Haunted Futures and Alien Archaeologies

Just before Christmas I attended the annual Theoretical Archaeology Group conference in Chester. To be honest, I mostly steered clear of the hardcore theory – while I do quite like it, I liked it on my own terms and when my brain is feeling fresh and focused: the week before Christmas, at the end of a long and tiring year, not so much. But there was a lot else going on at the conference and I attended several inspiring panels about outreach, engagement and how archaeology relates to other fields. I’ve written about the conference in general over on the CREWS blog, but here I wanted to go into a little detail about my own paper, which was firmly in this blog’s thematic ambit since it was about the archaeology of alien megastructures in fiction.

Imagining the Future in Bricks: The Designs of Lego Space (Part 1 – 70s and 80s)

Space Lego.

Have there ever been two words that go together quite so evocatively and conjure such boundless possibility? From 1978 to 1999 Lego released an unbroken sequence of original space sets, more than twenty years’ worth of spaceships, bases, rovers and robots. I was lucky enough to grow up right in the middle of this, a geeky kid as fascinated by space and science fiction as I was by knights and castles. Needless to say, I had a lot of space Lego.

I’ve written elsewhere about my own experience of a childhood lived through Lego bricks, about how those little plastic pieces lent physical reality and material texture to my imagination, how they continue to encode memories of my early life. What I’m interested in here is the world of Lego Space itself, and how it drew from outside inspiration. These ship designs and imagined spaces that mean so much to me – loosely defined but vividly depicted – where did they come from?  What were the influences on the small group of predominantly Danish designers who created them?

The Writing Systems of The Legend of Zelda

I wrote a little while ago about the storytelling of the Legend of Zelda games, flushed with excitement for the then-forthcoming latest instalment ‘Breath of the Wild’. Well, that came out five weeks ago now, and I’m still playing it. As anyone who’s glanced at a video games review site recently will know, it’s very, very good. At some point I’ll write something about the archaeology of Breath of the Wild, which I find fascinating, but for now I want to bring all this Zelda talk a bit closer to the day job and talk about writing systems.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the Zelda series has always placed game mechanics and fun over world-building and internal consistency. It’s largely eschewed the reams of invented lore that populate the bookshelves of other fantasy games, and it’s certainly not the kind of series that would bother itself with Tolkien-esque invention of fictional language. But, perhaps curiously, it has been very willing to experiment with inventing writing systems, and in true Zelda style there’s little consistency from one game to the next, which means it offers us some remarkable diversity.

What are the most Lovecraftian stories in Classic Doctor Who?

I’m going to level with you straight up – this post isn’t going to have a lot of archaeological or academic content (except inasmuch as Lovecraft’s stories themselves are intrinsically archaeological and scholarly in character), so if that’s what you come here for you might want to sit it out and wait for the next one.

The original run of Doctor Who last more than quarter of a century from 1963 to 1989 and in that time the good Doctor fought everything from the well-known Daleks and Cybermen to the more eccentric – robots made of sweets, gigantic prawn-viruses, rubber-clad men with aerials on their heads, and so on. More than once he’s come up against ancient, unknowable evils ‘Eeeevil, evilsincethedawnoftime!’ as Sylvester McCoy’s seventh Doctor once put it (unfortunately the clip doesn’t seem to be up online anywhere), and especially in the 70s, he’s also seen his fair share of sinister cultists. These are, of course, staples of the works of H. P. Lovecraft, and you’d expect a fair bit of overlap between the kinds of people who read his stories and those who watch and write for Doctor Who.

Sure enough, once the series was cancelled and the Doctor’s ongoing adventures moved to a series of monthly original novels for the 1990s, some of the fans writing these books tried to forge explicit connections between the cults and formless evils of the old days and the handily out-of-copyright Lovecraftian Cthulhu mythos. There had been a universe before this one, a couple of stories said, and it had its own physical laws and its own equivalent of the Time Lords, the Doctor’s powerful race of time-travellers. When that universe ended, a few of them found ways to survive and emerge into our own, where they acquired previously undreamt-of powers. These became the Great Old Ones, and a number of the Doctor’s old foes were among their numbers. It’s a bit of a silly retcon, of course, an unnecessary link between two bodies of work almost diametrically opposed in their values, attitudes and approaches. But on the other hand, it is kind of fun, and part of Doctor Who’s raison d’etre is mashing itself up with things that don’t quite fit.

So with this in mind, let’s go for a whistle-stop tour through time and see just how Lovecraftian original-flavour Doctor Who could be.

H.P. Lovecraft meets the Bronze Age – Designing Ancient Horror

I wrote recently about the excellent Lovecraftian board game Eldritch Horror. That post was actually something of a preliminary to this one. You see, for the last several months I’ve been working on my own version of Eldritch Horror, set in the East Mediterranean Bronze Age.

Earlier this year, my friend and colleague Anna Judson called us together to play something else – her excellent Mycenopoly: an Aegean Bronze Age themed version of Monopoly, complete with barter system and utilities such as textile works and the ability to build megara instead of hotels. I highly recommend checking out her own blog about it, which went a bit viral, and deservedly so. Apart from having an excellent time with Mycenopoly, the evening left me wondering if it would be possible to do something similar for the game we most often play together, Eldritch Horror.

3D Worlds – Exploring Archaeology Digitally

I want to make a confession. I found Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood academically useful.

For those who don’t follow video games, Assassin’s Creed is a more-or-less-annual series of big budget games with primarily historical settings. It provides sandbox cities and sometimes wider landscapes in which the player can explore, engage in parcour-style running and jumping, and undertake missions. The first game was set in mediaeval Palestine and if nothing else is worth checking out just because of how unlikely it was that we would ever get a big budget video game set in the former Phoenician city of Akko. Also, if you like jumping around on crusader castles, it’s likely a big win. Other games in the series have focused on settings as diverse as the American war of independence, the French Revolution or the pirate-filled 18th-century Caribbean. So far so good. It’s certainly nice to see such under-explored settings being used for games. Plot-wise, though, the Assassin’s Creed games are not exactly dissertations in historical accuracy. There’s a Dan Brown-esque nonsense plot involving the Knights Templar, modern-day conspiracies, precursor races of superbeings with the names of Roman deities, some silliness about the hypothetical Mayan apocalypse that the internet reckoned was supposed to happen in 2012 (which they had to drop fairly sharpish in more recent releases), and so on. You get the idea.

 

The first Assassin’s Creed’s rendition of Akko/Acre

So why did I find Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood genuinely useful in my academic life?

Ruins from a Long Time Ago and Far, Far Away

The Star Wars films are well-known for popularising the idea of a ‘used future’, where the spaceships, bases and other science-fictional paraphernalia don’t gleam with the factory-new sheen of glossy and optimistic futurity but are worn-down, grimy and broken. A New Hope wasn’t the first time this had been done – witness, for example, the wonderfully industrial modelwork of Gerry Anderson’s 1960s ‘Supermarionation’ series, Thunderbirds in particular – but after Star Wars, this visual style became the norm for science fiction, to the extent that today when an SF film does opt for gleaming perfection – such as in the 2009 Star Trek reboot – it comes across as unusual and consciously retro.

The grit and grime of the used future is seen as adding to verisimilitude – it makes the sets, models and computer imagery more familiar to our own experiences of the world. In a sense it removes a dimension of estrangement from the setting, but in return it gives every scratch, battle-scar or busted piece of instrumentation a back-story. It no longer seems to exist only for the story being told, but appears to have had an existence before-hand. In short, it gives us time-depth.

So far, so obvious.

But there’s another aspect to the idea of time-depth in the Star Wars films. It’s not just equipment, vehicles and buildings which are shown to be used, but the worlds themselves. They have long histories, evidenced by the presence of ruins – a used future (or long-long-ago past-future) in the longue-durée, if you like. In particular, the first film in each of the three trilogies – original, prequel and newly-minted sequel – prominently features what we might see as  ‘archaeological’ or ‘historic’ sites.

Science Fiction and Archaeology: Part 2 – Grave-robbers, explorers and dilettantes

See Part 1 for why I think archaeology and science fiction share certain approaches and why they ought to go well together. This post will explore how they’ve tried and often failed.

Two Prometheuses (Prometheis?) bookend the relationship so far, and between them exemplify many of the recurring tropes which have characterised archaeological SF: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, seen by many as the first true SF novel; and Ridley Scott’s 2012 cinematic Prometheus. They take us from Gothic grave-robbers, through von Dänikenesque Chariots of the Gods to Big Dumb Objects and the Ozymandian relics of long-dead alien civilisations.

Frankenstein, illustrated by Bernie Wrightson

Now obviously, archaeology’s far from central to Frankenstein. As a discipline it was still in its infancy in 1815; anatomy and the fledgling science of galvanism were Shelley’s immediate inspirations, not the work of those adventuring plunderers who kept western aristocrats and museums in Greek vases and Aegyptiaca. Nevertheless, many of Frankenstein’s themes resonate strongly with those of archaeology. As the work’s very subtitle makes clear, it’s a work which understands the present with reference to antiquity. The link it draws between ancient myth and modern science is one that SF would revisit again and again over the next two centuries: the seeds of Chariots of the Gods? were sown there in Shelley’s masterwork. What’s more, Gothic literature’s obsession with the dead revived, the buried uncovered and the forgotten past restored blends naturally into the concerns of archaeologists. After all, what do archaeologists try to do every day if not raise the dead, give them some manner of life again with their arts?

Science Fiction and Archaeology: Part 1 – Building worlds in the past and future

Science fiction and archaeology are two sides of the same coin. No, really. For all that one’s a literary genre and the other an academic discipline, they share a great deal in terms of goals, preoccupations and techniques. There also seems to be a good deal of overlap in the interests of practitioners: archaeologists – especially those who work actively in the field – often tend to be young, highly-educated and, in a word, geeky. With that kind of demographic, it’s no surprise that many have at least a passing interest in SF. For its part, SF has had a long-standing – if not necessarily productive – interest in the themes and motifs of archaeology.

Mummies as Monsters: Reviewing The Book of the Dead

It’ll be obvious from even the briefest glance over my past posts here that I’ve got a strong interest in both archaeology and monsters. Slap-bang in the middle of that Venn-diagram lies (or staggers stiffly around) the Mummy. More than any other creature, perhaps, the monstrous mummy of literature and film embodies (no pun intended) that fundamental archaeological tension between artefact and person. Most potent when it concerns human remains, the transition from living, breathing person (or the daily accoutrements of a person’s life and world) to an artefact, an object of scientific study, isn’t a comfortable one.