Ariana got the shouting out of her system in re: whining about how making stuff and showing it to people is too hard.

Now she’s moved on to: how to start thinking about making a project.

…if the feedback I’m getting is any indication (and I’ve got comments disabled here because they don’t suit me, but I do pay attention to Twitter and I read everything on Whitechapel) — there are a LOT of you right. on. that. cusp. of taking the first step. So look, I know I’ve been giving you lot a hard time about “just getting it done,” but before I get into my list of Stuff What I Learned Working With POD sometime tomorrow, I wanna back up a step and talk to you.

Here’s what you need to do, right now, tonight. No, NOT tomorrow morning, or this weekend, or once your work rush has let off a little, or after the holidays, or sometime in the New Year: Right. Fucking. Now….

And from there to book-specific notes and observations about working with a POD system:

…how you go about putting your book together is completely up to you, and what you’re comfortable with. The Lulu templates will give you a bit less control over what the finished product looks like, but it’s a really good place for the people that are just starting out. Do you already understand why your inside margins need to be a titch wider than your outside? If that question just kinda terrified you: that’s all right, but you probably want to start with the templates. Trust me, your book is still going to be lovely, the important thing for you is just getting your content into a pretty and readable format.

And, today, the begininngs of how we run FREAKANGELS the way we do.

Wil’s been all over Ariana’s THIS IS HOW WE FIX SHIT WITH WRENCHES posts during this week, and has a distillation of what he’s taken from them at this link here:

This is incredibly inspiring to me, and I hope that it’s just as inspiring to indie artists everywhere. Why not take a creative risk and see if it works out? Unlike the old days, when we had to purchase a lot of stock ahead of time and hope we could sell it, we can just Get Excited and Make Things, knowing that the very worst that can happen is that nobody likes that thing we made as much as we thought they would…

So, one week later. Copies of SHIVERING SANDS are now starting to arrive with people — I found this on Kat Foisy’s blog this morning:

(If you want to send me a photo of you posing with SHIVERING SANDS? Email it to my dump address at warrenellis [at] gmail dot com, along with your website address or twitter ID or whatever, and I’ll run it and your link here)

A week since launch of the book. We’ve sold, I believe, a little over four hundred copies. Given that the production of the book involved 1) me culling from seven years of jabbering and sticking it all into a couple of RTF files 2) Ariana flowing all that into a single file and spending a couple months’ worth of spare moments fiddling with it 3) Ariana uploading the thing, ordering a proof and spending an hour checking it over… we were well into any definition of profit by the end of day one.

It is, of course, the long game that pays off. It’s interesting to look at the first week, but it’s not defining.

A persistent criticism of my interest in POD has been that only writers at my level of cultural awareness can make any kind of success out of it. And some of them will now be saying, well, even Warren Ellis can only move 400 copies in the first week of a POD project. But, for one thing, it is about the long game. For everybody. The book doesn’t go away. And, for another, if I’m not aware enough of you to order that POD project — whose fault is that, really? Because, I’ve got to tell you, I wasn’t born with a book deal in one hand and an exclusive comics contract wrapped around my other flipper. Hell, when I was starting out, there wasn’t even an internet.

SHIVERING SANDS is published through Lulu.

Today I release SHIVERING SANDS, a book containing a selection of essays, articles, columns, rambles and jabberings that were written in various places on the internet over the last seven years or so. I publish it, with trusty mechanic Ariana Osborne, as the International Electrophonic Unit through the print-on-demand house Lulu. Regular readers will know that I’ve been talking about POD for months, and I thought it was time to try it out. This work has not been collected in one place before, and I think pretty much none of it has ever been on paper.

SHIVERING SANDS is 176 pages long, and costs USD $15.54. Go to http://www.electrophonic.net and click on the book title to be taken to the order page. Or, hell, just click right through to the Lulu page. You’ll also find a book preview there, a dozen pages or so.

All books are sold through and mailed by Lulu. We touch nothing. This is the most useful thing about POD houses like Lulu: they handle everything once we upload the book file. So any questions about shipping will have to be handled through the Lulu FAQs. We can tell you that Ariana, in California, got her proof copy within five working days. We’re printing with an international standard size that means your copy will be printed as physically close to you as possible, rather than everything being shipped from the States.

Ariana — who designs much of my Avatar Press work, like AETHERIC MECHANICS — has outdone herself on the book. It’s beautiful. Even though making a collection like this beautiful is like being presented with a young and very well dressed mental patient.

Brief notes: no plans yet for a digital edition: no, it won’t be in bookstores: no, I can’t sell or send you a signed copy: I have no copies of the book, they’re all sold through Lulu: we don’t set shipping prices: no intent to sell it through Amazon. There. Thanks for your attention.

Blogging, reblogging and twittering is encouraged, if not openly begged for.

For the last several months, Ariana and I have been picking at the great volume of stuff I’ve written for the internet over the last seven years or so, on this site and elsewhere. And we’ve hacked and hammered and crammed until it fills about a hundred and seventy pages of your actual printed paper.

It will be available for ordering soon. But I’m so pleased with the cover Ariana built that I wanted to show it off in advance.

It’s a national holiday here today, so I decided to play truant (read: child and its mother whined at me until I agreed to leave the house). Stopped off at Battlesbridge during the day’s travels to get Lili some new riding gear: left them in the shop and walked to the water. This is the River Crouch, at lowish tide. I should have taken a shot of the sailing barge that was moored next to me, because it occurs to me that not everyone’s seen a classic east coast sailing barge, but the two grim old people sitting by its wheel glaring at me over their mugs of tea kind of dissuaded me. You don’t mess around with barge folk. Unless you want a boat ’ook up yer bum.

You can’t really get any more inland (westward) from here on the Crouch, unless maybe you’re in a kayak or coracle. Eastwards, the Crouch is navigable for the fifteen or so miles that get you to Holliwell and Foulness Points, and out into the North Sea. Foulness Point is the tip of Foulness Island, which is mostly owned by the Ministry Of Defence, who use it as an artillery range and experimental proving ground. The bangs and whumps echo down the Southend coast when the wind is right, and every now and then you’ll meet someone in a pub with interesting scars or shattered-looking eyes who’ll tell you tales of unlucky Foulness menials who had various bits of themselves blown off in unusual ways…

In centuries past, of course, the Crouch and particularly its eastern tributary, the Roach, were pirate waterways. Smugglers, in the middle of the night, carefully angling their agile boats down the creeks they grew up around and knew like the lines in their own salt-hard palms, away from the big Inland Revenue cutters crewed by strangers in uniforms. This was their territory, their water.

And there’s been generations of mine, too, standing here by the water’s edge, with a cigarette in their hand, watching the Crouch go by. When I stand here, I’m standing with my dad, and my grandad. Nothing between us but years. And you learn, after a while, that years mean nothing at all.

For no good reason I can see, my insane publishers stuffed the rear of the paperback edition of CROOKED LITTLE VEIN with some of the experiments in food I’d put on my mailing list Bad Signal. They were put on the Signal either by request or because I was worried I’d forget them. The response I’d get from those was, frankly, weird in its enthusiasm.

So tonight I randomly experimented in the kitchen. So randomly, in fact, that I was basically making it up as I went along. And now I’m thinking I’m probably going to forget what I did. So, before it all fades away into the same haze that occludes things like What I Did Yesterday, Whether Or Not I Went To The Toilet In My Pants or What Sex Is Like, I give you Experiments In Food:

First, some notes:

Everything below is made for two very hungry people in a cold country on a rainy day who have had at most a very light lunch previous to this meal. Adjust accordingly.

I am not an exact cook. Not big on precise measurements. Trust your instinct/Zen/The Force/Flying Spaghetti Monster/whatever.

I use organic produce wherever possible. Organic produce often costs a little more, and looks a little funny. It does, however, taste a lot better, and it is better on your system. Trust a man who is 95% toxins on this.

Salt. I use Maldon sea salt. You’ll have access to sea salt of some kind where you are. Use it. There’s a difference between that and plain old table salt. Don’t get silly and let people talk you into smoked salt. You should shank those people.

Sweet Potato & Roasted Garlic Mash

* Roasting garlic

Pull a good length of tin foil. Fold it in half. Fold the edges together, a half-inch or so, to make a seam. Fold it in half again. Fold a seam along the sides, leaving the top open. See what you’ve made? A tinfoil pocket. A shiny silver scrotum from the future. Now get a garlic, a whole head. Find a knife and slice the very top off, so you can see the tops of the individual cloves inside. Put it in the tinfoil pocket.

Open a bottle of beer. Not fucking Budweiser or Labatts — a proper beer, damnit. During this experiment, I used the outstanding Black Adder ale from Mauldons. A good bitter, an ale, an IPA — a proper fucking beer, you know what I mean. Pour some down your throat. Now pour some in the tinfoil. A mouthful or so. Spit your mouthful out into the pocket if you’d like. I mean, it’d be disgusting, but the person you’re cooking for will never know, right? Close up the pocket, so you now have a sealed tinfoil bag full of a head of garlic and (possibly regurgitated) beer.

Sling it in the oven. Your oven is set to 190 degrees C, which is 375F or Gas mark 5. It’s going to be in there for an hour. Have some more beer. Swallow it this time, you freak.

* Sweet Potato Mash

This bit is going to take you half an hour. So time it so the end of this coincides with the garlic popping out of the oven.

Fill a reasonably large saucepan about halfway up with water, put two or three twists of salt in it, and put it on the hob to boil.

Take three sweet potatos and peel them. This is a pain in the arse. Use a small knife and pare off the skin in motions that go away from your body, like Sarah Palin field-dressing a moose. Five or ten minutes later, you’ll have a complete fucking mess and three nude sweet potatos. Which do in fact look a bit creepy, like mutant stillborn moles or something. Unless that’s just me. Anyway. If you’ve got a stronger, bigger knife, grab it, and slice the sweet potato into coins. If you end up with some big thick ones, cut those in half.

Once the water’s boiling, fling the bastards in. You can pretend they’re screaming as they hit the boiling water if you like. Try not to let people catch you making the noises.

They’re going to boil for twenty to thirty minutes. It’s okay to turn the heat down somewhat if they boil over the side of the pan, but keep ’em bubbling. When a knife goes through a bit of sweet potato effortlessly, they’re done.

* Combining

Drain off the cooked sweet potato — just set the lid on it slightly off-centre and upend the whole thing over the sink, letting all the water out while leaving the sweet potato in there. Once it’s drained, bring it back to your work surface. Where you now need to look for a masher. If you haven’t got one… fuck it, use a big spoon or something, this isn’t hard.

Get the garlic out of the oven. Be very careful how you open it. So, once you’ve slashed or chewed it open and seared your face off, take the garlic out. There’s no easy way to do the next bit, so — open up the tops of the cloves with your knife and squeeze the garlic out into the sweet potato. Roasting it turns it into a hot paste, and it just squidges out of the skin like delicious zit pus. (You can also just smash it down on the counter top under the flat of a big knife, and scoop up the paste as it shoots out obscenely).

Mash it all together. If you have some ground cinnamon, you can throw a pinch in, and it’s good, but not essential.

Sweet potato is a superfood, and garlic is a medicinal plant that retains a lot of its potency even after cooking. This is actually pretty good for you. The next one… not so much.

Onion Marmalade

This is a hot marmalade made in small quantities as a fresh accompaniment to meats. This is going to take you about half an hour too, but bear with me,

One large onion. See how the onion clearly has a top and a bottom, as defined by the hairy bits. Stand it on its bottom. See the top. Imagine now you are considering the head of a small animal. Like a seal. See the little seal head. Now take a knife and slice off juuust enough of its skull that you can see the very very top of its brains. Yes? Excellent. Now turn it on its side and slice downwards, so that you’re getting relatively thin rings. Pop out the rings-within-rings, and you’ve got a big pile of rings there. Cut some of them in half, or quarters, randomly, just to get a little variety happening.

Take a smallish saucepan. Put a knob of butter in it. Just curl one out with a knife, big as the top half of your thumb or thereabouts. Get some heat happening under the pan — you don’t want to be there all day, crank it up to three-quarters. The butter will melt, and a little while later you’re going to see the surface of it prickle with little bubbles, and start to shimmer. Chuck all the onion in there. Now, there’s loads of onion, and it’s a little pan. So you need to be turning the onion so it all gets buttery and nothing burns. Five or ten minutes of that, and you’ll see the onion getting soft and paler.

What you really want to do is shake a bottle of balsamic vinegar over it three or four times. Red wine vinegar will also do the trick, I’m told, but you should really obtain, borrow or steal a little bottle of balsamic vinegar, as it’s useful stuff. Three or four splashes of it. It’s sharp and aromatic and adds a layer to the flavours.

Do you know what a dessert spoon is? It’s the spoon that’s the same size as a dining fork - not the little teaspoon, not the huge tablespoon. Fling two dessert spoons of sugar in there.

(I use a raw organic demerara sugar. Which sounds flash, except that I get it from the local Co-Op supermarket, which means it’s not fucking flash at all, is it?)

And then chuck half a bottle of beer over the top. Call it… 200 or 250ml of beer. Good beer, mind. See above. If you wouldn’t drink it, don’t fucking cook with it. (This doesn’t mean that you should use meths just because you drink it.)

Stick a lid on it. You’re done. You should come back and stir it every five minutes or so, but basically that’s it. That’s going to take twenty or twenty-five minutes to cook down to a dark, glossy pile of Cthulhu droppings. Seriously, it’s a bit grotesque-looking. And, yes, sometimes it moves when it thinks you’re not looking. But it goes great with sausages, so what the hell.

So I wake up this afternoon to Alex Steffen informing me that We’re All Doomed. To wit, the executive editor of Worldchanging.com was telling me that permafrost on the Arctic seabed has been warmed away, allowing vast underground pockets of methane to ascend in great "chimneys," causing the sea to foam and scientists to fall over in horror because methane is a greenhouse gas twenty times better at its planet-cooking job than good old CO2. These underground deposits were lidded over before the last ice age, apparently, and would have stayed bunged up if, ha ha, there hadn’t been rapid climate change in the Arctic over the last twenty years.

Should all concerns be confirmed, it appears that we’re all going to die from the escape of monstrous planetary farts from beyond history.

Funnily enough, though, Spook Turds From The Bottom Of The Sea are washing up on the shores of New Zealand. Now, this is New Zealand for you: a six foot long barnacled white lump of fatty crap turns up on the beach. What do the locals do?

Mrs Wilkie was keen to cut the greasy lump into blocks and sell it as
moisturising sunblock.

Because that’s the first thing you think of when an alien turd the size of a Smartcar plonks itself on the sand. Not "what in hell did that come out of?" But "can I screw a few dollars out of people by conning them into rubbing sea-monster shit on their skin?" You can at least rely on the English to try and screw it or smoke it first.

I can’t yet construct a workable theory explaining that these things were fired out of an underground sphincter in the Arctic. But I’d like to, if only to make James Lovelock swallow his tongue. Wouldn’t it be lovely to explain to him that we discovered where all the indigestible trans fats that we place into the earth in the form of dead people actually go?

I was just sorting through a stack of CDs, and found this somehow interleaved between them. I’d gotten some old photos from my stepmother when my father died a few years ago, and this was among them. God knows how it got separated from the others.

My dad was a sailor for a while: he always said he simply couldn’t resist the idea of being paid to see the world. And, as far as I know, he served chiefly on the Oriana. I think it may have been the first passenger liner of its type to have a swimming pool — he was certainly under the impression it was. His career as a sailor seems to have been as fraught as his career in the Queen’s Lifeguards (where he was once complicit in giving the Queen a horse with the shits for a public appearance), the high point probably being his missing the ship entirely during shoretime on Fiji and being "imprisoned" for jumping ship in what was basically a hut he was politely asked to return to at nights.

He was in his early twenties when he sent this postcard — presumably nicked out of the ship’s shop — to my grandma. I’m not sure which direction the Oriana would have been steaming in, at this point. Research tells me that she was off Long Beach in March 1962, getting a gash cut in her side by an aircraft carrier. Dad never mentioned it. He never talked a lot about those years, because it bugged my mother, who had never gotten to travel and somehow resented my dad for his experiences. So I never got many details: just the sense that travel was worth doing, and that my dad believed he’d been made a better man by it.

I didn’t get to New Zealand and Australia until my early thirties. But I got there. It’s a weird thing, I suppose, to see the path of your father’s footsteps curling around the entire world. But I like it.

I also like that the silly bastard’s pen ran out during that unintelligible squiggle at the end and he just had to get a pencil to explain that.

Years ago, back when I was prone to laying down for many hours in conditions of significantly altered consciousness, I had an Idea. Following the pattern of behavior that makes such people so unpleasant and scary to decent folks, I spent the next several weeks explaining my Idea to everything that moved, and a few things that didn’t. Because you know what it’s like when you’re pretty sure your brain has exceeded the speed of light and your heart sounds like a badly abused motorcycle engine and you think that maybe other people can hear it so you need to stick eggboxes to the walls and tape rubbish bags to the windows and play Diamanda Galas very very loud at 4am to drown out the sound and paint special pictures on the door with your own blood and semen to keep the police and the Upside Down People away and anyway. Idea.

Teleportation should be a matter of simply proving you’re somewhere else.

A teleportation device would be a little computer set up to run a single equation. And this equation would prove that you’re somewhere else entirely. You’d plug in the coordinates of where you want to be and press Enter. The machine would run, the equation would solve, proving to the entire spacetime continuum that you are in fact in the other place, and suddenly you’d be in the location relating to the provided coordinates. You wouldn’t appear inside another object, because the universe doesn’t like that. The only tricky bit, I figured, would be that the Earth moves through space around the sun and the sun moves through space with the Milky Way and the Milky Way is subject to the expansion of the universe. But people are clever and would find ways to allow for spacetime drift. I think that if you’ve cracked the mathematics to convince the universe that you’re somewhere else entirely, these small details would be easily attended to.

And the best bit is that it wouldn’t require the power demanded by "classical" teleportation — which, some say, demands the energy output of the sun in order to briefly render the teleportee into a controlled Hiroshima-scale nuclear explosion. I figure you could run my teleport device on a couple of AA batteries.

This is, of course, why I don’t really take drugs anymore.

Did you know that only two species can be removed from the biosphere with no knock-on effects whatsoever? Wasps and dogs. Seriously. I have no reason to lie about this.* Delete either of those two from life on earth, and there’s no effect on the foodchain, planetary ecology, nothing. They are surplus to requirements. The wasp exists to just bug people, and the dog is the planet’s way of reminding us that pure, genetic Evil exists in the universe.

Which makes me wonder why no-one thought of this before:

A street-sweeping truck has sucked a dog up through its bristles on a New York street, leaving its horrified owner holding nothing but the lead.

How did this act of stark, shining genius have to happen by accident? This is the ultimate Eureka moment for the human race. Send sweeper trucks through the streets every six hours to denude our roads of dogs. No more of their plotting on street corners, their shitting under human feet, their watching, their constant awful watching for signs of weakness. Oh, yes, a human’s best friend. Until you show a sign of weakness. And then they eat you. Cats eat dead bodies because they get hungry, and, let’s face it, they made it clear they couldn’t give a shit about you from the start. Dogs lure you with that masquerade of unconditional affection. But they’ve been thinking about eating you the whole time.

My friend Zo lost her dog Moo some weeks ago. What do you think happened to that little dog, now no-one’s keeping their eye on it? That’s right. That dog is now living on the fucking moon, collaborating with Nazis. Prove me wrong.

Yeah, you can laugh. But I can hear you. It’s that shaky, uncertain kind of laugh. Deep down, you know I’m right. You fear the Dog, but I Hate it, and that’s why I can say these things out loud. The Dog is the natural enemy of the Human. We should all have street-sweeping trucks. Packs of us should be trundling up and down the streets every day, sucking the yappy bastards up for the good of our children and our children’s children.

Find that street sweeper guy and give him a medal. He has shown us the way of the future.

* I might actually be lying about this.

Given the choice, how would you prefer to announce the presence of your species in local space? Imagine all the ways you could describe the emergence of a digital-age society on this planet. All the ways you could explain our species and our environment and biosphere, and explain that, no, we’re not perfect, we’re still fighting, we still haven’t resolved our relationship with nature, there are still hungry people and sick people. But we’re trying, and in some places we’re winning, and although we can’t reach you, we could really use a friend. All the ways in which you could hope to open up a conversation with the Other, wherever it may lie.

Or you could just send them a Doritos ad.

Because, yes, on the morning of June 12 2008, the EISCAT high-powered space transmitter station on Svalbard used its array of radars to beam a Doritos ad at a solar system 42 light years from here.

For six hours, the MPEG video file was repeatedly pulsed at system 47 UMa, in the Ursa Minor constellation, which was chosen because it seems to have a circumstellar habitable zone. 47 UMa does have two Jupiter-class planets outside the HZ, although one of them is so massive that it very probably does weird gravity things to the outside edge of the HZ. This means that, if there are Earth-like rocky planets inside the habitable zone that we just can’t see yet, there’s a fair chance they’ll be small, lumpy, thirsty and ugly. Like a man in a Foster’s commercial. Or, presumably, a Doritos one.

EISCAT, which has had funding problems, has received an undisclosed but presumably substantial donation from Doritos in return for the broadcast, which will help them meet their actual aims of performing radar astronomy experiments. The director of EISCAT is quoted as saying: ""Some years in the future, the money that comes from this kind of commercial service could be used to fund pure research."

This would seem to open the door to polluting local space with the grottiest capitalistic artifacts conceivable in return for being able to do a bit of science. That’s a pretty high cost — of a piece with the recurring nightmare in fiction of the Coca-Cola logo being permanently sprayed on the surface of the moon. Others will champion this as private enterprise giving science the boost it needs, which is usually where I’m told to wave my hands in glee that Richard Branson and his mates have created a zippy goshwow 21st Century space business on the same kind of suborbital lob Alan Shepherd managed in 1961 (and a fair distance short of the full orbital flight Yuri Gagarin made).

Fuck that. I don’t care. Attempting to announce our presence to any intelligence that can get in front of the signal by sending them something made by a company that sells crunchy shit in bags is not the way to the maturity of the species.

According to the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence’s Permanent Study Group, it’s been argued that "a civilization which hopes to detect radio evidence of other civilizations in the cosmos is obligated to reveal its own presence. Others maintain that it is suicidal to shout in the jungle." There is, therefore, a San Marino Scale measuring risk in these matters. You can play with an online calculator, if you know a few specifics, to work out whether or not a signal broadcast into space will in fact bring down the alien hordes ov chewy doooom. And if it does, you know damn well that their first words will be "Sponsored by Doritos?"

Amazingly (to me), it’s not the first time we’ve fired signals at 47 UMa. Notional lifeforms in-system will also one day be privy to The 1st Theremin Concern For Aliens. They’re due to get that in the summer of 2047. The funny thing about that, of course, is that the theremin was usually used to announce the presence of spooky space aliens in 1950s science fiction films…

We’re just asking for it, really.

The devices at Queen’s University Belfast are described as "small hockey-puck-like antennas," but they sound like bugs to me. They channel wireless data signals across human skin using a physical effect called, I swear, The Creeping Wave. The Creeping Wave Effect would allow several electronic implants to communicate with each other across the surface of your skin — essentially, a bluetoothing of the human body. Or, if you like, bugging yourself — monitoring and updating your own devices over the air. I’m not sure if New Scientist’s term "skin-tenna" will stick. Let’s face it: it’s going to be a creeping bug.

At the same time, however, a team at Rutgers has its own creeping bug problem. They thawed out a bunch of soil-based bacterias, the youngest of which went into the deep-freeze in 1974, and tried some antibiotics on them. Antibiotic resistance is an increasing problem in the medical sector, and some elements of that resistance may be found in soil, hence the experiments. No-one was happy to see these vintage soil-bugs fend off a dose of Cipro that would literally have killed a sumo wrestler.

The thing is, Cipro doesn’t occur in nature. And all of the antibiotics used in the test were developed some considerable time after the soil bacteria samples were stuffed in the icebox. Bacteria that have not been exposed to an antibiotic should not have been able to evolve resistance to it, right? I mean, Cipro used to work just fine. And these bugs had never seen Cipro, because it came after they’d been frozen and because it was generated in a lab. Speculative explanations seem to begin with the suggestion that "natural variation or prior exposure to undiscovered Cipro-like molecules could explain the bacteria’s retroactive resistance." But a different idea occurred to me.

What if bacteria update over the air in a creeping wave across the surface of the earth?

I had a sort of infernokrusher/BRUTE! moment in July of 2005. A searing rupture in the sf paradigm: the certain knowledge that in fact what sf needed was both an upgrade and a retrograde. A science fiction dominated by obsession with penis size, an adolescent terror of sex, sickening violence and massive, random, senseless explosions. Written with the sort of ugly, naive bluntness with which a disturbed teenager might craft the self-produced pornographic material that just barely prevents him from going off the rails and fucking all the neighbourhood pets to death. Imagine, then, a lobotomised fourteen-year-old Stephen Hawking who’d been sexually abused by nuns since the age of three, turning his hand to the great game of science fiction. I felt that, somehow, this would produce the perfect science fiction, the truest response to the early pulp-magazine sf.

Luckily for everyone, I sobered up a day later because my family was coming home. The only products of that 24-hour fugue state were the following two sketches. And thank god there weren’t any more. Even my dear friend, the late Eva Lux, a sometime porn performer, looked askance at terms like “beef missile.”

But, sometimes, deep in the armpit of the night, these sketches call to me. I dream that perhaps I walked away from the purest fiction ever to have touched a screen. And then I dream that I’m being repeatedly punched in the face by everybody.

Planet Earth’s Control Room

Jesus Christ’s liver tasted of gin and semen. I gobbed it out on to the floor and looked around the control room. Somewhere out back, the Pope was still screaming. If I hadn’t punched the teeth out of the pirahna before I poured them up him, he might be dead by now. The only thing muffling his fucking noise was the mouthful of used condoms. The Virgin Mary came out of a side door with a shotgun. I bit off the end and spat it in her eye, laughing. “Virgin Mary my arse,” I said. “Any wife of mine coming home with that story would have been left out for the lepers before midnight. You like the taste of dadpaste and no mistake. I’ve chewed open your son and washed his raw meat down with a bottle of shit wine. What do you think to that?” As the Virgin Mary went down on her booted knees and skilfully guided my purple-headed battering ram past her prehensile tonsils, I looked at the control panel. There was a depression in it with a red button at the bottom with the sign DO NOT PRESS. At the last moment, I ripped my beef missile free of her vocal cords with both hands and shoved it down into the control console.

The world exploded.

And THEN I ejaculated.

The end. Fuck off.

The Insulted Lover

I grabbed a handful of my own semen out of Mother Teresa and flung it at the oncoming cops. They all got instantly pregnant and fell over. Even the men.

“I’ve had better,” said Mother Teresa, sparking a match off her nipple and lighting up a joint.

It was then I knew I had to kill everyone in the city. With my penis.

I flexed my flaming meathammer. The road cracked in half. The cops exploded. So did the buildings. Everybody died.

Except me.

Result.

The end. Fuck off.

Today we learned that our universe may well have "bubbled off" from a previous one. That, in fact, our universe may well be nothing but one of a chain of entire serial realities. Or, perhaps, universes cluster like frogspawn in the pondwater of some unimaginable hyperreal superfluid:

Their model suggests that new universes could be created spontaneously from apparently empty space. From inside the parent universe, the event would be surprisingly unspectacular…"a universe could form inside this room and we’d never know".

This apparently has a further implication: that the Big Bang (from our end — obviously an inaudible farting sound on the other end) of bubbling off from a previous universe meant that our universe emerged in ordered condition, rather than accidental chaos. This preserves the Second Law Of Thermodynamics, which says that systems progress from order to disorder, which explains why time runs in one direction. Serial universes explain the arrow of time.

In my slightly whiskied state tonight, this also suggests to me that time never ends. There was time before the very beginnings of the universe, and there will be time after the end of our universe. All the time in the world. Also, check this out:

Detailed measurements made by the satellite have shown that the fluctuations in the microwave background are about 10% stronger on one side of the sky than those on the other. Sean Carroll conceded that this might just be a coincidence, but pointed out that a natural explanation for this discrepancy would be if it represented a structure inherited from our universe’s parent.

Let me repeat that bit. The universe may have an inherited structure. Like a RepRap machine, a self-replicating object. Turn this one around in your head tonight: what if a universe is a thing that builds more universes? Or a postbiological animal that reproduces more universes in n-dimensional space?

We learn stuff like this every single day. Every single goddamned day a new idea just falls out of the sky.

Who’d want to live anywhere else?

The things the internet have done to music continue to fascinate me.

In times past, people recorded for radio — that is, they recorded in a way that would sound good on medium-wave broadcasting, because BBC Radio 1, the nation’s way of discovering music, broadcast on 275 and 285 on the medium wave. FM was, for a long time, reserved for the Chart Show on Sundays, where Radio 1 took Radio 2’s FM slot for two hours. (Or was it an hour and a half?) This is one reason why there wasn’t any bass in British pop music for years and years. It didn’t broadcast all that well. Pop music was incredibly toppy for a long time; you only got real bass in clubs and at gigs.

Today, it’s the middle stretch that goes missing. Mp3 preserves the top and the bottom, but the centre loses nuance in the compression. And now I’m hearing people record for mp3. People are starting to complain about it — click around and you’ll find ”audiophiles” wishing for FLAC and Ogg that preserves more of the music. It’s just another cycle. Sooner or later, we’ll have another moment as in ‘87/’88 when people discovered bass again, and everything else sounded kind of insipid in comparison.

Not that it’ll happen in a big wave next time. The other interesting thing is the immediacy and fractioning of musical movements. In (say) 1988, you could feel it coming. (In actual fact, there were two things coming — in addition to acid, there was a reinvention of guitar music). Genesis P-Orridge has talked about this a little bit, the weird surge in the air that took him to Jack The Tab. In those days, big cultural shifts were a slow wave passing over the planet, moving at the speed of postage and club nights and the occasional phone call. And they came, at best, one or two at a time. And they caught up everybody.

What’s changed is the speed of communication and the speed at which new music can be experienced. So today we no longer wait for the breakers to hit every 11 years (roughly: rock, 55. Psychedelia, 66. Punk, 77. Acid, 1988). Instead, micro-movements pop up every month. Some new eddy in the hardcore continuum, MySpacey chavpop, The Fonal Sound, British ”dark folk,” the spooktronics crowd being drawn to the Miasmah label (and too many more to mention)… far more plentiful than “scenes” in the past, geographically scattered and inspiring the sort of mad group inspiration and evolution that you used to only find at the top of big New Sound cultural events.

Everything is happening, all the time, very fast. I like that.

At the end of the month, I’m off to Chicago to guest at the WizardWorld Chicago comics convention.  The name is a bit of a misnomer: it’s actually held in Rosemont, some way outside Chicago, basically just a convention-centre compound.  I will never actually get to see Chicago.  The experience will be not unlike a forty year old man visiting the city in LOGAN’S RUN.  Only without the sex and the mass suicides at the end.  That would be a fine way to end a comics convention — everyone into Carousel so Warren can watch you explode.  They ought to lay on that sort of show just for me, and I am therefore disappointed that they don’t show their guests of honour the correct volume of love.  There are never enough exploding people at these things.

As is usual when I do my annual American show, I’ll be doing a late-night talk on the Friday. The way these things work is that I am helped to a stage and then take questions from the audience until everyone gets sick of me. These gigs are sometimes curtailed by the fact that you can’t smoke in most of America anymore. Though I did light up during my San Diego talk anyway, and probably narrowly missed being arrested as, I don’t know, a lung terrorist or something.

This year at Chicago, Avatar Press (who arranged my appearance) have beaten expectations. They have somehow gotten my Friday night talk accredited as Performance Art. And it seems that under Illinois law performance artists can smoke on stage in pursuit of, well, the performance. And there’s a bar in the hall.

This means that, since I can remain drunk off my arse and wreathed in smoke for the entire gig, I will probably be talking well into Saturday. And probably to myself.

But if you’d put yourself in the situation of having to answer questions in front of several hundred people, wouldn’t you want to be shitfaced and chainsmoking too?

The only drawback to the plan is that my signing schedule is, to put it lightly, punishing, and the press time will go on top of that. So the chances of my actually seeing anyone outside convention time are minimal to forget-it. My schedule usually commences at 9am and finishes out around 1am.

Please don’t be offended if I don’t shake hands with you. I shook with every proffered hand at my signings at Heroes Con a couple of years ago, and by Saturday afternoon I was having to ice my hand down. And since I use that hand for typing and earning bill money, that’s not good. I sign for literally thousands of people at these things now, and it turns out a thousand handshakes a day just pulps my right hand.

You may kiss the hem of my garment instead.

Last year I had singing zombie girls, but this year I kind of fancy a call to prayer before my signings begin. What do you think? Too much?

As noted earlier in the week, Kid Shirt tagged me in the Seven Songs Meme that’s doing the rounds:

"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to."

These things circulate like a dose of the intellectual clap. "I fucked this disease into your brainmeat. Confess your shame in public and then fuck it into seven other people." You find yourself looking at your friends and fellow-travellers, wondering which of them you hate enough to infect.

1: "Denaissance" - Kemper Norton Collective

I once played this on a podcast, but I’m listening to it again since Kemper included it on his recent CD-R. Again and again. Because it’s joyous, in its own doomed and drunken way. It’s big and it stomps and there are lots of instruments and lots of people singing and playing and just fucking daring the sun to go down.

2: "Live at ICC, Tokyo" - Philip Jeck

Do not listen to Philip Jeck on earphones in a darkened Oslo hotel room at three in the morning. Philip Jeck’s association by others with the emergent field/passing game of sonic hauntology is half-founded on the fact that he can haunt a room. I never really "got" Jeck until I saw him live — he creates a thoroughly supernatural chill in acoustic space — and I found this recording afterwards. Put it on my phone to listen to during my recent trip back to Norway. Usual hotel room insomnia brought on by sleeping alone. Pushed in the earbuds and pressed play. Fuck me, that was a mistake.

3: "Late Night" - Belong

Someone else playing with haunted audio: the sound of an obscure cover version playing on an AM car radio as you walk past it at night. Washed out by the ambience of 21st Century life. Almost but not quite lost in it: that gorgeous sad-smile chord change at the top of the chorus still comes through. It’s a thing that makes me pensive.

4: "Ghosts IV 32" - NIN

My favourite piece from GHOSTS I-IV. That prowling, pulsing rhythm has a real motorik feel to it, that slightly sleazy driving-at-night propulsiveness. It’s the piece on GHOSTS that I can slip into and go with.

5: "Reed Sodger" - Clive Powell

Yes, still obsessed with this, a couple of months after I first wrote about it here. It probably comes out of my current fascination with "haunted music/music that haunts." With the weird accompaniment of distorted and filtered instruments, it’s almost like the clearest Electronic Voice Phenomenon you ever heard — the strong, sweet voice of Northern Britain of decades and centuries past coming back to us through the DOCTOR WHO time-tunnel howlaround effect.

6: "Guest Informant" - The Fall

Ancient, I know. I’m in the process of replacing all my crumbled old Fall tapes and unusable Fall vinyl with CDs. The "Brix years" of the Fall tend to be looked down on a bit, these days, and my own favourite Fall is still HEX ENDUCTION HOUR… but I rediscovered my love of this garagey bit of impenetrable twanging madness off FRENZ EXPERIMENT. I spent a significant chunk of winter 1988 trying to work out what the hell Brix was yelling in the background all through the song. Turns out it was "Baghdad/ Space Cog/ Analyst." The new album’s not bad, either, Mark E Smith full on as The Last English Psychotronic Bluesman…

7: "We’re Gonna Rise" - The Breeders

Weird thing. This came up on my mp3 player just as I was finishing the last page of Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD in the departure lounge in Oslo Gardermoen the other week. It’s insidious like "Fortunately Gone," the opening song on their very first album, but in a different way. It creeps up slowly, winds its way into your head, and before you know it you’re just kind of looking out the window wistfully.

Looking back, it’s all very quiet stuff. It’s been a very quiet spring. I just downloaded the new Ladytron, let’s see if that sets me up for summer.

Maybe I’ll try and sling all these, sans the Jeck, up on a muxtape tomorrow.

Now, the horrible part. I have to fuck this tag into seven other people.

Matt Fraction, of course, because I know that it’ll nag at him and he’ll eventually produce a masterpiece of obsession. Eliza Gauger, because it occurs to me that I have no idea what she’s listening to right now. Wil Wheaton should do one of these. I think Patton Oswalt should, too, but I doubt he’ll have time. Kieron Gillen is an obvious tag. I’m really kind of interested in how Susannah Breslin would respond. And I’m going to tag Ariana Osborne, to force her to write more. Heh.

EDIT: Simon Reynolds tagged me after the fact.

When, on my mailing list some months ago, I expressed a preference for Barack Obama in the Democratic selection process, I received an email which read, ”Oh, I see. You’d support a black man but not a white woman.”

That kind of fucked-up paralogia seemed to infect the entire Clinton campaign, reaching its perverse crescendo when she trumpeted her support among uneducated white folks. Her press ops, as one wag pointed out, stopped just short of her being photographed taking a shit in an outhouse.

There’s a case to be made that the core of her campaign’s failure was that she was running against John McCain for the justplainfolks vote, instead of running against Obama and his “politics of joy” (a term I, not he, lift from one-time Dem hopeful Hubert Humphrey). There may be a better case to be made for her campaign simply being a shambolic display of entitlement and two-faced political hackery. The actual numbers don’t really speak to the genuine disgust her tactics raised in many people, hardening and broadening the schism between pro-Obama and pro-Clinton in the Democratic base.

On the Clinton side, of course, there remains a certainty that Obama is “all talk,” and untested in national politics of any kind — that there’s more to a leader than talk. Certainly he makes interesting counterprogramming to McCain, who is unafraid of mentioning that he ate water rats in Viet Nam for 18 years at any opportunity and has been in politics since Ben Franklin was a boy.

This is the point at which I get interested. As longtime readers will recall with tiredness, I’m fascinated by American Presidential elections, and over the last twenty years I have a flawless scorecard for picking the winner. This, I’m not ready to predict yet.

I want to see how he does against McCain on the stump. He’ll cut a better figure, and that gift for rhetoric will soar — but Obama doesn’t have the same advantages going in that, say, Bill Clinton had against Bush Senior. Clinton played the debate hall like a rock-star king, but he also had working experience as a governor that he brought into play brilliantly. The test of Obama will be how he behaves when McCain puts him into a corner.

I imagine the Republican machine isn’t completely happy today. They have the ”experience” card, but they really wanted Hillary Clinton. They’ve been waiting for Hillary Clinton. They know how to run against her. Some of them have been licking their lips in anticipation of the most sickening public political evisceration in decades. Remember when Hillary declared she and Bill were under siege by a massive right-wing conspiracy? A UK newspaper did some digging, and found it. Interviewed them and everything. And those people didn’t suddenly go out and get hobbies. Obama is a different animal, and harder to run against in many ways.

I like what I know of Barack Obama. I’m glad it’s him. I have concerns — about the strength and breadth of his platform, and, frankly, about his safety, in a country where supporting a black man over a white woman is apparently worth confronting someone in email over — and I distrust the messianic Obamania I see here and there. I understand the sentiment and its roots, but I don’t like it: it invites the universe to fuck with your life. But, from my perspective over here in Britain, he has something America needs in a leader right now.

It would also be nice, really, if Americans abroad could have some dignity and respect returned to them.

Is putting humans on Mars important? Yes. Humans need land to live on, and, in a dynamic environment, they need land to move to. Closed systems are bad because they remove options. A single planet is a closed system. And the thing about land is, as a history teacher of mine used to say, they don’t make it anymore.

Put aside the grim meathook future of our coming environmental doom for a moment. What if something drops on us? What if some natural freak event like a sequence of volcanic incidents drops us into faux-nuclear winter? We’ve come close to that before, in the 1880’s. What if something no-one ever thought of happens to make human life no longer viable on this planet? Do we just shrug and say fuckit?

I believe that exploration is necessary to the human spirit. But even if you don’t share that particular delusion, I think most people would agree that any kind of extinction is bad. Except maybe for dogs.

Mars is the best local option for setting up a colony and, eventually, a second life for humanity. It’s a bit of a crap option: no magnetic field to speak of, cold as hell, and currently no guarantees of usable water. But Venus is a shithole, Mercury’s a suicide trip and the Jovian system is a radiation trap. Forget everything you heard about asteroid habitats, it’s bullshit. Right now, it’s Mars or an extrasolar planet, and an exoplanet is going to stay out of our reach, barring a dramatic breakthrough in propulsion engineering, for at least fifty years.

There has long been a movement to preserve Mars. It’s said that terraforming Mars is nothing but another wart extruded from the human imperialist tendency, and it should remain the equivalent of a national park, unspoiled. The same people have said that if we go to Mars, we should ”do it with class,” eschewing nuclear-drive options.

I’m currently working on a project written from, if you like, the pro-Mars Id. The chances are good that in fact there is no life on Mars beyond the odd super-tough bacterium. And while I did indeed just say that no kind of extinction is good, it should also be pointed out that giving up a bolthole for human breeding pairs — which are, make no mistake, the stakes on a Martian colonisation drive — on the basis that we might kill something less substantial and self-aware than a cough is no way to run a railroad.

So my characters — and the dark side of my conscience — say what are we waiting for? Let us now bend Mars to our will (and I’m aware of the overtones of both ”run a railroad” and ”will”) and fix the place up for human habitation. Let’s cover the bastard in GM lichen and bugs, thicken up the atmosphere, drop a few nukes on Tharsis, do everything we can think of, fast and dirty, because the universe is hiding the stopwatch from us and we don’t know how much time we’ve got left. Let’s get a bit of air pressure happening, see if we can force out some of that water, do what it takes to at least get some overground stations into a safety zone.

Because it’s not doing us any good as a national park. And we are barely clinging to the surface of our world. And not through any fault of our own. Successful human life was a fluke on this planet even before we started poisoning ourselves. Playing the “we need to learn how to look after our planet before we go to another” lament is utterly beside the point. Think about your favourite art, your favourite memories, the best things people ever did. Does that have to go away because some people want Mars to always look like that quarry in Wales where they always shot DOCTOR WHO episodes in the 1970’s?

Fuck the Martian bugs, one of my characters says. In forty years I want my grandkids to email me from a .mars address. It’s not like we have to hunt whales or give a Tasmanian Devil face cancer to do it. It’s just sitting there. Why not bend it?

It’s hard to get excited about robots. Unless, like a singer acquaintance of mine, you have what’s termed a “clunk” fetish. Once a year or so, she asks me if I’ll write a comic about robots fucking.
I imagine she’s waiting with ragged breath for the Phoenix Lander to stab its metal cock into the Martian regolith to see if the planet is wet for it. Sometime today, I think, the robot explorer will slide a probe into the rusty crust in the search for ice and biochemical presence. We already have the photo that may show exposed Martian ice for the first time — unless it’s a photographic artifact, a trick of light and lens and no more real than the Face On Mars.

Somewhere, Robert Zubrin is chewing on his John Lennon hat in barely controlled anger, or so I like to imagine. Zubrin’s been advocating immediate human exploration of Mars for decades. He even costed out a mission, Mars Direct, using already-extant space technology, that came in at a fraction of NASA’s own estimates. Zubrin’s programme could have done it for the price of a couple of Hollywood summer tentpole movies. And, somewhere, he’s hissing that the first person off the Mars Express lander could have told us if that was ice or not. He’s had people pretending to be on Mars in simulated lander stations dropped in remote frozen locations for years.

The problems with Zubrin’s plans are many and various, of course, and begin with the fact that both deep space and the Martian environment are powerfully iniquitous to human life. Playing pretend astronauts in an FMARS tent in the frozen north is not the same as having to erect an anti-radiation shelter (or, more likely, digging yourself a Martian burrow) to ensure you don’t come home as a tumour in a spacesuit. Nor is flying to your simulator location the same as flying a spacecraft nine months out from Earth’s protective magnetic field. There is no test article for a vessel that’ll stop you taking at least twice the human rad limit on your voyage.

No-one seems to be listening to Robert Zubrin, who once allied himself with Newt Gingrich if memory serves, anymore. He plugs on with his Mars simulations with his eager faux-astronauts, and continues to hold gatherings of his Mars Society, which is taking on the pall of those other 90s groups of similar hubris like the people trying to build ocean habitats or intentional space societies. One of those, as I recall, turned themselves into something called the Living Universe Foundation and tried to buy themselves some scrubland outside Bastrop in Texas for a compound.

Maybe that’s an option for the Mars Society now. Buy some frontier land and ritually smash effigies of the radiation-hardened robot lander currently clunking away at the Martian maidenhead.