April 5th, 2011 | guest informant
Michel Fiffe is a writer, artist and journalist, one of the founder creators of the ACT-I-VATE collective and a contributor to the award-wining POPGUN anthology. I asked him if he had time for Three Panels, and he very kindly drew you this:
April 4th, 2011 | guest informant
You may remember me raving about Catherynne M Valente’s novel PALIMPSEST a while back. She has a new novel out, DEATHLESS. I asked her to write to you about it, and she kindly found the time to say this:
I can’t always do that. Sometimes ideas come from nowhere, or seem to have always been banging around in my head. An obsession with fairy tales or Prester John or writing on skin. But it so happens that sometime in 2006, this guy I had just started dating offered to read me a Russian fairy tale from a very beautifully illustrated book. He just translated on the fly, reading Russian and speaking English and it was a nice little Bluebeard sort of story, about a boy named Ivan and a girl named Marya. Ivan was not supposed to go into the basement but of course he did–Ivan is never very bright in these stories. I liked the whole Girl Bluebeard reversal thing and was grooving along until Ivan discovers that what is in the basement that he’s not supposed to see is Koschei the Deathless, hanging from chains on the wall of the cellar of Marya’s house.
“Wait, what?” I said. “Why is he in the basement?”
“I don’t know,” said my suitor. “He just is. See?” And he showed me the illustration.
“But isn’t Koschei like, kind of the devil?”
“Yeah, basically. Without the whole religion part. He kidnaps maidens and is immortal and vaguely vampirey and various people named Ivan have to go get their girlfriends back.”
“Then why does she have him chained up in her basement? Who is she? How did she do that? Is he letting her? Did she force him? Was she a maiden he took before, and then she turned the tables on him? Does he still love her? I’ll bet he still loves her.”
My suitor had seen me do this particular dance before–Reading Too Much Into Things That Never Bothered Me and Just Want to Be Left Alone is like my #1 personality trait.
“It doesn’t say,” he said, grinning.
“Well, it sounds pretty kinky to me. Things which are actually meant to be kinky and hot are less kinky than fairy tale girls chaining up devilish vampires in their basement for fun and no reason.”
“It’s not really the point of the story. Ivan has this whole adventure after this, to get Marya back after Koschei runs off with her again. This is like act two. Marya’s not really in it much after this.”
“I don’t care about Ivan! He sucks. Marya is awesome–you heard the story! It said she was a warrior princess! She should be in All the Parts.”
And I paused. And our eyes met. And I said:
“I’m gonna write a book about this.”
And five years later, the Russian fairy tale boy and I are married, and he still reads me folktales looking for that glint in my eye when I find the place in a story where I fit, where the tale I want to tell is hiding.
And five years later there is a book where Marya is in all the parts, and there are reasons for everything, and it is kinky and funny and sad and hard, but yes, in the end, he still loves her.
After all, you never forget the girl with the power to chain you up in her cellar forever.
If you can’t find DEATHLESS in your local booksellers, Amazon.com has it, as does Amazon.co.uk. You can find Cat at her Livejournal, and her main site is here.
April 4th, 2011 | guest informant
Today’s guestcomic is by Rachel Smythe, whom I’ve known on and off for a few years now. And it’s been a joy to watch her illustration develop. I asked her for Three Panels, and got this vaguely Beckettian piece of smut – which is as expected! — a sort of outtake from her longrunning webcomic THE DOCTOR PEPPER SHOW.
You can find Rachel at her webcomic, her art site or her twitter.
March 24th, 2011 | guest informant
Literally just got this in email from novelist and comics writer Charlie Huston, who’s having some technical issues over at his place. Am delighted to run it here. Did I mention that SLEEPLESS is one of my favourite novels of the last year or two? Probably. Charlie Huston, folks:
So I wrote another piece for the Mulholland Books website.
Some random thoughts that had been swirling around my head immediately following Hosni Mubarak’s abdication from power in Egypt and that country’s military taking the reins of governance.
What I wrote is HERE.
Obviously a lot has changed in the ensuing weeks. So much has changed that as the post date for this little piece approached, I was considering writing a brief addendum. Not to correct errors in my thinking/projections, but to reflect on the speed of change in cases of revolution. As of a few days ago, spending thought bubbles on the irony of Egypt’s military seeming to be a marked improvement over Mubarak’s regime was a singular waste of fifteen minutes. Both the complexion and inner nature of Middle Eastern protest movements having undergone radical change.
"Protest movement."
The phrase seems positively quaint.
Updated lexicons favor "revolution" or "civil war."
As a case study for generalization, my little brain fart appeared years out of date after a span of weeks.
Of course that was before the last 24 hour news cycle in which we started hearing about THIS and THIS.
Both items to be filed under Same As It Ever Was.
Also emphasizing, to me, the speed of change.
In about three weeks, my little piece on revolution has gone from feeling, to myself in any case, relevant, to being utterly behind the curve of event, to having event go round the curve and circle back and make the piece relevant again.
Presto!
And all without even nodding in the direction of Japan.
Keeping up is no longer the issue. The question now is whether it is more efficient to run as fast as you can in an effort to keep the gap between yourself and the rate of change as narrow as possible, or to stand still and hope that you get lapped on a regular basis, gleaning what you can each time the present/future whips by scattering loose debris in its wake.
This matters to me because I’m trying to write about today. A fictional version of today that is still recognizably today. A task that is complicated by the fact that I’m trying to accomplish it in the context of a novel. A form that does not traditionally lend itself to speed.
From when I finish a clean first draft of this thing I can expect a year to pass before publication. In that time I’ll have opportunities to update, correct, and amend some of the content, but it is inevitable that passages and scenes that felt of the moment when they were written will have become hopelessly bedraggled and irrelevant while type was being set.
Research.
Research in this climate of change is…constant. Relentless.
The question is the same: Try to keep up, or remain stationary?
Try to be utterly of the moment, or take a stab at timelessness?
Which boils down to: Incorporate actual current events, or fictionalize the whole world in a way that suggests the feeling of living in a era of constant crisis?
These are existential question for a writer.
I just wrote that and I did not mean it to be taken ironically. It may be the most sincere thing I have ever stated about writing. So sincere that it makes me uncomfortable enough that I need to comment on it. Because I’m a writer, not a philosopher or a thinking. A storyteller, I.
But there it is.
Lady or the tiger, whichever device you chose to employ in your story, they change the fabric of everything.
Write about the factual NOW in fiction, or fictionalize the NOW to create an honest sense of what it’s like to be alive? It doesn’t get more brass tacks than that.
So I wrote another piece for Mulholland Books. Filler for my new publisher’s website. Loose thoughts cobbled into vague order. And it has been transmuted by the passage of events into a case study applicable to a novel I’m writing. And a way of thinking about writing it. And, because I am a storyteller, a way for me to think about how I’m living.
How it feels.
How the future feels to me.
It feels like living all the time with a hand grenade, and the pin is out.
And I don’t know how long the fuse is.
Throw it and hope there isn’t time for anyone to throw it back at you?
Or hold on for another second more?
And another.
Another.
A second more.
Safe travels,
- c
March 24th, 2011 | guest informant
Three Panels is a guestpost spot for comics artists, wherein I ask them to do a comic about anything they like so long as it’s 640 pixels across and only three panels.
The demented Chris G has been entertaining people on my message board, and via his webcomic SPACE SHARK, as well as his dA page, for some while, and I thought he should spread his brainmuck here too. So I asked him to do three panels for me. And what he produced was surprisingly serene:
March 23rd, 2011 | guest informant
Three Panels is a guestpost spot for comics artists, wherein I ask them to do a comic about anything they like so long as it’s 640 pixels across and only three panels.
Yao Xiao created a bit of a stir with her wonderful piece for the TRANSMET charity art book, so I asked her to do three panels for me. You can find her, and her terrific work, at her website. And she’s @yaoxiaoart on the twitters. These are Yao’s Three Panels:
February 14th, 2011 | guest informant
Because I am of great and magnanimous soul, I invited the novelist Carolyn Turgeon, author of the forthcoming book MERMAID, to write to you about whatever was in her head today. This was a mistake, as she is quite mad. I apologise for the following.
So you might be surprised to know that Warren Ellis hates mermaids. This is very suspicious to me – I mean, who hates mermaids? He has at various times told me that “I don’t know anything about goddamn mermaids!” and “I’ve never met anyone interesting who smelled like haddock” and then at other times, using shorthand, he has just written the word “fishtits” to me and I can only imagine the horror (yet slight desire?) that passes over his face as he does so, not to mention the way that word—and the grotesque yet seductive image behind it—very likely haunts his dreams.
I am sure that this mermaid aversion tells us something very profound and secret about Warren Ellis, but I sadly wasted much of my twenties getting useless degrees in Italian literature rather than psychoanalysis or what have you. But it is all totally Freudian.
He won’t even write about his anti-mermaid stance for my new blog, iamamermaid.com, in which I talk to many fascinating people about their totally normal and understandable love for mermaids, a love that Warren Ellis refuses to partake in. Due to a cold cold—even fishlike—heart? (Though as I point out on my blog, just because you’re half a fish doesn’t mean you have half a heart. But what if Warren Ellis is a whole fish?)
There is also a thin line between repulsion and attraction sometimes, as people who love Warren Ellis well know.
Anyway, he suggested that I write about my obsession with fishtits on his website.
Because I am extremely amiable and have a huge hot heart, unlike Warren Ellis, I said I would be happy to write about fishtits for said site. Warren claims that he would like me to do this so that he can selflessly help promote my new novel, Mermaid. I’m sure this generosity in no way has to do with Warren Ellis secretly wanting to know more about mermaids and possibly procreate with them or watch cinema classics like Talk Dirty to Me Part 3 (a 1980s porn version of Splash in which a 16-year-old Traci Lords plays a mergirl who learns to speak human by “talking dirty”) or anything like that.
That would be ridiculous.
I would now like to share with you ten reasons why you should not shun mermaids the way that Warren Ellis does, other than the obvious fact that Warren Ellis is a very bad role model and to follow him is to be led into a state of eternal sin.
One. Mermaids are hot, everyone knows that. They sit around on rocks brushing their hair and wearing seashells over their breasts and singing songs that make you want to jump out of ships and stuff. And when you start to drown they sometimes will save you and sometimes they’ll just carry you to the bottom of the sea and dance with your corpse, but seriously, considering we all have to die one day it’s not a bad way to go.
Two. Everyone knows that when you add potential death and destruction to sex and desire, you’ve pretty much hit the motherlode.
Three. Mermaids are totally unattainable. Even if you caught one you couldn’t have sex with her, because she has no genitals. And if you try any other moves on her she’ll likely slip away anyway; she is half a fish. So you can only long for her, and everyone knows that longing for something is usually better than having it.
Four. Mermaids live in the very bottom of the ocean, alongside strange wondrous monsters that no one has ever seen. They represent secret knowledge and the subconscious and darkness and mystery and birth and all that kind of stuff, and if you could find a mermaid and get her to reveal her secrets to you you would get totally rich and possibly become a demigod. Which some people believe Warren Ellis already is. Hmm.
Five. Mermaids are two things at once and everyone knows that being two things is always better than being one. That’s just math.
Six. Celebrities always dress up like mermaids and everyone knows that celebrities are better than regular people. Plus, Bettie Page was a mermaid:
Seven. Even Superman was into mermaids.
Eight. There are whole cities of mermaids you can go visit. There is Weeki Wachee Springs in Florida where real mermaids swim in an underwater theater. The symbol of Warsaw, Poland, has been the mermaid since the middle ages and there are a few famous statues there including this weird big mermaid on the Vistula River that was one of the few things the Nazis left alone when they tore that city down. Why? Because it was just a mermaid and they didn’t realize that the mermaid is Warsaw’s protectress and has this big political significance. She also carries a shield and a sword. So mermaids can be totally badass and trick Nazis.
Nine. Fishtits. Right?
Ten. There are many, many awesome novels written about mermaids, and by many many I mean mine
.
Now, with all that said, the questions remains: why does Warren Ellis hate mermaids (or pretend to hate mermaids) when the rest of us love them so?
Well I am no Freud but as an expert in mermaids I have my own suspicions.
Look at what Wikipedia says about mermen:
“In Finnish mythology, a merman (vetehinen) is often portrayed as a magical, powerful, handsome, bearded man with the tail of a fish. He can cure illnesses, lift curses and brew potions, but he can also cause unintended harm by becoming too curious about human life.”
I will let you draw your own conclusions.
Carolyn’s fishtit altar is at http://iamamermaid.com/. Her personal haddock cave is at http://www.carolynturgeon.com/. And here’s the Amazon link for MERMAID. At which point I have to admit that the mad woman writes beautiful prose.
January 28th, 2011 | guest informant
I asked my friend Phil Broughton, aka Herr Direktor Funranium (creator and provider of the Black Blood Of The Earth) to write to you today about something that interested him. When I asked Phil how I should describe him, he said… well, I’ll just copypaste it: “I am a health physicist at UC Berkeley, which is a radiation safety professional. My resume is sufficiently all over the map of science (high powered laser assembly & service, volcanology, cryogenics/science tech at South Pole station, general safety to the weapons & demolition groups at LLNL, etc.), you might as well describe me as an Adventure Scientist. I have a hat that says so and everything courtesy of a smartass former co-worker.” And now, Phil:
NB: I used to work at a nuclear weapons laboratory, but don’t anymore. I held a “Q” clearance but, as you’ll read below, those responsibilities never end.
The problem with asking about a “secret history” is that people immediately think you are a whackadoo hell bent on conspiracy theories and just hoping, pleading, and praying to be anal probed by alien. But we do have secret history and are making more of it every day, courtesy of the way various governments classify information. My particular interest is in the history of the global nuclear weapons programs and you’re going to have to bear with me because there’s a lot of acronyms to cope with in the Land of the Classified. Here is quick primer on classification in the American system:
We have two different tiers of classification: Restricted Data (RD), AKA nuclear secrets, and everything else. The normal classification procedure involves the review of the information and then decision if it needs to be classified into the familiar Confidential, Secret (S), Top Secret (TS), etc. categories. For normal materials, it is presumed public information until someone reviews it and gives it a classification. This classified information will, in time, automatically declassify as expiration dates hit, unless someone renews their classification. For example, every soldiers’ WWII military records were classified and automatically became public in 25 years, although my grandfather’s war record has received a 25 year extension…twice.
Not so with nuclear secrets. They are “born secret” and must be reviewed to be declassified. There are no expiration dates on nuclear secrets. The two clearances that allow the use of Restricted Data are the Department of Energy’s “L’” and “Q” clearances. They may be considered as offset and slightly higher versions of Secret & Top Secret, except that they permit the access to RD. One of the problems with trying to piece together history related to nuclear secrets is that they suffer something of a contagion theory; things that normally would be completely pedestrian information, such as a phonebook, become Official Use Only (OUO) it holds a list of names and phone numbers of people who hold L & Q clearances. State Department documents that might reference the nuclear ambitions of another nation suddenly become cross-classified with a L or Q clearance.
This also means that people who have L & Q clearances are “Informed Individuals”. With what they already know that is classified, they are capable of thinking entirely new, instantly classified thoughts and to speak them out loud in an uncleared area or to uncleared people is a felony. So, yes, it is possible to commit Thoughtcrime. In light of that, it should make sense that workers in the nuclear complex tend to work very long hours and stay long past retirement age. Inside the gate is the only place they are free to think and talk. Outside the gate they have to constantly guard themselves from accidentally thinking the wrong thing out loud. My very favorite cold warrior comes of as a bit of an airhead in public, because the only thing she feels safe in discussing are interior decorating and clothes. This self-censoring doesn’t end once you leave and no longer have an active clearance. You know what you know, but now you have nowhere to go to discuss it. The obligations of a Department of Energy clearance are for life.
Now, with that out of the way…
I just took a trip to the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, NV, took in all the exhibits and had the pleasure of meeting an 83 year old retiree from the Nevada Test Site. Reading/listening to the interviews sends a very clear message that the Nevada desert is where the American front of Cold War was waged, one nuclear blast at a time, in the opinion of the former Test Site workers. To people that haven’t worked in the nuclear weapons complex, this may sound strident and reactionary. I know it felt a bit wrong hearing it all and that’s me talking. I was only at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for three years and change, but I spent a lot of time talking with and listening to the older workers and retirees (decontamination of facilities is sometimes like doing an oral history project with people who worked there, starting with “I just need to know what you did so I know what danger I might be in”). The Q cleared workers of the Department of Energy carry a very heavy burden that they can never put down, even the former janitors.. They have been entrusted with the nuclear secrets of the nation and you’d be surprised how informative very peripheral information, like frequency of trash collection, can be. For this reason, they aren’t free to speak…EVER.You disappear behind the Q and cease to be an individual, you are part of the complex.
They’re used to a sizable population that hates the work they do, but they aren’t allowed to defend their work to the public. On the flip side, they are used to their lives and research being guided by the budgeting whims of elected officials and appointees that, typically, have very little scientific literacy and operate on election timetables. It is funny how the Cold Warriors I used to enjoy talking to felt that while Soviet designers had been their competition, it was Capitol Hill was the actual enemy of Science. A few former Soviet researchers I’ve spoken to said they felt the same way about the American designers and the Kremlin. While Reagan called the national labs “The Arsenal of Freedom”, they never felt particularly held in esteem. The budgets and executive actions deeply at odds with the rhetoric in George W. Bush’s administration was a matter of doublethink that alienated the career workers of the complex further. With all that in mind, this helps inform the proud siege mentality I find many weapons complex workers to have.
It is also important to remember that weapons work is not the only thing they do. In fact, a majority of the Q cleared workers have nothing to do with weapons whatsoever. Just as it was in my time in Antarctica, for every researcher there are at least eight other people there who make their work possible because you certainly don’t want people like me doing carpentry. Only the most arrogant PhD or callous bureaucrat would fail to acknowledge all the other people working to make the national labs a success. Research grinds to a halt when the toilets don’t work, you know?
But then I got to thinking about about countries beyond America, in particular, the United Kingdom and how their workers weathered the shifting political tides, shrinking budgets, and anti-intellectual fervor. For example, I find it hard to believe that in ’70s that there was never an attempt to make a “nuclear union” in the pre-Thatcher era. The tradesmen that work in the weapons program and nuclear power plants in America may belong to their own individual trade unions, but not as a union of workers in nuclear industry.
Something we often gloss over in the history of the Manhattan Project is how many non-Americans contributed to it. Part of the reason this is easy to do is that many of the scientists naturalized and became American citizens, but some didn’t and went back to their home countries after the war. The United Kingdom, in particular, sent it’s researchers to contribute to 1) get them out of England, and 2) hopefully make something that would give Jerry a jolly good thrashing, with agreements of research sharing made in 1943 & ’44. In 1946, with the signature of the Atomic Energy Act and creation of the Restricted Data clearances, all those foreign nationals were sent home with out so much as a scrap of paper for all the work they’d done in Los Alamos.
This, understandably, caused a bit of diplomatic rift between the Washington and London. The subsequent, brusquely denied, request for America to honor their agreements lead to the creation of British nuclear weapons program on a thousand pieces of scrap paper as the scientists were order to reconstitute what they’d done during the Manhattan Project, almost out of spite per Prime Minister Attlee’s papers. They then went from scribbles to a functioning weapons test in about five years, which is damn impressive considering the much more limited resources & manpower of post-war Britain. Some of this story is captured in the novel Spycatcher by Peter Wright, which was banned in Britain at one point…ensuring it’s commercial success.
The British nuclear weapons program has always been small and accustomed to making do with very little, as opposed to the American program who had a hard time spending all the money thrown at them through the 60s & 70s. Where the American workers felt besieged by public and increasingly alienated from the government that employed them, it is hard to get a sense of the experience in other countries. I imagine that Thatcher’s England would have been a close analog to Reagan’s America, but the staggering shifts to the educational system must have had some reflection in the nuclear complex. Subsequent governments don’t seem like they would have been terribly supportive either. What was it like to work there? What projects have we forgotten about because they never hit prime time outside of the gates?
And it is these stories that I would like to reclaim. This is the secret history we are losing as the retirees die, keeping their oaths to the grave. The Atomic Testing Museum and DOE Nevada Site Office are trying to save a small fragment of it but there is so much more out there in the world. The lessons of the “small” British and French programs may be more instructive for the future of arms control than studying America and the Soviet Union’s.
Phil Broughton, 27 January 2011
(AKA Herr Direktor Funranium)
Phil can be found and contacted at http://www.funraniumlabs.com.
January 24th, 2011 | guest informant
Matt Jones is a principal at BERG, has done award-winning design work for the BBC, has been a director for Nokia Design and Dopplr, and is a visiting tutor at the Royal College Of Art. He is also very good at drinking beer. I asked him to write to you about whatever was in his head today, and he said:
I just had a chat with my dad on the phone.
He’s 80 this year, a retired – well, lots of things. He gets bored. Amongst other things he was an engineer in the steel industry – and he thought that his grasp of maths might of helped in understanding a recent BBC documentary entitled “What Is Reality?” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/xxgbn/).
The programme was a series of interviews with particle physicists and cosmologists. He told me he didn’t sleep a wink after watching it – his mind was racing all night. He told me he came to the conclusion that they were all bluffing.
By coincidence – I’d been reading an article in New Scientist about the many models and theories of quantum reality at play. I told him about the one that caught my eye – referenced in the leader of NS the same week.
It is simply entitled:
“Shut Up & Calculate”.
As that leader article describes: ”the most practical approach comes from the quantum agnostics who simply “shut up and calculate”, while subscribing to no particular interpretation. This approach has delivered novel materials and devices.”
“Shut Up & Calculate” is the ‘what works, works’ practical chaosmagick that gives us most of the early 21st century. It ignores philosophising, and puts it’s emphasis on results. It’s the surprise you get when you turn the handle, rather than worryingly looking at the machine.
So, “Shut Up & Calculate”.
The old engineer laughed.
He liked that. A lot.
Matt Jones blogs when the mood takes him at Magical Nihilism. You can usually catch him speaking at tech and design conferences around the world a few times a year.
January 17th, 2011 | guest informant
I asked Paul Duffield, illustrator of our online comic FREAKANGELS, to write to you about whatever was in his head today. Unusually for comics artists, he can form sentences very well, and this is what he had to say:
A few weeks ago I was asked to do an interview for a dissertation about motion comics because of my background in animation. It’s not something I’d ever given much thought to, but surely I should be full of positive things to say since they combine my favourite disciplines. Instead I was left with the tricky task of trying to explain why I’m not keen on them, wondering all the time whether I was just being a big snob about the whole thing.
The problem is, film (including animation) and comics are very different creatures, but I’m of the opinion that they are too freely associated with each other academically and creatively. When editing in a film is discussed, it’s a very direct and tangible topic that can be measured in seconds and frames. Short of appealing to the subjectivity of conscious experience and all that, you have to admit that the editor of a film is almost completely in control of the watcher’s experience. But for the creator of a comic comics that’s not the case by half.
If you consider adapting a double page spread in a comic to film, it might take up as much as 2 or 3 minutes of the watcher’s time, but when seen on the page the same sequence can be casually scanned by a reader in any order and in less than a few seconds. Obviously that doesn’t tend to happen when the reader is in a proper flow, but it is real issue when the text-to-image ratio gets too dense, or when a layout is confusing. The reader can be distracted by events in the future that they glimpse on the opposite page, or have their attention grabbed by a particular drawing for any number of hard-to-predict reasons. The comics creator can hope to guide the reader in the right direction, but reading a comic will never be the same passive experience that watching a film is.
For me, that’s how a comic is defined: a page exists all at once but is read bit by bit. It’s a unique storytelling property, and it leads to the wonderful fact that comics are a different work of art on the level of the story, the page and the panel… and the equally frustrating fact that it’s often hard to herd the reader into appreciating that during a casual read.
By that definition, there’s not much “comic” in motion comics, since they tend to be presented just like an animation, or more precisely like an animatic, which is a stage that animated films sometimes pass through in early production in order to test the timing of a storyboard. Consequently, all the effort in producing a motion comic tends to go into creating the illusion of movement in a static frame, leaving little scope for the animated elements to actually add to the storytelling or characterisation. When it comes down to it, there’s nothing to distinguish something claiming to be a “motion comic” from other low-budget animation beyond the superficial comic trappings left over from the cut-up original.
This isn’t to say that they can’t and haven’t be well done before, but I think there might be a deeper problem at work – if a motion comic is constructed out of frames from pre-existing comics, they have to present parts of a now-missing page, (literally ripping bits of art out of a larger piece of art), and because they’re low budget, they offer very little to replace what has been lost. I’ve never found the result as engaging as either the original comic, or a purpose-built animation. And if a motion comic is actually a purpose-built animation, then there’s no need to call it a comic – it’s not one.
Ideally, I’d love to see animation and comics in a new fusion-genre with its own unique storytelling properties, but most attempts seem to fall into the sort of lacklustre animation I’ve described, or into experimental webcomics with interactive or animated features (the only successful one of which I’ve ever seen is When I am King). With the internet and internet devices being what they are, I wonder if we’re seeing a new medium spending a bit too long in its infancy, or just the illusion of one that just doesn’t have anywhere meaningful to go. I guess time will tell.
Paul Duffield can be found at spoonbard.com when he’s not drawing FREAKANGELS.
Other Guest Informant posts on warrenellis.com.
January 4th, 2011 | guest informant
Novelist Steve Aylett was recently described by Michael Moorcock as “the most original voice in the literary scene… become, if you like, his own genre.” I’ve loved his work since SLAUGHTERMATIC back in ’97, and enjoyed seeing him receive The Jack Trevor Story Memorial Prize in 06, the conditions of which are that, in the Jack Trevor Story tradition, “the money shall be spent in a week to a fortnight and the author have nothing to show for it at the end of that time.” He’s been a sort of distant acquaintance to me for years — I think, the last time Grant Morrison tried to get us together, I was in Denmark or something. Nonetheless, we’ve vaguely stayed in touch to the extent that I felt okay about throwing burning stuff at his shack in the woods until he agreed to write to you about whatever was in his head that day. And this is what he’s thinking about:
AYLETT: IMPERVIOUS TO POPULARITY
Lately I’ve been considering the specific elements that brought my career to the miasma of screaming chimps and burning wreckage it is today.
APPEARANCE: These days it’s good for an author to have an attractive visual. For instance, China Mieville looks like Conan the Barbarian emerging annoyed from a beauty salon. I myself, who more than anything resemble a giant hen, have to compensate by being a better writer.
PREDICTING THE FUTURE: Very easy to do, but people think it’s hard and no-one likes a smart-ass.
INOCULATION: Readers tend to quote my stuff to their loved ones while gasping with laughter, so for every rabid fan a minimum of one bitter enemy is created.
KILLING FROM A DISTANCE: I sent a copy of my juvenilia The Crime Studio to William Burroughs – a week later he was dead. I sent a copy of Bigot Hall to Stephen Fry and he went temporarily insane. It really began when I got a copy of The Crime Studio into Broadmoor to get a blurb remark from Ronnie Kray. He didn’t provide a blurb remark but decided he wanted to be a writer, and sent me a story about a young man on the way to be hanged, a tender bloom to be cut down like a flower. Fearing reprisals if I said it was crap, I decided to ignore the entire situation. This worked well for me, as Ron subsequently died. Years later I had forgotten these phenomena and sent a copy of LINT to Kurt Vonnegut, who immediately died.
MISSING THE POINT: When I got a big deal from Orion to write four books I was as happy as a dog in a sidecar, but failed to realise that this was my time to ‘sell out’ and write some sprawling fantasy containing nothing conspicuous. Instead I wrote the four Accomplice books (now collected in one volume as THE COMPLETE ACCOMPLICE), deemed some of the strangest and most unduly interesting books ever written, an inconvenience that ended my commercial career. One editor hinted that he wanted to break every bone in my body, forcing me to point out that the hundreds of tiny cartilaginous ones in my ears would take weeks of precision work, and that by the time he’d finished the second one the first will have healed and he would have to start the whole process again. It would in effect be like painting the Forth Bridge.
CORNERING A MARKET NO-ONE WANTS: People claim to want originality but when confronted with the real thing they’re repelled . Because it’s new there’s no receptor slot in their head to comfortably receive it. But since this is all I write, I’m stuck dealing in a thing deemed poison to all.
SATIRE: There’s a notion that if something is funny it’s not to be taken seriously. Anyone who has suffered a hernia can tell you this isn’t so.
STRANGE CONCERNS: Chefs, mimes, waiters. What do they want? Dogs, what do they mean? Snails, why? Let’s tackle waiters – the restaurant represents a society in which those claiming to serve us are in fact our masters. They are called waiters but it is we who wait. Throughout the experience we are baffled and powerless, but will do anything to avoid admitting it. Waiters can go to hell.
EFFORTLESS INCITEMENT: I cause rage and concern by pointing the way with my elbows when asked for directions, bulging my eyes at arbitrary moments, saying ‘Don’t kiss me, I’ve got a cold’ to men, addressing people as ‘my liege’, replying to the wrong person, inflating my forehead like the throat of a bullfrog, stepping with both legs at once, and carrying out every activity in such a way as to covertly draw attention to my chin. I am despised and pelted with fruit, which I catch in my mouth.
BEING CONCISE: What could be more unfashionable than an epigram? The devil is a black glove we wear to hide our own fingerprints. I blame you.
Steve Aylett is the author of LINT, Slaughtermatic, The Complete Accomplice, Smithereens and Rebel at the End of Time, as well as THE CATERER comic.
December 16th, 2010 | guest informant
Rita J King and I got talking on Twitter a while ago. She’s one of those scary people who can seemingly do anything: writer and journalist, futurist, Senior Fellow at two think-tanks, an Innovator In Residence at IBM, artist, public speaker and I give up. She’s currently exploring what she calls “hybrid realities,” which very broadly speaking could encompass storytelling, the digital world and the public event. I asked her to write to you about whatever thing interested her today, and this is what she wrote:
Artists, writers and cartographers who can imagine the magnificence of the Seven Seas should check out the guidelines for participating in the story of the Levitating Mermaid.
The story is that the Levitating Mermaid is in possession of a massive trove of secret letters, with the Imaginary Sailor, Balthazar, in hot pursuit across the Seven Seas, described here by the 9th century AD author Ya’qubi:
“Whoever wants to go to China must cross seven seas, each one with its own color and wind and fish and breeze, completely unlike the sea that lies beside it.”
* Sea of Fars ends at a strait where pearls are fished.
* Larwi is massive, filled with islands that have kings. It can only be sailed by starlight and contains many wonders that are beyond description.
* Harkand has an island filled with precious stones and rubies.
* Kalah is shallow and filled with huge serpents that ride the wind and smash ships.
* Salahit is large and filled with wonders.
* Kardanj is very rainy.
* The Sea of Sanji, the final crossing, is the sea of China.
The site contains handwritten letters written to and from the Levitating Mermaid and the Imaginary Sailor, as well as glimpses of the trove of secret letters in her possession. Balthazar’s passion is letter writing (the results are sometimes, but not always, NSFW, like his site), which is how I met him when I requested a letter.
The story has just begun, so now is the time to become a character in this electrifying global art caper.
Follow artist, adventurer and entrepreneur Rita J. King on Twitter (@ritajking).
December 14th, 2010 | guest informant
Jamais Cascio is a futures strategist, a writer, frequent technical consultant, co-founder of the recently closed Worldchanging.org and a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Future. And, not coincidentally, a good friend of mine, which is why he’s here. I asked him to write to you about whatever was on his mind today. And this is what he has to say:
Neodicy
Technology will save us. Technology will destroy us.
The Future will save us. The Future will destroy us.
The tension between the myriad ways our tools — our technologies — affect us is often at the core of futurological discussions. Do they weaken us, destroying our memories (as Socrates argued) or our ability to think deeply (as Nicholas Carr argues), or do they enhance us? Do our technologies rob us of our humanity, or are they what make us human? While I tend to bias towards the latter view, it’s not without recognition that our tools (and how we use them) can damage our planet and our civilization. But for a surprisingly large number of people, such discussions of technology aren’t just part of futurism, they are futurism. From this perspective, the question of whether our technologies will destroy us is essentially the same as asking if our futures will destroy us.
This deep fear that what we have built will both give us heretofore unimagined power and ultimately lay us to waste has been with us for centuries, from the story of Icarus to the story of Frankenstein to the story of the Singularity. But because of its mythical roots, few foresight professionals give this fear sufficient credence. Not in the particulars of each story (I don’t think we have much cause to worry about the risks associated with wax-and-feather personal flight), but in the recognition that for many people, a desire to embrace “the future” is entangled with a real, visceral fear of what the future holds for us.
In religious study, an explanation of how an all-powerful deity that claims to love us can allow evil is known as a “theodicy.” The term was coined in 1710 by Gottfried Liebniz — a German natural philosopher who, among his many inventions and ideas, came up with calculus (independently of Newton, who is usually credited) and the binary number system. A theodicy is not merely a “mysterious ways” or “free will” defense, it’s an attempt to craft a consistent plausible justification for evil in a universe created by an intrinsically good deity. Theodicies are inherently controversial; some philosophers claim that without full knowledge of good, no theodicy can be sufficient. Nonetheless, theodicies have allowed believers to think through and discuss in relatively sophisticated ways the existence of evil.
The practice of foresight needs within its philosophical underpinnings a similar discourse that treats the fear of dangerous outcomes as a real and meaningful concern, one that can neither be waved away as pessimism nor treated as the sole truth — a “neodicy,” if you will. Neodicies would grapple with the very real question of how we can justifiably believe in better futures while still acknowledging the risks that will inevitably arise as our futures unfold. Such a discourse may even allow the rehabilitation of the concept of progress, the idea that as a civilization we do learn from our mistakes, and have the capacity to make our futures better than our past.
For those outside the practice of futurism, neodicies could be sources of comfort, allowing a measure of grace and calm within a dynamic and turbulent environment; neodicies give future dangers meaningful context. For futurists, the construction of neodicies would demand that we base our forecasts in more than just passing trends and a desire to catch the Next Big Thing; neodicies require complexity. For all of us, neodicies would force an abandonment of both optimism- and (more often) pessimism-dominated filters. Neodicies would reveal the risks inherent to a Panglossian future, and the beauty and hope contained within an apocaphile’s lament.
What I’m seeking here is ultimately an articulation of futurology (futurism, foresight, etc.) as a philosophical approach, not simply a tool for business or political strategy. I want those of us in the discipline to think more about the “why” of the futures we anticipate than about the “what.” Arguing neodicies would allow us to construct sophisticated, complex paradigms of how futures emerge, and what they mean (I’d call them “futurosophies,” but I’m on a strict one-neologism-at-a-time diet). Different paradigms need not agree with each other; in fact, it’s probably better if they don’t, encouraging greater intellectual ferment, competition and evolution. And while these paradigms would be abstractions, they could still have practical value: when applied to particular time frames, technologies, or regions, these paradigms could offer distinct perspectives on issues such as why some outcomes are more likely than others, why risks and innovation coevolve, and how tomorrow can be simultaneously within our grasp and out of control.
But the real value of a neodicy is not in the utility it provides, but the understanding. For too many of us, “the future” is a bizarre and overwhelming concept, where danger looms large amidst a shimmering assortment of gadgets and temptations. We imagine that, at best, the shiny toys will give us solace while the dangers unfold, and thoughts of the enormous consequences about to fall upon us are themselves buried beneath the desire for immediate (personal, economic, political) gratification. Under such conditions, it’s easy to lose both caution and hope.
A world where futurology embraces the concept of neodicy won’t make those conditions go away, but it would give us a means of pushing back. Neodicies could provide the necessary support for caution and hope, together. Theodicy is often defined simply as an explanation of why the existence of evil in the world doesn’t rule out a just and omnipotent God; we can define neodicy, then, as an explanation of why a future that contains dangers and terrible risks can still be worth building — and worth fighting for.
You can buy Jamais’ book, HACKING THE EARTH, right here. Also I really like his poster.
December 8th, 2010 | guest informant
Image via Wikipedia
Charlie Huston became, with SLEEPLESS, one of my favourite novelists. His new WOLVERINE series for Marvel launched last week, he has a new series of books forthcoming from the beloved Mulholland Books, and his novel THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH is being adapted for HBO by Alan Ball. I asked him to write to you about whatever was in his head today. This is it:
A counter proposal: let’s talk about reading and writing. Rather, let’s write about reading and writing.
Questions and answers that we can, if we’re feeling ambitious and dickish, hurl at our writer friends.
I’ll go first.
To wit: You have to take an enormous dump. You can tell at once that it will take a great while, but will also be a glorious experience. You will feel weightless after this magnificent shit.
Still, you will occupy the head for some time, and just recently all reading material was removed from said water closet.
With only a brief amount of time to consider the options, select three texts to take with you.
One book (not necessarily a novel).
One comic book/graphic novel.
One magazine.
Paper only, no online matter.
Because, in the end, you must use one of the above to wipe.
Which will it be?
In the interests of fairness, I will go first.
The most recent William Gibson, whatever it may be. Gibson can be read in small chunks while always bearing fruit.
Grant Morrison’s run on NEW X-MEN. Madness. Makes little or no sense. Always entertaining no matter where the pages flop open.
NEW YORK MAGAZINE. Pop culture consumerist trash about a city I love and lived in for many years. The mind drifts, the rectum relaxes. Shit in, shit out. I once opened the pages to see a picture of a friend of mine wearing a monkey fur jacket. My household subscription will never lapse.
In need, I will wipe with NEW YORK MAGAZINE. Starting with the real estate listings. The pages are too smooth for the purpose, but reasonably soft when crumpled.
PS
A more serious query: have you read Toby Barlow’s SHARP TEETH? This is important. If you have not read it, you will need to do something about that. Werewolf noir set in Los Angeles, inspired by Barlow’s readings of graphic novels, written in free verse.
November 24th, 2010 | guest informant
I sent a telegram to Moon Wiring Club, fine purveyors of (and coiners of the term) Confusing English Electronic Music, asking that they provide me a list of their six favourite new pieces of said music from the year. The following appeared on my laptop screen this afternoon in a puff of radiophonic phlogiston:
1. VHS HEAD ~ Trademark Ribbons of Gold
SKAM return from nothingness and release a spliced master-class in FUN electonica, fusing murky (yes) 80s VHS voiceovers/synth-action with a right weird ear, this must be light-years ahead of everyone else recycling Tangerine Dream. 2009′s ‘Video Club’ EP was fine, but this is something else entirely, and the reason I’ve been saying ‘Academy Award Winner ~ Academy Award Winner’ everyday for the past 2 months. Perhaps not everyone’s cuppa if you don’t have an taste for the partly party frenetic, but this is deeply wonderful stuff. And from Blackpool.
2. D D Denham ~ Electronic Music in the Classroom
DDD his risen from the grave to throw us this archived artefact. Using period instruments, techniques and glue, the fictional entity know as ‘Jon Brooks’ flexes his audio-chops and shows us all how he gained ‘Irrational Treasure’ status. No one else ‘alive’ has the skills to create this download-only nicely sliced delight. You can tell it isn’t real because it’s just too good. So good, the British Museum want it for their fancy cabinet of 21st century curiosities.
3. Broadcast and the Focus Group ~ Familiar Shapes and Noises
The bestest so far in the charming Ghost Box Study Series Sevens sees ‘Inside Out’ sprawling breakbeats and synth across wonky bells, spooky clavichord and an owd Joanna. Trish seems to be singing whilst wandering around a different record alogether, and an unknown voice keeps saying ‘Falling’ (or summat) in your right ear. Oh! What ever-more do you want? It’s Bob’s full house.
4. The Bug ~ Skeng (Autechre Dub)
Given away FREE via FACT this grotty nugget bewitched me for several weeks of non-stop festering rotation. Sounding like something left out by the bins and growing like a Krynoid of FUNK, it fused two sound-worlds into a tip-top vortex of grot.
5. Pye Corner Audio Transcription Services ~ Black Mill Tapes Vol.1
PCATS confused everyone with a stunning fizzy fuzzbag of authentic tape-mangling and top-notch gloomy atmospherics. The catchely titled ‘Electronic Rhythm Number Three’ and ‘Electronic Rhythm Number Eight’ gave us some marvellously mildewed but propelling, euphoric moments, whilst the assortment of murky-tape drones on offer were clearly dredged from local canal using ‘special techniques’.
6. The Hardy Tree ~ The Fields Lie Sleeping Underneath.
Oh! This charmingly picturesque puzzle-box is a lovely hand-crafted jewel of a thing. Very wistful and calming, this was this my soundtrack to stuffing large cardboard envelopes with more cardboard and I enjoyed every bloomin’ moment. The cd itself really is the most beautiful thing I’ve bought all year. An exceedingly complete delight!
On a non-CEEM TIP (?), I would be reet wrong to not mention AMAZING music from oOoOO, LA Vampires, Umberto, Washed Out, Madlib and Zola Jesus & totally tons of others. And from last year Fever Ray cast a rather large shadow. AND finally, for next year can we have some proper UK electro-murky-female-goth-hop-weird music PLEASE.
Moon Wiring Club’s new long player is the gloriously mental “A Spare Tabby At The Cat’s Wedding,” and you can learn more about that at this link here.
November 22nd, 2010 | guest informant
Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University in the US and the author of many wonderful books like DOOM PATROLS and CONNECTED. His new book POST CINEMATIC AFFECT, is about the intersection of supermodern life and the new cinema. I asked him to write to you about his strangest and/or most interesting film experiences of the last year.
This is not a definitive top ten list; there are too many recent films that I still haven’t seen (including Red, based on Warren’s graphic novel). But the films that especially impressed me over the past year include the following:
* Splice (Vincenzo Natali). A box office flop, but to my mind the best SF/biohorror film since early Cronenberg. Sarah Polley and Adrian Brody are genius bioengineers who create an intelligent transhuman entity as their “child,” and then don’t know how to treat her. Disturbing less for the body special effects than for the emotional claustrophobia. What’s the use of creating something new, if we still act in all the old, stupid ways?
* Scott Pilgrim Vs the World (Edgar Wright). Another box office flop that I thought was pure genius. A movie entirely styled in the manner of indy comics and 1980s videogames. A film so dynamic, and so attuned to our current multimediated world, that it even made Michael Cera seem empathetic. This is the future of movies; nearly everything else seems drearily 20th-century in comparison.
* Life and Death of a Porno Gang (Mladen Djordjevic). This Serbian film has not yet been released in the US or the UK, though it played at several horror festivals, and has been in circulation on the Internet. A troupe of performers goes around the countryside on a hippie bus, offering audiences “the first porno cabaret in the Balkans.” But they are drawn instead into a creepy underworld of violence and exploitation. Eros turns out to be no match for Thanatos, at least in today’s world of gangster capitalism. A film that pushes into new extremes of graphic sex and violence (although in this respect it is outmatched by its companion piece, Srdjan Spasojevic’s A Serbian Film, which goes to extremes that would make even the crassest exploitation filmmakers blush).
* Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé). An amazing psychedelic downer of a movie. The main character is killed in the first few minutes, and spends the rest of this 2 1/2-hour-long film in the afterlife, forced to relive his sordid memories and forgotten dreams, and to see what happens to his loved ones in his absence. It’s all cheap drugs, furtive sex, and failed hustles; and yet it also gives you a transcendental rush. It’s actually a remake of Kubrick’s 2001 for the twenty-first century, when we have forgotten about outer space and become fascinated instead with inner space.
* Adopted (Pauly Shore). Yes, the whiny and obnoxious MTV comedian of the early 1990s is back, having reinvented himself as an independent filmmaker. In this pseudo-documentary, Pauly (playing himself) goes to South Africa to adopt an orphan, figuring that what’s good for Madonna and for Angelina Jolie has to be good for him as well. The result is awesomely cringe-inducing; Pauly embodies everything that’s despicable about the condescending, racist, rich Westerner who goes to a poorer part of the world convinced that he is God’s gift to the “natives.” It’s hard to tell when Pauly is deliberately being satirical, and when he doesn’t quite realize what he’s doing; but this confusion is what gives the film its undeniable edge.
POST CINEMATIC AFFECT is available in good bookstores, from the publisher, and from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk.
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