Eruditorum Press

June 12, 2013

Outside the Government 11 (Attack of the Graske)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum outside the government, tennant 63

For only the second time ever, December 25th, 2005 featured the debut of two separate new episodes of Doctor Who. Immediately after The Christmas Invasion viewers were invited to press the red button and thus to watch Attack of the Graske, an interactive Doctor Who story in which viewers take on the role of the companion in stopping an alien invasion.

Attack of the Graske had no real prospect of being a conventionally good Doctor Who episode, nor of being a conventionally good piece of interactive fiction. This is less a factor of the people involved with it than it is a basic medial limit: the BBC Red Button service is not actually sophisticated enough, and the amount of footage they can actually afford to film with David Tennant for a throwaway like this is not actually high enough to make this work. And so what we get is about ten minutes of footage, virtually none of it actually involving Tennant (who does all his scenes from the TARDIS, meaning this was probably shot in about a lunch break), in which there’s not so much interaction as a series of tests you’re graded on. Only the final scene allows you to make a decision that affects the plot, and it divides squarely into a good ending and a bad ending.

All of which is seems a spectacularly churlish set of things to say about something with the sole purpose in life of allowing children to have their very own Doctor Who adventures. I mean, the point of this is being invited onto the TARDIS to be a companion, right? And the Doctor saying he might come back for you? And your remote getting linked with the sonic screwdriver? It’s pure fantastic glee, isn’t it?

Well, no. Probably not. I mean, children aren’t stupid. They get how the red button works. They understand the difference between fiction and reality. And they’ve played enough video games to tell a good one from a bad one. This is firmly within an aesthetic they’re familiar with. Admittedly being Doctor Who probably wins some substantive points from a fair number of kids, and it’s not as though Attack of the Graske is an outright bad game. Indeed, we should remember that as originally conceived it’s not a game at all but an interactive episode of television. This is more Silence in the Library than Call of Duty 2. It had a specific airtime in which it could be watched, and is controlled with a TV remote.

We should detour briefly here to explain the technology, as there are Americans around. The “red button” is more or less exactly what it sounds like, and launches a service that was then called BBC Red Button, but now goes with the marginally less intuitive name “BBCi,” the vowel standing for “interactive.” The service is the technological heir to the late, lamented Ceefax, a 1970s form of interactive television that gave news headlines and allowed several rudimentary games to be played.…

June 11, 2013

“I cannot-Yet I must! How do you calculate that?”: The Galileo Seven

Forest of Illusions star trek, TOS Season 1 5

Little known fact about Taurus II: It is actually the Bigfoot homeworld.

The key thing to note, I feel, about the second third of the Original Series’ first season is that it can in many ways be read as a systematic attempt to reconceptualise the show by redefining the kind and broadening the scope of stories the show can do. Gene Roddenberry had a fairly straightforward pitch for the show: Gulliver’s Travels with the Space Air Force. Gene Coon, by contrast has from the beginning set about making overtures to change this, and this will eventually culminate in his two most memorable and defining episodes at the back end of the year. For the time being we still have the setting we inherited from Roddenberry, but Coon is starting to tweak and refine it a little and “The Galileo Seven” takes some of the most clear and obvious steps forward we’ve seen yet.

Following up on the implications of the teaser and opening act of “Miri”, we have the Enterprise going out of its way to investigate a quasar phenomenon for purely scientific reasons, Kirk claiming he has standing orders to do so whenever he has the opportunity to. This seems like an unusual thing for Earth Command to take an interest in, as it certainly falls outside the jurisdiction of interplanetary patrol and law enforcement. Indeed, this is actually literalized in the narrative, at least from the bridge crew’s point of view, as the Enterprise is torn between first investigating the quasar, then rescuing the crashed shuttlecraft, and getting the supply of vaccinations to Makus III on time. Although this plot point obviously exists primarily to give the episode dramatic tension, it is also a clear move away from the sorts of things the show was doing less than a month ago.

While “The Galileo Seven” doesn’t take the exploration theme any further, the main thrust of the plot, the marooned science crew and Spock’s attempts to command from a purely logical perspective, is new territory for the show in its own way. This episode marks the first real time Star Trek has attempted a story where proper character development is the primary driving force. Under Roddenberry we frequently had episodes dealing with main character’s emotions and relationships, but the very structure of the show forced them to be extremely superficial and disposable: Kirk’s friendship with Gary Mitchell in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” is there purely for drama and is never followed up on. The same is also true of McCoy’s history with Nancy Crater in “The Man Trap”, and while that episode did play with soap opera tropes, with the exception of Rand and Sulu all of those moments were between random extras, most of whom get death-suckered by Salt Vampire not long after they showed up. Plus, Rand’s gone now so in hindsight the effectiveness of that scene is dampened.

In this episode, however, the interpersonal conflicts and connections between characters are central to how the whole story works: The entire plot hinges on the fact Spock is determined to handle the situation with disaffected logic as he feels it is the self-evidently correct way to run a command, and the specific situation he’s in forces him to see the limitations of his philosophy because not everything in the universe operates according to logical principles.…

June 11, 2013

The Victory of the Commenters

Elizabeth Sandifer 41

All righty. Our contest winners, though first, some honorable mentions, all of which get good old fashioned Marvel Comics No Prizes. I decided to get a little soft and not disqualify people for dropping either definite article. This was brutal to judge. Well played to everyone.

First off, the Rulebreakers division, where the prize goes to Lewis Christian for Lett’s Kill Pertwee.

Next, the Rude division, where we have three contenders. The bronze No Prize goes to Matthew Blanchette’s impressively awful The Fapping of the Worm, itself a modification of Tony Macklin’s The Tapping of the Wire. The silver goes to overflowontology’s Feast of the Merkins after Matthew Blanchette’s The Terror of the Mirkins, itself a modification of overflowontology’s work. And the gold No Prize goes to IG’s modification of prandeamus’s suggestion, The Wind of the Slitheen. Excellent work, you sick bastards.

Next, the Literary Theory division, which has two prizes. Like any good piece of literary theory, or, for that matter, good piece of Doctor Who, both are plagiarized. We’ll call it a tie between John Toon’s The Death of the Author and Anton B’s The Society of the Spectacle.

The Actually Sincere Attempt at a Story Title division has but one prize, AuntyJack’s pleasantly unnerving The Sigil of Xanthus. A round of applause to AuntyJack for being one of only a few entrants to actually attempt a title of that quality.

Next we have our Doctor Who In Jokes division. Bronzes goes to thingsiambotheredby’s proposal The Evil of the Chumblies, with an honorable mention for James V’s proposed modification Remembrance of the Chumblies. Ferret’s modification of Joel Phillips’s suggestion The Machine of the Gods, The ??/??? of the WiFi gets the silver. While the division winner is Jane’s The New Men of Sydney, a modification of Lewis Christian’s The H of Christopher Bidmead.

In a closely related award, the prize for “best use of the definite article” goes to IG’s The Catharsis of the Spurious Morality.

Which brings us to our general classification.

In third place, Tony Macklin’s The Heat of the Moment.

In second, Matthew Blanchette’s The Passion of the Anoraks, a modification of EarBucket’s The Passion of the Christ.

And our winner. This posed a problem, because I, somewhat foolishly, intervened slightly in one post, noting that I could see a modification that would improve it. That post was prandeamus’s The Anagram of the Master, which HarlequiNQB realized would be improved with The Anagram of the Stream, or, actually, even better than my idea, The Stream of Anagrams. So free ebooks to prandeamus, HarlequiNQB, and, apparently, myself.

Which is, of course, terribly unfair, so I’ll just declare a second winning entry and give a set of ebooks to Ununnilium for the equally brilliant The Kyriarchy of the Daleks.

Congratulations to all three winners – send me an e-mail and I’ll get your ebooks to you.

I know several of you already have a set of ebooks.…

June 10, 2013

I Become Part of Events (The Christmas Invasion)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum tennant 132

Tennant based his characterization on fellow Scotsman
Graham Crowden’s nuanced portrayal of Soldeed in The
Horns of Nimon

Blogger’s spam filter is being a bit frisky lately, and is catching a lot of legitimate comments by long term posters. If your posts don’t appear, that’s why. I’m cleaning it out several times a day, and all comments will appear eventually.

It’s December 25th, 2005. We are in the long winter of years in which the winner of The X Factor gets to be the Christmas number one every year, choking the life out of what had previously been a rather pleasant cultural oddity whereby a motley of novelty acts, trash pop, and hit bands would fight it out for the honor of going on a music anorak’s list of Christmas number ones instead gets supplanted by The X Factor winning everything. So for the record, it’s Shayne Ward with “That’s My Goal,” but in this case it’s everything that isn’t number one, which is to say, absolutely every other song in Britain, that matters.

News, then. Doctor Who has been off the air for six months. In those six months, London was awarded the 2012 Olympics the day before a series of terrorist attacks hit the London transportation system, killing fifty-two people, along with the four bombers. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, revealing a staggeringly poor federal response system. Jyllands-Posten published their infamously controversial set of comics depicting the prophet Muhammad, and Saddam Hussein’s trial began. While in the month of December David Cameron becomes leader of the Conservative Party, Harold Pinter wins the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work on The Abominable Snowmen, and the law allowing same sex “civil partnerships” takes effect.

Let’s go back to the issue of music, however. As I noted, the domination of The X Factor over the Christmas charts brought to an unsatisfyingly corporate end to a quaint British ritual. This construction, of course, ignores the fact that the British charts are already corporate, and, more to the point, endlessly prone to manipulation, most famously with what is widely believed to be the deliberate fudging of numbers to prevent the Sex Pistols from reaching number one with “God Save the Queen” in 1977. Nor is it prima facie the case that The X Factor produces worse number one singles than, say, “Mr. Blobby,” which was in fact the number one in 1993. No, what’s depressing here is the loss of the game – the sense that something that once belonged to the British public now belongs to Simon Cowell.

Ah yes, Simon Cowell. Now there’s an interesting figure. What is notable about Cowell is his ability to combine an unsparing ruthlessness with an instinctive grasp of populism. The result is someone who is jaw-droppingly good at engineering hits, and who has absolutely no compunctions about acting like that’s what he’s doing. The result is something aggressively soulless – a sense not just of utter conformity, but of the most mean-spirited and cynical conformity imaginable.…

June 9, 2013

“And you claim these words as your own”: The Conscience of the King

Forest of Illusions star trek, TOS Season 1 6

“Let your indulgence set me free.”

A flash of a dagger, and someone lies dead. The guilt-wracked murderer wonders if all the oceans could wash the blood from his hands. Not long afterward we learn the slain person was King Duncan and we’re watching a performance of Macbeth. But then the camera cuts to a Shakespearean actor dressed in a bright yellow jumper commenting on the performance while the man next to him rambles on about somebody named Kodos the Executioner. Somehow this is supposed to be a science fiction show, somehow this is supposed to be Star Trek. But it is in truth another play.

This is an episode about performativity-It’s about people playing roles and how the kinds of roles we play change throughout our lives and how each role only reveals a snapshot of one facet of a person at one point in time. That’s the thing nobody in the story manages to understand, however: Kirk wants to extract justice; he wants to be able to prove Anton Karidian is *really* Kodos under an alias. By contrast, Lenore is hoping to erase all historical trace of Kodos by killing off those who had seen him, thus forcing people to see her father as Anton forever and always.

But the truth of the matter is the Actor is both Anton and Kodos. One is not more real than another, they’re just two different roles the same man has played at two different points in time. As characters are by definition more flat that real people, each role can only reflect one specific aspect of his personality, and even then they can only reflect how they exist at the specific time the Actor is playing that particular role. As Kodos, he made the decisions he thought were justified when he was ruler of Tarsus IV. As Anton his worldview has changed and regrets the actions he took as Kodos and hopes to move beyond them. Despite what Kirk and Lenore want, he can’t be only one for them. He has to be everything at once. Incidentally, this is as good as the show has ever been at depicting human nuance and complexity: There are no more White Hats and Black Hats here, only people trying to make the best choices they can in the present moment, and that alone makes it astonishingly progressive for its time.

The theatrical theme is everywhere in “The Conscience of the King”, and an argument could be made it’s almost too heavy-handed: There’s the title, a straight-up reference to Hamlet, which is the same play the Karidian Players wind up performing for the Enterprise crew. The teaser sequence with the Macbeth show is just about the most obvious bit of foreshadowing Barry Trivers could have come up with, and Lenore speaking almost entirely in Shakespeare quotes and allusions makes General Chang in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country look subtle and understated. Indeed, the entire episode itself bears some pretty overt similarities to Hamlet, featuring a guilt-ridden leader, his mad daughter and the exposure of his past during a stage show.…

June 9, 2013

Blog Association

Jack Graham josh marsfelder, star trek, vaka rangi 1

I’ve never been a Trekkie, but I’ve seen enough of the franchise over the years to make me think I could talk about it with some familiarity, hence this post from a while ago. It started out as an outgrowth of something about the Cybermen and the Borg that I’m still tinkering with. I stand by a lot of what I wrote, but I’m preparing to have to revise some of my views because of the arrival of a truly excellent new blog called Vaka Rangi, written by my online friend (and frequent Shabgraff commenter) Josh Marsfelder. He describes the blog as

an attempt at a critical history of utopian futurism in televised science fiction, particularly science fiction involving voyaging starships, from a specific perspective and using the Star Trek franchise as a “guiding text”

I’m posting this not simply to get you to check out this blog (which you should utterly do, if the subject interests you) but also to address a remark I made in my own essay on Trek. This remark:

it’s astounding that apparently intelligent people can tout Star Trek as a great example of progressivism in popular culture

Well, there you go. My tendency to slip into that ghastly denunciatory tone so common on the left. Yeurch. As I say, there’s now a blog by a demonstrably intelligent person (as if I’m an arbiter of that!) who will, I think, argue that Trek is (or at least becomes) an example of progressivism in popular culture. He’s currently working his way through the original series and is frequently taking it to task for all sorts of horrible attitudes… but a journey of a billion miles would probably have to begin with a few missteps.…

June 7, 2013

Saturday Waffling (June 8, 2013)

Elizabeth Sandifer waffling 200

So, first of all, I’m running a contest, because I’ve never run a contest before and it sounds fun. The prize will be Volumes 1-3 of TARDIS Eruditorum (Volume 1 in its first edition state, obviously, as that’s the one that exists) in ebook format.

Entering is simple – you just come up with the best possible title for a Doctor Who story in the format The _____ of the _____. Post in comments. You can go for funny or sincere, and any sort of story – judging criteria will strictly be what catches my fancy.

One interesting note, though – collaboration is encouraged; you can win just as well by tinkering with someone else’s suggestion. And if a tinkered version of your suggestion wins, both you and the tinkerer will win the prize. So if someone suggested the (actually quite rubbish) title The Terror of the Giraffes, and you came along and said, “actually, I think that would be much better as The Horror of the Giraffes” then, if I agreed, both you AND the person who came up with The Terror of the Giraffes would win a set of ebooks. You thus lose nothing at all by having people tinker with your titles. You may also tinker with other tinkerings as desired.

Limit of two initial entries. Entries based on tinkering other entries are currently unlimited, though if someone annoys me I’ll change that rule.

I’ll post the winners on Tuesday, along with other favorites. Second of all, then, I have an idea.

Virtually everyone writing with advice for writers these days makes much of the fact that the market is changing and blah blah blah. I imagine the same is true for other creative pursuits. But there’s very little information on the pragmatic reality of being a professional writer – what sort of markets and forms people’s “real money” comes from, and just, broadly speaking, information on the working conditions of writers. I can find a few individual discussions – authors here or there who go into detail on their royalty statements – but the market is so idiosyncratic that a few datapoints aren’t useful.

And what I really can’t find are questions like, for instance, do writers tend to make their money by getting small royalty checks off multiple books that add up, do they live entirely off new releases, do they get one hit that keeps them going for a long time, or what? And how does it work for other media?

So I wanted to just set up a nice, informal survey in the hopes that I can get a bunch of answers and compile them into something that paints a decent picture of how working creators make their money. To that end, if you are a professional creator and don’t mind shooting me an e-mail with the answers to a few questions, please do.

Let’s define professional creator subjectively – if a significant portion of your household income comes from your creative work, you qualify.…

June 7, 2013

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 62 (Battlestar Galactica)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum pop between realities, tennant 88

“What about the United States” is, of course, a terribly weird move to make right now. After all, by the time The Christmas Invasion, which we’ll deal with on Monday, aired in the UK, exactly zero episodes of the new series had aired in the United States. Indeed, the airing of Series One in the US coincided with much of the airing of Series Two in the UK. The show’s US popularity lagged the UK by a quite massive margin. So for the most part the question of Doctor Who in America will be tabled until Matt Smith and BBC America, who do, shall we say, rather a better job with the show.

Still, let’s talk about its initial American context on the Sci-Fi Channel. The Sci-Fi Channel is one of the most unfortunate ideas in television history. It was launched as a cable channel in the early 90s, when cable was expanding and everybody thought cult television was actually a way to make money. (A year before The X-Files, then.) Unfortunately this turned out not to be the case. Sci-Fi Channel’s original plan of running old cult series acquired cheap never quite took off, and their forays into original programming were, for the most part, similarly unsuccessful. On the occasions they created good programs – Farscape, for instance, which actually ran after Doctor Who Confidential on BBC Three – they usually ran into the problem that good cult-style science fiction was expensive to create and drew too small an audience to be worth it, which is where most science fiction of this sort falls down. Farscape was good, intelligent, funny, and never attracted ratings high enough for a marginal cable channel like Sci-Fi to produce it.

It’s worth noting that even though science fiction is broadly popular, there’s virtually none of it that’s done in the old cult model anymore. Anyone pitching a high-budget science fiction action-adventure serial aimed squarely at males 18-35 is going to be laughed out of the room. Seriously, is there even a single show that works that way anymore? I’m pretty sure they’ve all adopted some version of the high emotional content/soap opera plotting approach now. (The last arguable survivor I can think of, Warehouse 13, is slated for demolition next year, and is hardly primarily a male audience anyway. Maybe Arrow? I’ve not bothered to watch.) And accordingly, the Sci-Fi Channel, these days rebranded as the non-committal and more trademarkable SyFy, steadily became a shockingly low rent channel known for deliberate pieces of cheese like Sharktopus, more ghost hunting than you can shake a stick at, and a lot of professional wrestling. (A parenthetical on this, as it may well be an entirely US thing – professional wrestling is not actually a sport but a simulated one in which results are pre-determined and stuntmen perform fake wrestling matches according to long-running plotlines. Basically, it’s a gobsmackingly homoerotic soap opera that pretends to be a sports competition. So like the Premier League, only with more match-fixing.)…

June 6, 2013

“Listen to it…The sound of children playing…”: Miri

Forest of Illusions star trek, TOS Season 1 8

That’s not right!

OK, let’s get this out of the way right off the bat: “Miri” is pretty terrible. Its central concept, while interesting, is basic and stretched far too thin, it’s padded to the point whole dialog exchanges and entire scenes are repeated almost verbatim, its pacing is excruciating, it has behind-the-scenes problems that will culminate in Grace Lee Whitney getting fired and it has a someone who looks like a 15-year old falling in love with Captain Kirk (even if she does turn out to be over 300) and as a result this is an episode nobody is especially fond of. In spite of all that, however, it *is* a landmark moment in the history of Star Trek, because this is the first episode overseen by new producer and showrunner-in-all-but-name Gene Coon.

Coon is one of the great unsung heroes of Star Trek and probably the most criminally marginalized person in the entire history of the franchise. Coon’s influence on Star Trek, or at least the Star Trek everyone likes to pretend existed, cannot be overstated: Not to put too fine a point on it, but if there’s something you remember liking about the Original Series that didn’t evolve in some way from “The Cage”, chances are it was Coon’s idea. The fact of the matter is the lion’s share of the utopianism and progressive idealism Star Trek is so frequently praised for comes not from Gene Roddenberry, but from Gene Coon. I don’t want to completely dismiss Roddenberry, mind: He and Coon seemed to generally work well together and one of Roddenberry’s virtues was his willingness to listen to every idea and piece of constructive criticism people gave him. Granted, he was more likely than not to go ahead and do whatever the hell he wanted anyway, but he’d at least listen to you. However, the problems come when people, especially Coon, would give Roddenberry particularly good ideas that caused him to see things in a totally new way and then Roddenberry would then turn around and claim it was his idea all along. This will prove to be a troublingly reoccurring motif.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This is Coon’s first episode and I’d like to take some time to try and tease out a little of how his style contrasts with Roddenberry’s. Unfortunately, Coon is given a right turkey of a story to work with here so the show isn’t doing him any favours right from the start, but even so there are signs things might just be starting to change. For one, this is the first time the Enterprise seems to be doing something other than running errands or law enforcement: It’s not entirely clear what it was up to before receiving the distress signal, but the crew were clearly not on another mission beforehand. And on top of that, the whole teaser and first few scenes are absolute corkers: The Enterprise stumbles upon a planet that is inexplicably an exact clone of Earth and, once the away team beams down, it seems dead except for a group of disturbingly feral children who seem to haunt the town, always hidden just out of sight and chanting in warped versions of playground games.…

June 6, 2013