Eruditorum Press

Pounded in the butt by dialectical materialism.

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 54 (The League of Gentlemen)

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So, I watched The League of Gentlemen for this post, and my immediate reaction was, essentially, barely coherent rage. At a very specific aspect of the show, for what it’s worth, namely the character of Barbara Dixon. Barbara Dixon is a transgender taxi driver where the entire joke is the grotesquery of her still masculine features and the way in which she describes in uncomfortable medical detail the surgery involved. The joke is in part how Barbara’s face is hidden from us, thus stressing the way she’s horrible and ugly. And it’s awful. It’s absolutely, vilely, offensively, awful. It’s a joke about how trans women aren’t real women and can never be attractive and are just deformed wretches. That’s the whole joke. Aren’t trans people ugly. I guess the punchline is when one of them gets raped and murdered for it?

Yes, this is an issue I’m particularly prickly on. Transphobia raises my hackles with a directness that other forms of offensiveness don’t. So much so that it’s just not a topic I’m eager to deal with on this blog. I could get two thousand words of sputtering outrage out of Barbara Dixon in which I meticulously track all of the horrific stereotypes trotted out by it and draw the direct line from what’s a “joke” in The League of Gentlemen to what gets real people killed for being trans. Because it’s there, and it affects people I love, and everyone involved should be ashamed, and I really doubt they are. But it would barely be about Doctor Who, and more to the point, the level of rage involved is just too exhausting to go through, and I just did the post on The Shadows of Avalon, and, I’m sorry, dear reader, I just don’t have it in me. So let’s instead just accept that I am never going to be able to give a polite and reasoned analysis of the merits of The League of Gentlemen and instead do the autopsy of this joke. In other words, how does a character like Barbara Dixon happen.

She’s hardly the only offensive bit of The League of Gentlemen. The canonical example is Papa Lazarou, a blackface circus clown whose actual skin color appears to be grotesque blackface makeup. He’s certainly a jaw-dropping character for the late nineties, and I’m thoroughly unconvinced he ends up anywhere near the right side of good taste, but there’s at least some defense that people marshall whereby he’s not actually a racist parody of minorities as creepy lecherous others, he’s a parody of racist depictions of minorities. I’m inclined to say that’s perhaps too slender a reed of irony to support the character, and that the central joke of Lazarou is in fact how creepy and horrible he is, not how bracing a parody of historical British depictions of race he is. But no matter, because nothing resembling that defense exists for Barbara Dixon. And there are more than these two examples we could turn to. So first of all, we should take her as a symptom of a larger problem.…

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Oh Dear. Women. Not Really My Field. (The Shadows of Avalon)

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I’ll Explain Later

We went skip-happy again. No The Taking of Planet Five (12th best), Frontier Worlds (29th), or Parallel 59 (54th). The Shadows of Avalon is Paul Cornell’s one contribution to the Eighth Doctor Adventures. Mostly it’s a book about Celtic mythology, grief, and the Brigadier. A little bit it’s a book that does a huge plot twist in the novel line as Compassion turns out to be the first of the living TARDISes we met in Alien Bodies and Romana turns a bit evil. Unfortunately it’s a bit wonky. Lars Pearson mourns giving Paul Cornell his first bad review. Vanessa Bishop calls it “less self-indulgent than Paul’s later work for Virgin” but mostly finds time to keep bashing Interference. It’s only at 31st in the rankings, which is strikingly low for Paul Cornell.

——

It’s February of 2000. Gabrielle is at number one with “Rise,” which lasts two weeks before Oasis debuts at number one with “Go Let It Out,” which is unseated a week later by All Saints with “Pure Shores.” R.E.M., Shania Twain, Christina Aguilera, Aqua, Britney Spears, and… OK, I just need to admit, we’re miles outside any part of British music I know a thing about. So I’m just picking band names that amuse me now. Scanty Sandwich, Lyte Funkie Ones, Sash!, Joey Negro, and Ian Brown also chart. Ian Brown’s name doesn’t amuse me, but the song title “Dolphins Were Monkeys” does, so it goes on the list too.

In news, since we left off, Pervez Musharraf successfully executed a coup d’etat in Pakistan, narrowly avoiding dying in a plane crash, which was actually the other alternative. The Catholic Church and Lutherans resolved their theological dispute over salvation. A horrific train crash took place at Ladbroke Grove, killing thirty-one people and prompting major reforms in rail safety in the UK. Gary Glitter was jailed for downloading child pornography, and both the Millennium Dome and the London Eye opened. Also, the odometer rolled over without the world ending, unless you happened to be a Pyrenean Ibex, in which case you went extinct when your last surviving member had a tree fall on her. While in the month this book came out Peanuts ends its run in newspapers.

And in books, The Shadows of Avalon. So there’s an elephant in the room with this book that I’ll spend most of the post on, but I want to set up some other bits first, mostly because everybody focuses on the ending of this book. And while I want to say my piece there, especially as it’s the bit that feeds into the larger narrative best, I want to give the book the repsect of its own terms as well.

This is, by Cornell’s own admission, a book he wrote because he was strapped for cash. It is, as a result, the weakest Paul Cornell novel by some margin. In some ways this is surprising: the continually passionate Eighth Doctor, who absolutely sings in Orman and Blum’s hands, seems similarly tailor-made for Cornell’s frockery.…

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Liberty in Space

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From the October 2011 issue of Panic Moon.  Very slightly edited and revised.  This piece really only scratches the surface of its topic.  Please think of it as a ‘place-holder’ for something longer that I haven’t written yet.

“In the end, the liberals always do what the empire wants.”
– Christopher Hitchens (I got the quote via this.)

No story better demonstrates the ambivalence of Doctor Who’s liberal ethos than ‘Colony in Space’.  It’s an anti-corporate eco-parable.  Industrial technology has destroyed Earth’s environment and so the industrialists want to get their claws into other planets.  IMC even fit claws to their mining robots.  They lie, bully and kill for profit.  Interplanetary law seems to favour such corporations, even without Time Lord supervillains impersonating Adjudicators.  Big business is thus depicted as legal gangsterism.  Strong stuff for Saturday tea-time, as you’d expect from Malcolm Hulke.

“Here comes another one looking for a lost droid…
he’ll feel the edge of my gaffi-stick and no mistake!”

Thing is, ‘Colony’ is also a sci-fi reiteration of the frontier Western genre.  Poor settler townsfolk versus unscrupulous railroad men.  And, like most such tales, it ignores the injustice suffered by the ‘Indians’, ie the Uxariean natives.  They may be innocent of Norton’s slurs, but their depiction mostly follows standard stereotypes: they’re inscrutable, sullen, silent, changeable, likely to attack and/or sacrifice you if the mood strikes them.

It’s not entirely straightforward.  The Guardian, the one Uxareian who speaks, displays a kind of humane wisdom. However, that’s because he’s the last ‘advanced’ Uxariean.  The rest of his people turn out to be the descendants of his ruined high-tech civilisation.  Still, this renders the humans’ dismissive term “primitives” rather ironic.  It also chimes with the backstory about an Earth devastated by technology: the “primitives” may be a glimpse of the future of Earth’s population.

All the same, the story ignores the issue that the humans – colonists or miners – threaten the aboriginal people with displacement.  Ashe and Winton fulminate about their rights against the encroachment of IMC, yet fail to notice that they are themselves encroaching on the land and rights of the natives.  Nobody questions that one or other group of humans has a right to appropriate Uxarieus.  Even the Doctor blithely says that any hostile alien life on the planet can be hunted and destroyed (how very eco-unfriendly of him!) and advocates human colonisation as an escape from lives “like battery hens”.  Meanwhile, not even the Guardian gets to speak about his people’s rights.

Hulke, a one-time Communist whose Doctor Who stories exemplify (ironically enough) the show’s liberal outlook, had previously explored the theme of ‘humans as newcomers’ in ‘Doctor Who and the Silurians’, but there the situation is depicted as an ethical minefield: Silurian prior claims versus human squatters’ rights.  Both sides experience each other as immigrants and both are, in a sense, right.  In ‘Colony in Space’, however, the humans are just alien invaders.  This point is never addressed. Indeed, the Doctor supports the colonists on liberal grounds.…

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Outside of These Experiments You Have Absolutely No Significance (The Blue Angel)

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I’ll Explain Later

The Blue Angel is Paul Magrs’s second Doctor Who novel, co-authored with Jeremy Hoad. It features Iris Wildthyme in a dense plot weaving its way through multiple levels of reality, a Star Trek parody, and a few other bits of postmodernism to boot. Lars Pearson calls it “passionate, whimsical and charming,” while Doctor Who Magazine likes it, but only when it can contextualize it against “the inherited story arc’s desire to crumble the Doctor.” Regardless, it fares rather worse than the other Magrs books in the rankings, stuck at forty-eighth out of seventy-three Eighth Doctor Adventures. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

——

It’s September of 1999. Lou Bega is at number one with “Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit Of…),” which is impressively only one of two songs in the top two with “Mambo” in the title, and one of four in the top ten with explicit Latin influences, which clearly constitutes a bit of a fad. Two weeks later Vengaboys take number one with “We’re Going To Ibiza!,” and a week after that Eiffel 65 takes over with “Blue (Da Ba Dee).” Tom Jones and the Cardigans, Enrique Inglesias, and Ricky Martin also chart. In news, an earthquake kills 143 in Greece, and another kills 2,400 in Taiwan. The President of Indonesia is successfully pressured to allow an international peacekeeping force into the country. And the Midland Bank renames itself HSBC, a name under which it will do lots of impressively bad things.

While in books we have The Blue Angel, the first of two times in which Paul Magrs immediately follows Lawrence Miles in the running order, helping establish a strange sort of dualism between Faction Paradox and Iris Wildthyme as the defining ideas of the era. More than any other book in either the BBC or Virgin line, The Blue Angel wants to stand alone as a novel. It’s a novel that luxuriates in its own structure and space. Its style is not ostentatious or over the top – this is not Sky Pirates!, nor even, for that matter, The Scarlet Empress. But the entire book gives a continual sense of being structured and deliberate. Its casual play with multiple realities and refusal to impose an overall structure on them makes the book actively difficult to reconcile with the rest of the line in any direct way. It doesn’t contradict anything, but so much of what it’s doing stems out of its own structure and feeds into its own concerns that it seems almost silly to spend too much time connecting it elsewhere. On top of that, it is a book that actively declines to offer explanations for itself. It’s not quite a difficult book, but it’s a strange one that doesn’t quite fit in. In this regard it’s a welcome break from the pace of the EDAs I’ve mostly set for myself – in many ways it’s the one EDA I’m looking at because it’s interesting on its own merits instead of because it fits cleanly into the larger narrative of the series.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 53 (Queer as Folk)

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I was going to go with this, but I realized I didn’t actually
know what Google’s policies on “adult content” were. Oh
yeah, NSFW and all.

When talking about The Scarlet Empress I suggested that there was an aesthetic of hedonism represented in the book that was a viable alternative to the paranoid excesses of the 1990s. Then, last post, I made some off-handed comments about abandoning ethics in favor of aesthetics. So I suppose this is a decent time to put my cards on the table, since the turn in question is a pretty massive one. And, more to the point, one that’s broadly germane to what the blog is doing through here.

It has escaped few readers’ notice that the tone of the blog has shifted as we’ve approached the present day. Since we’re now lagging the present only by about thirteen years, the lens of history has grown somewhat less clarifying. Put simply, it’s easier to talk about the movement of historical forces when your subject is 1969 or 1979 than it is 1989, and it’s harder still in 1999 or 2009. The game is still being played. If I say that the idealism of the 60s utopians gave way to the bleaker youth culture of punk and its descendants, well, that’s easy. No points on award for that. But if I start talking about what the culture of 1999 gave way to it means I have to declare a defining cultural milieu for the present day. Which, you know, how to be completely irrelevant in one easy step, that one.

But I’ve got to peel off the Band-Aid brand adhesive bandage eventually, and so we may as well. There is at least one shift left to be had in utopianism between 1999 and the present day. There’s a shift in paranoia as well, of course – two of them, really. But those are easier to track. Look for a big news event and you can find a shift in paranoia. The shifts in utopianism are altogether trickier. But equally, you can clearly see that we’ve had one because Doctor Who in 2005 is unlike what you’d have expected Doctor Who to be just six years earlier. We’ve already seen the technical transition to how to do Doctor Who, and for the most part that’s done: there haven’t been a lot of major jumps in the aesthetics of television since the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In fact, things are getting a bit stagnant on that front. (Though actually, people have won Oscars for achievements in cinematography less bold than the camera-as-unreliable-narrator tricks in Day of the Moon)

But the philosophical transition is altogether more complex. Because there was something surprising about Russell T Davies’s Doctor Who when it showed up in 2005. And it struck a chord we didn’t expect, or even quite realize, could be played. And if 2005 was the first time that chord hit the mainstream then Queer as Folk in 1999 was the first time it was properly played.…

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Apocalypse Below (or The Tractate Face-Off)

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From Panic Moon, July 2011.  Edited, and with new material in a seprate coda.


This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end

At first, ‘Frontios’ seems like the odd one out amongst Christopher H. Bidmead’s Doctor Who scripts. Unlike ‘Logopolis’ and ‘Castrovalva’, it’s overtly political and doesn’t seem to be powered by any underlying scientific concept. Also, it has monsters in it.

Bidmead included monsters – reluctantly – at the insistence of John Nathan-Turner.  On reflection, this seems a dodgy call. Monsters from Bidmead were always going to be too concept-heavy to realise properly on screen. Sure enough, he comes up with giant woodlice that can disguise themselves as rocks until they unexpectedly uncurl… which was never gonna look good on the day.

Apparently finding the macabre more fascinating than he expected, Bidmead also included alien machines made with bits of corpses. This was very tuned in to the then-current turn towards biomechanics and ‘body horror’ in the fantasy genre, but it proved too horrific for Doctor Who to attempt on screen (though it livens up the novelisation).

The politics is also a departure. Aside from Tegan’s worries about sweatshops in ‘Logopolis’ and the hilarious sexism of the Castrovalvans, previous Bidmead scripts seem politically detached. He’s a world-builder, but not in the utopian or dystopian manner. So ‘Frontios’ comes a little out of leftfield… though that’s the only leftish thing about it. I’ve no idea what Bidmead’s own politics may be, but ‘Frontios’ seems to say that the ordinary people require stern discipline, that they want and need confident rulers. The story frowns on the ‘every man for himself’ ethic, yet implies that only hierarchy and obedience stand between society and what Hobbes described as the “war of all against all”.

In the absence of Plantagenet, there is “anarchy”, with the colonists turning to looting with a rapidity that is almost funny. Thrown “outside the system”, Cockerill is quickly attacked by ravening ‘Retrogrades’. However, when he apparently defeats the hungry earth, Cockerill is eagerly adopted as a replacement leader by the mob. Meanwhile, Plantagenet’s bravery proves he is genetically fit to rule (he is, after all, named after a line of kings). Brazen – the personification of authority – ultimately proves himself admirable, his noble final words being “that’s an order!”.

Actually, I think ‘Frontios’ has more in common with ‘Logopolis’ than it appears.  Bidmead never takes the series into the past – he’s too aware of entropy as ‘time’s arrow’ to believe that you can go backwards – and his view of the far future is one of maximum entropy. The “failure proof technology” that failed, the dwindling population, the wrecked ship, the malfunctioning generator, the “doomed planet Earth”, etc. Mine shafts collapse.  Lights stop working. The TARDIS falls apart. Even “eaten by the earth” sounds like a metaphor for putrefaction.

The politics reflects this state of decay. Order becomes disorder as Orderlies become disorderly.…

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Categorically Speaking

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Kant’s categorical imperative is an expression of the bourgeois liberal ideas of the 18th century, expressed as morality.  It is progressive in the sense that it attempts to derive morality from Reason.  It is part of the Enlightenment.  It also expresses the new, universal promises of the bourgeois revolutions in that it universalises (i.e. “All men are created equal”).  It is based on the principle of universality.  What you do must apply to all people or it fails to be truly moral. 

However, it is also based on a bourgeois notion of rights.  The concept of ‘rights’ is a product of the rise of bourgeois property/trade relations.  One brings one’s rights to the market place and, on that basis, one participates in the putatively level playing field.  For Kant, one negotiates the conflicts between these rights on the basis of contractual clauses.  If the Party of the First Part undertakes to do such and such, the Party of the Second part will be understood to be obliged to do so and so.  It is this which finally inverts the universality of the notion into an entire bourgeois conception of individualism.  Through this embedded notion of contractual obligations, the decision as to universal moral actions rests with the individual’s willingness to enter into a personal contract regarding his conduct, his willingness to be bound.

The sting in the tail lies in the fact that different people will always have different notions as to what is or isn’t universally desirable.  One individual may consider it highly desirable that theft be considered universally immoral because they have a great personal interest in the institution of private property (i.e. because they own lots of it).  Another (who perhaps owns little) may be prepared to risk universalising the permissability of theft if he thinks he can steal what he wants and then protect his stolen goods by force.  Alternatively, there may be those who feel that there are worse prospects for the future than the fall of private property.  And, in practice, the guardians of morality will always be ready to claim the universality of laws that they themselves break, simply because they take a more pragmatic view of Reason.

The R/reasonable promises of bourgeois liberalism and Enlightenment will always have such loopholes in their social contracts and, as a result, will always find themselves in full or partial, official or unofficial abeyance.  The Enlightenment declared that all men were created equal, but oversaw (and, indeed, was partially built upon) all black men (and women) being crated equally… for shipping.  Why should a white man who profits from the slave trade care if ‘enslave black people’ became a universal moral maxim?  He knows the colour of his own skin will exempt him from the chains, and the inequality of property and opportunity will protect him from universal business competition.…

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You May Find His Behavior Somewhat Erratic (Interference)

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This post should display in five distinct typefaces and three distinct colors of text. Although the post is readable if it is not formatted like that on your screen, the difficulty level of it increases considerably (not that it’s easy either way), and you may wish to read on an alternate device.

I’ll Explain Later

We skipped David McIntee’s Autumn Mist, which was a bit of a flop. Taking up both the Eighth Doctor Adventure and Past What is the significance of retconning Planet of the Spiders out of existence? There are some answers we can simply rule out as terribly silly. It does not, obviously, do any violence to Planet of the Spiders as a 150-minute long stretch of video. That remained pleasantly inviolate on everybody’s bookshelf in VHS form, as it had for the For reasons not entirely unrelated to a desire to be ostentatious, I periodically claim to have no ethical principles, only aesthetic ones. In this regard the Remote seem almost designed to be interesting to me. That said, it’s not as though either Miles or I have terribly original ideas here: the idea that there’s a link to be found between aesthetics and ethics has deep roots. Kant made Miles’s comments on the bottle universes are difficult to quite square away. He claims to have created them to sort out the continuity between the Virgin line and the BBC Books line, with the book that convinced him that the BBC Books line wasn’t set to be in the same universe as the Virgin line being The Eight Doctors, and blames writers like Kate Orman and Gary Russell for When talking about Grant Morrison and The Invisibles I posited that Morrison was of the man’s party and didn’t know it. That is, he is hopelessly torn between a revolutionary aesthetic and a commitment to working within a fundamentally anti-revolutionary form. A similar affliction seems to plague Lawrence Miles, albeit one that I simply haven’t read enough to resolve quite at this Doctor Adventure slot for the month, Interference is a two-part Doctor Who novel featuring both the Third and Eighth Doctors. We’ve covered it once already, and as with The Two Doctors, it is my intention not to repeat myself, though equally, not to contradict myself. Much. If I can avoid it. In any case, Interference is the big one, both literally and figuratively, setting past eight years. Nor, of course, can this be claimed as in any meaningful way similar to War of the Daleks. War of the Daleks was stupid because it ran roughshod over stories and told us that what we saw on the screen was wrong. Interference renders Planet of the Spiders non-canonical, yes, but it keeps it intact as it explicit in The Critique of Judgment, and it appears that Hannah Arendt died in the earliest stages of working on a book that would have explicitly based a theory of political philosophy on Kant’s aesthetics. I make the claim because it’s amusing and brash, not because it’s terribly original.…

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Out of Eden

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From the October 2011 issue of Panic Moon.  As ever, lightly edited and titivated… ‘cos I just can’t help tinkering.

When Doctor Who talks about evolution, it doesn’t usually bother getting the facts right.  ‘Evolution of the Daleks’, for instance, seems to think species change when genes mutate morally because of lightning bolts.  Such ideas go right back to ‘The Daleks’, in which the two races on Skaro have changed totally in mere “hundreds of years” of mutation, with the warrior Thals becoming natural pacifists in the process.  (Incidentally, it’s ironic that this supposedly anti-Nazi parable speaks of blonde, blue-eyed, athletic specimens as “refined” and “perfect”.)

Real evolution does involve mutations, but they’re not sudden and drastic as depicted in, to pick another example, ‘The Mutants’.  Instead we’re talking about tiny replication errors in genetic code which are preserved or rejected by natural selection, leading to big changes over very long periods.  This creates staggering variety on our planet alone.  However, most aliens in the Doctor Who universe look like British actors, which (accidentally) implies that the humanoid shape is a universal pinnacle or goal of evolution.  Again, real evolution teaches us the opposite.  There’s nothing “perfect” about humans.  We’re no ‘better evolved’ than worms.  Species succeed when they fit their niches.  ‘Full Circle’ alone understands this.  The Alzarians are humanoid only because they evolved to fit inside the Starliner.

Doctor Who has sometimes been sceptical of such human hubris.  In ‘Doctor Who and the Silurians’, humans encounter ‘advanced’ reptiles who see them as errant apes.  ‘Inferno‘ implies that snarling beasts lurk beneath the lab coat or uniform.  ‘The Invisible Enemy’ equates the “Great Break Out” of humanity with a viral epidemic.  In ‘The Ark in Space’, the Doctor praises humans as “indomitable”, but the Wirrn confront humanity with a lethal reflection of the same evolutionary urge to survive and inherit the Earth.

‘The Ark in Space’ retells the Old Testament myth of the flood.  ‘Genesis of the Daleks‘ also adapts the book of… well, Genesis.  Both stories are about species changing, about them subsuming and defeating other species.  But ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ is also fundamentally about creations disobeying their creator.  Hence the lack of scientific accuracy: the science isn’t the real interest of the storytellers.  Instead, evolution takes on religious connotations.  This is understandable.  Evolution, as a scientific origin story, thrives in the gap in the cultural ecology left by the decline of religion.  And, like much science-fiction, Doctor Who uses scientific and technological idioms to retell myths and legends.

‘Genesis of the Daleks’ also reiterates original sin: the Daleks are cursed by their genes to be bad.  Mutations of morality again!  This sort of thing mirrors tabloid stories about ‘genes for crime’, but Doctor Who has also tackled reactionary appropriations of evolution.  ‘Survival’ critiqued Thatcherism by exploring what happens when the values of ruthless Darwinian competition are applied to society.  The term ‘survival of the fittest’ was coined by Herbert Spencer, a 19th century pioneer of libertarianism. …

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Outside the Government 8 (Dead Romance)

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Dead Romance is, it seems, the best Lawrence Miles novel ever. Possibly the best Doctor Who-related novel ever. And so, whatever the larger argument I may be making about Lawrence Miles’s failings are, and I am, in fact, making one, we should probably stop and sort out the fact that this is bloody fantastic. Because it is. Whatever the flaws of the Morrison/Miles approach in general, Dead Romance is a book that works and works very well, and it illustrates the things that approach can do.

What everybody praises about Dead Romance is its twist ending. So here’s the thing. I kind of hate twist endings and, if someone were foolish enough to give me despotic powers over all fiction, I would impose a ten-year moratorium on them along with creepy children and procedurals with social misfit lead characters. The problem with twist endings is that they’re cheap. They’re a cheap way to get out of having to write an ending that actually follows from what comes before. They’re what you do when you can’t actually resolve what you have in an interesting fashion – you decide in the last act that you’re going to throw everything away and establish a new premise for your story.

And yet Dead Romance actually makes it work. There are a couple tricks here. The first is that the narrator is complicit in the deception. This makes a big difference, simply because it means that the deception is thoroughly motivated. When the book pulls the rug out from under us it does so for reasons that are intimately related to the things that Christine has wanted all book, most notably to feel as though she’s real. Everything about why she’d be lying to the reader is set up early on. Furthermore, the revelation itself is set up early on. The revelation that Christine is inside a bottle universe from the rest of the Virgin line is essentially the same revelation as the one that she was just a clone grown by Cwej.

Secondly, it turns on an entirely believable revelation about a character we already know. Cwej is a known quantity to readers of the New Adventures, even if he hadn’t actually appeared in a while. And while we might want to believe that he would never do the sorts of things depicted here, the fact of the matter is that it’s all too easy to believe that he could get this far in over his head and make decisions this bad. It’s quintessential Cwej, tragically enough. And because the twist hinges on that, it avoids the feeling of arbitrariness that plagues some twist endings.

Thirdly, and crucially, it ends up making Christine a more interesting character. Through most of the book we assume she’s the lone survivor of the world, which is interesting but arbitrary. We’re looking at the world through the eyes of the one person who happened to be lucky enough not to die. Fair enough, but ultimately arbitrary. But by establishing that she’s a clone with implanted memories we get a reason why she should survive, which is that she’s not really of the world in the first place.…

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