Eruditorum Press

Ideas may be bulletproof, but nobody’s tried plasma rifles

“The Devil You Know”: The Apple

, 13

“1-2-3…Hey! No fair Zerg rushing!”

“The Apple” was the episode of the Original Series that always stuck out in my mind as the one I unequivocally hated. Most of the time an episode being forgettable is a cause for concern when doing this kind of revisit and retrospective, but this is a case where the story made me so angry I never forgot it and I would constantly bring it up in discussions as Exhibit A for why I could never get into this show. It’s good to know some things remain constant and my tastes weren’t altogether unrefined all those many years ago.

“The Apple” is Biblically awful. That it’s not even the worst episode of the season should explain in no uncertain terms how bad things are for Star Trek right now. It is shockingly racist and imperialistic, with naive, simple, primitive people modeled on Pacific islanders in funny skin colours and outfits in a cargo cult setup being told how to live their lives by educated white people from space. It believes quite strongly in a teleological view of history and cultural development, where all societies have to follow a pre-determined and unwavering master narrative where Western cultures are seen as more advanced then non-Western cultures (despite the idyllic, childlike lifestyles they have), basically making this the Space Age White Man’s Burden, except that poem was at least well constructed. It is pop Christian, being a straight-up plot lift of the book of Genesis. It is unoriginally pop Christian, shamelessly recycling all the worst aspects of “The Return of the Archons” and “This Side of Paradise” and somehow managing to make both look better by comparison. It is also *textually* racist: Kirk and McCoy talk down to Spock throughout the entire episode, making fun of his green blood, logical mind and resemblance to Satan.

It is sexist, with yet another wistful, pouty yeoman fretting about needing someone to protect her (albeit one who at least gets to hold her own in a fight scene this time). It is proudly and boldly heteronormative, conflating love, procreative sex and heterosexual relationships. It has an appallingly lax attitude towards life and death, casually killing off enough redshirts to the point it makes jokes about Doctor Who‘s death toll look unwarranted and tasteless (well, at least perhaps even more so). Aside from being a bigot, Kirk is once again written as a gruff, shouty military commander having a psychological meltdown over regulations and taking it out on his crew. Chekov gets another grating “Russia is the greatest country in the universe” scene and is in full-on cartoonish stereotype mode. Even Spock, the most sympathetic person in this episode by virtue of voicing the self-evidently correct course of action (which the rest of the show helpfully belittles him for) is made to look like a complete idiot by getting carelessly and dumbly injured once an act. There is not a single likable character in this entire production. The pacing is sluggish which, combined with the excruciatingly terrible story, has the combined effect of making this feel like the longest fifty minutes ever put to film.…

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The Colour Foundation

, 3

More flash fiction.

Marcel Miedinger surveyed the system one last time before he disconnected. The dumbs were already active, weaving their own tagging system to correspond to the existing catalogue. Marcel watched the broad strokes of the semantic filing system get mapped out, but moved on as it all got a bit too big data for him. No intelligence was ever going to need to deal with the dumb catalogue anyway – it was just an underlying system to support the semantic labeling that the Colour Foundation had meticulously created.

There had been some debate right before the downsizing began over whether or not to maintain all four versions of the semantic catalogue, or just the most recent one. Marcel had, romantically, advocated for the full system. He prided himself on an old-fashioned streak that valued preservation. But in the end he was outvoted by a bloc of neo-modernists who wanted to ensure the immaculate design of the Colour Foundation’s final edition. He could have reopened the issue once the Foundation had shrunk to a skeleton crew, but he didn’t. In the end, he understood the impulse; he’d been an iconoclast once too.

Now he’d come to think of himself as an old man, whatever that concept referred to nowadays. Even today he kept track of the exterior world’s calendar. He knew he’d been around the sun two hundred and eleven times since he’d last seen it, making him two hundred and sixty-five all told. That was surely enough to be an old man by any definition, he told himself.

Suddenly, a raft of connections he had to the system went dark. Marcel started, old physiological processes kicking into action as though they’d been built for this. But the adrenaline faded quickly – it was routine. The dumbs had moved the ports allocated to the Colour Foundation so that they all went through the interface the Design Committee had created for the general public. Marcel had seen it a thousand times, but decided to connect in one more time – perhaps just for the novelty of being the first customer.

The interface was based around the sensation of an antechamber. It was not, by and large, a memory, nor even an assemblage of memories. This was reverse engineered – a set of manufactured sensations laid around the sensation of feeling your sensory input shift from being in a confined space to being in an open one. The original draft had what Marcel considered a somewhat childish sense paradox – the neurological sense of an open space combined with visual perceptions of a long corridor. Marcel had gone off on a lengthy lecture at that meeting, reminding everyone, or perhaps just himself, that accessibility was a moral principle of design.

He really could be a right old bore sometimes.

Still, he’d gotten it changed to the current open chamber, made entirely out of invented materials. This produced its own vertiginous sensation; the human mind never entirely adapts to completely artificial sensation, and an excess of it remained unsettling, though not, even he had to admit, in an entirely unpleasant way.…

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Outside the Government: Random Shoes

, 16

Not so much bovvered as… dead, really.

It’s December 10th, 2006. Booty Luv’s “Boogie 2nite” has slipped into a newly formed gap between Take That and “Smack That.” Gwen Stefani, Lazy Town, and Jamelia also chart. In news, Joseph Kabila is inaugurated as president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kevin Rudd becomes leader of the Australian Labor Party, and Robert Gates is confirmed as United States Secretary of Defense. Also, Igor Smirnov wins the presidential election in Transnistria, also known as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, which is generally considered not to be a country so much as a particularly ornery region of Moldova.

Random Shoes, on the other hand, is something of the forgotten man of the first season of Torchwood. Called Invisible Eugene until two weeks before it aired, and in fact still listed as that in the Radio Times, this is, quite frankly, the bit of the season where it becomes aggressively, painfully obvious that Torchwood proved a little too much to manage alongside Doctor Who and that things got dropped. It’s an astonishingly sloppily done episode.

Somewhere in here there’s a good idea. Doing Love and Monsters for Torchwood may or may not have actually been it, but even that feels at least vaguely admirable. Love and Monsters was, in many ways, the gem of Season Two, and an approach worth exploring again. But Torchwood is an odd venue for it. Love and Monsters is ultimately one of the most optimistic statements of Davies’s basically hedonistic theme. This theme is present in Torchwood – it’s reiterated in its darker way in They Keep Killing Suzie via Suzie’s “This is. Driving through the dark. All this stupid, tiny stuff” line. Indeed, it’s central to Torchwood, with its myriad of wondrous spaces alongside ordinary life pitched against the absolute oblivion of death. But Torchwood takes a rather darker view than Love and Monsters, to say the least, and the Love and Monsters approach doesn’t port over.

Mind you, Random Shoes basically gets that right by realizing that Eugene, unlike Elton, has to actually die at the end. The problem is that this happens a week after They Keep Killing Suzie, and thus the ascent into the heavens in a blaze of white light with a halo is… metaphysically incongruent, to say the least. A more thorough and accurate assessment would be that it plunges headlong into the bathetic – which, actually, the whole thing does starting roughly with when Eugene’s father breaks out into “Danny Boy” at the funeral. The result is a completely miscued ending that attempts to pull off a darker and more cynical ending than Love and Monsters and ends up with what is arguably the Russell T Davies era’s second most stunning moment of shooting for camp and ending up in “what the holy hell am I even watching.”

This is a big problem, though honestly, mucking up the ending after a good buildup is less of a problem than it might sound. There’s lots to really like about Random Shoes.…

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“I am error.”: The Changeling

, 4

“You’re too late. We’re everywhere.”

I will admit it’s very tempting, given my areas of interests, the other projects I’m working on at the moment, and especially so soon after bidding farewell to Robert Bloch, to grab hold of Kirk’s line about faery changeling babies that gives this episode its title, run with it and come up with some delightfully overblown reading of this one within the context of the Otherworld and ancient heathen mythology. Sadly, however, the analogy doesn’t really work: Nomad doesn’t actually act much at all like a proper changeling, Star Trek doesn’t quite get a handle on the magickal doors between realms thing for another 25 years or so and when it eventually does this isn’t the primary story that will facilitate that transformation, certainly not when compared with something like “Catspaw” or “Metamorphosis” or even “Wolf in the Fold” or “The City on the Edge of Forever”.

However, Gene Roddenberry seemed to have a fixation on the story of a robot built by humans who goes away on a journey, experiences a profound transformation, attains great power and returns seeking its creator, reusing it a number of times over his career. It was the subject of a failed 1974 pilot for a prospective television series co-created with Gene Coon called The Questor Tapes and also served as the basic plot for “In Thy Image”, the pilot episode of Star Trek Phase II, which eventually underwent its own profound transformation into Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Arguably, there is even a faint echo of this theme in the very earliest episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where Data’s own creator and “point of origin” are a mystery to us. This then is the first draft of a story that is apparently very important to Roddenberry, so we should take a look at what he may have intended to say with it and what it might reveal about him as a writer and a thinker.

Me being me, I’m once again predisposed to snap back onto the magickal interpretation: The robot’s journey could be seen as a spiritual one, and the years spent travelling the expanses of outer space and acquiring power and knowledge might be seen as attaining a form of enlightenment. This might make the robot comparable to the original conception of the Cybermen in the Doctor Who serial “The Tenth Planet”, similar mechanics-enhanced life forms who went away on a long journey and returned enlightened. I’m not sure this reading holds though, because in every version of this story the robot is portrayed as extremely deficient in some areas, despite its massive power and intelligence, and its yearning to discover its creator seems at once a primary calling and a microcosm of its inability to gain a complete understanding of the universe and its place within it.

Perhaps something could be made out of how, in “The Changeling”, Nomad literally brings Scotty back from the dead, tying into the mythic reorientation that has played a part in several episodes this year.…

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Saturday Waffling (August 10th)

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My God, work. This was a TARDIS Eruditorum week – still is, actually, as I’ve got one more post to write over the next two days. The stretch before this was the only all-Torchwood stretch, and was frankly grueling – entries that would finish at 1500 words and force me to look through them for space to pry open and fit more observations. (2000 words is less a preference for length and more a way of ensuring the density of coverage I like in given post.) Then back to revisions – I’m actually down to one on the Tom Baker book, and have now done two on the Hartnell book. I’ve unilaterally decided to alter the promised book, dumping Eoin Coilfer’s A Big Hand for the Doctor out of a general complete lack of any interest in talking about a bad book and put in an essay on the most obvious and important book that I never talked about at any length. A hat tip to whichever commenter first identifies it.

These extra essays are frustrating. Part of it is that there’s so many – a byproduct of the Kickstarter. Another part is that I have no commutes in my life, and so never have what I consider optimal time to listen to Big Finish stuff, and there’s a lot of audios on the list. Going to have to just knuckle down and do that, which isn’t punishment, but is still active reworking of my day. Plus many of them are just… hard in not entertaining ways. I’ve already decided book essays can make it to around 1500 because I just didn’t have much to say. I don’t want to just put in book reviews of random out of print 90s novels, and finding things to say about the period the book is about is often difficult. I regularly muse on the fact that if this essay had been a good idea, I’d have written it the first time through.

I’m quite liking the commissions, particularly the ones that pick Pop Between Realities stuff. I think I may go more in that direction starting with the Graham Williams book, leaning away from novels and audios and towards Pop Between Realities stuff and, perhaps, more commissions. I rather like commissions as a concept, and have been finding them very fun.

I had been hoping to plow through all my co-books on StoryBundle so I could talk about them this weekend. In one of those pleasant complications, however, right when I was set to start that a review copy of something else hit my inbox, and that something else was a book I’ve been looking forward to for a very long time. I’ll run a very big review in a week and change. Spoiler: there’s a gas mask on the cover.

In any case, I only got to poke at two titles in Storybundle – Nick Grifith’s Dalek I Loved You and Chris-Rachel Oseland’s Dining With The Doctor.

One thing that’s obvious about the Storybundle deal is that these are very different types of books.…

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Outside the Government: They Keep Killing Suzie

, 30

The real tragedy is, it’s a better logo.

It’s December 3rd, 2006. Take That are at number one with “Patience,” just ahead of “Smack That” by Akon and Eminem. Nelly Furtado, Justin Timberlake, Emma Bunton, and Muse are also charting. In news, Michael Grade, by now BBC Chairman, is poached by ITV. The British government declines to extend copyright protection from 50 years to 95, though the EU eventually took care of it for them in 2011. Clive Goodman pleads guilty of conspiring to hack the phones of Princes William and Harry, and Augusto Pinochet has the heart attack that kills him.

Speaking of death, with They Keep Killing Suzie Torchwood finally comes to what, in hindsight, was always its theme. All of the wondrous spaces we’ve been exploring over the preceding seven hours turn out to be metaphors for the big one: the realm of the dead. This is not, strictly speaking, surprising or complicated. The argument that the wondrous cultural spaces that Torchwood has been playing with – ones we’ve already seen are deeply entwined with the larger British culture – are metaphors for death. The spirit world is in many ways the archetypal wondrous space – the one that all other wondrous spaces are just echoes and reflections of.

Jacques Derrida, who I don’t think I’ve annoyed you all by discussing yet, suggests that one of the key aspects of writing is its battle against death. Writing preserves the idea of the speaker after the moment of death, albeit in an altered form that is not so much the speaker as a haunting ghost of them. Similar ideas abound in media studies – Friedrich Kittler has, in his landmark Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, the lovely declaration that “The realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture.” The idea permeates so many different sorts of books and movies as to be inescapable; it’s also the underlying fantasy of detective fiction, which Torchwood owes a huge debt to. Solving the mystery is a way of communicating with the deceased – receiving one final message from them.

And Torchwood, in particular, was always going to be about death. It had to be. The basic conceit of its lead character necessitated it. You can’t do a show whose central mystery is “why can’t Jack die” without having death become something of a major theme. You certainly can’t after combining the premise with a first episode about a glove that brings people back from the dead. The show committed itself to being about death from its first episode, a fact that continues to have profound implications right up until the last episode.

Given all of this, Torchwood’s actual take on death has to be one of the most striking things about it. In a show where everything has a wondrous dimension, where the world is vast and full of mysteries, and where some notion of the soul is clearly bought into on a fundamental level, we have a depiction of death that is frighteningly simple: when you die, you’re dead.…

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“Monsters are real”: Wolf in the Fold

, 4

“I am Nazgaar of the Spirit World…”

Oh goodie, more violence against women. Just another Wednesday then?

At least there’s a vaguely defensible reason for it this time, given that “Wolf in the Fold” borrows its basic structure from slasher movies, which is somewhat befitting the third of three Star Trek episodes penned by Psycho author Robert Bloch. Indeed, this story is once again a straightforward whole plot lift, this time of Bloch’s own famous short story “Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper”, which posited the titular ripper had somehow managed to attain immortality through his crimes. This episode changes him to an ageless non-corporeal life-form who feeds on fear and death, but the basic premise and themes remain the same. “Wolf in the Fold” thus becomes a very competent and professional execution of this kind of horror story, as one would expect with a writer of Bloch’s calbre behind it. That said, I have to twist my own knife a bit here: Merely being in the slasher genre (or proto-slasher, depending on whether or not one wishes to name Psycho the ur example of its kind) does not, of course, excuse the violence towards women. This one’s better then Bloch’s previous effort in this regard, but really not by a whole lot and he doesn’t make a good case for himself when he opens in an exotic dance parlour clearly designed to cater to straight men, starts picking off women and then gives Spock dialog about how Redjack naturally preys on women because they’re more predisposed to extreme fear and terror and are thus more vulnerable then men.

There’s also the somewhat troubling matter that Star Trek has already shown itself to be bigger than the slasher genre, and in the Gene Roddenberry era no less. The very first episode to air, “The Man Trap”, was a complete rejection of this kind of story: Janice Rand and Sulu are shot like nameless slaughter victims, but their big scene involves them eating lunch and talking about plants. Salt Vampire is shot like a slasher villain, but is really a starving animal. Honestly, going from “The Man Trap” to “Wolf in the Fold” is kind of a step back for the show, especially given the former’s strength was in making all of its characters feel like likeable, complete people while the latter treats women as helpless passive objects. Sadly though, we should probably expect that given Star Trek‘s aggravating lack of internal consistency and general self-awareness. That all said though, I don’t want to completely go “Who Mourns for Adonais?” on Bloch, mostly because I really, really don’t have the energy, but also because Bloch, despite his failings, and he does have several, remains one of the good guys. Anybody who gave us voodoo and alchemy in “Catspaw” clearly has hidden depths and is someone worth taking the time to engage with, and “Wolf in the Fold” is a similarly intriguing magickal door if one looks at it a certain way.

The obvious thing to talk about would be Redjack: An ancient being of pure evil who has existed since the dawn of time and thrives on fear, terror and death.…

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No, I don’t kip

, , 2

Godfrey Bloom, UKIP member of the European Parliament (there’s a dialectical proposition if ever I heard one), has said how unhappy he is about so much foreign aid going to “Bongo Bongo Land”.

He has subsequently expressed regret over the remark.  As always, with the British, the crime is in getting caught.

Godfrey Bloom, MEP (UKIP): racist pillock

But he shouldn’t regret saying “Bongo Bongo Land”.  He really shouldn’t.  That was at least honest, even if it did sound like the kind of thing Richie from Bottom used to say.  It was a sincere little window into the real heart of UKIP’s tweedy fascism.

What Bloom should regret is being a fucking racist pillock.…

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The Death of Marguerite-Charlotte David

, 7

If you missed it on Tuesday, the Patrick Troughton volume of TARDIS Eruditorum is part of Storybundle’s new Doctor Who-themed bundle of ebooks. You can set your own price to get it, Barry Letts’s Who and Me, Nick Griffiths’s Dalek I Loved You, and Chris-Rachel Oseland’s Dining with the Doctor. Paying over $10 also gets you Earl Green’s VWORP! and The Best of TARDIS Eruditorum, a collection of this blog’s best posts with short introductions exclusive to the volume. The Best Of book is exclusive to Storybundle, and I have no plans to offer it for sale again this year. Head over to Storybundle to check it out. It’s a terribly neat deal. Meanwhile, a bit of flash fiction I scraped up off the bottom of my hard drive:

Marguerite-Charlotte David’s dress sublimates into the guttural crackle of mid-90s Japanese noise music. The shimmer of her dress curls in the informational fire consuming her, the crackle of the fire becoming a kaleidoscopic backbeat, its combusting edges measured precisely as they decay to form the outline of the resulting waveform. Her dress peels off her breasts, which, constructed out of imagination instead of memory, lack the mottling of digitized oil paint. They are instead porcelain polished with the damp shine of hardcore pornography, oil posing as sweat.

Ultradave14 has been caught out – he’s using junk data, a cache of some archive or another preserved during the final hours of the mycosis, after the mushroom cloud had finally noticed the gap in its original preservation plan. He’d gone packrat when the archives got closed out, grabbing an almost random assortment of texts and images that, predictably, he’s done next to nothing with. He’d never even looked at the painting enough to formulate a detailed imaginary layer, and when he was forced to fill in Marguerite-Charlotte’s breasts he had nothing prepared, and so subbed in something on what was, in hindsight, rather embarrassing instinct.

His sex partner, who identifies as Izu in this interaction, makes her displeasure known, quickly shredding the breasts into a stuttering Eurotrash pop jungle beat that’s emasculating in its groove. She’s only in it for the sake of making new kinds of sound, picked him because early 19th century neoclassical French painting was material she’d not mulched before. She’s running hundreds of these at once, taking memories and force-converting them to sound. The overwhelming majority will be crap, but that’s not the point of the operation. The point is the fleeting moments of truly new forms of noise.

Her use of generic sound is the equivalent of throwing a drink in his face, and he knows it. He’s caught off-guard, remembering rejection at a middle school dance. He’d been terrified all dance to ask the object of his crush, hung to the wall, not realizing until three years later how much that made him come off as creepy, and that she’d have said yes if he’d only asked her an hour earlier. Before he can get a handle on the memory it’s bled into the datastream, and Izu has turned it into a four second hiss punctuated by staccato inserts of a wet, hollow squelching sound.…

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