Eruditorum Press

An entryist coup for your subconscious

You Were Expecting Someone Else 10 (FASA)

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The 1984 Doctor Who roleplaying game published by FASA is, as roleplaying games go, not hugely exciting or interesting. As Doctor Who merchandise it’s slightly more exciting – and inadvertently hilarious at times, such as when it provides a character sheet for Peri that reveals her to be wildly less competent than a newly created player character would be. (So far as I can tell from a perusal of the rules she’s spent exactly eight attribute points and three skill points. A new character should have 74-84 skill points and 38-48 attribute points. I assure you that if you knew what any of this meant it would be hilarious.)

But what’s interesting about it, and why it gets more than a footnote in the blog is that it allows for an interesting look at the rather nebulous process of “identification” and its slightly saner cousin “empathy.” It should come as no surprise, given the rather hardline anti-realist and anti-escapist position of this blog, that I am no fan of “identification” as a concept. In almost all cases I strongly favor models of reading/viewing/whatevering that openly and consistently acknowledge the fact that fiction is fiction, feeling that even if the resulting theories are a bit more complex at first glance they avoid the sorts of absurd contortions that are needed the moment you start digging into a model based around the idea of immersion, escapism, realism, or, yes, identification. Readings based on some flavor of “suspension of disbelief” require the reader to continually moderate between a knowingly false premise (“this is real”) and a true one (“this is not real”). In practice this is always going to be more complex than a system that sticks to one set of true premises.

Many years ago a professor expressed the problems of identification with the following example, which I don’t know if was his originally or not. Imagine a horror movie with a female protagonist walking up a hill towards what the audience knows to be a haunted house, but that she does not. The girl is not afraid in this circumstance, but the audience is. Then, at the end of the movie, imagine her battered, injured, but having finally killed whatever monster lives in the house. At this moment the audience feels triumphant, but the girl feels traumatized, hurt, and terrified. Not only is the audience clearly not identifying with the protagonist here, were the audience to identify with the protagonist the story wouldn’t work at all. In order to function that plot has to have the audience and the protagonist feeling almost the exact opposite.

To my mind, at least, everything one wants to get out of the concept of identification can be accomplished with far more sensible concepts like “investment” and “empathy.” What’s at issue in the hypothetical horror movie is not that we feel the same things as the protagonist but that we both understand what she feels and have an emotional investment in it that is rooted in similarities between her and her situation and things we recognize in our own lives.…

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Green Day

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This is a slightly-tweaked version of something originally published in the January 2011 edition of Panic Moon.  Back issues of this excellent fanzine (now, sadly, on hiatus) are still available, here.

Plant monsters. That’s an old one. Where does it come from? Maybe it’s about the Venus Fly Trap, the cactus or the thorns on the stem of a rose. Maybe it’s about the faces that we see in the gnarled bark of trees; the faces that gave us generations of tales about tree folk. We see this in ‘The Seeds of Doom’, in the initial humanoid shape of the monster, in its booming threats, in its communion with Chase, in the way that the Doctor keeps calling it Keeler ironically, having chided Sarah for referring to the transformed Winlett by name.

Maybe it’s the sheer unnerving silence and mindlessness of things that nonetheless seem to have flesh and veins and skin, that nonetheless grow and move and breed.  We see this in ‘The Seeds of Doom’, with all the emphasis on skin, blood and pain… and Chase’s obsessional desire to “see what happens when the Krynoid touches human flesh”. We see this in the way the Krynoid moves, unfettered by roots. The way it seethes and crawls. The way it is tentacular, like the octopoda or squid monsters that pervade 20th century literary/cinematic/political monsterology, standing
for the threatened global reach of the powerfully, shapelessly, amorphously unknowable.

Maybe the Krynoid is an echo of the trauma of the first humans to discover that sometimes delicious-looking vegetation gives you agonizing stomach ache… or kills you… or causes terrifying hallucinations. We can see this fear demonstrated in Stevenson, mesmerised by his pod… and Winlett and Keeler so “taken over” that they literally transform into nightmare images of the insane roots that have taken their reason prisoner.

Maybe it’s guilt at tearing up and eating beautiful, living, growing things; we see this in Chase’s later ideological hatred of “animal fiends”. Maybe we can’t help see it – on some level – as exploitation, hence the Doctor’s word: “revolution”. Maybe it’s guilt at the way we wipe out plant species with our industrialised carelessness, guilt that makes us imagine them turning on us. We see this in the existence of the World Ecology Bureau, and Chase’s accusation to Dunbar that the endangered plants are ignored because of a pro-animal bias.

Maybe it’s about ancient history, about wars between peoples over cultivated land covered in crops; organised violence that had been unknown to hunter-gatherer societies for thousands of years until the development of agriculture. Maybe it’s the old and persistent nightmare of the classes of priests and administrators who started to rise once agriculture came, who hoarded the surplus grain and used it to wield power over the people. We see these fears demonstrated in ‘The Seeds of Doom’, with Scorby the violent capturer of coveted plants, with Harrison Chase (the sole proprietor and abbot of a “green cathedral”) lording it over everyone else because of his wealth, owning people “body and soul”.

Maybe it’s to do with the way vegetation encroaches upon human civilisations, almost like an invading enemy, unless carefully held in check.…

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Independence Day

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This is a slightly-expanded/tweaked version of something originally published in the January 2011 edition of Panic Moon.  Back issues of this excellent fanzine (now, sadly, on hiatus) are still available, here.

In ‘The Mutants’, Earth’s empire is the British Empire in decline, as it disassembles itself out of economic necessity (true in general terms but misleading in particular; the British were usually savage in their resistance to independence). The Marshall echoes Ian Smith, who ran the racist apartheid state of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and tried to hang on after the British cut him loose.

We get a positive view of a national liberation movement. Ky is clearly the figurehead of a powerful anti-Overlord groundswell; they’re called “terrorists” naturally, and maybe they are, but they’re fighting for their freedom. We get no patronising sermons to oppressed people about non-violence.

The system is depicted as inherently racist, featuring a version of apartheid. The Solonians are not black, but then neither were the Irish… and they were the first to come under the British heel. ‘The Mutants’ shows racism, quite rightly, as the ideology of empire, not the cause.

There is an apologia for empire that stresses the “progress” it can bring to its subjects. The concept of “progress” is really what this story interrogates. Earth hasn’t brought much to Solos, whatever the Administrator’s ceremonial bromides. Of course, Solos only seemed in need of ‘progress’ to the humans. It suited the Solonians just fine, as you’d expect. This expresses something very true about colonialism: that what the colonisers see as raw material needing to be shaped, the colonised often see as shaped just fine already thank you very much. To the Overlords, what they’d call “progress” (uniforms, racism and technology that destroys ecosystems) is all up on Skybase, their celestial seat. Understandably, Ky rejects it. The script backs him up with the descriptions of Earth as worn out, a wasteland of ash, slag and clinker: “the fruits of technology” as the Doctor says. This is the real reason for the humans’ presence on Solos. This is fairly accurate as a picture of a declining empire. An empire that, say, runs on fossil fuels that are gradually running out might be keen to control other people’s oil. Of course, you can’t really understand modern imperialism without understanding capitalism, which doesn’t appear in ‘The Mutants’, not even by implication.

Imperial “progress” often means people like Jaeger using their advanced technology to customize colonies for their needs in ways that will decimate the natives. This is pretty much what happened when the white man arrived in Africa and America. The Doctor is there to personify the other possibility; the humanistic, ethical science that we’d all like to believe in. There is no idiotic blanket condemnation of science, just recognition that it can be a weapon in the hands of power. We are also invited to condition science with an awareness that older forms of discourse might have objective validity. The Doctor brings the ancient artefacts of the Solonians to the attention of hippy-anthropologist Sondergaard and they find accurate accounts of history and biology in the native culture.

I used to think that this story represented evolution (inaccurately) as an upward progress from brutish animalism to enlightened and “higher” forms… but that doesn’t hold.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 29 (Max Headroom, Tripods)

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So what went wrong? I mean, the flaws are obvious enough in The Twin Dilemma. And it’s easy enough to pin the blame. But what’s the alternative? Throughout the Davison era, even when it was having its biggest disasters, it was at least relatively clear what the good parts of the show were. They may have frequently struggled to break through, but we could usually tell what good Doctor Who was supposed to look like. But the highlights of the Colin Baker eras, though existent, are so few and far between that it’s difficult to say what they should have done. For a long time the conventional wisdom was “not cast Colin Baker” or “have a different concept of the Doctor,” but as we’ll see Big Finish proves that Baker’s Doctor could have worked. Still, the advance in storytelling techniques over the nearly 30 years since this era aired mean that we can’t just say “they should have done what Big Finish did.” The question is what Doctor Who in 1985-86 should have looked like. 

The usual technique would be to look at what else was going on in TV sci-fi in Britain. But we have slim pickings for this era, so in this case that becomes where we start. Or, rather, in the difference between them.

See, Doctor Who has always existed in a liminal space between children’s television and science fiction. This may seem a bit of a strange claim given the rather obvious fact that there’s a good deal of children’s television is science fiction, but it’s important to realize that these are two distinct traditions with a subtle but significant philosophical difference at their heart, and that Doctor Who has always had to do at least some active work to bridge them.

If one were to make a horrific overgeneralization about children’s fiction then one of the least inaccurate ones available would be to observe that children’s literature tends to focus thematically on the existence of a threshold between two worlds, whether they be mundane and fantastic or otherwise. The logic of this is not difficult to figure out – it’s as sensible a metaphor for coming of age as exists. But at the heart of this approach is the fact that a children’s story tends to be about obtaining some degree of mastery and sense over the strange second world. Put another way, the basic arc of children’s fiction is that it makes the strange familiar.

Science fiction, on the other hand, when considered as a genre instead of as an iconography, does almost the exact opposite. Science fiction’s main trick is to use the expanded possibilities of its iconography to reflect our own world back at us from an odd angle. So science fiction goes not for making the strange familiar, but for making the familiar strange.

These ideas are not impossible to reconcile, not least because science fiction can serve equally as a vague iconography that is easily made familiar, and because children’s literature often involves making the world that its protagonist starts in strange along wiht making the new world familiar.…

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Does It Offend You? (The Twin Dilemma)

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What do you tell a companion with two black eyes?

It’s March 22nd, 1984. Lionel Richie is at number one with “Hello,” and remains so for the whole of this story. Sade, Culture Club, Bananarama, and Depeche Mode also chart, along with, at number two for the second week of this story, the Weather Girls with “It’s Raining Men.” Hallelujah. In real news, the heyday of the Satanic ritual abuse panic begins in sync with the Colin Baker era as teachers at the McMartin Preschool are falsely accused of it. Speaking of Satanic ritual abuse, Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Starlight Express opens in London.

While on television, we go from the supposed best Doctor Who story ever to the supposed worst. Unlike The Caves of Androzani, The Twin Dilemma made it as the worst story for two polls running. On basic quality, this might not be quite fair. It’s very bad, but as a matter of competent production and provision of a modicum of entertainment it’s not demonstrably worse than many others. If you were to show someone a selection of this, Warriors of the Deep, The Horns of Nimon, Mark of the Rani, and The Monster of Peladon and ask them to pick the worst of them I don’t think you’d see this one picked in particular excess to the others. There are actually moments of it that border on the compelling. I mean, this is praising with faint damnation, but it’s still worth noting that, taken on its own and out of context, and judged purely on its storytelling merits, this is merely among the worst stories ever made, but it’s not clear that it’s the worst story ever by any means.

But, of course, when have we ever taken things out of context here? Yes, the biggest problem with this story is its context in Doctor Who, but the thing aired on television in a context everyone involved knew about, so really, that criticism sticks pretty well. Because what this story does is doom Colin Baker’s tenure as the Doctor and, in doing so, ensure the show’s cancellation. In this regard it is the single story most destructive to Doctor Who. Never mind Michael Foot. At 100 minutes, this is the longest suicide note in history.

There are, of course, self-inflicted wounds prior to this. If the past two seasons hadn’t started with pieces of utter crap like Warriors of the Deep and The Arc of Infinity, if the Peter Davison era hadn’t been a monument to wasted potential, et cetera, et cetera. The Twin Dilemma’s spectacular faceplant and sabotaging of the series didn’t happen in isolation. On the other hand, it’s also not the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s the entire bale of hay flung at high velocity towards the camel’s back. Doctor Who was vulnerable coming into this story, yes, but even if the Davison era had been a consistent triumph it would have been, at the very least, in serious trouble coming out of this story.…

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Opposite Reaction

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The TARDIS Eruditorum blog recently took the opportunity to connect ‘The Caves of Androzani‘ with the 1984-85 Miner’s Strike.  In the process, Philip Sandifer (the author of the blog) writes:

…Arthur Scargill, head of the NUM, made an egregious political miscalculation. Faced with an accelerated schedule for closing the pits and afraid that he’d lose the vote, Scargill declined to submit the strike to a national vote. This was against NUM rules and allowed Thatcher to delegitimize the strike, which she wasted no time doing, comparing striking miners to Argentina in the Falklands. 

and…

The propaganda war, combined with Scargill’s inept politicking, kept the strike from gaining broad support with the public, and it ended in failure a year later, leaving the mining industry and union a shadow of its former self. 

Sandifer mentions police savagery and also the wholesale media propaganda assault against the NUM (though he talks about the ‘redtops’, as though it was a purely tabloid phenomenon).  Ultimately, however, he seems to imply a plague upon both Thatcher’s and Scargill’s houses.

In the various permutations that this view takes, the heroic resistance of 150,000 workers and their families over a year of struggle is always deemed to have been overshadowed by the lack of a formal vote on it.  Here’s a vital corrective to such apparently reasonable ‘even-handedness’, courtesy of Paul Foot in The Vote: How It was Won and How it Was Undermined:

Scargill had failed to win three strike ballots because of the divisions among miners caused by the incentive agreements that had been pushed through by the employers in spite of a ballot vote against them.  The ballot results left NUM leadership with the agonizing prospect that pits could be closed piecemeal, one by one, or two by two, and that the union would be prevented by hostile ballot results from responding.  This was the background to the confrontation that was started by the closure, without consultation, and in defiance of all agreements, of Cottonwood colliery in Yorkshire.  Encouraged by the executive, and by a wave of flying pickets from the threatened pits, strike after strike led very quickly to a massive national confrontation, in which pretty well all the pits in Yorkshire, Scotland, Wales and most of the Midlands were on strike, leaving only traditionally less militant areas, Nottinghamshire and Leicesterhsire, at work. 

To those who bleated, ‘I wish Scargill had had a ballot’, there was a prompt reply: ‘Suppose he had had a ballot and lost it – what then?’  Were the miners leaders expected to stand aside while the Government and its newly appointed Coal Board laid waste to the British coal industry?  The truth was that actions spoke louder than ballots.  The sheer size and breathtaking solidarity of the mass strike was the fact, and the suggestion that the action should have been put at risk by a ballot was an argument that could be sustained only by the enemies of the miners’ union.  Very soon, moreover, the democratic potential of the miners’ strike was every bit as obvious as it had been in 1921 and 1926, if not more so.

…

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The Grinding Engines of the Universe (The Caves of Androzani)

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Don’t worry, Peri. It’s just a Voord.

It’s March 8th, 1984. 99 Red Balloons continue to float along atop the charts, and will play out Peter Davison. Also in the top ten are Van Halen with “Jump” and Billy Joel with “An Innocent Man,” while lower in the charts are King Crimson and the Fraggle Rock theme, a trivia fact I included just to use the phrase “King Crimson and the Fraggle Rock theme.” Top albums are Into The Gap by The Thompson Twins and Human’s Lib by Howard Jones.

In the news, Gerry Adams and three other Sinn Féin members are injured in an attack by the Ulster Volunteer Force, and the other William F. Buckley is kidnapped in Beirut. But the real news and, in many ways, most crucial backdrop for this story comes with the start of the miner’s strike.

It is difficult to come up with a better illustration of the idea of a “clusterfuck” than the 1984-85 miner’s strike. As a pragmatic issue, the strike consisted of Thatcher’s government running rings around the National Union of Miners so as to humiliate them and break the back of what had previously been the most powerful union in the country. Thatcher’s government stockpiled coal prior to announcing the pit closures that sparked the strike, thus blunting the immediate impact of the strike and preventing the calamity of the Three Day Week. Meanwhile Arthur Scargill, head of the NUM, made an egregious political miscalculation. Faced with an accelerated schedule for closing the pits and afraid that he’d lose the vote, Scargill declined to submit the strike to a national vote. This was against NUM rules and allowed Thatcher to delegitimize the strike, which she wasted no time doing, comparing striking miners to Argentina in the Falklands.

The resulting PR coup was, quite literally, literally bloody and brutal. Backed by the redtops Thatcher unleashed the police force, which was spectacularly violent and corrupt. Indeed, the extent of the depravity is still coming out. Only a few weeks ago The Guardian ran a story observing that the South Yorkshire police, who arrested 95 people at the so-called Battle of Orgreave before having to drop prosecution on all of them due to having fabricated the evidence, would five years later be largely responsible for the Hillsborough disaster and the appalling attempt to blame the incident on Liverpool supporters. In both cases, of course, the police and government were aided and abetted by Murdoch and The Sun. The propaganda war, combined with Scargill’s inept politicking, kept the strike from gaining broad support with the public, and it ended in failure a year later, leaving the mining industry and union a shadow of its former self.

In more fundamental terms, of course, the strike is a classic example of the false opposition. Of course closure of collieries had to happen. The coal industry was increasingly unprofitable, and even in 1984 it was clear that in the medium to long term a transition away from coal mining and towards other forms of energy was necessary.…

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Victory of the Icon 2

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Winston Churchill was the British Secretary of State for War in 1920.  As such, he was the British politician most directly and personally responsible for the Black and Tans, the notorious ‘special policemen’ (paramilitaries really) sent in to help the Royal Irish Constabulary put down the revolt against British rule.  The Irish people had rejected Home Rule in a referendum… only to find that the British were going to try to impose it by force.  This triggered the conflict – a nationalist revolt met by imperial repression – that is known as the ‘Anglo-Irish War’.

The Black and Tans went on a rampage of violence, targeting civilians alongside anyone suspected of involvement in the revolt.  Indiscriminate reprisals and revenge killings were the order of the day.  Many whole towns and villages were besieged and sacked, often simply as collective punishment for the killings of RIC officers.  They beat, shot, starved and tortured people.  They tore out people’s fingernails in front of their families.  ‘Murder squads’ disguised in civilian clothes roamed the streets.  The Tans sacked Cork and left the city centre in smoking ruins.  The RIC murdered the Mayor in front of his wife and son.

All this horror on the authority of Lloyd George and Winston.  An officer veteran of the Cork ‘campaign’, the man later to become famous as Field Marshall Montgomery, wrote later that it “never bothered me a bit how many houses were burnt.”

Churchill was once challenged about the behaviour of the Tans by Sir Henry Wilson.  Wilson recorded a conversation between himself, Churchill and Major General Henry Tudor (who was running murder squads) on 23rd September 1920:

Tudor made it very clear that the Police and the Black and Tans and the 100 Intelligence officers are all carrying out reprisal murders. … At Balbriggan, Thurles and Galway yesterday, the local Police marked down certain SFs (Sinn Feiners) as in their opinion the actual murderers or instigators and then coolly went and shot them without question or trial. Winston saw very little harm in this but it horrifies me.

Wilson was later assassinated by the IRA… but before we weep for him, we should bear in mind that he wasn’t against shooting people just for being in a political party opposed to British rule… he just thought it should be done ‘officially’.

In Ireland, 1920 was known as the ‘year of terror’.

Mind you, some of the atrocities often attributed to the Black and Tans were actually the work of the regular RIC, or of a different force of British paramilitary terrorists known as the Auxiliaries.  The idea of the ‘Auxies’ seems to trace back to Churchill.  He proposed the idea to a conference of ministers in May 1920.

The Auxies were smaller in their numbers than the Tans but were generally considered cleverer, more ruthless and more violent.  They were involved in the infamous ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre at Croke Park in November 1920.  RIC men, aided by Auxies, indiscriminately sprayed bullets into the crowd at a football game, fatally wounding 14 civilians.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 21 (Warmonger)

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Given that none of the BBC Books novels featuring Davison’s Doctor are particularly beloved, the pick of a novel was always going to be one of the two golden turkeys – this or Gary Russell’s Divided Loyalties. I picked this for two reasons. First, Divided Loyalties was a Season 19 book and having just come off of a host of non-televised entries at the end of the Tom Baker era I didn’t want to do two novels in Season 19. And I was pretty firmly committed to Cold Fusion. But the second is that Divided Loyalties received mostly scathing and truly outraged reviews on the Doctor Who Ratings Guide, whereas nearly every review of Warmonger consists of several paragraphs of admitting that the novel is unfathomably awful before the author sheepishly confesses that they loved it. (Of course, several of those exist for Divided Loyalties, and more than a few outright pans of Warmonger exist as well)

For those who have never heard of this… interesting book, allow me to provide a basic plot summary. Peri inadvertently gets her arm ripped off by a pterodactyl, so the Doctor rushes her to a pre-Brain of Morbius Karn in the hopes that Dr. Solon will reattach it. He does, but unfortunately the Doctor and Peri get caught up in galactic politics and the rise of Morbius such that Peri is stranded on an alien world as a fierce guerilla warrior against Morbius’s galactic army and the Doctor is rechristened the Supremo and leading an army of Draconians, Sontarans, Cybermen, Ogrons, and Ice Warriors against Morbius in what is, we are repeatedly assured, a terribly dire, ugly war. Eventually he rescues Peri and she makes a drunken pass at him, then they defeat Morbius, the end.

If this sounds like a hot mess, you are underestimating things. But let’s pause for a moment and note two things. First, Terrance Dicks’s gloriously readable prose continues to rescue him. As preposterous as this book is, Dicks is able to make each fresh absurdity another step in a standard plucky adventure, marching cheerily through the action with a horribly compelling glee. Second, Terrance Dicks is surely way too smart a writer to pen a book this bad by accident. In fact, it is my firm conviction that this book consists of Terrance Dicks, elder statesmen of the Doctor Who world, in his 34th year of working professionally with Doctor Who, just unrepentantly screwing with the audience.

Let us boil this question down to its barest essentials. There is a moment, fairly early in the book, in which guerrilla warrior Peri, the Scourge of Sylvana, is captured along with some other guerillas. One begins to shudder as their captor, Lieutenant Hakon, ogles her. The following bit of prose then happens:

Puzzled and repelled, Hakon released her. “What’s the matter with her?”
“She can’t stand to be touched,” said Peri.
“Why not?”
“She was gang-raped by some of your troops when the first wave landed.”
“Some girls have all the luck,” said Hakon.…

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