Doctor Who review won’t be up until Tuesday at the earliest, as I spent most of Sunday running my Werewolf: The Apocalypse game and didn’t watch it until late. But speaking of my gaming habit, I got a chance to read the first issue of Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’s forthcoming comic Die, so I can at least tell you all sorts of interesting stuff about that. Well, sort of. This is my first time in the weird realm of embargos and “spoiler-free” reviews. So I have to tell you how awesome this thing is without actually telling you anything about it that hasn’t already been spilled in interviews already.

Let’s start with the obvious. This thing is awesome. It’s a fascinating book that has all the signs of being a major statement on the nature of fantasy and escapism. You should definitely pre-order it; if you buy physical comics, call your local shop. If you’re into digital or haven’t really bought many comics and just want an easy way to do the thing, you can pre-order it on Comixology. Pre-ordering is massively important with comics because it is an insane industry where nothing is done in a remotely rational manner, so really, if the following sounds like your thing, please go do the thing.

Right. So Die. The premise is simple enough: in 1991, six kids sat down to play a roleplaying game. They disappeared. Two years later, five of them reappeared. When asked what happened and where they’d been, their only answer was “I can’t say.” Surprising nobody who’s consumed any contemporary fantasy media whatsoever, what happened is that they were transported into a magical realm. And now, twenty-five years later, they have to go back. 

The most interesting element here, for my money, is the twenty-five years later bit. This gives us middle-aged characters. This isn’t just interesting in terms of Kieron’s work, which has focused on teenagers and young adults to a degree that has been a defining bit of style for him. It’s also interesting as a lens on both roleplaying games and fantasy. I mean, the middle-aged geek is obviously a thing in popular culture, but it’s not actually a perspective represented within it very often, and when it is it tends to be in the Hook/Christopher Robin vein of “reawakening a lost sense of wonder.” Die has the same sense of melancholy implicit in that, but the emphasis is in completely different places; there’s no assumption that growing up involves losing some vital connection to the fantastic. The wounds being confronted are very different from just not being sixten anymore.

The other interesting thing is the suspicion of fantasy. I mean, it’s still the hook of the book, and you’ve got fantasy worlds rendered in lush glory by Stephanie Hans, who’s one of the great painter-artists working in comics right now. She gives the book a opulent, emotional moodiness that’s well worth drooling over. This is a book that relishes the iconography of fantasy. And yet it’s also a book that, in a typically Gillen-esque theme drop, proclaims the game they’re about to play in 1991 to be “fantasy for grown-ups,” then muses “we were sold.…

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This is a sponsored post by James Wylder. If you’re interested in having your project featured on Eruditorum Press, you can e-mail me at snowspinner at gmail dot com. 

History can be fascinating, you just need the right storytellers.

One thing that always frustrated me growing up as I read science-fiction and fantasy was the tendency for there to be massive detailed backstories to some of my favorite universes that could only be read in summary. The stories that hung at the edges of another story, propping it up but forever remaining elusive. Of course, getting older, I began to realize why telling those stories often wasn’t a good idea: they were often piecemeal, a series of interlinked events that couldn’t easily be formed into something good. Trying to shove them into a traditional narrative was a recipe for disaster. As my friends and I started working on our own series of sci-fi books we called “10,000 Dawns”, I began to wonder…what if we could find a way to tell those stories?

After some playing around, I came up with the idea for my new anthology, “10,000 Dawns: Poor Man’s Iliad”: an anthology of stories by different writers, where the stories were as long or short as they needed to be. Characters could cross between stories, or stay in place. Different narratives could run in tandem, and then collide. Some could dead end, or end up somewhere totally unexpected. We could create a book where we could explore different lives and perspectives, and give readers something quite unique they’d never read before.

The resulting book is an 802 page monster, with 44 stories by 16 writers, featuring illustrations by 6 artists. There are 33 short stories, 8 novelettes, 2 novellas, and one story that accidentally became a short novel. All of them fit their length, and there’s a wonderful variety to them. War stories, art heists, family dramas, introspection, and weird experiments are all part of it.

There’s some amazing talent in this book, Doctor Who and Faction Paradox author Simon Bucher-Jones contributed a tale, while Star Wars Tales writer Nathan P. Butler did as well. Tim Sutton who worked on Marble Hornets and Slender: The Arrival is there too! Plus there’s great stuff from Trevor Allen, Eric R. Asher, Kevin Burnard, Evan Forman, Nicholas Scott Kory, Kylie Leane, Colby McClung, Michael Robertson, Jo Smiley, Sarah E Southern, Jordan Stout, and Elizabeth Tock. Oh, and me, James Wylder. I wrote the Doctor Who poetry book An Eloquence of Time and Space, plus nine other books, and you may have seen me knocking about the Eruditorum Press comment section over the last few years.

If you like the sound of the book and what we’ve tried to do with it, please give it a shot. The ebook is a bargain at $5, and the print version is $30, which is very pretty looking.

Let’s talk long term goals though, for a second. I’m not going to divulge anyone’s private or public life, but there’s a fairly significant LGBTQ+ presence in the group who helped put this together, and if this book is a success I’d like to bring them back for another go, and pay them better.…

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What has eight leggs and is guest-starring Holy Boson?

This week’s Eruditorum Presscast about Arachnids in the UK.

Why does a podcast have legs?

Erm. Yeah, you’ve got me there.…

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I am reminded of the way in which late-era Gatiss stories landed with a sense of pleasurable relief. Not in the high stakes way of Rosa or The Woman Who Fell to Earth where being crap would have had disastrous consequences, but in the way that you’re relieved when you brace yourself for pain that never comes. “Attack of the giant spiders written by Chris Chibnall” is as far from a straightforwardly promising premise as it is possible to get. And yet this is surprisingly good. It’s not a classic in the all-time best sense, but in the well-worn and vintage sense; it’s Doctor Who doing what Doctor Who does, and doing it well.

It’s fair to ask why. If you rifle through the back catalog for an obvious analogue, after all, the closest thing you get is probably The Lazarus Experiment, which is an outright failure of an episode. They’re both “return to Earth” episodes in which the Doctor finds a non-alien threat around the family life of one of someone who goes from being a temporary companion to a permanent fixture. Neither offers a particularly compelling premise or a searing sense of ambition. Indeed, there’s not necessarily an obvious explanation for why Arachnids in the UK is roughly The Faceless Ones tier while The Lazarus Experiment is closer to The Android Invasion.

Instead it’s a profusion of details. One thing the Chibnall era is rapidly establishing as a strength is its ability to structure the process of the Doctor figuring things out over the course of an episode. Where Moffat drew on his sitcom background to build ostentatious narrative contraptions that snapped together with a catharsis of (sometimes spurious) cleverness, Chibnall is drawing on his time writing various flavors procedurals, whether Law and Order UK, Broadchurch, or, in its own way, Torchwood to make a show that is about the Doctor encountering a situation and working out what it is and what to do with it. If Arachnids in the UK feels classic, it’s not in the “attack of the common phobia” sense, but in the sense of going back a mode of thinking about plot and setting that was consciously discarded in one sense when Innes Lloyd came to favor the base under siege as a narrative structure and in another when Russell T Davies reworked the show as a post-Buffy character drama.

But Chibnall isn’t rolling back the years so much as he’s working out how to do procedural Doctor Who in 2018 and in fifty-minute containers. There’s deftness to the way he splits the party to give Graham and Yaz character beats while weaving the establishment of the mystery across all three strands, then calmly reassembles it once the mystery is in place and it’s time to start investigating it. And he continues in this vein, breaking off Graham and Ryan to give them a big scene and establish the queen spider while the Doctor, Yaz, and Najia go solve the how and why of it, but then bringing everyone back together for the denouement.…

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I’m joined this week by the legendary Kate Orman (along with two cute but really annoying dogs and an intermittent drilling sound that crash the party, though both mercifully say in the background) to talk about Rosa. 

Check it out here.…

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A strange case where the episode itself matters less than the standards you decide to apply to it. What, exactly, do we want out of “Doctor Who meets Rosa Parks”? What is this supposed to do? A lot of us, myself included, reacted with a measure of wariness to, really, the whole affair. There are a lot of very obvious ways to do this wrong, and very little sense of how you’d do it right. The news that it’s by Malorie Blackman was comforting, but the fact that Chibnall saw fit to rewrite a black woman on Rosa Parks was ominous, and Blackman’s absence from the publicity and relative silence about the episode on Twitter seemed a bad omen.

In light of that, the easiest emotion to feel about the episode itself is relief. This is tightly constructed and coherent in ways previous episodes haven’t been. The character work is appreciably more lively. As a technical object, it’s vastly improved over both of the episodes before it. And despite a few clumsy moments, most obviously the bathos of the “they even named an asteroid after her” sequence, this is mostly considerably more subtle and intelligent than one might have feared. In an episode where the “don’t screw it up” stakes are high and the bar for doing so even higher, the Chibnall era has once again acquitted itself.

None of this, however, answers the question of what we want out of this. The nature of Jodie Whittaker’s casting means that the Chibnall era is essentially unable to even pretend to be apolitical, but this is the first time it’s really stepped up and owned that role. And yet as a framework for talking about race in Doctor Who, Rosa Parks is profoundly limited and, in its own way, lazy. The racism is displaced onto a foreign country, the historical figure is easy to remain hagiographic about, and the targets are soft as can be. In three weeks time we get Doctor Who doing the partition of India, a concept whose politics are equally overt, but that feels dangerous and uncertain in entirely different ways—ways in which it’s a lot less clear what the show is even going to say. Here there’s never really any doubt what the basic political angle is going to be.

Of course, it’s not as though “racism is bad” is an unnecessary message in 2018. Far from it; it’s hard to think of a period in the program’s history where an overt anti-racism stance is more vital. But there are unquestionably framings of that stance that have a hell of a lot more teeth than this possibly can. Yes, the treatment of Ryan throughout the episode (and to a secondary degree Yaz) is viscerally upsetting, but it’s also framed entirely as “look at those people in the past.” They just as easily and justifiably could have hurled racist abuse at him in The Woman Who Fell to Earth. They’ll be perfectly able to next week. The fact that this is unthinkable (regardless of whether it’s a good idea) tells us a lot about how limited a confrontation with the brutal materialism of racism this is.…

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In which shit is shot by Shana and me, mostly on the subject of the Ghost Monument, but often by whatever shiny thing caught our attention.

Get it here, dear listeners.…

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