If you’re reading this on a LiveJournal syndicated feed, such as warrenelliscom or warrenelliswire — stop. Unsubscribe from those feeds and add http://warren-ellis.livejournal.com/ , which I am turning into a crossposted LJ later today. The advantages of this include creating a working archive of the site on LJ (syndicated feeds, including all the comments, get wiped after 14 days or so), and my being able to received comments and conversations generated on the LJ.

For the rest of you: LiveJournal is a once-popular social-blogging service that was run into the ground by SixApart, and is now largely a repository for amateur writing about Harry Potter being jerked off by hobbits. In space.

From Wednesday in North America, from Thursday in the UK and elsewhere:

1. Skull & Crossbones Ice Cubes, 2. Shift Freedom, 3. Progress, 4. my lil’ monster, Iggy Pop hugs on to me, 5. MY FIRST FISH!, 6. Mooby picks his nose and prepares to be steak

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?

Available in better comics stores from this Wednesday:

Neil Clarke, of the excellent web-based sf magazine CLARKESWORLD, threw his hat into the ring in re: the decline in the major print sf short-fiction magazines (a thing that’s been interesting me for years, and an occasional focus of my writing here for a year or so). In making points I never got around to because it was the print magazines’ plight that was interesting me — such as, obviously, that short fiction is making its new home on the web — he generated some interesting graphs.

These are found in the comments section of the post, which you need to pop because there’s some really interesting stuff in there. Anyway. Provided LOCUS’ data are unimpeachable, those lines are really pretty difficult to refute.

A note on ASIMOV’S, which I’ve been reading again for the past several months (after all the shit I talked about the print sf magazines, I bought a bunch of subscriptions in the interests of fair play): I haven’t seen it yet mentioned that they seem to have cornered/re-invented what my friend Rosie Sharp calls the "sigh-fi" market. I’m trying not to sound disparaging, because I think it may be a good thing, but some might term it "Oprah sf." Stories in which the daughter defeats the evil father to save the mother. Stories in which the surrogate mother saves the daughter-figure. Stories in which, yes, the disgraced man complicit in the daughter’s death becomes the faithful family dog to aid the heroic estranged wife. There seems to be a definite skein of Women’s SF forming there. Which, given that women have been believed to be the dominant sector in the reading market for years and years, would appear to be a rich vein indeed. I’m not certain anyone involved has realised it. The packaging is the same dismal regurgitation of "classic" sf themes that all these things wrap themselves in like a homeless person piling cardboard on themselves at night.

I am going to be interested to see how WEIRD TALES fares year-on-year following their dramatic re-invention.

1. IMG_0714.JPG, 2. Absent City, 3. Nationaltheateret Station, 4. Day 210: EXIT, 5. baconnnnn, 6. Untitled

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.

1. CIMG4259, 2. evil DJ, 3. 06-08-08_0038.jpg, 4. DIY Wearable Alarm, as housed in The Aphrodite Project: Platforms, 5. Ed’s Playboy security batch, 6. Guess who made the cover?

This just turned up on Whitechapel via one of our Brazilian inmates: I’m going to show you one of the milder images apparently being prepared for all Brazilian cigarette packets, and you can go to the link to see the others (some of which are pretty fucked up).

Andre says they were released into the marketplace this past week.

1. Washington Sq Park: guitar girl, 2. hot nun action, 3. Lover’s Quarrel, 4. Posing sideways for three cameras, 5. i heart you brooklyn bridge, 6. opera4

• Amanda Rose Smith – New York City, New York – Other / Classical / Experimental – www.myspace.com/amandarosesmith
  (tags: music)

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?

1. Oslo, 2. Fresh dye, 3. street fatigued, 4. Red light for Lisbon Treaty at Ballybough, Dublin, Ireland, 5. anna, 6. indexbook

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.

It’s Friday, it’s gone noon UK time, so the new FREAKANGELS episode is up for your cost-free enjoyment (as are all previous episodes): http://www.freakangels.com/?p=40

• BigO Worldwide
  “evil, decadent… amoral, intoxicated, and uncontrolled”.
  (tags: mp3)

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Ryan Condal has been hired to adapt "Ocean," a comic miniseries by Warren Ellis and Chris Sprouse that is set up at Warner Bros. Nick Wechsler and Hollywood Gang’s Gianni Nunnari are producing…

…story revolves around the discovery of thousands of coffins containing angel-like bodies and a giant weapon of mass destruction beneath the ice on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. A U.N. weapons inspector is sent to investigate the find, teaming with a space station crew, when a powerful conglomerate moves in to exploit the discovery….

And now you know as much as I do!

An interview with FREAKANGELS artist Paul Duffield. Me trying to kill people using solely a 1980s music video. A discussion on The Singularity that I haven’t had time to look at yet. Award-winning creator Daniel Merlin Goodbrey and Sean Azzopardi announcing a new webcomic. The Hauntological Congress chugs on, as does Val Lindsay’s fantastic scans of old sf pulp magazine covers.

And the Self-Portrait Imagethread is always fun.