I had the great privilege of meeting, speaking to and working with Rachel Armstrong this summer, at a think-tank in Eindhoven.  I bought this book, a Kindle Single (also on iBooks), right after.  It’s taken me months to finish it, not least because I had to sit down and think for a month after each chapter.  If nothing else, this here is probably the manual for the next five years of science fiction “biopunk” novels, (Ah, if only they would stick with “ribofunk,” too!) with protocells becoming the new nanomachines.

Rachel said to me, “biology is the new engineering,” and the book is an expression of that thought.  Put crudely, the idea is that manual-assembly construction of buildings and physical infrastructures out of inert materials that either grow more inert or corrode away entirely over time… is stupid and dangerous.  Rachel illustrates (with occasional, thrilling speculative extrapolations) how buildings could be grown, and how existing architecture could be transformed, and how this new age of living architecture could achieve astonishing things.  There is, in fact, the strong sense than even Rachel herself feels like she’s barely scratching the surface of the possibilities.

LIVING ARCHITECTURE is a wonderful read that puts fire in the imagination.  I recommend it greatly.

You can find Rachel @livingarchitect .

ALPHA is a little bit like someone suffered toxic levels of exposure to the bad Manly Thrillers that pollute the shelves of every airport in the Western world, and instead of just dying of The Shitty, said to themselves, “what if one of these things was actually good?”

Greg Rucka is greatly admired, in my circle of writer friends, for the absolute egolessness of his writing.  There’s no signature, no telltale quirk or tic.  Every sentence is in absolute service to the narrative and its needs.  To those of us who can’t help but cough our stylistic phlegm over our work, Greg comes off like a wizard.  The great watchmaker.  We just watch his stuff spin in its perfect selfless engineering and wonder how he did it.  I remember, after reading SHOOTING AT MIDNIGHT, emailing Greg after I finished the last page and saying, simply, “what a bloody good book,” because I was still processing some of the things he did in there.

So, his new book’s called ALPHA.  First of a projected trilogy, I believe.  And it feels like Greg’s trying to engineer a fresh start.  It’s got every cheap trick you’d expect from one of the Manly Techno-Thriller people.  The protagonist is some hot-shit special-forces shoulder, there’s a pretty ex-wife, a kid who is not only cute and has a cute nickname but is also deaf, there’s laconic fellow soldiers and a spooky Colonel, and for Christ’s sake the action is set inside a terrorist-struck theme park full of vulnerable kiddies.  You could stick six airport thrillers in a blender and pour this plot out.

And then what Greg does is he takes these pieces, and he very carefully pins them to wheels and springs and trains, and he spins them.  This is the point where ALPHA becomes very much more than the sum of its parts, and where a Dale Brown fan who picked this book off the shelf starts wondering what exactly they’ve done to themselves.

It’s a very commercial book, to be sure, and a proper Yarn, but once it gets spinning, you realise the appeal to Greg of setting it in what is basically a downmarket Disneyland.  He’s that writer who walked through a theme park, looking around, and working out all the ways in which people could be killed there.  And therefore it’s also kind of eccentric.  It’s fun stuff.

In fact, when you come down to it, it’s a bloody good book, and I hope it does for Greg what he wants it to do. 

(amazon.com) (amazon.uk)

This is getting desperate.

* ALPHA, Greg Rucka

* LONDON’S OVERTHROW, China Mieville

* THE ISLANDERS, Christopher Priest

* POST-CINEMATIC AFFECT, Steven Shaviro

* Jeff Noon’s CHANNEL SK1N

* TRIBAL PEOPLES FOR TOMORROW’S WORLD by Stephen Corry.

* ANGELMAKER, Nick Harkaway.

* HOW TO TEACH QUANTUM PHYSICS TO YOUR DOG, Chad Orzel

* BACKROOM BOYS, Francis Spufford

* DEAD WATER, Simon Ings

* HIGH LIFE, Matthew Stokoe (I think Frankie Boyle recommended me this)

* RATNER’S STAR, Don Delillo

* MURDER AS A FINE ART, David Morrell

* THE FORBIDDEN BOOK, Guido Mina di Sospiro & Joscelyn Godwin

* THE RELIGION OF THE SAMURAI, Kaiten Nukariya

* TOPLOADER, Ed O’Loughlin

* THE GIFT OF STONES, Jim Crace

* EMBASSYTOWN, China Mieville

#informationdiet

Stephen Baxter’s NORTHLAND TRILOGY – made up of STONE SPRING, BRONZE SUMMER and IRON WINTER – tells an alternate history where Doggerland wasn’t swallowed up by the North Sea by 5500BC, because the people of Doggerland built a great Wall to keep the sea out.

Doggerland is a fascinating thing, because its lowlands surely would have changed the course of history if they’d gone unsubmerged.  Ana, another of Baxter’s long line of sour autism-spectrum protagonists, leads the construction of a Wall that will eventually become a city in and of itself.

If Ana saw Zesi coming, she showed no signs of it. ‘This is the future,’ she said gravely. She held her own shovel over her head like a hunter’s spear. ‘The future.’

The first book is an amusing piece of world-building (quite literally),  It’s a bit airport-novel in more than one place, but it does have moments in it like the above, which I love.  The second book is a Ripping Yarn of the old school, with no real pretense of alternate-history beyond some dressing.

The third book postulates that the lack of agriculture in the Doggerland way of life, in this alternate world, allows a new glacial age to arrive.  Baxter also cites the Younger Dryas glacial period as being triggered by icy floods chilling the North Atlantic and killing the Gulf Stream.  Which is interesting, as a wall big enough to dam the North Sea would stunt the Gulf Stream all on its own, turning much of Britain and Scandinavia into tundra.  All the way through the third book, I was waiting for someone to reveal the secret of the sudden “longwinter” as “you dammed the fucking sea, what did you think was going to happen?”  But no, apparently some dodgy point about early anthropocene climate alteration was to be made.  Which, regardless of its potential veracity, just seems a lot less interesting than “we built this fucking great wall to save our civilisation and now it’s killing the world.”  Now that’s a ripping yarn.  It’s also, of course, my projection on to the author’s work and intents, and deeply unfair.  I remain disappointed with the last two books.  But STONE SPRING is often thought-provoking, full of potential, and a book to contemplate.

Related articles

• Booklist 1sep12: McLuhan’s Massage (warrenellis.com)

Why do I keep adding to my booklist?  It’s a sickness.  But Lili and I went shopping the other day, and…

I haven’t read any Christopher Priest in ages, but I happened to meet him and his wonderful partner Nina Allan in Brighton the other week, so I decided it was time.  And you can’t pass up a China Mieville polemic, especially in so delightful an edition (full marks to The Westbourne Press there).

The List Of Shame grows.

Related articles

• Booklist 1sep12: McLuhan’s Massage (warrenellis.com)

I’m adding to it.  Why am I adding to it?  I’m mad.  Also I really wanted to re-read THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE, which I haven’t looked at since I was 20, probably.  It turned out I didn’t have a copy in the house.  (I have an ancient copy of UNDERSTANDING MEDIA in the attic, and the only image of that particular edition I could find online is here – )

The other night, iTunes DJ threw up an old Terence McKenna talk about Marshall McLuhan, called RIDING THE RANGE WITH MARSHALL McLUHAN – hey, here’s an mp3 of that talk – and I found myself thinking about him for the first time in years.

To give you a flavour of McLuhan – a Canadian media theorist and James Joyce scholar manque, here’s a snip from an interview he did with Playboy (yes, once upon a time people really did buy it for the articles) in 1969, talking about television:

By requiring us to constantly fill in the spaces of the mosaic mesh, the iconoscope is tattooing its message directly on our skins. Each viewer is thus an unconscious pointillist painter like Seurat, limning new shapes and images as the iconoscope washes over his entire body.

The iconoscope is tattooing its message directly on our skins.

This is, remember, 1969.  His major work was already done, at this point.  In the Seventies, he was lecturing at the University of Toronto, at the same time as writer/director David Cronenberg was attending.  McLuhan was dead by 1980, three years before Cronenberg’s VIDEODROME, with its grim McLuhan stand-in Brian O’Blivion was released.  And if you’ve seen that film, then you get the extra bleak irony there.

This is the edition of MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE I grabbed off Amazon. Nice clean cover design. I’ve been writing something as a spare-time, hobby kind of thing that’s intended to use a lot of infoviz — charts, graphics, etc.  And so, when the McKenna audio popped up, I naturally thought of it again, looked for it in the house, and then bit the bullet and ordered one.

Why on EARTH are McLuhan’s works not in ebook form?  That’s a sick gag to pull on the man’s legacy.

The title’s something of a joke: Marshall McLuhan’s buzzphrase was “the medium is the message” – this title was, it’s said, a production typo, and it amuses McLuhan so much that he kept it.

I may end up re-reading all of McLuhan – in fact, it occurs to me that I may never have read COUNTERBLAST or WAR AND PEACE IN THE GLOBAL VILLAGE.

#informationdiet

I am writing this list in order to shame myself into doing better.

I have obtained a pile (for values of “pile,” as most are electronic) of books over the last several months that for many and various (bad) reasons I haven’t yet read.  I need to fix this.  Not least because I need to add some more into the stream (ooh, “stream,” much better than “pile”) right now and doing that without processing what’s already in the stream is very bad and you get the idea.

In no order, and probably not complete:

* Jeff Noon’s CHANNEL SK1N

* TRIBAL PEOPLES FOR TOMORROW’S WORLD by Stephen Corry.

* ANGELMAKER, Nick Harkaway.

* HOW TO TEACH QUANTUM PHYSICS TO YOUR DOG, Chad Orzel

* BACKROOM BOYS, Francis Spufford

* DEAD WATER, Simon Ings

* HIGH LIFE, Matthew Stokoe (I think Frankie Boyle recommended me this)

* RATNER’S STAR, Don Delillo

* MURDER AS A FINE ART, David Morrell

* THE FORBIDDEN BOOK, Guido Mina di Sospiro & Joscelyn Godwin

* THE RELIGION OF THE SAMURAI, Kaiten Nukariya

* TOPLOADER, Ed O’Loughlin

* THE GIFT OF STONES, Jim Crace

* EMBASSYTOWN, China Mieville

This is basically appalling, and I need to do better.

Also why the fuck cannot I buy ebooks of Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre?  Seriously.

(He said, having just listed all the books he’s failed to read in the last four months.)

I nearly used a collaborative app, like Well, to list these, but I was suddenly horrified at the thought of people being able to add to the list.

My public email address is warrenellis@gmail.com, and I’m @warrenellis .

#informationdiet

The original title of Aaron Sorkin’s THE NEWSROOM was “You Canned STUDIO 60 Before I Got To Come, So Now I’m Humping This Shit Til Doomsday”

— Warren Ellis (@warrenellis) June 21, 2012

That was pretty unfair of me.  But I watched the pilot episode of Aaron Sorkin’s new show, THE NEWSROOM, the other day, and it really did strike me as STUDIO 60: Phase Two.

Some wags have suggested that I actually mean SPORTS NIGHT: Phase Four, but I don’t think that’s true. SPORTS NIGHT flirted with the ethics of reportage, but in a more personal way.  WEST WING was a paean to public service, but much more of a complete statement, despite Sorkin taking off at the end of the fourth season.

But STUDIO 60… using the backstage workings of a live comedy tv show to address both the trouble that American tv is in, and the trouble that American culture is in.  Sorkin got cut short on that show, and, quite clearly, never got to say everything he wanted to say.  And, perhaps, it wasn’t the best vehicle for delivering all the stuff that’s currently in his system.

And now, THE NEWSROOM: a vehicle for fully expressing everything he wanted to talk about in STUDIO 60, but in a more culturally “heavyweight” setting.  At least notionally.  And if you liked STUDIO 60, or wanted to see what more he had to say after that show’s cancellation, you’ll have a pretty good time with THE NEWSROOM.  It’s, obviously, a consummately craftsmanlike piece of television writing, and if you liked the casting and the gags on SPORTS NIGHT and STUDIO 60, you’ll probably like THE NEWSROOM just fine.

It opens, as STUDIO 60 did, with an elder man (in this instance, the protagonist, newsreader Will McAvoy) losing his shit in public in the mode of Peter Finch in NETWORK, the rant about how the culture is terrible being the engine of the show.  But there’s something a little different in this.  In talking about how ill-informed the American public is, McAvoy summons the memory of “great men” who told it like it was, Murrow and Cronkite.  Not great journalists.  Not even great newscasters.  Great Men.

That was the first of three things that really leapt out at me during this show.  The second was at the end, when I discovered that this show is actually set a couple of years ago, and what it’s positioned to do is illustrate how the American news media should have covered a string of real-life events.  It’s actually an alternate history.

(I’m reminded suddenly of a comment I made after I read the script, to the effect that the show was a televisual fantasy exploring the idea of whether or not Jeremy Paxman could get work in America.)

The third was all over the show, and is related to the first.  It doesn’t like women very much.  The female lead, Mackenzie, while described by someone else as having scars from covering Shiite protests and the like (but it’s Great Men who do the great work and Christiane Amanpour was certainly never on the ground for the siege of Sarajevo), is first described to us by two Great Men as both untrustworthy and some kind of fainting ninny whom they have to bring home from the world and fan until she revives.  The question that sets off McAvoy’s rant comes from a blonde student whom McAvoy also calls a “sorority girl” once or twice during the bit.

(I’m not counting as cruelty the fact that the gifted Alison Pill seems essentially cast as a stand-in for Janel Moloney – just the way her character is treated — but I thought it was a shame that we don’t really get to see the fire and bite she can produce.)

(I also don’t want to get into the frankly stupid interview Aaron Sorkin gave to Sarah Nicole Prickett, in which he is reported as addressing her with “Listen here, Internet girl…” This is too long already.  But read it.  It speaks quite directly to the tone of the show.)

But I wanted this to be a brief note, not a lecture or a drone strike, so let me just circle around to the first thing again.  That this is a show about A Great Man (or, if you like, as others have styled it, A Great White Man) allowing a team of women and less-than-classically-masculine men aid him in his crusade to Fix TV Journalism, Fix Reportage and Fix America.  In an alternate world, where, in the pilot episode, the work of many many journalists across the world is condensed into an hour’s placing of phone calls from the newsroom.  Sure, it’s fiction, there’s license, I get that, I do it all the time (TRANSMETROPOLITAN is nothing but a fantasia of journalism)… it’s just lousy coincidence that I’m currently reading a book about the BP oil spill that forms the news event of the pilot episode, a book which illustrates how much is still not commonly known about that event even today.  Hindsight lets Sorkin cheat (and I’m not going to spoil the big cheat for you, but you’ll know it when you see it and it’s a cynical “must invent shit to compress events for drama” cheat), and, unfortunately, that and the obvious triumphal applause at the end of the bit are going to give a lot of people clubs to beat him with.

And those aren’t the clubs that I think may well put THE NEWSROOM to death.  A death I take no pleasure in, because I loved THE WEST WING and I like living in a world where Aaron Sorkin is writing for television.  I think it would be really nice if, over the course of the run, Aaron Sorkin learned some things about how journalism happens and put them into the show.  I take no issue with the pilot episode’s lack of nuance, or the fact that it’s a polemic.

But, as a middle-aged white man, I take issue with the notion that it takes a Great White Man to fix the culture, and that shitting on every woman in the room to do it is just quirky, grumpy collateral damage.  I’m pretty sure that’s been tried, over here in the real world.  And here we are.

I read this book in two sittings – half on the train ride out to Hay, half on the train ride back.  Paul Mason is the economics editor for BBC Newsnight.  You might expect a novel by that person to be as sober and measured as that programme.  It’s really, really not.  A pissed hack in the last extremis of anything that can be called “reporting” in commercial broadcasting, trying and failing to add heft to a doomed shoot in China, trips over the worst thing he could possibly encounter: an actual story.  And that’s when things get weird. What I really liked about this book is its refusal to do anything easy.  Even what seems like the looming obligatory “creepy vicarious sex scene” sex scene turns into a hilarious nightmare that sees said pissed hack kicked half to death for his uselessness. At the heart of it all is an attempt to understand China: or, at least an attempt to define the reasons why the West so consistently fails to understand China.

It does that by embracing the surreality of life there – teasing out the strangenesses until the real things present as so goddamn weird that the inventions appear grounded by comparison.  And every element, and more or less every character, reveals its true nature by stages. 

I don’t want to rattle on – these are supposed to be quick notes – but I had a lot of fun with this odd, clever little book.  I think that if you in general like my stuff, you’d find a lot to enjoy in RARE EARTH.

You can read a preview chunk of the book at the publisher’s website.  You can find Paul on Twitter @paulmasonnews.

This is an absolute treasure trove of the disturbing and enlightening.  Mark Dery (remember the term “culture jamming”?  That was him), in this sequence of gorgeously written essays, surrounds something he conceives of as the “pathological sublime” in American culture. A score-settling excoriation on how virulent, cackling old Mark Twain’s reputation has been given a sentimental cleanse actually stakes out Dery’s perimeters for a new American Gothic.  A deceptively amiable consideration of Lady Gaga puts her permanently outside Dery’s dark velvet ropes. And then he’s off on foot through the trees, sending off great bursts of searing tracer fire in pursuit of, not just the strange, but also of the fake weird, removing the dressing and bullshit from the stark landscape of the deeply odd American experiment.  For Dery, that seems to be the real America, and he loves it dearly, in all its glorious horror.

amazon.com – amazon.co.uk

ZONA is a book about a man sitting in a room watching a film about a man going to sit in a Room.  The film is STALKER, Tarkovsky’s masterpiece, based upon the sf novel ROADSIDE PICNIC by the brothers Strugatsky.  (I like STALKER.) The man is Geoff Dyer, a man who has watched STALKER so often that he is compelled to write a book about it.  A book about the film STALKER, and a book about the act of watching STALKER, and a book about him watching STALKER and all the times he’s watched STALKER.  Which probably sounds appalling.  But, even as the story of STALKER unfolds as a journey into the deepest core of the characters, ZONA becomes a ride into the depths of the film, and of the nature of cinema, and, often quite affectingly, into Dyer’s own life.  I must’ve watched STALKER half a dozen times, but Dyer teased new angles out of the film for me, with clear sight and cranky humour, and I’d recommend it just for that – but there is a lot more to like in ZONA.

on Amazon.co.uk | on Amazon.com

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

Partway through Iain Sinclair’s GHOST MILK and finding the wading hard, I commented to a writer friend that it read like an auto-obituary.  The friend recommended I persevere, even though he found himself in agreement.  Which didn’t bode well.  But here I am at the other end of the book, and my initial impression remains.  It’s like watching someone give his funeral audience a lengthy disquisition on his life while digging his own grave and knocking together his own coffin in front of them. The “grand project” of the subtitle is nominally the Olympic structure being imposed on east end London for this coming summer’s games, and all the other airdropped corporate constructions attempting landings across the country.  But there’s a clear double meaning: the project being called in is Sinclair’s own.

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

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

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

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

James Leyland Kirby, in his guise of The Caretaker, created a soundtrack to Grant Gee’s documentary about the magnificent writer WG Sebald.  Currently on vinyl only – I’m a direct subscriber to Kirby’s work, and so received the download early.  It’ll be out on CD and download next month. It’s of a piece with other Caretaker work, and Kirby’s other output outside the “Intrigue & Stuff” collections: deeply haunted early 20th Century recordings summoned through dusty electronic seance.  I’ve seen a few people comment that it’s Kirby-as-usual and the trick’s getting thin.  I think it’s a perfect response to Sebald’s work.

It did, in fact, send me running for my shattered old first-printing paperback copy of Sebald’s sublime THE RINGS OF SATURN.  Which promptly crumbled and disintegrated in my hands, a shower of papery dust and brittle yellowed sheets.  No more apt way to strew the way for the recording, I suppose. 

PATIENCE (AFTER SEBALD) is, at a long stroll’s pace, meditative and deeply involved with memory.  Exactly like Sebald’s own work.  I haven’t yet seem the film, but it’s hard to imagine a more fitting accompaniment to the man’s themes.  It is also, like Sebald’s prose, very stately and beautiful.

You can hear samples at Boomkat.  If you’ve never heard Kirby’s work before and have further interest, there’s a fine selection for full free streaming at his Bandcamp page.

(I can’t believe there’s not an ebook edition of RINGS OF SATURN.)