxy.

So once again we’ve stumbled into a region of space where weird and inexplicable things happen. This time though, the closest analog seems not to be pagan mythology but supernatural horror movies: The mystery woman materializes every once in awhile to a specific crewmember, both on the planet and aboard the Enterprise. Puzzlingly declaring she is “for” them and that she knows everything about them, she gains their trust enough so she can touch them, at which point she explodes every cell in their body simultaneously. The mystery woman is a slasher villain then, and “That Which Survives” works a bit like an old haunted house movie, where travellers have to seek shelter in a dark and foreboding mansion. But it’s also a survival movie, as Kirk, Sulu and McCoy are forced to search for food and water as they’re now cut off from the Enterprise and are unsure if they’ll ever be able to leave. And, in a cruel twist of fate, it seems like the planet they’ve found themselves on has neither.

However, this is just half the story. “That Which Survives” is split between the landing party and the Enterprise at the other end of the galaxy trying to return to where it was. On the Enterprise, the episode plays out entirely differently-While the mystery woman still hunts people down, the challenge Spock, Scotty, Uhura and M’Benga face is an entirely different one: This part of the episode is straightforwardly a thriller in the mould of “The Doomsday Machine”, albeit with the inspired decision to put Spock at the centre and forcing him to react to everything. The crew soon discovers that in addition to throwing them across the galaxy, the mystery woman has somehow also sabotaged the ship’s warp drive. With the warp engines locked and accelerating at a rate beyond Scotty’s control and to a speed at which the Enterprise wasn’t designed to withstand, the crew has fifteen minutes to figure out what’s happened and correct it or the entire ship will blow up.…

Continue Reading

A Wondrous Book Launch

10

The cover art is, as ever, by the fantastic
James Taylor, who talks about his process
over here. 

Last War in Albion will run on Saturday this week, in lieu of the usual waffling.

I am pleased to announce that A Golden Thread: An Unofficial Critical History of Wonder Woman is at long last available from Eruditorum Press. It’s priced at $7.99 for the US ebook edition, with all other editions priced to give me the same royalty. You can buy it now at Amazon (Print, Kindle), Amazon UK (Print, Kindle), and Smashwords, which can provide you with ebook versions for any non-Kindle devices. It’s available in most other Amazon stores, and will be on Nook, iBooks, and Sony stores in a few weeks.

The book is a critical history of Wonder Woman, focusing primarily but not exclusively on her comic book appearances. It starts in 1941, as William Moulton Marston, a pop psychologist, creates a female superhero to advance his idiosyncratic goals about the relationship between men and women, through the days when she was more feminist than Gloria Steinem, and all the way to the present day, where the character is stuck in DC’s woeful New 52 relaunch, looking at every era of Wonder Woman in between.

It’s written to be understandable and interesting to audiences who have never read a Wonder Woman comic before, but has enough detail that even the most die-hard fan will learn a few things. It doesn’t just cover the canonical “major eras” like the Marston era and the Pérez era, but every era from 1941 on is there, in varying levels of detail.

Why, one might ask, a history of Wonder Woman? Because she’s simultaneously one of the most recognized figures in popular culture and one of the least well-understood. She’s a wildly popular character, and yet save for three seasons of television in the 1970s it’s hard to point to her iconic or beloved version. There are not stories like The Dark Knight Returns or The Death of Gwen Stacy that everyone points to as the iconic Wonder Woman story. There’s no movie version.

And yet she’s fascinating. Not just because she was designed as propaganda for Marston’s imagined female supremacist bondage utopia, but because she’s spent over seventy years in continual publication by a company that has never seemed to understand the character. Where Batman and Superman feel easy to understand, Wonder Woman is strangely amorphous, resisting an easy definition. This has made her comics often frustrating, but rarely, if ever, boring. And because she is, by her nature, a symbol of feminism and of social justice, the highs and lows of her comics are often fascinating.

Inevitably, a book drifts over two years of being written and produced. When I envisioned the book, of course, it was called Paradise Dungeons, playing off of Wonder Woman’s Paradise Island and the oft-remarked upon bondage components of Wonder Woman. But when I finished the book it wasn’t quite that book.…

Continue Reading

Gothic Marxism

, , 0

For Hallowe’en, here are some talks to enjoy.

Here‘s David McNally, talking about the ideas in his book Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism, which I mentioned (and cribbed from shamelessly) in this recent post.

Here‘s Silvia Federici, talking about her book Caliban and the Witch, which links the witchhunt craze to the rise of capitalism.

And here‘s China Mieville, giving a Marxist view of Hallowe’en (which is more fun than it sounds).

Monsters of the world, unite!

 *

ADDITION 01/11/13:

I didn’t know this, but there’s a video of the China Mieville talk I linked to above:

…

Continue Reading

Outside the Government: Adam

, 25

It’s February 13th, 2008. Still Basshunter at number one, with the same bunch of folks on the lower charts, along with Lupe Fiasco, David Jordan, and Wet Wet Wet. In news, Mitt Romney drops out of the GOP primaries, the Writers Guild of America strike resolves, and Obama keeps winning stuff, leading to a desperate shakeup in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which continues to be blatantly unable to win a majority of delegates. The military government of Myanmar agrees to a referendum on a new constitution that will begin devolving power from it, Anonymous bursts onto the scene of political protest with a series of actions against Scientology, and the US decides that maybe waterboarding isn’t nice and should be banned.

While on television, Torchwood’s second season plods miserably on. So much so that at this point I have to admit defeat. There are not 2000 words to be said about every episode of Torchwood this season. Where the first season was at least interesting, really regardless of its quality, this season is simply banal. And Adam serves as my breaking point. It is an episode that is spectacular in its complete lack of anything interesting. More than any other Torchwood episode to date, this one seems designed to mimic a specific episode of American television. Adam is a direct remake of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Superstar,” to the point of using the trick of redoing the opening credits to include the fake character who forms the premise of the episode. 
There are, of course, huge differences. “Superstar” was about Jonathan, who was steadily built up over multiple seasons from a recurring background character to a significant character in his own right, until finally getting an episode in which he, for mysterious and unknown reasons, becomes not just a mainstay of the Scooby Gang, but one who has supposedly been there for ages. Jonathan is a problem in the episode and his rise to power is undone, but he remains a more or less sympathetic character and, though he remains problematic and is never quite a good guy, he’s also always carefully kept from being an outright villain.
Adam, on the other hand, is about a malevolent character. He rapes Tosh and revels in his cruelty to Ianto. He’s firmly a monster of the week; he’s killed off at the end of the episode, and he’s never to be spoken of again. Indeed, given that the entire episode is wiped from the minds of all of the main characters, future use of the character is pretty much salted earth. He’s not even going to be referenced again, little yet actually brought back. There’s, right off the bat, a very different sort of approach in play here.
But the broad strokes are all here. Adam, like Superstar, is an episode designed to let all of the main cast play slightly different versions of their characters. So we have Owen and Tosh’s roles in their relationship flipped, with Owen becoming the shy one and Tosh becoming the confident and sexually active one.
…

Continue Reading

Pearl of Beauty: Wink of an Eye

, 3

“I knew this would happen if we gave the LHC access to Starfleet’s resources.”

One of the things that’s especially curious about the third season is that in some ways it is arguably the most thematically consistent the Original Series ever was. We’ve now had several stories dealing quite explicitly with the question of utopia, idealism, Star Trek’s Western pedigree and what makes the show ultimately valuable and worth preserving. And then there’s that odd flirtation with the mystical, something “Wink of an Eye” doubles down on to a delightful extent.

This episode sees Gene Coon back (at least I’m assuming I can attribute it to him: He didn’t write the screenplay but the story is credited to Lee Cronin) and it’s sort of chilling how easily he seems to have embraced the magickal head trip the series has gone on recently. What we have here is a story that can be quite easily read as being just as Otherworldly as “The Tholian Web”, and takes a unique look at a number of science fiction conventions to boot. First of all we see the Enterprise answering a desperate distress signal from the people of a planet called Scalos, but beaming down they find the entire planet devoid of life. Spock and Uhura reason the distress call was prerecorded, but just as the landing party is about to beam back up the redshirt suddenly vanishes into thin air in front of McCoy. back on the ship, random pieces of equipment start malfunctioning and circuits start rerouting themselves. McCoy and Chapel tell Kirk the medical supply cabinet has been broken into and things have been rearranged, and people keep hearing a strange, insect-like buzzing sound. The whole first act then once again brings to mind ghosts, and this time evokes in particular stories of places haunted by poltergeist activity.

But that all changes in the second act when Kirk vanishes too. This time we get to follow things from his point of view, and it turns out that the culprits are in truth the Scalosians themselves, who beamed aboard the Enterprise with the landing party and have commandeered it. It turns out that the Scalosians conceive of time differently than other people, and exist in a state of perpetual hyper-accelerated existence. Kirk meets Deela, the Scalosian Queen who makes the interesting declaration that she has chosen Kirk to be her king. Deela says that long ago the Scalosian civilization was wiped out by a series of natural disasters that also sterilized the male population, and they now have to abduct men from other species and bring them into their plane to ensure the survival of their people.

As cheesy as that scenario sounds, I first have to give the show credit for inverting the stock “Mars Needs Women” scenario long before most people realised that was in fact a stock scenario that could be inverted. This perhaps isn’t the episode to talk at length about this, but the kind of role reversal we see here brings up the question of the effectiveness of turnabout as a form of social criticism: “Wink of an Eye” doesn’t quite manage to shed absolutely all of the disturbing sci-fi rape connotations of this kind of plot, though it’s clear Deela would prefer her subjects to know and love her first, which is something of a start I suppose.…

Continue Reading

Book Review: Adventures with the Wife in Space

27

Adventures With the Wife in Space is, as we’ve already talked about, an absolutely wonderful blog. But reading it over the years, one also often gets the nagging sense that it’s been a troubled blog, and troubled largely because of Neil Perryman’s ambivalence regarding the project.

It’s both an interesting and brave decision, therefore, that the book of the blog goes so far away from the blog’s apparent wheelhouse. For all of us in fandom it seemed obvious that the real point of The Wife in Space was the reviews. It was Doctor Who as reviewed by a not-we – a normal person. Sue was our great reasonably sane hope; the person who would tell us what bits of the classic series we could actually be proud of and what bits were as rubbish as we feared.

Because this is a thing. Tat Wood, in About Time 7, accuses the new series of suffering from anorakaphobia. This seems a bit of a leap for a show that includes easter eggs about The Sensorites on more than one occasion, but it does get at something real, which is that ever since the new series fandom has had a sense of non-trivial anxiety about the classic series. On the one hand, Doctor Who was suddenly popular. This was fantastic. Suddenly we weren’t freaks for liking it any more. But there was a clear divide between the new series and the classic series. The popularity of the new series didn’t magically make it remotely normal to like The Claws of Axos.

Beyond that, fandom had learned its lesson. Doctor Who fandom, especially in the UK, was characterized by loving snark. Or, sometimes, unloving snark. Being a Doctor Who fan meant knowing “not the mind probe,” or the bubble wrap in The Ark in Space, or the bits in The Monster of Peladon where it was obviously Terry Walsh and not Jon Pertwee, or all the Billy fluffs. This didn’t mean hating the series. But it meant loving it in spite of itself, with a slightly embarrassed look. And nothing about the popularity of the new series erased that problem.

This is baked into the entire premise of Wife in Space: the fact that watching the classic series is slightly embarrassing. Hell, I’ve had the problem with my wife, who does identify as a Doctor Who fan and was genuinely interested in having me show her bits of the classic series. My reaction was roughly, “what, reading my blog isn’t enough? You want to see them? Why?” Not because I didn’t love them so much as because it is vaguely incomprehensible why anyone else would. (Then again, my wife also adores our blind cat who routinely sneezes explosively and sprays snot all over our house. And, for that matter, me. Even The Web Planet is easy to love in comparison.)

But there was a problem with all of this, and it’s one that quickly becomes clear when reading the book version of Adventures of the Wife in Space: Sue is not even a little bit normal.…

Continue Reading

Outside the Government: Meat

, 9

It’s February 6th, 2008. Basshunter remains at number one, with Adele, Nickelback, Kelly Rowland, Britney Spears, Rihanna, and Hot Chip also charting. I put Hot Chip on the list mainly because it’s funny to end that list with “Hot Chip.” In news, several undersea cables are severed, disrupting Internet service through large parts of the world. Barack Obama acquires what is functionally an unassailable delegate lead following “Super Tuesday” such that Hillary Clinton has no meaningful chance of winning the nomination, ensuring a several month long nomination process.

While on television, we have the succinctly titled Meat. Meat is an interesting story in a large part because of its particular pairing of writer and story. Catherine Tregenna made her name in the first season of Torchwood with a pair of quiet character pieces, which happened to be two of the standout episodes of the season to boot. But with Meat she ends up with a more action-based premise – much more dashing around and solving crimes, and much less quiet focus on character. It’s not characterization-free by any measure, but it’s also not the quiet sort of story Tregenna’s previous work suggested.

In some ways this is a mistake, though not really one of Tregenna’s making. As with the previous time the brief included “let’s do the biggest Doctor Who monster ever,” insufficient thought was given to whether they could actually pull it off, leaving the story with a spectacularly unconvincing and rubbish monster as its centerpiece. This obscures the fact that Tregenna’s actual writing of an action/suspense thriller is actually quite solid, and that it’s merely sandbagged by having a lot of the key scenes take place in a giant warehouse dominated by a massive CGI slug that, accordingly, have to be shot from strange angles to cut down on the number of F/X shots, since Torchwood is the cheap show and doesn’t get many of those.

Nevertheless, Meat is a surprising story, especially coming off the heals of two stories that were terribly predictable and a third that was interesting along a narrow but substantive band. And it’s not interesting just for the decision to shake up the status quo and let Rhys in on the premise of his own show. Though this decision is interesting and worth talking about. These sorts of decisions are always a bit complex; on one level, it leads to the steady dismantling of the series’ original premises, and shows a small amount of desperation. In this regard it resembles major character deaths, not that Torchwood is ever going to do any of those. In any given premise there’s a set number of stories you can do that involve knocking down pillars of the premise. Doctor Who, for instance, could write any of its main characters out of the show, destroy the TARDIS, or reveal where the Doctor came from. All of which it did within the first six seasons before, somewhat sensibly, basically stopping and not doing any more of those save for The Deadly Assassin.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 254 255 256 257 ›»