At VICE’s Motherboard blog, I’m interviewed by Abraham Joseph about space travel and the somewhat confused recent claims of Speaker Gingrich.

Well, let’s start with the “51st State” bit that’s being bandied about. Speaker Gingrich knows as well as the next political mammal that the Outer Space Treaty forbids any one nation from claiming sovereignty over the moon. So, not so much with the 51st State crap…

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I write books and comics and articles and other things.  I live in south-east England.  My next novel, GUN MACHINE, is due autumn 2012 from Mulholland Books.  The film RED 2, sequel to RED, based on the graphic novel I wrote, is due autumn 2013.  I have author pages at Amazon and Amazon UK.  My most recent original work was SVK, produced in partnership with the design & invention unit BERG.

Public email address: warrenellis@gmail.com (gets checked once a day or so)

@warrenellis on Twitter.  Facebook Page.  Username warrenellis on Instagram and This Is My Jam.

If you need to contact me about writing for print or web, please contact my agent Lydia Wills using the link in the righthand menu bar.

If you need to contact me about anything involving film, tv, games or other things that move and make noises, please contact my agent Angela Cheng Caplan using the link in the righthand menu bar.

Sometimes I speak at conferences, or do other kinds of talks and appearances.  I’ve previously been a columnist for WIRED UK and Reuters.

I occasionally podcast.

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BECAUSE SERIOUSLY WHY WOULD SHE EVEN DO THIS

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Earlier today, Eric Stephenson at Image Comics kindly flowed me along an Advance Reading Copy of the first issue of Brian K Vaughan (Y THE LAST MAN, LOST) and Fiona Staples’ new comics series, SAGA.  Below, a section of the first issue’s cover, which got some idiot cheesecake painter all aerated because it’s apparently disgusting and  “shock value” and The Reason Why Kids Don’t Like Comics No More:

Yes.  Drawn Lady is drawn nursing Drawn Baby.  Presumably the real thing reduces persons of delicate sensibilities to projectile vomiting.  (He’s since removed his post because so many people shouted at him.)

And, of course, it’s not a comic for kids.  Defining “kids” as, I dunno, under twelve.  Because there’s childbirth and swearing and alien sex in it.  None of which was new to me when I was twelve, and I didn’t even have the fucking internet, but whatever.  That’s not what we’re here for.  I’m just making the point that this is clearly a sf/f book for non-infants.  It is, I think, a very good comic, and one that will prove something of a barometer for the maturity of the current commercial comics market.

First things first: this opening issue of SAGA is the first chapter of what will clearly be a very longform sf serial about war and politics, magic and science and love and sex.  The clue is kind of in the title.  Brian, an extremely gifted author, has written a clever and charming script, and Fiona Staples, whom I’ve previously seen very little by, is demonstrably a very intelligent artist who creates warm and characterful performances for her actors while spinning out perfectly weighted storytelling that puts me in mind of experts like Steve Dillon.  It’s a little like listening to an orchestra tuning up and running through the early phrases of a big symphony, sounding the main themes and hinting at the complex beauty to come.

Romeo and Juliet up there are Marko and Alana, from either side of a war that has no good side.  And what they did – having her umbilical gnawed off there – was something that apparently never should have happened.  And it’s her story (or will be):

Because, you see, the book is shot through with panels like this, and lettering like this, as if from a children’s book.  And that’s the baby’s narrative.

You can almost guarantee that someone or other will complain about one juxtaposition of elements or other.  That the perfectly lovely children’s-book bits and the cherished violent bits should not be seen in the same place as baby-feeding and robot fucking.  Or that the robot fucking is excellent and the character writing just gets in the way.  Or that the whole thing is too slow and “decompressed,” or that the swearing distracts from the magical bits, or, I don’t know, babies disturb their wanking or something.  Either people will recognise this as the opening notes of a rich and extended piece that contains much, as a novel should, or they are going to find a panoply of bad reasons to complain about it.

None of which feels right to talk about, in a way.  I’ve talked about all these poisonous suppositions I have, instead of focussing on the work itself, which is bad form.  But I want to be true to the feeling I had on closing the issue, which was, simply: god, what if the commercial comics market in 2012 might not support a novelistic longform serial written by Brian fucking Vaughan?  As with much to do with comics lately, I would like to be wrong.  Because I would like to read a lot more of SAGA.

It’s a terrific book, and another sign of the new resurgence at Image Comics.  It is a wonderful thing to welcome Brian back to the medium, and a wonderful thing to discover the art of Fiona Staples.

SAGA #1 is released on 14 March 2012 from Image Comics.  It will cost USD $2.99.  You can contact your local comics shop and give them the order code JAN120485, if you want to arrange your copy in advance.  Which I would recommend.

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Indonesian man arrested for kicking woman he thought was a ghost

In which the Head Technician leaves behind much of his radiophonic and classical hauntological experimentation and heads off into realms I described on the twitters as British Cosmic.  Passing through the 70s TV memoryscape mined by The Advisory Circle, the record crosses into a zone of distortion and beats that is (to me) clearly Kosmische, loping and yet frequently meditational.  Analog electronic spacelaunch.  And it seems to touch down, on the last track, in a warped Leyland Kirby wasteland, reality foaming at the edges, beautiful and unsettling. It took me a couple of listens to warm up to it: it’s not as immediately pretty as its predecessors, but I’ve found it’s richer and more rewarding. Stream it for free here or click through and buy it for cheap.

Ariana and I have been saying we’d do these for years, and we keep forgetting.  Ariana remembered last night.  And so here they are, at the usual place.

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Comics creator Chip Zdarsky — dimly related by birth to Canada’s National Post cartoonist and thwarted Toronto mayoral candidate Steve Murray — is currently writing his autobiography, and has very kindly shared a chapter of said tome with me.  Herein, he relates the story of the time he was offered the job of creating the WATCHMEN comics sequel.

You may not want other people around while you’re reading this.

(more…)

Reuters: “A Kashmiri protester throws a “kangri” or Kashmiri traditional firepot towards Indian police during a protest in Srinagar January 21, 2012.”

Wikipedia: “Small earthen pots filled with combustibles were used as early thermal weapons during the classical and medieval periods. Containers made at first from clay, later from cast iron, known as ‘carcasses’, were launched by a siege engine, filled with pitch, Greek fire or other incendiary mixtures. These fire pots could cause great damage to besieged cities with largely wooden construction… By the mid-17th century, fire pots had largely been replaced by shells filled with explosives, which may be seen as the direct descendants of military fire pots.”

And also: “A kanger; also known as kangri or kangar or kangir) is an Indian pot filled with hot embers used by Kashmiris beneath their traditional clothing to keep the chill at bay, which is also regarded as a work of art.[3] It is normally kept inside the phiren (Overcoat type garment), the Kashmiri cloak, or inside a blanket. If a person is wearing a jacket, it may be used as a hand-warmer. It is about 6 inches (150 mm) in diameter and reaches a temperature of about 150 °F (66 °C)… Regular use of the kanger can cause skin cancer.”

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Are now live at the store, since a few people asked for them.

SPEKTRMODULE 5 went live over the weekend, and the shirts went live last week.  Good morning.

SPEKTRMODULE 05 Underfoot 36 minutes and 29 seconds

Direct mp3 link.  Press Play on the player then find the menu button in the bottom left for other functions.  iTunes link.

@warrenellis / warrenellis@gmail.com

1. logotone

2. “black and white flight” -  Ela Orleans  (album: “Mars Is Heaven”)

3.  Hello.

4.  “So-So” -  KaitO    (album: You’ve Seen Us… You Must Have Seen Us… )

5.  “Untitled”-   Skirt    (EP: Horizontal Ground 10)

6.  “Not That I Am” – Throbbing Gristle    (album: The Third Mind Movements)

7.  “A Generation Of Spiders” -  Exuviae   (album: Swallow The Ghost)

8.  Me.  Been having some lung problems for the last couple of weeks, as you will hear.  Please forgive the heavy breathing.  More talky stuff next time, probably, if I still have lungs.

9.  “Innerspace Laboratory Program” -  Saturn Finger  (album: Saturn Finger)

10.  “Round In Circles” -   Nocow  (album: “G5TAPE01: Ruins Tape”)

11.  “Dancing With Friends” -  Julianna Barwick   (album: Sanguine)

12.  “Harmo” – Nudge   (album: As Good As Gone)

13.  “Slipped” -  Diane Kensington    (album: …And Her Ministry of Digital Devotees)     

14.  “Untitled” -  Luke Abbott   (album: Holkham Drones)

15.  Me again.

16  “Marconi’s Radio”  – The Secret Machines  (album:  September 000)

17.  logotone

PREVIOUSLY: 1 – Fire Axes In Space | 2 – The Lane | 3 – Comfort And Joy | 4 – Long Count

T-shirt?

• Warren Jeffs’ revelations – Google Maps
  "Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints leader Warren Jeffs predicted several cities and nations would have tragedies befall them. Here are the cities, and what will happen to them according to Jeffs."
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Partway through Iain Sinclair’s GHOST MILK and finding the wading hard, I commented to a writer friend that it read like an auto-obituary.  The friend recommended I persevere, even though he found himself in agreement.  Which didn’t bode well.  But here I am at the other end of the book, and my initial impression remains.  It’s like watching someone give his funeral audience a lengthy disquisition on his life while digging his own grave and knocking together his own coffin in front of them. The “grand project” of the subtitle is nominally the Olympic structure being imposed on east end London for this coming summer’s games, and all the other airdropped corporate constructions attempting landings across the country.  But there’s a clear double meaning: the project being called in is Sinclair’s own.

If there is a next Iain Sinclair book, I will buy it automatically on sight, as I bought this one, because the man can write like Promethean fire when the drive is there.  And perhaps, if there is a next Iain Sinclair book, he will do so again.  But GHOST MILK feels like a last Iain Sinclair book.  I hope I’m wrong.

There’s an awful pall of failure over the whole thing, thicker and deader than a modest blanket of self-deprecation.  He trots out his friends as a parade of doomed losers, sketching out a difficult and often charmless eulogy for his generation of wasters in the arts.  He carefully balances the milestones of a somewhat buggered career by the roadside for us and plots his own course into irrelevance in neat little chapters.  And there’s a lot of “back in my day, all this round here were fields and trees wastegrounds and condom dumps and canals wi’ bicycles sticking out of ‘em.”  There’s a sense that the life of the deep urban flaneur closes when corporations and governments can do in concrete and steel what the derive can achieve only in air and ink – remake the streets according to their own will. 

Also, there’s only so many snotty comments about new buildings you can commit to print before you start to sound like the sort of inverse-snob who preferred Hackney when all the toilets were outside.  The book has the tone of a man who’s done.  It’s a tired and miserable monologue.  His prose has, for the most part, lost its arcane crackle.

In 2002, Sinclair said: “London gives you anonymity, you can spook about the place like a spy with no problems at all.”  Not any more, mate.  And, worse: when, in GHOST MILK, he gets spotted trying to spook around, he’s not spotted as a writer, a filmmaker, London’s last lost mythologiser.  He’s assumed to be an unemployed indigent and pointed at a nearby hut where he can get a proper job.

Also, this and some other things happened:

The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, two laws currently working their way through the American legislative system, will do untold damage to the structure of the internet if passed.  Neither law is fit for its spoken purpose.  I am not American, nor do I live in America.  But the internet is an interdependent creature, and unilateral SOPA or PIPA actions will affect the entire animal.  One country, even a country I love and admire, should not wield that power, especially in service of a cause both confused and mendacious.

As Charlie says, meddling in another country’s politics is rarely wise.  But I support the blackout.

I’ll see you on the 19th.

Timeless from KS12 on Vimeo.

The digital settles in as background. We remember less and query more. Our identity play would be considered schizophrenic in the last century. We have more friends than ever before yet know new frontiers of isolation. The quantification of our experience haunts us in the form of a persistent history. And we are distracted more than we ever knew possible. These circumstances are paradoxically a description of the near future and a diagnosis of the current state of affairs. The truly timeless is redefined – it has transcended that which is classic; it has become that which is never finished.

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Polis:

In Comuna 13 of Medellin, Colombia’s largest city, a recently built 1,260-foot long escalator snakes across the hillside shantytown in six separate divisions. As part of the neighborhood’s larger urban regeneration project, this massive outdoor escalator cuts down the time to traverse Comuna 13, reportedly one of Medellin’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods, from 35 minutes to six minutes on foot.

Velocity applied to every traveller.  Every pedestrian given escape-pod momentum and jettisoned clear of shantytown. In someone’s conception.  I look at this and see a launchpad for all the feared criminals of Comuna 13 to speed up into all the nice places where the quality live.  Saves having to nick a car. 

You remember South Ossetia?  Declared independence from Georgia in 1990 in the chaotic hangover from the breakup of the Soviet Union.  Got the shit blasted out of it a couple of times since then.  After the last time, in 2008, all kinds of people promised to put money and resources into South Ossetia, even though (I think) Georgia still doesn’t recognise it as a state.

So let’s see how that’s worked out.

The railway line out of Tskhinvali looks good, right?

The housing’s in fine condition.

And a rotting tank turret that no bugger’s bothered to move in three or four years makes an excellent piece of public art.

More at the link.