Eruditorum Press

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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

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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

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“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)

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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

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“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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Outside the Government 14 (The Infinite Quest)

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The Infinite Quest is almost completely unsuited to the form in which anyone actually encounters it these days. These days it’s reskinned to appear like an episode of Doctor Who that happens to be animated – complete with a cold open and credit sequence. In reality, it’s a thirteen episode serial consisting of short episodes lasting roughly three and a half minutes that were one of several components of the second and final season of Totally Doctor Who.

We’ve covered Totally Doctor Who and its inadequacies at the end of the second season. To recap, it was a show that did a poor job of engaging with Doctor Who, treating its audience like they’re idiots. Given this, The Infinite Quest is actually not that bad. Everyone is clearly putting effort into it – the animation is by the remnants of Cosgrove Hall, who did Scream of the Shalka and the two episodes of The Invasion. David Tennant and Anthony Head both do quite well for dealing with a script that they clearly first saw about twenty minutes before they started recording. Freema Agyeman is rougher, turning in a shockingly poor performance, but to be fair, voice acting is a different skillset from screen acting, and there’s not actually an inherent reason why being good at one means you’re good at the other. (Actually, I’m curious when this was recorded – given the lead time needed for animation, it wouldn’t surprise me if Agyeman did this before she’d substantially gotten to work with the character.)

The problem is that, structurally, it seems messy. Several ideas seem underdeveloped in the extreme. For instance, early on it introduces a world in which interplanetary oil piracy to free needed resources from powerful corporations is common. This is a neat, politically incendiary premise. Indeed, it goes politically further than the series is usually willing to, coming off better than, for instance, the attempt to deal with exploitative labor conditions next season in Planet of the Ood. The problem with it is that it seems to be dealt with and discarded shockingly quickly, taking up only about ten minutes of screen time total.

But this is just an illusion caused by repackaging The Infinite Quest into a quasi-episode of Doctor Who. In reality the oil pirates storyline was explored for three or four weeks, roughly (based on the timing in the episode), from Gridlock through to The Lazarus Project. Far from seeming like an underdeveloped theme, this is actually quite a substantial amount of time spent. And the idea that the entire story should have focused more tightly on one or two ideas is ludicrous. The Infinite Quest was designed to be experienced over the course of three months. It has as many episodes as The Daleks’ Masterplan (counting Mission to the Unknown). Of course it jumps around a lot – spending ten weeks of Doctor Who in one setting with one idea would be unbearably dull.

And yet there’s a complication here. You’ll note that my account of exactly which parts of The Infinite Quest contain the oil pirates plot is speculative.…

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Sensor Scan: The Transformed Man

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William Shatner is one of those personalities who is so ubiquitous that their reputation precedes and obfuscates their actual contributions to art and pop culture. Shatner is so famous as Captain Kirk and the the king of unironic and self-evidently ridiculous camp that his iconic public persona dwarfs and overshadows his entire creative body of work. One of the reasons why I focus so heavily on Shatner in my overview of this period of Star Trek history (if not the primary one) is that his status as an omnipresent and immediately recognisable part of pop culture has ironically made it difficult to discern any reasonable erudition about the kind of actor he is, the style of performance he delivers and what the positionality he draws it all from really is. That’s not to say Leonard Nimoy, James Doohan, DeForest Kelley, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig aren’t equally as iconic and memorable in their roles, they are, but everyone knows they’re brilliant and, more to the point, everyone largely knows why they’re brilliant. That’s not really the case with with William Shatner.

All of which is to say that in 1968 William Shatner released an album of spoken-word poetry.

This is, it should probably go without saying, manifestly not the sort of thing anybody expected of William Shatner at the time, two thirds of the way through the original run of Star Trek. It is also probably fairly safe to say it is still not the sort of thing people expect of William Shatner today, because despite his subsequent musical performances becoming part of his camp reputation, the sort of bemused detachment this part of his oeuvre attracts from would-be fans and critics is rather telling. But the existence of The Transformed Man is in fact a very revealing look at not only the approach to Soda Pop Art in the late-1960s but also Shatner’s own worldview and how his presence helped re-shape what Star Trek came to represent. So with that said, what the heck even *is* The Transformed Man?

It may actually be beneficial to begin with an overview of what The Transformed Man *isn’t*, as this is the source of the overwhelming majority of confusion and bafflement this record attracts. In this regard it’s worth comparing it, if for no other reason then the comparison is unavoidable, with Leonard Nimoy’s musical catalog. In 1967, just as Star Trek was starting to gain a significant following, Dot Records released an album called Mr. Spock’s Songs from Space, which was pretty much exactly what it sounds like: A collection of fluffy novelty songs Nimoy recorded in full-on Spock-the-logician mode to abjectly hilarious results. Literally the only reason this album exists is because Spock was the show’s breakout character, and in the 1960s releasing an album of novelty music to tie in to a popular TV show was just sort of the thing you did, no matter how nonsensical it might sound if you think too hard about it (see also “Snoopy’s Christmas” by The Royal Guardians).…

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Saturday Waffling (September 28th, 2013)

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I made the Last War in Albion deadline, obviously. I’ve also just about worked through the Wonder Woman copyedits – I just need to rewrite the last chapter to deal with the fact that it was written a year ago and is about the current run of Wonder Woman comics. Which shouldn’t be hard, as the last year of Wonder Woman comics was not particularly different from the year before it. And then it needs one more round of edits and some formatting, but I’m cautiously optimistic that I can get that out in October. Meanwhile, the Flood book comes out in November. That’s very fun – I just flipped through bits of it today, and found myself enjoying it. You can pre-order it on Amazon here. Hartnell Second Ed should be December, and I’m not really sure about Baker 1 – it’s still got a fair chunk of revisions to work through. But my goal is to have all four come out in 2013.

I’ve got an issue with Last War in Albion I’m not quite sure what to do with – the next post deals with R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson at length, and can’t really be done without including some NSFW images. How would people prefer I handle that when it happens (since it’ll be an issue more than just next week, i.e. when I get to Lost Girls or Neonomicon)? A warning at the top of the screen and no NSFW until at least a monitor’s length down? A “clean” version of the post on the front page and a link to an explicit one? NSFW images done as links instead of embedded in the text? Don’t worry about it because you all have workplaces in which massive tableaus of violent demon sex are perfectly acceptable?

Since that’s the most rubbish topic of discussion ever, and since we’re all geeks here… Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. What did we all think?…

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