Eruditorum Press

Less the heroes of our stories than the villains of some other bastard’s

A Clarification

, , 17

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.
…

Continue Reading

A Few Random Notes on Self-Publishing

35

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.…

Continue Reading

The Dr Speaks

, , , , , , 1

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.…

Continue Reading

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

114

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.…

Continue Reading

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

, 10

“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.…

Continue Reading

Awe & Slaughter

, , , 3

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.)…

Continue Reading

Saturday Waffling (July 13th, 2013)

42

“Hello faithful readers,” says the man who has listened to maybe a few too many Russell T Davies commentary tracks recently.

I’ve been writing the last handful of bonus essays for the Tom Baker book, but I feel like it needs one, maybe two more of those bonus essays not actually on stories that I write for the books. Stuff like the UNIT dating or “How Does the TARDIS Work” essays from past books. I’ve got one on the very obvious topic of what, if anything, Genesis of the Daleks changes about Dalek history, and an end-of-book “Now My Doctor” essay, but I feel like I need at least one more.
The book’s on the first three Tom Baker seasons – Robot to Talons of Weng-Chiang. Ideal topics are things I didn’t cover particularly in the entries and things that would benefit from a bit of a wonkish approach. Ideas and requests in comments, and a hat tip in the book if I use your suggestion. 
Speaking of suggestions, have you ever thought, “you know, TARDIS Eruditorum is absolutely great, but it would really be a lot better if only it were about My Little Pony?” Thankfully, if you haven’t, Jed Blue has, and has been blogging the hell out of Friendship is Magic over at My Little Po-Mo. I admit freely to not having gotten around to watching Friendship is Magic yet, despite the cheery adamance with which Web Kobold Anna Wiggins has hyped the series. This, however, has not proven any barrier to enjoying Jed’s marvelous work, and I admit to having made a noise not entirely unlike a squeal of delight when I discovered that a My Little Pony blog overtly modeled on my work existed.
In any case, Jed’s Kickstarting a book version of My Little Po-Mo over here. He’s a good bloke and deserves to have this come together, and I hope you’ll go kick him $10 or $20. If nothing else, it’s clear that Friendship is Magic is a tremendously important show in the development of popular culture, and Jed’s doing bang-up work with it. 
And if you’ve got a bit of cash left after that, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I thought Alan Moore’s Kickstarter was pretty cool. If you’ve not seen the first two of the five “Jimmy’s End” films, they’re basically Alan Moore writing David Lynch movies, a phrase that should parse as “shut up and take my money” to more than a few of my readers. But it’s at goal now and doesn’t strictly speaking need your support, whereas Jed’s only a couple hundred bucks short of goal and a nice push from you lot would be more than enough to bring him over the line.
…

Continue Reading

She Carried the Evil Inside Her (Fear Her)

84

Suck it, Redgrave

It’s June 24th, 2006. Nelly Furtado is at number one with “Maneater.” Shakira and Wyclef Jean, Bon Jovi, and Pink are also in the charts. In news, ummm… the United States celebrates Go Skateboarding Day. This is a real thing. I just looked it up. It’s a boring week, yes. England earn a 2-2 draw against Sweden in their last and largely irrelevant group game, setting them up for a clash with Ecuador the day after this story airs.

This story, of course, is Fear Her, the consensus worst story of the Russell T Davies era (and, I suspect, worst story of the new series were a thorough poll to be run today – I can’t think of any Moffat stories with enough sheer volume of hatred to overcome it). As ever, I don’t find the issue of why it’s bad supremely interesting. The short form is that the story was rushed and misconceived. Stephen Fry’s planned script for the second season had to be abandoned late in the process, so they grabbed Matthew Graham’s planned Series Three script off the reserve pile and put it into production quickly. Graham, for his part, appears to have had a crappy brief – he was told to do Yeti-on-the-loo style local terror with a target audience of seven-year-olds. To say that this is an awkward combination is an understatement, and virtually everything that’s wrong with the story can be traced to the basic inability to decide whether it’s a scary story or a naff cheap one for the kids, and the fact that these are a particularly bad pair of stools to fall between.

But two specific aspects of this tension are worth remarking upon. The first is Murray Gold, or, more accurately, his music. It’s become the populist choice to criticize Murray Gold’s Doctor Who scores in general. I’m not entirely sympathetic to this line of argument, but it’s not incoherent wibbling spat into the void either. Those that dislike Gold’s music usually point to two related problems. The first is that they are simply mixed too loud and too omnipresently. This is probably true, but not actually Murray Gold’s department, as he doesn’t do the final sound mixes for episodes. Still, Gold’s music is particularly prone to becoming overpowering because of the other complaint usually leveled against it, which is that it’s heavy-handed. This is also not inaccurate – Gold’s music exists largely to inform the audience how they should be feeling, and it is usually a bit unrelenting in the pursuit of that. This means that when it’s put a bit high in the mix the effect is more overwhelming even than the usual tendency towards volume over all else within sound mixing these days.

As I said, in the general case, at least, I am hard pressed to find much to complain about in Golds’s music. It’s blatant, but this is not necessarily a vice. One of the things that characterizes the new series is its relentlessly fast pace.…

Continue Reading

“Work for peace at any price, except the price of liberty.”: Errand of Mercy

, 7

“Tell me, Jim: Why do you fight?”

“Errand of Mercy” is the moment where all the themes and motifs Gene Coon has been working with since the beginning of his tenure finally coalesce into a cohesive, articulate message. It’s a stinging indictment of what Star Trek is at this point, but what saves it from the nihilism of “A Taste of Armageddon” and “Space Seed” is that it’s paired with a slightly more hopeful outlook gleaned from the other scripts Coon is the sole author of. It’s not perfect, even by the standards the show’s laid out for itself by this point, but it’s a sufficiently effective statement of where the show is placing its ethics now. Also, it’s the debut of the Klingon Empire, which is somewhat self-evidently important, so I guess I’d better deal with that.

There are few things more immediately recognisable as undeniably Star Trek than the Klingons. In terms of ubiquity within the pop consciousness, they’re on par with Kirk, Spock and the Enterprise. They’re so well-known and beloved that fans who own replica Klingon uniforms, headpieces and weapons and speak Klingonese fluently are seen to be as quintessentially Star Trek as it’s possible to get, and none of these things are even going to be a part of the franchise until 1989 at the absolute earliest. Even the Federation and Starfleet don’t quite have this level of memorability and iconic status. In fact, the Klingons are so entrenched in people’s ideas of what Star Trek is about there’s only one other thing in the entirety of the franchise that can claim to have anywhere remotely near their level of cultural capital and that’s the Klingons’ own mortal enemies.Why might this be? Part of this has to be the fact the Klingons are the Original Series’ only recurring antagonists. Although they only actually appear in seven episodes out of the show’s 79 episode run, they do appear more frequently than any other alien race. Certainly the fact they get brought back and heavily retooled to become a lovable culture of proud, honourable (sometimes comically so) warriors in both the original movie series and the Rick Berman era also must have something to do with it, but there remains, after all, a reason they come back in the first place.

All that said, however, one thing that’s worth noting about the Klingons in “Errand of Mercy” is that they really don’t seem like they’re actually cut out for the job: I’m not so much referring to the general execution of the characters here, although John Colicos’ intense performance as Commander Kor is pretty much the one memorable, or actually convincing, acting job amongst the Klingon cast, but in terms of their actual conception. Common lore claims Coon based the Klingon Empire on the Soviet Union, and while there is evidence of this (Kor’s comment to Kirk about how all Klingons are cogs and everyone is monitored primarily), D.C. Fontana asserts that Coon wrote it as more an amalgamation of all the worst traits he saw in the people he fought during World War II.…

Continue Reading

This Zen-Crazed Aerial Madman Just Won’t Take No For An Answer (The Last War in Albion Part 4: Michael Moorcock, Luther Arkwright)

, 42

“This Zen-crazed aerial madman just won’t take no for an answer”

-Grant Morrison, The Invisibles #18, 1996
[previously] The Cornelius books are characterized by large quantities of philosophical dialogue in amidst the action set pieces, which often fade towards the background. A few chapters after the yowling passenger Cornelius recalls a conversation where “a girl had once asked him, stroking the muscles of his stomach, ‘what do you achieve by the destruction of the odd library? There are so many. How much can one man do?’ ‘What he can,’ Cornelius had told her, rolling on her. ‘It’s History that’s caused all the trouble in the past.’” Moorcock has commented that the Cornelius books are populated by “characters who are aware of the psychological implications of their statements and actions. That is they are as aware of the unconscious as the conscious. In that sense it was a rejection of modernist techniques as found in Joyce, Woolf and so on. My view was that we had moved on from needing to make that sort of observation.” Instead Moorcock’s characters, as he describes it, “tend to anticipate one another’s statements and short-cut their own,” engaging in an endlessly anticipated and reiterated philosophical dialogue that plays out over the superficial frame of the heroic fantasy stories.
In this regard the Cornelius line can be thought of as the archetypal Moorcock work – the one that explores the way in which the same basic story structure that underpins all of the iterations of the Eternal Champion changes and shifts as the world around it does. The later Cornelius stories arbitrarily change the frame and rules of the story from chapter to chapter without particular explanation.
Figure 22: Barbarians and Mods juxtaposed in “Time is a
Four Letter Word,” from Near Myths #2, 1979 (Click images
to expand)
To suggest that it is possible that a fictional multiverse in which one primary character is a dandy action hero who lives in an eternally shifting world and another – the most prominent, in fact – is a sword and sorcery barbarian figure whose world blends in with the present day at times might have been an influence on the writer of the Gideon Stargrave stories or “Time is a Four Letter Word” seems almost too obvious to be worthwhile. Of course Moorcock was a major influence on Grant Morrison’s earliest comics work, and, more to the point, on much of his subsequent work.
The question of why Moorcock, who was after all usually perfectly happy to let others play with his fictional concepts, lashed out so angrily at Morrison for his Cornelius pastiche is interesting, but not entirely germane at this point in the war’s development. Suffice it to say that Morrison is quite justified in his exasperation when he points to his later works and asks “can anyone tell me from which Michael Moorcock novels Zenith and Animal Man were plagiarized,” but that it is equally clear that Morrison was influenced by the entire new wave literary tradition Moorcock came out of, and that it is in many ways very easy to draw direct links between Moorcock’s work and his. 
…

Continue Reading

«‹ 271 272 273 274 ›»