Eruditorum Press

Wicked.

Sensor Scan: Raumpatrouille Orion

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Raumpatrouille Orion

In September of 1966 the landscape of pop culture changed forever with the debut of a groundbreaking new science fiction television show that would singlehandedly transform how the genre was thought of. Blending elements of pulp and Golden Age sci-fi with a critical deconstructive eye and unique fascination with the trappings of soap operas, this show dared us to follow the adventures of a ragtag group of Space Air Force pilots in a utopian future setting where nationalism had been abolished as they set out to explore the universe beyond the realm of human knowledge and experience. I am, of course, speaking about the legendary Raumpatrouille – Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion.

Every once in awhile you stumble upon something so unbelievably serendipitous it really does force you to stop and muse for a time on synchronicity and the effect reoccurring patterns of time and place have on human beings. There is literally no other way to explain how two groups of people on opposite ends of the planet came up with two superficially identical science fiction shows in the exact same month other than a simultaneous tapping of the shared cultural zeitgeist. It’s perhaps tempting to expect the West German production filmed in stark black-and-white on sets made out of kitchen appliances and scrap metal to be an almost hilariously shameless ripoff of the bright, flashy, big budget Technicolor Hollywood spectacle airing on major network television, were we to conveniently forget that Raumpatrouille – Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion (hereafter Raumpatrouille Orion or simply Raumpatrouille) was filmed at the exact same time as Star Trek‘s first season and premiered within days of it. Germans wouldn’t be introduced to Star Trek until 1972, and most people on the other side of the Atlantic to this day have no idea Raumpatrouille Orion exists. And that’s a true shame, because, to be blunt, Raumpatrouille Orion is unabashedly superior on almost every single level. This show is everything Star Trek should have been in its first season.

The most immediately obvious thing Raumpatrouille just absolutely nails is its setting. While the world of Star Trek retroactively becomes an idealized or utopian society thanks to the large-scale fan reconceptualization of the Original Series in the 1970s, a reading which is bolstered by the influence of Star Trek Phase II and Star Trek: The Next Generation (which were, of course, written in the wake of this re-evaluation), the world of Raumpatrouille actually explicitly is one. In lieu of Captain Kirk’s famous “Space…The Final Frontier” monologue that opens every Star Trek episode starting midway through the first season, Raumpatrouille Orion gives us this declaration, equally famous in German science fiction circles, at the opening of each of its stories:

“What may sound like a fairy tale today may be tomorrow’s reality. This is a fairy tale from the day after tomorrow: There are no more nations. There is only mankind and its colonies in space. People have settled on faraway stars.

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Not Born So Much As Ground Like Pigment From His Times (The Last War in Albion Part 5: Luther Arkwright and William Blake)

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“Not born so such as ground like pigment from his times”

– Alan Moore, Angel Passage, 2001
[previously] The text becomes a cut-up invocation that puts Burroughs to shame, describing how “in the garden of Gethesemene Kali becomes Miranda take this my ankh the egyptian sign of life renounce the ways of violence Luther the tabla beat faster the star changes to a distant Balalaika Siberian winds howl” against a backdrop of copulating demons drawn in sinewy shadow.” This is all, however, too late to have influenced Morrison’s work directly – The Adventures of Luther Arkwright #6 contains only material prepared after Near Myths. Rather this demonstrates the extent to which Morrison’s early strips firmly belong in an existent literary and artistic tradition. 
Figure 30: Grant Morrison spending
five minutes scribbling Luther Arkwright
for Valkyrie Press in 1989

Even still, for all that Morrison insists, admittedly with self-depricating panache, that he dismissed Talbot because “I was a punk, and I didn’t need things to be slick as long as they had conviction and personality,” the direct influence is compelling. Morrison’s artwork evolves over his time on Near Myths, adopting a heavier shadow and thicker line that owes a clear debt to Talbot (as well as to the squarer-jawed action style of then-DC Comics based superhero artist Neal Adams, discussions of whose work bookend the chapter of Supergods in which Talbot and Near Myths are discussed). Morrison’s final Near Myths story, “The Checkmate Man,” feels more like Luther Arkwright, both in its structure and style. Morrison’s copyright notice on the strip separates the script from the art, dating the script back to 1977, as though mindful of the similarities and wanting to make sure everybody knew he’d come up with it independently.

But the anxiety of influence is not particularly interesting in this case, as we’ve seen. Morrison’s work fits clearly into an overall tradition in which all of these things – dandy secret agents leaping among worlds and having psychedelic revelations – were downright common. What’s interesting is not the question of when Morrison became aware of Talbot’s work any more than it’s whether Ballard or Moorcock is the larger influence on Gideon Stargrave. There’s no reason not to believe Morrison when he says that Near Myths “introduced me to Bryan Talbot,” a statement that seems to consciously hedge against the possibility that “The Vatican Conspiracy” is, as Talbot alleges, plagiarized from the similarly named “The Papist Affair.” Given that Stargrave appears in issue #3 of Near Myths several months after Arkwright’s debut, it’s entirely possible that Morrison was self-consciously tweaking the comic’s head feature with a glitzed-up experimental parody of its abandoned first version. It would, after all, be a perfect reflection of Jerry Cornelius’s first story’s status as a rewrite of some early Elric yarns. Equally, however, it’s just possible that Morrison and Talbot individually hit what was obviously hanging in the air like cannabis smoke hung over social meetings in Edinburgh’s Science Fiction Bookshop.
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Outside the Government 12: The TARDISodes

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The “TARDISodes” were a set of online shorts promoting individual episodes of Series Two, written by Gareth Roberts. They were among the early experiments with “Internet versions of television” that were going on in the mid-aughts, which is to say done cheaply and mostly as an experiment. As befits mini-episodes, then, mini-entries, written in sequence, each one done without watching any of the subsequent TARDISodes so as to provide a micro-blog of the season.

New Earth: It’s a particularly big challenge to kick these off – how do you establish what a mini-episode should be like? How do you make them differ from the trailer? Roberts picks a savvy approach here – where the trailer is mainly about the visual concepts, here he lays out in thirty seconds the basic mystery of the story: how can this hospital cure any disease, and what’s its dirty secret? Notably, the mini-episode does not attempt to explain the premise of the story. It throws in cat nurses with no real context, clearly marking this as something for a more dedicated flavor of fan. Note also that the specific mystery teased is one of the first ones encountered – though only in one plot thread (this being one of the most traditional “split the Doctor and the companion up when they get to the planet and keep them apart until the end” episodes ever), thus being a significant tease but not a major spoiler.

Tooth and Claw: There’s a real challenge in keeping these from all being basically the same structure: here’s a world, oh no, there’s a monster. The decision to start with a meteor crash is thus a reasonably clever strategy to keep things lively. Also clever is the actual use of the werewolf in the final shot, especially given that Davies had to carefully count his werewolf shots and allowed for one to be used over here. The chase from the werewolf’s point of view suggests that we’re not going to actually see the monster, so the “money shot,” as it were, is cheeky. Try, on the other hand, to ignore the fact that the random Scottish werewolf bait looks for all the world like he tripped and fell out of Monty Python’s Holy Grail, unless it really happens to amuse you, in which case, don’t worry about it.

School Reunion: Again there’s a pleasant bit of focus here. The decision to hold Mickey back until the third one of these makes it a bit of a thing – it wasn’t clear prior to this that “real” cast members would be appearing in the TARDISodes. But equally, Mickey is a particularly interesting choice for this episode given that to anyone obsessive enough to watch the TARDISodes the real story was obviously Sarah Jane Smith and K-9, who aren’t even hinted at here. The teasing of Torchwood immediately after Tooth and Claw is similarly savvy, showing that there was real effort taken with these to make them tie in with the overall public narrative of the series.…

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“Exterminate! Annihilate! Destroy!”: Operation — Annihilate!

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“I’m so sorry.”

Really, it’s a bit unrealistic to expect Star Trek to come up with something to top “The City on the Edge of Forever” for its first season finale. Even if you, like me, grant that last episode was ultimately a morally bankrupt nightmare on every possible level, the sheer gravity it exerts upon the series, and the larger franchise, is undeniable. For those enraptured and left starry-eyed by the events of last week, it’s tough to see how anything, let alone a story about flying parasitic space pancakes, could possibly live up to their expectations, and for those with the perhaps more applicable response of being deeply disturbed and unsettled by the fallout from “The City on the Edge of Forever” (and maybe the last few months on the whole) it’s tough to get excited or optimistic about anything Star Trek does at this point.

But this is being a bit unfair to “Operation — Annihilate!”. The concept of the season finale as we know it was not one that was as entrenched in pop consciousness as an indelible part of television literacy the way it is today. That didn’t begin to happen until approximately the 1980s (and no, it was not the result of the episode you’re thinking of either: As talented as Michael Piller was, he didn’t invent the season finale-At the very least let’s not forget Dallas and “Who Shot J.R.?”). “Operation — Annihilate!” plays out more or less like an average episode of the series as of 1967, which is not entirely terrible. It’s certainly not as great as the best episodes of the year but, mercifully, it’s also leagues better than the worst (and there have been a lot of worsts).

The first thing this episode unequivocally has in its favour is the acting. Anyone who thinks William Shatner is a poor actor really ought to watch this one (and probably “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, “Balance of Terror” and “Miri” as well) because once again this is a stellar showcase for his talents. Kirk has a lot of emotional investment in this story, as first his brother, his family and then Spock all succumb to the neural parasites. Shatner plays it as any good old-school thespian would: With gratuitous, overstated theatrical flourish that very clearly marks every single thought and emotion that crosses Kirk’s mind. We watch Kirk grow increasingly more desperate and determined, and every single iota of his pain and and resolve is highlighted for our benefit.

What it comes down to is that Shatner isn’t a method actor: His approach is not, as a general rule, about trying to get his mental state to emulate Kirk’s. Instead, what he does is take great care to meticulously outline the sorts of emotions his character would most likely be feeling in a given situation and draws our attention to them by conveying them ever-so-slightly caricatured. So, for example, in the teaser, Shatner plays Kirk very visibly anxious and preoccupied when recording his log entry on the Deneva colony.…

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A Clarification

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If you think this…

…is what Chinese people actually look like, then guess what:

YOU’RE A FUCKING RACIST!

ADDITIONAL:
An explanation is probably in order.  This post is in response to an assertion made on the aforementioned ‘Talons’ thread, an assertion agreed with more-or-less by several other posters, that one might mistake John Bennett in his yellowface prosthetic make-up (see above) for an actual Chinese person.  Yes, human beings – people with brains and opposable thumbs and everything – actually felt comfortable making that assertion in public… though, they do use pseudonyms on Gallifrey Base forum, so maybe that anonymity helped.  
Some of the people in question have been engaged in inventive games of circumlocution and tactical point-missing around the subject of the racism in ‘Talons of Weng-Chiang’.  The usual disingenuous special pleading, most of it.  ‘There’s a stupid white policeman – does that mean it’s racist against white people?’ and ‘I’ve shown it to Asian friends and they weren’t offended!’.  Y’know, the sort of cretinous, spurious, trivial, entitled, privileged, desperate, dishonest bollocks always trotted out when these waaaah-waaaaahing manchildren feel that their untroubled viewing pleasure may be even slightly complicated by being implicated in the injustice visited upon people other than them.
However, the idea that it might be possible to mistake the above image – in all its Fu Manchu-y and rubbery and yellowy inglory – with an actual human being of Chinese descent… well, it’s simply breathtaking.  How is one to respond to people who evidently
a) base their notion of what Chinese people look like not upon the actual appearance of, y’know, actual chinese people, but rather upon racist stereotypes conjured into life by immobile, expressionless yellowface prosthetics, and
b) think that their own comfort with this racist elision is itself an alibi against charges of racism?
There’s something often said by fans about ‘Talons of Weng Chiang’: “ignore the rat”.  It means, decide to see past the extremely unconvincing giant rat monster in the story (which looks like exactly what it is: a combination of a real rat in a bad model set and a fluffy puppet) so that you can see the quality of the story beneath.  Well, ‘Talons’ is a good story in many ways… and no guilt need be felt by anyone who watches and enjoys it (another straw man set up by the point-missers club).  But it’s devastatingly revealing that any fan should be more worried by the unconvincing rat than by the unconvincing yellowface.  It reveals priorities that are so insular and narrow-minded as to be… and I don’t think this is too strong a word… inhuman.  
However, it’s yet another quantum leap to the point where you find the rat unconvincing but not the yellowface.  And you’re prepared to say so in public.  This reveals a shameless thoughtlessness, a terrifying absence of self-examination, an arrogance born of privilege.  And it also seems to reveal a willingness not simply to be unconcerned by the monstering of a whole race of people, not simply to delude yourself that its not happening in the text (because you’ve never bothered to avail yourself of the myriad opportunities now freely available to anyone with internet access to educate yourself about how representations of people work in the texts you consume) but to actually think that the representations (of, say, Chinese people as expressionless, rubberfaced bogeymen) are accurate and true to life.
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A Few Random Notes on Self-Publishing

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I just spent most of today fighting with book formatting for a thing I’ll talk about in good time, which led me to dust this set of notes I drew up off for your reading pleasure. Because occasionally people have asked me for advice about self-publishing. Which is funny, because it assumes I know what I’m doing, which I don’t, but here, at least, are some things I used to not know that I have since learned.

1) Recognize that everyone will assume you are an unprofessional git. This is potentially true, but equally, may well not be. It doesn’t matter. You’re self-publishing, which means you couldn’t get a real publisher, which means you must suck. Never mind the myriad of sane reasons to self-publish and the fact that you might just be working in a niche market where the overhead of professional publishing renders your book financially unsound. You’re a hack because you’re self-publishing. Therefore almost everything you do has to be done with the knowledge that this is how people see you.

2) There is shit you have to pay for. You cannot edit your own book. You just can’t. Nor can you give it to a friend to edit unless that friend is a professional editor or at least should be. Just having been an English major isn’t enough. My main two copyeditors are a professional editor and a former student whose work I was particularly impressed by. I have many, many friends with English degrees, graduate and undergraduate, who I would not let near my prose in a million years. That said, if you can work with a fan or friend who will subsidize the cost out of love for you or your work, it helps.

3) Your editor is right. I know. You loved that line. You thought it was brilliant. Tough. Your editor is right. Your editor is always right. This is, in fact, the primary thing to look for in hiring an editor: that they will always be right. You want someone you will grudgingly defer to every time. You’re allowed some raging against the dying of the light – I routinely mark things as “leave this as I wrote it, but also leave this comment in place so I can meekly change it back next round of edits.” My editor pretends to allow me dignity. It’s very nice of her. But frankly, the number of times you overrule your editor should be miniscule if you have a good editor. This requires you to be careful in choosing your editor. But it’s the key trait – that they will be someone who is always, obnoxiously, right.

4) You probably can’t do your own cover design. You can probably buy some stock photo or something and slap some writing on it, but your cover will look like shit and everyone will know that you’re a self-publishing hack the moment they look at your book. Pay an artist real money. Again, a fan or friend is ideal, but make sure they’re good at it, and more to the point good at the style you want out of them.…

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The Dr Speaks

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Against my better judgement, I allowed myself to get dragged into the latest “is ‘Talons’ racist?” debate at Gallifrey Base. (You’d think, wouldn’t you, that this one would’ve been settled long ago and been filed away in the same drawer with “is the world a sphere?” and “is the Tomorrow People reboot bound to be shit?” but nope, apparently not.)

I won’t rehearse it here, since everyone likely to read this blog is likely to be able to imagine exactly what has been (and remains to be) said. 

I just wanted to post this…

…which occured during my (increasingly and pointlessly irate) involvement.  Click to make it bigger.

You know, I disagree with Phil Sandifer about a lot… but the above just made me want to hug him.…

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There Never Was a Golden Age (Army of Ghosts/Doomsday)

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Whatever you think of this facial expression, just remember –
it’s a photo of David Tennant watching the 50th Anniversary
Special in 3-D.

It’s July 1st, 2006. Nelly Furtado is still consuming men at the top of the charts. Shakira and Wyclef Jean unseat her a week later with their ode to the veracity of hips. The Pussycat Dolls, Pink, and Muse also chart, the latter with “Supermassive Black Hole,” which is both apropos for this story and later used as background music for the opening scene of The Rebel Flesh. In news, England beat Ecuador 1-0, moving into the quarter finals. Three members of the Tongan royal family die in a car crash in California. Internet usage overtakes the television as the primary leisure time activity of young British people, and a wealth of mess flares up in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But let’s go back to July 1st itself, at about 5:00 in the afternoon, as England play Portugal in the World Cup Quarterfinal. England’s eternally frustrating great hope, Wayne Rooney, is sent off at the hour mark for maybe stomping on Ricardo Carvalho’s crotch more than is entirely appropriate within the Laws of the Game. The game ends 0-0 after extra time and, as ever, England go out humiliatingly on penalties.

This squad is by convention deemed a “golden generation” – a particularly fine crop of players who were supposed to be the team that could finally return the World Cup to England after forty years of inspired mediocrity. Instead… inspired mediocrity. The final tournament for David Beckham, who slouches off to Los Angeles a year later. As for the audience, those who don’t turn off their televisions in disgust are treated to the information that Rose Tyler, Billie Piper’s great everywoman, so accessible and loveable that her presence renders even that shit old sci-fi series Doctor Who watchable, has died.

Russell T Davies himself could not have dreamed up a better run of television drama – the ego blow of England’s golden generation flopping ignobly to pathetic defeat is followed up promptly by the long elegy for Rose Tyler. But within Army of Ghosts is a larger issue – that of Britain’s golden age, smothered idly in its crib in Tennant’s debut. We should note the terms on which Britain’s supposed golden age unfolds. The Christmas Invasion tells us that Jackie Tyler is “eighteen quid a week better off,” while Doomsday establishes Pete’s World’s “Golden Age” as “a world of peace” after the defeat of the Cybermen. This is, inevitably, a material golden age, defined by apparent social progress. But lurking unsubtly behind the concept is the idea of making Britain great again.

Davies will become progressively blunter about this as the series unfolds, steadily converting the latter portion of his run into an increasingly adamant attack on New Labour. It is a fact not often remarked upon that Tony Blair is almost as large a cartoon villain to a particular flavor of the political left as Margaret Thatcher was.…

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“Watch…your future’s end.”: The City on the Edge of Forever

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“I am my own beginning. And my own ending.”

“So. You’ve found the courage to speak to me face to face at last, have you? I must congratulate you on finally discovering your spine, however some thinkers far wiser than I might say there exists a very thin line between courage and stupidity.”

“I’ve not come for bravado-filled threats, I’ve come in the hope that together we might be able to negotiate an end to all of this. The damage can be repaired.”

“You people never fail to disappoint me, though your unwavering stubbornness is to be commended, I suppose. Have you nothing more or better to say to me than that?”

“Withdraw your troops from the 22nd Century. The damage can be repaired, and I’d hoped to make you remember the fundamental importance and worth of the Temporal Accords.”

“Please spare me your impassioned appeal to regulations and rules of order. I’ve lived far, far too long and much too hard to be swayed by your vapid platitudes, Agent.”

“Your quarrel isn’t with these people in this time! It’s with us!”

“Isn’t it? Tell me, do you know why my ships didn’t blow you out of the stars on sight? Because I wanted to show you this. This is what your people did on Earth in 1930, A.D. I want you to take a good, long look at it and try to defend or explain away your actions. Here. Now. To my face.”

“This…ceaseless hatred and violence…It is alien to us. And repugnant. We must depart this plane; the pain has become simply too great for us to bear any longer.”

“A philosophy of pacifism is only practical if you’re not living under oppression. It has been so very long: Do you remember what it feels like to be imprisoned? Trapped? Walked over? Used? Violated? We all know what the future means: Cycles of making and unmaking repeating themselves forever. We walk in eternity, you and I. But we are also stewards of it.”

“You are not of Organia, but you are like us. We should like to speak with you about this further.”

“Shh, now. In time.”

“The City on the Edge of Forever” is also rather infamously the center of an extremely messy legal dispute between writer Harlan Ellison and the then-members of the Star Trek production team. There seem to be two versions of events here and, unfortunately, in neither of them does Gene Roddenberry come out looking good. The first account, which is supported by Bob Justman and Herb Solow in Inside Star Trek and even Ellison’s own book on the subject says that the original draft (which was delivered late) featured an Enterprise crewman named Beckwith who was a drug dealer. After murdering a fellow crewmember who threatened to turn him in, he was sentenced to death on the planet the ship was in orbit of, which in this draft was inhabited by an ancient race of time observers called The Guardians and who maintained a Time Vortex.…

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Awe & Slaughter

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As expected, having been posthumously put on trial for his own murder, Trayvon Martin has been found guilty.  He committed the heinous crime of being black and in possession of a hoodie, armed with fizzy drinks and sweets, walking round George Zimmerman’s neighbourhood.  What else could Zimmerman do, given that (in his words) “these fucking punks” “always get away”?

Also, how long before Law & Order does a storyline based on Trayvon Martin, in which they bravely confront the issues and break PC taboos by depicting him as a junkie gangbanger, his family’s lawyers as slimey liars, any professional black activist involved as a cynical demagogue and all black protestors as unreasoning, flailing idiots who assume racism without evidence and who frustrate the good faith efforts of the police and DAs office? Just like in all their other ‘race’ episodes that they’ve ever done ever.

(Edited for clarification on one point, and to add a subject label.)…

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