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Four Tiny Essays On SF/F

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I just drove an hour in a fucking hellish snowstorm and am in no shape to do all the typesetting on Last War in Albion, so that’ll be a day or two later in the week. For now, I’ve had a couple of old Twitter threads get a lot of renewed attention on the back of some debates about current trends in SF/F literature. A couple of these are things I reworked into what I called “tiny essays” for Patreon a while back, and if my views are going to get cited and thrown around I may as well put them up in a durable and lightly edited form. So here’s four tiny essays on recent aesthetic trends mostly around SF/F, to publicly stake out some positions.

The Tor Wave

For three years running there have been precisely zero white men nominated for the Best Novel Hugo, and the last one to actually win was John Scalzi all the way back in 2013. This suggests a clear aesthetic shift in how sci-fi works—one on the scale of the rise of the New Wave in the 1960s or the sudden arrival of cyberpunk in the mid-80s. However nobody has formulated a take on how this movement functions.

Part of this is undoubtedly the nazis. The Sad Puppies attacked this style before it had gotten a chance to self-codify. Their attacks were farcical and largely not even wrong—the claim that this “wasn’t science fiction” remains pure historical erasure. But like any propaganda there were just enough truths mixed in with the lies to make things difficult.

Core principles.

  1. Diversity as an underlying assumption. Fantasy that isn’t medieval Europe fetishism but starts from international perspectives. (Rebecca Roanorse, N.K. Jemisin) Overt queerness (Charlie Jane Anders, Tamsyn Muir). This isn’t diversity for diversity’s sake, but rather focused exploration into the options that the white male default precludes.
  2. A massive dollop of fanfic and romance influence. Tamsyn Muir and Charlie Jane Anders are at the front line of this, so it clearly overlaps substantially with queerness. But let’s not forget that Naomi Novik’s breakout series was a reskinned Master and Commander fanfic.
  3. It’s stylistically a big tent, with the lyrical and allusiveness of Piranesi sitting comfortably alongside the cyberpunk reconstructionism of The Murderbot Diaries. Put another way, this is by a generation for whom SF/F has always had lots of different traditions, and who grew up reading all of them. Post-factionalization, although in practice this is still a faction.

Within this, the New Wave clearly has a ton of influence. Its innovations—SF/F conceits as tools for exploring interiority, the foregrounding of different cultural perspectives, stylistic experimentation—are all very, very internalized here. No longer controversial or innovative, just the way things are done. These are writers who grew up with library book sales where cheap copies of Dragonriders of Pern and Left Hand of Darkness abounded. More to the point, these existed besides Rendezvous with Rama and Neuromancer, all in a single “Science Fiction/Fantasy” genre.…

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Erebor (II)

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Erebor’s isolation makes it a magical symbol. It hunches over Northern Wilderland like a god of its terrain. Its six spurs reach across its territory like a maimed skulltopus, reaching in every direction, clutching the ground underneath it. Its southern spurs hold Dale like a trinket while Mirkwood watches from an apprehensive distance. Erebor’s power is individualism. What causes more catastrophe in Middle-earth than standing alone?

Tolkien’s identity politics are intrinsically geographic. Tolkien assigns territories to individual peoples: the Shire is for Hobbits, Lothlórien is Elvish, Gondor belongs to Númenórean Men. Threatened homelands invariably drive Tolkien’s plots, which often involve the survival efforts of their inhabitants. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings’s casts are ensembles from numerous peoples and lands who collaborate against a common enemy. Both novels’ denouements involve the improvement of peoples’ and territories’ social and political relationships before everyone goes home to their own peoples. A few characters gain special status among other peoples, like Gimli, the only Dwarf to sail to the Undying Lands, but as ‘exceptions’ they’re nonetheless strictly racially categorized. Otherwise, the Dwarves, who Tolkien considered Middle-earth’s Jews, live outside of the Elves’ resting place.

A quintessential racial home, The Kingdom Under the Mountain is the Dwarves’ greatest city, except for possibly Moria, whose sacking is one of their most catastrophic tragedies. A coil of “halls, and lanes, and tunnels, alleys, cellars, mansions and passages” (The Hobbit, “An Unexpected Party”), the kingdom is seen both through Thorin’s nostalgic recaps and as a ruin, a juxtaposition that underlines its effects. But even then, most of it is unseen. The Hobbit’s third act depicts events in only a few halls and cellars. It’s an underground city with some visible edges, not unlike how some of Pompeii’s ruins are still buried. Erebor’s culture is a secret. Its kingdom is every conspiracy theorist’s wet dream: disorientingly grand, ambivalent, intrinisically racial halls of power and commerce.

“The King under the Mountain” (Alan Lee)

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Past the Front Gate’s “old carven” arch, “a stone-paved road” runs alongside a small channel, which initiates the River Running (The Hobbit, “Not at Home”). At the opposite end, a number of doorways lead to Thrór’s great chamber, which Thorin calls “the hall of feasting and of council”. Its proximity to the Front Gate indicates its stature: visitors will see it before anything else, even if they venture downstairs. It’s where the Dwarves decide and observe significant events. Its designation as Thrór’s chamber points to ancestral pride; the Dwarves commemorate Thorin’s grandfather with this hall.

Thrór is one of Erebor’s pivotal kings, shepherding Erebor’s resurgence after a Dwarvish sojourn from the mountain, driving his people’s return to their kingdom after warring with dragons, and then seeing his kingdom destroyed by a dragon. Over 300 years before Thrór’s birth, his ancestor Thorin I leaves Erebor to mine the “rich and little explored” Grey Mountains, “where most of Durin’s folk were now gathering” (The Return of the King, Appendix A: “Durin’s Folk”).…

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IDSG Ep101 Roman McClay and the Manosphere

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And so we kick off 2022, IDSG’s fourth year, with an episode about the Denver shooter and self-published SF novelist (who put himself and his own murder plans in his own books) Lyndon McCleod, AKA Roman McClay, and his relationship to the infamous ‘Manosphere’, AKA a network of misogynistic and ‘masculinist’ fashy chudlingers like Jack Murphy, Jack Davenport, etc.  We follow up a bit on our last episode (Part 1 of our post-verdict Rittenhouse coverage) and drop back in on the nauseating You Are Here podcast, and Baldy McDickface’s Tim Pool’s show, as we explore the recent flap around Jack Murphy’s ‘Cuck Letter’ (don’t ask… well, just listen), before delving a tad into McCleod/McClay’s fiction and his worldview, including some hardcore stoopid genetic determinism.  Lots going on in this one, and so we’re issuing bigtime content warnings, not least for the recorded voice of a multiple murderer.

On a specific Eruditorum Press-related note, let me just note that El and I (along with others, of course) were covering the issue of toxic reactionary shit (written by toxic reactionary shits) in the world of niche SF fiction publishing a loooong time ago. c.f. Search Results for “puppies” – Eruditorum Press

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Podcast Notes:

Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent.  Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes.

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IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod

Daniel’s Twitter: @danieleharper

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Episode Notes/Links here: I Don’t Speak German: 101: Roman McClay and the Manosphere (libsyn.com)

…

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Radical and Aggressive (Book Three, Part 35: Crawling From The Wreckage, Experimental Film)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: After finding success with Animal Man, Morrison was brought on to revitalize the floundering Doom Patrol comic, which they began by leaning hard into themes of trauma and mental illness.

“Religions are fictions that modify the world. It’s just that this fiction is more radical and aggressive.” – Alan Moore, Providence

Of course, Doom Patrol was at its core a superhero book, and it wouldn’t do to have it full entirely of fucked up people discussing their trauma. And so with the remainder of Crawling From the Wreckage, which transitions to a plot about the “Scissormen,” mysterious figures who speak in nonsense phrases like “The leaching will be novelistic for effacement! Curdle your pilgrimage! Curdle your pilgrimage!” and who cut people out of existence, leaving a white void where they’d been. This is inventive—a sly use of the two dimensional portrayal of comics, where cutting a character from the page makes obvious sense, that then gets extended to the imaginary third dimension that the characters occupy. These, it’s revealed, are creatures  who came into existence with the composition of The Book With No Title, a book that describes the composition of a book called The Book With No Title, which is designed to alter human thought by introducing parasitic ideas, describing a city called Orqwith full of glass labyrinths and bone towers, that infiltrates other realities and slowly takes them over. Ultimately Rebis, Jane, and Roboman go to Orqwith where Rebis destroys it by addressing two clock-faced entities, one of whom always lies and the other of whom tells the truth, asking them “why is there something instead of nothing?” 

This is a pleasant bevy of ideas, but astute and well-read readers will have recognized the central one as borrowed from Borges, specifically his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” This story is structured much like a classical Lovecraft story, with a protagonist who investigates a mystery that leads inexorably towards a vast and reality-warping horror that drives him mad. It begins with the narrator, who purports to be Borges, learns about an aberrant version of an encyclopedia containing a description of an ancient city called Uqbar. Slowly Borges investigates, finding more information on Uqbar and its own fictional world of Tlön. Eventually it emerges that Uqbar and Tlön were created by a 16th century secret society as part of an elaborate plot to transform the world into a better version of itself by having Tlön slowly take it over, which, it’s revealed at the story’s end, it is doing so. 

This is a clear swipe, though ultimately no more blatant than any number of swipes other writers have done. Crawling From the Wreckage is no clone of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which lacks a terrifying city of bone, the Scissormen, or the accompanying theme of mental illness and trauma. But what is interesting about it is in many ways what Morrison doesn’t do, which is leave any sort of breadcrumbs leading the reader back to Borges.…

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Erebor (I)

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J.R.R._Tolkien_-_Smaug_flies_round_the_Mountain

Names: Erebor (Sindarin: “ereb”: lonely, isolated, “-or”: rise, mount), glossed as “the Lonely Mountain”

Description: A solitary mountain in northern Wilderland. Karen Wynn Fonstad estimates Erebor’s summit as 3500 ft (1066.8 m.) while at its broadest spurs its furthest reaches are about 9 mi. apart (approx. 14 km). The Lonely Mountain has six spurs, between the southern and southeastern of which originates the River Running, which flows through Dale, a city of Men. Home to the Longbeard Dwarves’ Kingdom under the Mountain, Erebor encompasses formidable mines, cellars, and throne rooms.
In T.A. 1999, Thráin I, a dwarf refugee from Khazad-dûm, arrives at Erebor and establishes the Kingdom under the Mountain. Dwarves begin mining Erebor, and collect gems and gold, including the Arkenstone (the Heart of the Mountain). The Kingdom under the Mountain prospers King Thrór, as the dwarves of Erebor arm the Iron Hill Dwarves and Wilderland’s Men against Easterlings.
In 2770, the dragon Smaug sacks Erebor, killing and dispersing the dwarves. He occupies the Mountain until 2941, when Erebor’s exiled king Thorin Oakenshield arrives at the Mountain with a small party. In retaliation, Smaug destroys Lake-town, a local settlement of Men, where Bard the bowman kills him. In the wake of Smaug’s demise, the Maia Sauron sends orc forces to conquer Erebor. The dwarves and their Iron Hills cousins fight in the Battle of the Five Armies. They triumph, though Oakenshield is killed. His successor as King is his cousin Dáin II Ironfoot.
In 3019’s Battle of Dale, Easterlings besiege Erebor and kill Dáin. They retreat when Barad-dûr falls. Thorin III Stonehelm is crowned King under the Mountain, and establishes a relationship with Gondor’s King Aragorn II Elessar, after which Erebor comes under Gondor’s protection.

Location in Peter Jackson’s films: Wanaka, Otago, South Island.

“I see the mountain/That is all I see.”

Carter, “The Mountain.”

This adventure began on a mountain. Now it arrives at another one, also solitary, hospitable yet apocalyptic when it chooses to be. The Lonely Mountain changes hands and talons many times, and yet its six spurs, summit, and cavernous interiors belong to no person. The Kingdom under the Mountain is not the Lonely Mountain itself; it’s an occupying force that the Mountain permits to dwell in its guts. Smaug scorches the earth around Erebor, the Lonely Mountain, strengthening its mighty power over Wilderland. Guy Debord says that psychogeography is “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographic environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviors of individuals” (“Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography”). Some of Tolkien’s most memorable characters are seismically changed and affected by Erebor. The shaking of windows or rattling of walls has little sway on the Mountain’s power; people may only submit to it.

“Smaug flies round the Mountain” (Tolkien)

Erebor is one of the most haunting places in Tolkien’s mythology and a corridor to many of its crucial themes. It’s an anti-realist landmark; Tolkien’s geography has little quarter for geologic reality, a recurring aspect of his mythology that Alex Acks has analyzed in depth.…

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Because We’re Young (Book Three, Part 34: The History of Doom Patrol)

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Peter Milligan made the jump to American comics around the same time as Morrison, but never had as seminal a career, with the highlight being the sometimes brilliant, often frustrating Shade the Changing Man.

“We’re not international criminals. We’re not famous super-terrorists. It’s true we want to tear down everything you’ve created and replace it. But it’s not because we’re monsters. It’s because we’re young and it’s our right.” -Grant Morrison, New X-Men

Perhaps the biggest problem facing Milligan was that the basic framework he was offering—a stranger and more surreal take on superhero dynamics—was already being done. By the time Shade the Changing Man #1 debuted in May of 1990 Morrison was well over a year into their run on Doom Patrol, an absolutely iconic run that was in many ways the crown jewel of their early reputation. 

In many ways, this followed the default British invasion pattern, with Morrison revamping a longstanding DC property for a new era. The Doom Patrol was created in 1963 by Arnold Drake, Bob Hanley, and Bruno Premiani in My Greatest Adventure #80. This was yet another instance of DC’s stable consolidating around superhero books; My Greatest Adventure had previously been an anthology of generic adventure stories with the vague hook of being told in the first person. The first issue, for instance, offered a cover feature called “My Cargo Was Death” (a man driving explosives through South America) along with “I Was King of Dagger Island” (a soldier washing up on a tropical island and convincing the natives he’s a god) and “I Hunted a Flying Saucer” (pretty much what you’d expect), and the comic continued for the better part of six years with this same basic mix of gonzo sci-fi and colonialist fantasy.

But by the 1960s, as DC pivoted increasingly to a superhero based lineup it became necessary to revamp the comic. As Arnold Drake recalls, “AI came in one morning, a Monday or a Tuesday morning, and I’d brought some scripts with me and some plot ideas and [Murray] Boltinoff said to me, ‘I’ve got a problem. My Greatest Adventure is dying and they’re probably going to kill it, but I’d like one more shot at it. What I want is a new feature that might save it.’” He came up with the idea of a man in a wheelchair leading a team of superheroes, but was stuck at two superhero ideas—the size-changing Elasti-Girl, aka ex actress Rita Farr, and the self-explanatory Roboman, aka former racecar driver Cliff Steele, whose brain has been put in a robotic body following a catastrophic accident—and so asked his friend and occasional writer partner Bob Haney for an assist, the bandaged Negative Man, aka former pilot Larry Trainor, who could project an energy entity, but only for sixty seconds at a time lest he die. Under the leadership of eccentric genius Dr. Niles Caulder, these were the Doom Patrol, sold under the Murray Boltinoff-created tagline “The World’s Strangest Heroes!”,…

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IDSG Eps 99 & 100: Sines vs Kessler & Kyle Rittenhouse

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For Episode 99, Daniel and I talk about the Sines vs. Kessler trial (the civil trial of the Unite the Right organisers etc), the way in which the far-right (including the defendants) have conceptualised it, the long-awaited aftermath in the wake of the verdict (which dropped just before Thanksgiving), and the reactions and attitudes to the whole thing among the far-right, including lots of inexplicably buoyant Cantwell lunacy.

Content Warnings

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For Episode 100, Daniel has prepared a bevvy of clips of Kyle Rittenhouse, the Kenosha Killer Kid, pre and post verdict.  Compare and contrast his tears on the stand to those he cried in the police interview room.  Compare and contrast his claimed trauma with his concerns – as expressed to his interesting Mom – immediately post-‘incident’.  Compare and contrast his attitude on Tucker Carlson’s and Charlie Kirk’s respective shows, to his cheeky antics as a guest on another show that Daniel has discovered in the course of his listening… 

This is not an episode calibrated to fill you with the Christmas spirit, to be honest.  But there is a point to this.  It demonstrates something, which will become evident as you listen, and be developed next episode.

Take care, everyone.  We love you.

Content Warnings.

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Podcast Notes:

Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent.  Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month.

Daniel’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper

Jack’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618

IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod

Daniel’s Twitter: @danieleharper

Jack’s Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_

IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1

Notes for 99:

Cold Open — Lose to the Crying Nazi

Sines v. Kessler docket

Unicorn Riot, Unite The Right On Trial in Charlottesville

Former Identity Evropa Organizer Tells Secrets In Trial Deposition

Bottom of the Barrel: Charlottesville Trial Defense Attorneys Spread Antisemitism

  • Joshua Smith, one of the attorneys, is representing Matthew Heimbach, Matthew Parrott, and the Traditionalist Worker Party, a neo-nazi group that helped put on Unite the Right in 2017. Calling in remotely to cross-examine a witness on November 11, Smith went on a meandering digression about so-called ‘ethnostates’. He claimed that expert witness and sociologist, Peter Simi, was ‘anti-white’ because he wouldn’t address Smith’s view that China and Singapore are ‘ethnostates’, and falsely said that white people are responsible for most advances in civilization and technology.
  • When trying to confuse jurors about sociological concepts like in-groups and out-groups, Smith asked Simi if Hillary Clinton was white supremacist, and soon after he told Judge Norman Moon that cross-examinations can be “conversations” with witnesses, before sheepishly admitting his scattered tangents were “trying to keep it lively for everybody.”
  • Another attorney in the Charlottesville lawsuit trial, Cincinnati-based, James E. Kolenich, is an antisemitic far-right Catholic. Kolenich told the Cincinnati Enquirer in 2018 that his motives in this case were simple: “My willingness to get involved is to oppose Jewish influence in society.” He questioned the accuracy of long-accepted scholarship about the death toll of the Holocaust: “You can’t call the Jew Holocaust into question, right?
…

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Davies in the Anxious Interval

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Last War in Albion will return next week with the first of ten posts on Doom Patrol.

The music critic and musician Momus formulated a model of nostalgia cycles that hinges on the concept of the anxious interval. It goes something like this: we live in, unsurprisingly, the present—a concept that does not simply entail the here and now, but the last couple of years—any point in the culture that does not feel in some fashion “dated.” Momus suggests that “If you can look at a photo of yourself and not think ‘God, what a strange haircut I had, and what strange sunglasses I was wearing!’ then that photo was probably taken in the present.”

Sitting immediately behind the present, however, is the anxious interval—the awkward period of culture which has started to look dated, but is not yet old enough to reclaim and repurpose. As Momus puts it, “the anxious interval is a place, a style, a set of references we avoid, repress, sublimate, have selective amnesia about, stow away, throw out, deliberately forget”

Past the anxious interval is the goldmine—the points in culture that can be freely reclaimed and repurposed, and indeed from which the present’s sense of “cool” is usually being borrowed. (There’s also a tiny borderzone between them, the battlefront, which is where the cutting edge of tastemakers are currently sorting and writing a variety of “X IS GOOD ACTUALLY” hot takes—the point where the past is actively being contested, basically.)

And then, further back, is the anxious echo—the period that served as the goldmine for the anxious interval, and that is thus being forgotten along with it. Unlike the anxious interval’s forgetting, which exists so that it can be undone later as the goldmine, the anxious echo is being forgotten with some permanence; it will resurface simply as the past, a vast and undifferentiated set of old stuff, some bits perhaps easier to access than others at any given moment, but mostly just old. Crucially, what’s remembered will either be individual things—Dune, for example—or will be remembered within a single history-minded work—Last Night in Soho is certainly about the 1960s, but it’s not the vanguard of any sort of 1960s revivalism—it’s just a period piece. Another wholesale 1960s revival is now about as likely as an 1860s revival.

A few months ago my friend Alex made a mixtape for his Patreon themed around the anxious interval—a collection of music from the current interval that he felt held up and was thus interesting to look at from the vantage point of the present. The years he selected for this exercise were 2005-2009, which you may recognize as a set of dates that also describes the Russell T Davies era. Which is interesting given that the Russell T Davies era is on its way back. 

The idea that the anxious interval sits somewhere around the Davies era checks out, at least within television. After all, The Sopranos (1999-2007) just exited its anxious interval into massive celebration—remember five years ago when we were all desperately tired of Troubled Male Antiheroes in prestige television, when HBO embarrassed itself massively with Vinyl?…

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I Loved You And You Killed Me (Book Three, Part 33: hade the Changing Man at Vertigo)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Midway through Peter Milligan’s run on Shade the Changing Man a number of British Invasion titles were rebranded under the new imprint Vertigo, which launched with some additional material harvested from Disney’s aborted Touchmark imprint including Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo’s Enigma.

“Pitiful. Cruel. Tyrant. Narcissist. No better than the man you possessed. I loved you and you killed me.” -Cecil Castellucci, Shade the Changing Woman

Milligan was helped here by Fegredo, who dialed back the McKean-esque excesses of Kid Eternity to a more straightforward line style, focusing on what Milligan’s script required, which was emotional and character-focused storytelling. Fegredo’s underlying aptitude at expressive weirdness, meanwhile, ensures that the grotesqueries of Enigma’s world hit with appropriate horror—the first issue, for instance, focuses on the Head, a serial killer with a lizard head who sucks people’s brains out through a metal straw, and Fegredo renders her as a horrifically demonic figure that forms a sharp rupture with the ordinary world. Aiding Fegredo in this is colorist Sherilyn van Valkenburgh, who, in contrast to Fegredo’s taste for bright and vivid colors in Kid Eternity, uses a muted palate of earth tones to ground and contrast Fegredo’s tendencies towards weirdness.

All of this adds up to a clear classic of the period. Nevertheless, it’s equally clear that it’s an underrated one. It got a trade paperback collection in 1995, but went in and out of print, eventually following Karen Berger from DC to Dark Horse when it got picked up by her Berger Books line, the second time an editor brought the project with them when the original line was shuttered. In spite of its obscurity, however, it is a clear case that Milligan, on his day, could produce a work that stood shoulder to shoulder with anyone of his generation.

As for Shade the Changing Man, it spent just over half of its run as a Vertigo book, continuing all the way into March of 1996. This latter half of the run, however, marks a constant battle of entropy—one that Milligan slowly but surely loses. If one is inclined towards a “jump the shark” model a clear inflection point exists past which the book consistently finds itself on the wrong side of the basic quality line, but the truer story is simply one of gradual deflation, the eternally present question of whether Milligan was a giant on the scale of Moore, Morrison, and Gaiman steadily resolving itself into a shrugged “guess not.” 

Things began well enough, as they do with this sort of narrative. Milligan’s first arc for Vertigo was a three-parter entitled “Birth Pains” in which Shade gains yet another body, this time a catatonic person in a mental institution, and quickly finds himself having to save Kathy from a serial killer who views torture as an artistic medium granting access to a mythic realm called the Garden of Pain. The use of Kathy as a generic peril monkey is a bit frustrating, but on the whole it’s an effective bit of horror in what could now be called the Vertigo style.…

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IITSL 6 & 7 The Shining (1980) / Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

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So, since we last talked there have been two new releases in the It *IS* The Same Log series.

First, George and I fulfilled a longstanding plan to team up to talk about The Shining with Kit. As you’d expect, a long conversation ensued which ranges freely over the various incarnations of the story. That can be found here.

Then, George and I rejoined Elliot for a discussion of Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio. Here.

We’ve just recorded the next episode, on Exorcist III / Legion, taking in various other subjects including the other parts of the franchise (film and book) and some other stuff including Hannibal. Look out for that. As always, my patrons will get it a little sooner than everyone else. Jack Graham is creating Criticism, Analysis, Essays, Podcasts | Patreon

Take care, everyone.…

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