Star Whale

Harnessed beneath the floating future British metropolis, a star whale labored against zero gravity, acting as a gentle, unassuming engine to carry humans toward some uncertain destination. This is a near-spoiler, I suppose, since it gets at the gradually unraveling Smilerpremise of “The Beast Below,” the second Dr. Who episode to air this season– Sat. night on BBC America. For the second consecutive week, I watched, not fully sure whether I would grow bored with Who’s kitschy special effects or impatient with the show’s fantastical excesses. Yet, like the week before (unlike some), I was pleasantly surprised. I thought Episode Two was well done–well enough that I recommend it: an army of creepy fortune-telling machines (think Zoltar Speaks with extreme mood swings: called “Smilers”), a blaring, flickering civics quiz after which participants have the option to forget or protest (mass, self-selected forgetting preserves the Queen’s authority; too much protest dethrones her), and, of course, the city’s hefty, bottom-floor host, a schizophrenic giant merciful toward the children but unkind to adults. Enough.

All the more striking in this episode was the unmistakable family resemblance between the star whale and the withering, abused avanc in Mieville’s The Scar, that massive underwater creature yoked to Armada as their floating conglomeration of warped hulls and things drifted toward the water’s edge.

How Far Can We Drift?

I’ve been re-reading Cynthia Haynes’
"Writing Offshore: The Disappearing
Coastline of Composition"
over the past two days. I’d read it this spring, even
referred to it in my CCCC paper and in my dissertation prospectus. But
this time I wanted to work at it more slowly, soak in it.

This time around, I kept finding floating crumbs that made me think this is
the 50-page scholarly article version of China Mieville’s The Scar. I
probably can’t do justice to this in the time I have right now, but I will try.
Considering that The Scar is an adventure on the high seas about a
hybrid, hodge-podge floating city (Armada, as dappled and remade as composition
studies) and the fetishistic Lovers who command the peculiar conglomeration,
there are surprising tie-ins. [Spoiler alert.]

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