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Guest Post: Alternate Histories Part 2a: I Have No Idea What I’m Talking About

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Here’s Part 2 (well, part “2a”) of Ben Knaak’s Alternate Histories project exploring how to model a materialist conception of history through video games. Be sure to follow along on his blog and YouTube Channel!

 

King Solomon greets Queen Makeda of Sheba

Shit I Don’t Know Entry #1: Where Are We?

Here I must confess as to the greatest difficulty I face with a project that deals extensively with Ethiopian history: if you held a gun to my head, I would not be able to give you a concise, coherent definition of what Ethiopia even is.  The concept of the nation in general is a nebulous one that at even its most vivid doesn’t come close to approaching a science. National consciousness is therefore one which a historical materialist must regard with healthy skepticism, even when it accompanies a struggle for liberation against colonizers.  It certainly isn’t a sufficiently robust concept to be the sole basis for the authority of a state.

 

You will note that I have elected not to take the coward’s way out by appealing to a dictionary definition of the word “nation.”  There are two reasons for this: first, it’s a hacky, middle school essay-ass way to start off an article. Second, I can’t find a single definition of the word that cannot be disputed for some ideological reason or another.  Most center around the existence of linguistic, religious, cultural, or other historical commonalities by peoples within a contiguous area, but bright-line requirements that separate nations from mere states are hard to come by.  This is perhaps something I ought to have considered before I decided to make nationalism the second topic for this series, because Ethiopia’s history as a nation is a messy subject even by these standards.

 

There have, of course, been humans in Ethiopia for nearly as long as there have been humans, with the arrival of Homo sapiens proper dated to over 200,000 years ago.  Most of the population of the Horn of Africa today descend from toolmaking cultures who lived around 12,000 years ago.  These people likely spoke a proto-Afroasiatic language and indeed may have been the progenitors of that entire language family.

 

The Church of Saint George in Lalibela, one of many monolithic churches carved from hillsides during the Zagwe Dynasty.The earliest known state to emerge was the Kingdom of D’mt around the 10th century BCE.  The people of this kingdom spoke an early Ethio-Semitic language, and traded extensively with the Sabeans of the Southern Arabian peninsula.  (They were almost certainly not descended from Sabean migrants themselves – Ethiopia was, in fact, one of the first places Semitic languages were spoken).  This kingdom gave way to (or evolved into, or was incorporated into) the Kingdom of Axum, a prosperous superpower whose extent at its apex reached across the Red Sea into Yemen.  Notably, it was among the first states to adopt Christianity as an official religion. Axum collapsed under mysterious circumstances in the 10th century CE, even as the heart of its territory remained predominantly Christian.  This was succeeded by the Ethiopian Empire, ruled first by the Zagwe dynasty and then by the Solomonic dynasty – so named because it claimed descent from the first King of Axum, whom they claimed was the son of King Solomon by the Queen of Sheba.…

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The Tsuranga Conundrum Review

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If the Chibnall era is, as theorized last week, a latter-day Pertwee era, this is the equivalent of The Sea Devils. Not so much flawless as without any major issues, at several points veering into fascinating but still basically uninspiring, and an all around good showing for the period. As is clearly usual for Chibnall’s solo scripts, it is simply unconcerned with the idea that it should be “about” something. Instead it is a jumble of elements being juxtaposed purposelessly, with all the unexpected pleasures and awkward dissonance that implies, although at some point one has to admit that the consistency with which the balance trends towards the former implies some sort of underlying aesthetic sense.

At its heart, of course, it’s a fairly unreconstructed base under siege. As is often the case with Chibnall, however, the reduction to influences doesn’t quite work as an explanation. The convention of base under sieges, especially in the modern era, is to use the support cast as a supply of potential deaths to be drawn from when things are getting a bit dry. There’s typically at least some effort to give them characterization so that these resulting deaths have some emotional resonance, but everyone’s point is still basically to die. But that’s not what’s going on here. There are only two deaths, and one of them is a heroic completion of an arc as opposed to a tension builder. Only Astos exists to die and advance the plot.

Instead we have an episode structured as a bunch of people getting on with their private dramas while an alien attacks their ship. The result is compelling in its weirdness, particularly around Yoss and his baby, a plot which ends up absorbing half the regular cast and contributing literally nothing whatsoever to the nominal focus of the episode. The resultant final sequence, where Yoss’s delivery is intercut with the defeat of the P’Ting, is possibly the most rawly batshit sequence we’ve seen in Doctor Who since The Zygon Inversion. It is not entirely unreasonable to judge the worth of a Doctor Who episode in terms of how completely insane its weirdest sequence would look to a channel surfer. By that measure, this is a thunderous tour de force. 

The plot around Eve is more straightforward: a character flagrantly marked for death dies. But it’s still handled competently, and keeps the cast doing things other than getting picked off by the P’Ting. Whittaker, meanwhile, is finding new ways to play figuring stuff out and being given new angles on the problem—her bit responding to the computer’s explanation of the P’Ting with an enthusiastic line about feeling really well-informed is a deft lampshading of kludgey exposition dump. The problem of dealing with the P’Ting feels well-sized and suitably vexing, and the resultant solution is a clever use of the gun that was carefully positioned on the mantelpiece. 

The whole is defiantly valued at the sum of its parts, but in this case the math checks out.

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Die Review

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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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10,000 Dawns: Poor Man’s Illiad

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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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These Things of Darkness – Part 1

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Dismembered Bits and Pieces of an Introduction;

A Fingerpost Pointing in Various Directions, Some Wiser to Travel Than Others

 

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It would be obvious and banal to repeat the observation, employed by every hack journalist tasked with writing some bit of Dracula fluff, that “the Count will never lie down”.  Similarly, it would be obvious and banal to liken the spread of Dracula around the world and throughout culture to the exponential, viral expansion of vampirism that would ensue if vampires were actually real.  It would be no more than stating the fact that Dracula is a successful commodity or brand. That is what successful commodities or brands do. They reproduce. Seemingly without human input and out of human control, to the point of threatening people.  They seem to do this despite the fact that their reproduction is actually a result of human production. As with vampires, commodities are reproduced by the parasitism upon, and negation of, the human subject. Capital is the vampire battening on us, as Marx saw.  Commodity production hollows people out. Capital expands as humanity shrinks. The similarity between the viral commodity and Dracula is a tautology, since it has been so successful precisely because it expresses the underlying mechanism of its own success.

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Dracula and Frankenstein are inextricably linked.  Mutually dependant. But like many things that are inextricably linked and mutually dependant they are also irresolvably separate and antagonistic.  About the only thing they have in common is their moment of conception. As David McNally pointed out, both were conceived in the course of a single night in 1816, during which Mary Shelley became heavy with Frankenstein and Lord Byron with Dracula.  It is tempting to look at the evening as a copulation between these two, from which both came away pregnant. Dracula, it is true, gestated longer than Frankenstein. He was born almost immediately (in authorial time) whereas Dracula took longer. He was transplanted from Byron into Polidori, and then into Stoker, with much genetic material contributed along the way by Le Fanu and others.  Ironically, it was Dracula who had to be assembled from the bits and pieces of other characters.

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Franco Moretti – great Marxist critic and himself, it transpires, predatory monster – wrote a famous essay, ‘The Dialectic of Fear’, interpreting Dracula and Frankenstein as representing – to describe his argument crudely – bourgeoisie and proletariat. 

Frankenstein assembles his creature from many human parts, the parts of the dismembered poor, as the proletariat was constructed in the era of primitive accumulation during which the book was written.  The creature is corporate, its individuality and selfhood the subjects of contestation.  It is now called ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ in the same way that a worker is said to be ‘a Ford worker’ (Moretti’s analogy).  Its creator draws back from it in horror, recognising his future gravedigger in his own creation. It is feared that the creature will be the progenitor of a ‘new race’, a ‘race of devils’, much as the new global proletariat was constructed using new racial categories, and seen as a new and terrifying phenomenon that threatened to override the world by breeding too much, or by more consciously political means.…

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Arachnids in the UK Review

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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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Come and Listen to Us… Forever and Ever and Ever

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Yet another strand of Wrong With Authority launches.  This time it’s Carter Before the Horse.  It’s basically just Consider the Reagan but earlier. 

In this inaugural edition, James, Kit, and Jack watch Kubrick’s The Shining, and say things about it.

LISTEN/DOWNLOAD HERE

Beware Triggers, because we talk about the film’s themes, and they’re not pretty.

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The WWA back-catalogue contains several podcasts which make good Hallowe’en listening…
 
In this Footnote episode, James and Kit watch James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein.  (If we do any more films from that era we’ll have to think of a Herbert Hoover pun for the title of that strand.)
 
Speaking of James Whale, here‘s the entire gang doing a full Wrong With Authority episode about Gods and Monsters – the biopic of James Whale starring Ian McKellen – and also Shadow of the Vampire, a movie about (sort of) the making of the original Nosferatu.
 
And here‘s Kit and Daniel chatting about a couple of George Romero movies, The Crazies and Martin, in another Footnote episode.
 
Daniel has chatted with his buddies over at They Must Be Destroyed on Sight! about many horror movies.  They’re currently on a seasonal Horror kick.  So toddle over there for that excellent content.
 
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Other seasonal content of my own can be found here, in a series of articles about Horror movies, and in this article from my (undead) Tricky Dicky series in which I talk a little about Hallowe’en with reference to witches, prophecy, Macbeth, and the Gunpowder Plot.
 
In accordance with noises I made on Twitter, I am now writing something about Dracula and how it has been adapted.  What form it will take, and how much of it there will be, remains to be seen.  But I’m hoping to have the first part up next Friday. 
 
In the meantime, I wish you all a safe and happy Samhainn.  Do not allow yourselves to become dull boys, girls, or anything else.  I’m told that the key is play.  Rather than just work.
 
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Rosa Review

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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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