Eruditorum Press

No nationalism but Terry Nationalism

Outside the Government: Eye of the Gorgon

, 16

It’s October 1st, 2007. The fact that Sugababes are at number one is definitely relevant now, and they remain there all story. Feist, Kanye West, Mark Ronson and Amy Wimehouse, and Shayne Ward also chart. In news, Gordon Brown decides against calling an early election, and Larry Craig is not allowed to withdraw his guilty plea for soliciting sex in a Minnesota bathroom, but declines to resign from the Senate anyway. One of my favorite things about Wikipedia is that someone has posted a photo of the bathroom in question, so that if you’re ever in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, you can visit. It’s the one between Royal Zero Shoe Shine and Talie.

On television, meanwhile, Eye of the Gorgon. In many ways Eye of the Gorgon is puzzling. Certainly it does not fit into anything one would on the surface expect from The Sarah Jane Adventures. After two stories that are at their heart based around the day-to-day lives of people who are ostensibly like the audience, we get one that is grounded almost entirely in other sorts of narrative. In the broad strokes, this is not particularly unusual. The Sarah Jane Adventures’s parent show, after all, regularly reaches for genres that are in no way intrinsic to what might be called normative British childhood experience. Nobody has ever fretted about whether or not a spaceship that’s going to fall into the sun in forty-two minutes is too far removed from the experiences of British children. Sure, there’s Davies’s Fear of a Zog Planet, but the fear there is a lack of connection to any human experience. Typically, for Davies, an obvious connection to an existing popular genre is sufficient to solve the problem of having a way into the premise of a story.

And there is an existing genre here. Evil nuns on a quiet country estate (which is what Lavender Lawns looks like, even if it is in practice a nursing home) is a standard enough horror trope. It’s not hard to imagine the basic setup of a bunch of nuns worshipping a Gorgon in secret serving as the premise of an episode of Ace of Wands or The Tomorrow People. Or, for that matter, as the premise of some Season Thirteen story of 70s Doctor Who. Indeed, coming so soon on the heels of Blink, it’s hard not to see the use of the Gorgon as an expansion on that idea of making the act of watching a source of fear. Eye of the Gorgon is ultimately not just a story in which a 70s-style threat recurs, but one where the threat feels as though it comes out of the deeper fabric of what Doctor Who is. It’s not a recurring monster so much as a monster that just makes sense in Doctor Who: of course there are things that just looking at is fatal.

So it’s not the setting or premise that’s unusual as such. What’s unusual is simply that this isn’t the sort of show The Sarah Jane Adventures initially appeared to be.…

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“Put up a parking lot”: The Paradise Syndrome

, 9

“There seems to be a reoccurring reference to a ‘World-Eater’…”

Somewhere around the point one begins musing “you know, maybe ‘Elaan of Troyius’ wasn’t so bad after all”, one gets the sense there are worryingly fundamental underlying problems with “The Paradise Syndrome”.

It is wretched. Somewhat amazingly, it manages to tell a story about the concept of an idyllic lifestyle without invoking the godforsaken Garden of Eden again. This does not make it any less wretched. It is unabashedly racist, because it is noble savages again, and this time the show just drops all pretense and flat-out calls them literally “American Indians” so there’s absolutely no doubt about who and what it’s horrifically stereotyping and misrepresenting. Aside from “The Apple” (which this is almost as bad as) this was the episode I most dreaded having to rewatch: A story about a Kirk rendered amnesiac by a von Dänikenesque obelisk who becomes the messianic spiritual leader of a village of Space Native Americans, and lives for months married to a doting priestess who is promptly stoned to death along with their unborn son is my idea of just about the worst possible way to spend an evening.

My expectations were not disappointed.

Let’s tackle the racism first, because “The Paradise Syndrome” is absolutely racist and it’s so transparent about this it’s almost refreshing in a way. Let’s once again turn to Daniel Leonard Bernardi, as this is his territory and he’s apparently becoming something of a fixture this season (and also because it saves me having to reiterate everything):

“‘The Paradise Syndrome” stereotypes Native-Americans as noble savages and whites as ‘normal’ and even divine […] Miramanee cannot figure out how to pull Kirk’s shirt off, as she cannot find any lacing. She is portrayed as simpleminded, not that bright. This is not the case with Kirk. Moments before, he has fashioned a lamp from an old piece of pottery and saved a boy by using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Despite his amnesia, he is shown as naturally superior […] When the Indians realize that Kirk is not a god, they stone both him and Miramanee (it’s the Indians who are violent in this version of the noble savage stereotype). Spock and McCoy eventually intervene, but only Kirk survives. In this take on a standard white/red miscegenation narrative, the native girl dies so that Kirk, the white male hero, isn’t shown unheroically and immorally leaving her and their unborn baby behind.”

Just like before, we’ll use Bernardi’s analysis as a jumping-off point because, once again, he’s right as far as the basics go but he also seems to miss a great deal of nuances. I don’t want to go too hard on him as in many ways Bernardi was one of the first people to make note of Star Trek‘s more reactionary tendencies, but really: That “The Paradise Syndrome” treats Native Americans as simpleminded primitives is so laughably blatant and obvious it really doesn’t need to be commented on, at least not to the extent Bernardi does.…

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Saturday Waffling (October 5th, 2013)

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Have seen the first set of cover designs for the Wonder Woman book, now called A Golden Thread. James is, as ever, fantastic.

Those interested in James’s previous astonishing work will be interested to see Eruditorum Press’s new merchandise store, as promised in the Kickstarter. We’ve got both mugs and t-shirts based off of James’s absolutely gorgeous cover for the Patrick Troughton volume. Other volumes are forthcoming, when I stop working James to death with all these book covers. But for now, if you’ve wanted the Troughton cover to stare at you as you drink your morning tea or to rub up against your naked body throughout the day, you now have that power. Plus, you know, you cause both James and I to get money. In this case, I’ll beg on behalf of someone other than me – James does phenomenal work for way less than he’s worth. He doesn’t complain about this, and in fact stubbornly does things like contribute to my Kickstarter with his paychecks, but he deserves some recognition for the beautiful work he does. Go show the man how you love him.

So, I’m thinking about Tuesday content. Partially because I’m trying to figure out when I’m going to find the time to write some for this Tuesday, and partially because I’m trying to figure out what sort of content I should focus on. So. What sorts of Tuesday posts have you enjoyed? Are there topics (broadly considered) you’d like me to write about?

Right. Back to writing about Sarah Jane Adventures.…

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Outside the Government: Revenge of the Slitheen

, 24

It’s September 24th, 2007. Sean Kingston is at number one with “Beautiful Girls,” but is unseated a week later by Sugababes’s “About You Now,” a fact that only arguably counts in terms of this story. Shayne Ward, 50 Cent, Kanye West, Rihanna, and the Foo Fighters also chart. Since Last of the Time Lords, the last Harry Potter book came out. Dick Cheney is President of the United States for two-and-a-half hours, and spends the time penning a bizarrely self-serving letter about terrorism to his grandchildren. And Alberto Gonzales finally resigns, long after everyone had given up hoping. Meanwhile, Gordon Brown enjoys a momentary wave of popularity, but fails to have the good sense to hold an election, and manages to squander the lead within a few months. And the United States Episcopal Church agrees to back off on consecrating gay bishops or blessing same-sex marriages in an attempt to smooth over schisms in the Anglican Communion.

On television, meanwhile, we get the actual start of The Sarah Jane Adventures with Gareth Roberts’s Revenge of the Slitheen, which is more or less the episode you’d expect from that description. Roberts, as ever, is a precise writer who focuses on honing existing concepts to perfection. In this case it’s the Slitheen. Aliens of London/World War III was not a classic, less because of any specific flaw than a myriad of slightly off-kilter decisions. This led to the mistaken belief that the Slitheen didn’t work, and were just dumb farting aliens. It’s true that their original two-parter put two much emphasis on the fart jokes, just as the head-unzipping happened a few too many times to remain interesting (and had a profoundly annoying sound effect to boot). In fact, as Roberts demonstrates, the Slitheen are a marvelous concept that got slightly lost underneath the episode they appeared in.

At their heart, what’s most interesting about the Slitheen is not the green bug-eyed monsters, but the scenes in which they are wearing their skinsuits, in which they’re playing authority figures that we know are wrong. They are in this regard that most basic of children’s television fodder: the authority figure that the children know is illegitimate, but that nobody else can see. It’s one of the most basic moves of children’s fiction, and one of the cleverest bits of Aliens of London/World War III was elevating this logic to the higher stakes setting of Downing Street.

Even this stays within the general margins of children’s entertainment, however. One of the cultural assumptions underlying the entire idea of childhood is the idea that children have a measure of special innocence and moral sense. And so the point isn’t just the revelation that New Labour’s march to the Iraq War was in fact carried out by alien psychopaths; it’s the fact that their villainy is so obvious that even a child can see it. (Not, to be clear, that only a child can see it – for all that Doctor Who takes children’s perspectives seriously, it never goes for that “children are magic” twaddle.)…

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“I’m spunky!”: Elaan of Troyius

, 8

“Wow, this is a really crap episode.” “I know. Let’s see what else is on.”

“Elaan of Troyius” is the first visible sign that things have gotten really bad for Star Trek. “Spectre of the Gun” may have raised suspicions a bit and, upon closer examination, it turned out to be Gene Coon in active revolt against the new status quo. This episode, by contrast, is evidence of how toxic the new status quo actually is.

First of all, it is catastrophically terrible. Star Trek has been reactionary on many an occasion before, but it hasn’t managed to be quite *this* reactionary since the Gene Roddenberry era. Elaan is flat-out the worst character we’ve seen in the Original Series so far: Not since Nona has there been a confluence of bigoted, xenophobic tropes of this magnitude, and Elaan makes Nona look downright progressive. I could explain why, but I really don’t have to because our old friend Daniel Leonard Bernardi had a few choice words to say about this episode:

“‘Elaan of Troyius’ brings into play stereotypes of the Asian female – the manipulative dragon lady and the submissive female slave. Elaan is both irrational and primitive. She throws temper tantrums, eats with her hands, and drinks from the bottle. Kirk tells her, ‘Nobody’s told you that you’re an uncivilized savage, a vicious child in a woman’s body, an arrogant monster.’ Captain Kirk, the ‘white knight’ of Star Trek, articulates his and the Federation’s moral superiority and authority over the Asian-alien and her people through sexual conquest […] Indeed, it is only after the captain physically and sexually dominates her that she respects and eventually falls in love with him […] After giving in to Kirk’s power, Elaan, like the cunning and manipulative dragon lady of classical Hollywood cinema, returns the favor by capturing his heart. The Asian-alien’s tears contain a bio-chemical agent that, when touched by a man (even aliens like Kirk), forces him to fall deeply in love with her. After she manipulates Kirk into desiring her, Elaan becomes submissive, gentle, loyal, even willing to die with him, by his side, as the Klingons ruthlessly attack the Enterprise. It is at this point in the narrative that the other stereotype of the Asian female comes into play – that of the submissive Asian slave. In the end, Elaan does anything Captain Kirk requests, politely and adoringly obeying his demands and orders. Her dragon lady tactics were only used so that she could assume a position she truly desired: the submissive mistress of a white knight.”

Bernardi goes on like this, and, as is somewhat typical for him, he’s generally spot-on but in a narrow scope and with caveats. Ironically enough, Bernardi misses one of the biggest racist signifiers in the episode: While he’s right that Elaan draws upon Dragon Lady stereotypes, probably unfortunately in part due to her actor, France Nuyen, who is half-Vietnamese, the show is very clearly coding her as African too. Nuyen is dutifully browned up and her costume, hair style and facial makeup are all clearly modeled after stereotypical Ancient Egyptian imagery.…

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Glassy-Assed Jokers (The Last War in Albion Part 12: Roscoe Moscow, The Underground)

, 12

This is the second 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 stripMaxwell the Magic Cat. An omnibus of the entire chapter, sans images, is available in ebook form fromAmazon, 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. 
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore began his professional comics career in the pages of Sounds under the nom de plume “Curt Vile,” debuting Roscoe Moscow: Who Killed Rock ‘n Roll. 
“Hawdy haw! You glassy-assed jokers are a pushover!” – Alan Moore, Astounding Weird Penises

Much of this is due to the nature of Sounds as a magazine. It is, of course, primarily a music magazine, which means that its comics section was largely an afterthought. It was also, in many ways, the third rate music magazine of the late 1970s. The big two magazines were NME – the New Musical Express, to which Moore made his first professional sale: a drawing of Elvis Costello – and Melody Maker. These magazines were not meaningfully competitors – both were published by IPC, publishers of 2000 A.D., and presented a reasonable dichotomy. Those with traditional and more conservative taste could go to Melody Maker, edited by Ray Coleman, which was still embracing prog rock while getting very excited about Bruce Springsteen. Those favoring a more progressive, avant garde approach had NME, which was openly political and had a bevy of music writers who went on to become the sorts of elder statesmen that The Guardian likes to hire. 
Figure 91: Nicky Crane on the cover of Strength
Through Oi!
So when Jack Hutton and Peter Wilkinson left Melody Maker in 1970 to start their own company, this was the closed system they confronted. The approach they eventually settled on was straightforward: they were the magazine that would embrace brash, new music. Sounds was the first of the three music magazines to embrace punk, and eventually spun off a heavy metal magazine called Kerrang! that, unlike Sounds, continues to be published today. Sounds was originally conceived of as a left-wing magazine, but by the late 1970s had become something of a mishmash – Sounds covered the Oi! subgenre of punk extensively, to the point of, in 1981, releasing a compilation called Strength Through Oi!, a subversion of the slogan “strength through joy,” the cover of which featured gay neo-Nazi Nicky Crane on the cover. Crane was, at the time, serving a prison sentence for having violently attacked more black people than was socially acceptable.
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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 70 (Primeval, Robin Hood)

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An era of Doctor Who in which nobody is making desperate attempts to copy and compete with it is one to view with suspicion. The logic here is simple: when Doctor Who is hot, there are going to be efforts to do similar things. When it’s not… well, it wasn’t just Doctor Who that was withering in the mid-80s; the entire children-friendly sci-fi/fantasy/horror television market was dead, and adult sci-fi wasn’t doing much better, with Doctor Who being more or less the lone survivor in either category. Whereas in 1976, with the Hinchcliffe era at its imperious best, you had The Tomorrow People, Shadows, Survivors, Space: 1999, Rentaghost, and Children of the Stones all existing in the same general cultural space as Doctor Who. Notably, not all of these were competitors as such. Some were BBC productions that zeroed in on specific audiences, others were ITV “Doctor Who killers,” et cetera. The point is simply that Doctor Who, when it’s at its cultural peaks, is something that exists in a larger context of shows.

So following Doctor Who’s titanically successful launch in 2005, it was basically inevitable that there were going to be imitators. The major first two to market were the BBC’s 2006 version of Robin Hood, which was explicitly designed to fill the Saturday drama slot during some of the weeks Doctor Who wasn’t on the air, and ITV’s 2007 debut Primeval, which features time travel and dinosaurs. Neither show did phenomenally well, though both did respectably, getting a few seasons run and surviving with enough of an afterlife that they’re not recklessly obscure.

In many ways what is most interesting here is the underlying logic. That is, what do people think imitating Doctor Who means, exactly? After all, for all that there have been a lot of similar programs to Doctor Who over the years, only occasionally has anyone made a program that’s explicitly and consciously mimicking it.

Of the two, it is Primeval that feels the most like a straight-up imitation. There are, to be fair, significant differences. In many ways Primeval is closer to Torchwood – a team of people investigating weird things that come through a hole in space-time type thing. (Mostly dinosaurs, as it happens.) But equally, it’s an action-adventure sci-fi show featuring time travel of the sort that only exists because suddenly one of those was the biggest show on television. The producers made noises about how their show was more real-world and grounded, which is an absolutely wonderful thing to declare of a television show about dinosaurs attacking things. But this was a fig leaf fooling exactly nobody, and the points where it cribs the Doctor Who formula are at times amusingly blatant. (Most notably, casting a former pop star in the lead female role)

As a show, Primeval is solidly not bad, which is, of course, the exact worst thing a show can possibly be for the purposes of blogging about it. The staggeringly execrable and the absolutely phenomenal are both fairly easy to write about.…

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“The Last Chance Saloon”: Spectre of the Gun

, 3

“Zoinks! It’s…It’s It again! Let’s git!”

Star Trek is not in a healthy position.

Let’s get this over with right from the start. This is a dead show walking, and the average quality it hits over the next year backs this up completely. Under no condition did NBC want a fourth season of Star Trek, and the network went out of its way to hurry the show’s inevitable demise along, slashing the budget while increasing the actors’ salaries and shunting it into the Friday Night Death Slot, the final straw that lead almost the entire original creative team to stage a mass exodus in protest. Furthermore, those who did stay on were driven away by NBC’s constant micromanaging and burdening them with D.C. Fontana’s replacement as story editor, one Arthur Singer, who by all accounts knew absolutely nothing about what Star Trek was and how it worked, and nor did he care.

Traditionally, the blame for the malaise of the 1968-9 season was laid at the feet of incoming producer and showrunner Fred Frieberger, who is typically seen as a network lackey and responsible for “ruining” Star Trek. However, the reality was likely far more complex then being the fault of one person: Although Leonard Nimoy and Gene Roddenberry are quick to finger Frieberger, in their memoirs of their time on the show, both Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner go out of their way to defend him, saying he did the best he could with a show that had become at that point unmanageable. For the rest of his life, Frieberger was hounded by fans and critics alike eager to blame him for “killing” the Original Series, even going so far as to say his tenure as showrunner of and association with Star Trek was the single worst experience of his life, counting the time he spent in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Thankfully, one of the more laudable phenomena of recent Star Trek fandom is a comprehensive movement to redeem Frieberger. It’s just a shame they couldn’t have done that for other people involved in the franchise’s early years as well.

And really, this does seem to make a lot more sense then to posit Frieberger was some Evil Network Demon come to destroy the fans’ beloved utopia. Frieberger was an extremely professional and experienced television producer, with credits on shows like The Six-Million Dollar Man, Bonanza, The Wild Wild West, Have Gun, Will Travel, Rawhide, and The Dukes of Hazzard among many, many others. It seems, erm, illogical to argue he was an incompetent hack on Star Trek and Star Trek alone. It’s far more reasonable (and fits with the rest of what we know about this point of the show’s history) the presume this was a situation that was entirely out of Frieberger’s control.

Furthermore, Herb Solow and Bob Justman, perhaps predictably, don’t even need to think about laying all the blame at the feet of Gene Roddenberry in Inside Star Trek, whom they continually take to task for abandoning the show and leaving it leaderless (while continuing to draw an executive producer’s salary from an already desperate budget, no less).…

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Book Preview: They Might Be Giants’ Flood

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Today we’ve got the intro to They Might Be Giants’ Flood, the book I wrote with the brilliant S. Alexander Reed for Bloomsbury Academic’s 33 1/3 series. The book is out November 14th, and is available for pre-order at Amazon and Amazon UK. 
I’ll surely write about the book again closer to release, so I don’t want to do too much beyond just put the intro here and let it speak for itself. I will say that even if you’re not a huge They Might Be Giants fan, I think the book probably has plenty of cool stuff for you. It’s not just about They Might Be Giants, but about a particular historical moment. It’s not just a book about music, but about how 1990 was a turning point for geek culture, and about the nature of what geek culture is, in a way that goes beyond the conventional nerdy references. Indeed, one thing the book is very much about is how “geek” went from meaning twenty-sided dice and fluency in Klingon to meaning something much broader and more inclusive. I think most people who like my stuff will like it too.
But I will add a personal note. In the current publishing climate, the saying is that anything that sells a thousand copies is doing well. The TARDIS Eruditorum books do that. Handily. Unfortunately, they do it through channels that don’t show up when publishers do searches on authors’ past sales.
One of the explicitly stated reasons I didn’t get a traditional press contract for the Wonder Woman book (out towards the end of October, I believe) is exactly this – my sales figures look way smaller than they actually are. And by way smaller, I mean that when traditional publishers check my sales, I have sold two books. Ever.
All of which is an overly long way of saying that this book is kind of a big deal for me. If it does well then when I shop future projects to traditional publishers I look a lot more credible. It opens doors. So if you’re interested, please consider putting in a pre-order. Impressive pre-orders make the publisher put more time into supporting the book. The publisher supporting the book boosts sales. Strong pre-orders are, in current publishing, a huge deal.
But more broadly, and with the knowledge that my readers have been incredibly generous to me this year, and that I have a lot of material coming out in a short period of time, I just want to pause and say thank you to everyone who supports my work, however you support it, and whichever bits of it you support. It means a lot knowing that I do work that people enjoy enough to support. More than a few days have been genuinely brightened just by knowing you lot exist.
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