My name’s Warren Ellis. I write books and comics and articles and other things.  I live in south-east England.  My next novel, GUN MACHINE, is due January 2013 from Mulholland Books.  The film RED 2, sequel to RED, based on the graphic novel I wrote, is due autumn 2013.  A film version of my GRAVEL graphic novels is in active development at Legendary Pictures.  I have author pages at Amazon and Amazon UK.  My most recent original comics work was SVK, produced in partnership with the design & invention unit BERG.

I’m writing a new novel and developing things in film and tv, but am keeping an eye out for interesting things to do on the side.

If you want to contact me about writing for print or web, please contact my agent Lydia Wills – her email’s linked in the righthand menu bar, too. I’m currently looking to write more articles and the like, to help keep me sane during the writing of this novel.

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

Sometimes I speak at conferences, or do other kinds of talks and appearances.  I’ve previously been a columnist for WIRED UK and Reuters.  You can contact me directly about everything else, including interview requests, at my public email address: warrenellis@gmail.com (gets checked daily.)

I have a weeklyish newsletter, MACHINE VISION, which you can sign up for at this link.

@warrenellis on Twitter.

I have an Official Facebook Page.

Username warrenellis on Instagram (for as long as it lasts!) and This Is My Jam.

I keep a notebook at Tumblr.

I occasionally podcast.

Related articles

• Spektrmodule 10 (warrenellis.com)

• The New Aesthetic and The New Writing : Kenneth Goldsmith : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation
  "The Twenty-first century is invisible. We were promised jetpacks but ended up with handlebar moustaches. The surface of things is the wrong place to find the 21st century. Instead, the unseen, the Infrathin—those tiny devices in our pockets or the thick data-haze which permeates the air we breathe — locates us in the present."
  (tags:newaesthetic culture gz )

A not-fully-baked consideration.

Manfred’s on the road again, making strangers rich.

It’s a hot summer Tuesday, and he’s standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he’s fresh off the train from Schiphol: He’s infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.

He wonders who it’s going to be.

I re-read Charles Stross’ ACCELERANDO at least once a year.  More often, I’ll return to just the first three chapters once every few months.  Published in 2005, and written in serial form from 1999 to 2004 – and you can grab the whole thing for yourself, free, from this link here – ACCELERANDO is a sprawling (yet massively condensed and concentrated) piece of radical hard sf about the deep computational future.  It’s also about Manfred Macx, “venture altruist,” staying ahead of the memetic curve with an exotic set of information-processing hardware.  Let’s run a bit of that opening again:

He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived.

He’s doing that with, essentially, Google Glasses and some wearable computers to beef up their utility.  It’s what I’d do today with a smartphone.  In fact, I last did it on Thursday.  Macx’s kit is based around the glasses.

I got asked a question on Tumblr yesterday — which I’ll get to in a later post – that set me to thinking again about Manfred Macx, who can’t do what he does without processing vast amounts of information each day.  So I’m cropping out the bits of ACCELERANDO (with apologies to Charlie, obviously), to illustrate how this parallel-future character goes about his business, and what a fictional set from 2004 says to us in 2012.

His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press releases at him. They compete for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery.

I like to think that this bit is Bruce Sterling at age 70.  That’s a man who processes a lot of press releases.

He’s ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some low-bandwidth, high-sensation time with his beer and the pigeons, when a woman walks up to him, and says his name: "Manfred Macx?"

I might be the only person I know who doesn’t use IM at all.  That said, this book is pre-Twitter, and I can certainly get a “please RT” vibe off that…

Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock – he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current.

I think I’ve probably gotten into the concept of agalmics and how it relates to the attention economy before now.  Attention Philanthropy is the takeaway, and how this site mostly works – using whatever profile I have to direct you to works of interest.  How much text do you take in every day?  Is it even possible to quantify it by bytes anymore?

Also: I watch no videoblogs at all.  The only informational video I get is watching Newsnight on the iPad.  I should probably review the field again.

his glasses remind him that he’s six hours behind the moment and urgently needs to catch up.

Do you ever feel like that upon waking?  Six hours behind the moment.  Sleeping took you off the road to the future.

He speed reads a new pop-philosophy tome while he brushes his teeth, then blogs his web throughput to a public annotation server; he’s still too enervated to finish his pre-breakfast routine by posting a morning rant on his storyboard site.

Kick that one around.  It contains the point that he’s not just taking in information, but processing it and excreting more information.  Also, extruding it out on to a public space where people can fiddle with it.  (Of course, Charlie still has comments enabled on his site.  I am less sanguine about that sort of thing.)

The point is crucial.  If we’re not doing something with the information we’re taking in, then we’re just pigs at the media trough.

What is also happening here, of course, is that he’s doing the work of a public intellectual.  “Critical creativity,” as I think Umberto Eco once put it.  Only without the requirement of space in a newspaper or magazine, of course, which is what the internet brought us.  And, as the net trends towards microblogs and status updates, it is also what we’re taking away from the internet now.

Lying on a bench seat staring up at bridges, he’s got it together enough to file for a couple of new patents, write a diary rant, and digestify chunks of the permanent floating slashdot party for his public site. Fragments of his weblog go to a private subscriber list – the people, corporates, collectives, and bots he currently favors.

I’m reminded of Bruce again, here, and the fact that his Twitter account is locked.  20,000 people are allowed to follow his account – in actual fact, the people, corporates, collectives, and bots he currently favours.

It feels like there’s a lot to unpack in that couple of sentences.  The patents he mentions go into a special “Free Intellect Foundation,” which is a more careful way of basically just flinging a complete idea out into the wild.  Agalmia: gift culture.

He sits in a chair, gin and tonic at hand, absorbing the latest market news and grazing his multichannel feeds in parallel. His reputation is up two percent for no obvious reason today, he notices: Odd, that.

Aah, when we thought there’d be a trackable reputation economy.  Cory, what damage you wrought on the poor innocent heads of the socially optimistic.  Charlie himself ended up taking down Klout last year.

In other senses, of course, this does exist.  Checking Likes, Instagram and Tumblr hearts and even +1s.  Your reputation’s only as good as the last piece of content you gave to a social network.  How much time do we spend assimilating content and spitting the tastiest bits back out into the world in order to gain reputation as a gifted regurgitator?  Where we’re adding no more to each piece of information than the identifying DNA in the smear of saliva we leave on it?

The metacortex – a distributed cloud of software agents that surrounds him in netspace, borrowing CPU cycles from convenient processors (such as his robot pet) – is as much a part of Manfred as the society of mind that occupies his skull; his thoughts migrate into it, spawning new agents to research new experiences, and at night, they return to roost and share their knowledge.

I kind of want to mention Weavrs here – I still have to find the time to train the one I spawned last year, but (with all respect to the developers) I doubt I’ll ever be able to make it do what I want.  Intelligent Agents are going to be a pipedream for a while longer, I suspect.  Which makes me sad.  But there’s something here – Weavrs and other software instances like Google Alerts can enact discovery, and bring us information we wouldn’t necessarily have the time or awareness to grab manually.  This makes me want to spawn new sets of Google Alerts.  I only have a couple running right now, for hauntology and radiophonics, which I set up a couple of years back.

"Do I know you?" he asks politely, even as he feels a shock of recognition.

"Amsterdam, three years ago." The woman in the double-breasted suit raises an eyebrow at him, and his social secretary remembers her for him, whispers in his ear.

"Annette from Arianespace marketing?"

Not really in the flow of what I’m trying to talk about here, but: facial recognition software yoked to a contacts system hooked into a well-maintained calendar.

His glasses are on the breakfast bar; he pulls them on and is besieged by an urgent flurry of ideas demanding attention.

Six hours behind the moment again.  But this is (in part) the same experience as picking up a smartphone with notifications enabled.

"What’s life coming to when I can’t cope with the pace of change?" he asks the ceiling plaintively.

Manfred is thirty when he says this.  I’m forty-four.

Off to London for Molly Crabapple’s thing at the Groucho. And whisky.

Dr Debbie Chachra is a materials scientist: an engineering professor at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering (Deb’s bio at Olin), and a prolific writer.  She also produces one of my favourite tumblrs, Daily Idioms.   Basically, I learn something every time Deb writes anything.  So I asked her to write to you about whatever was on her mind, and she said this:

Plasticity has its grand tradition and main stream, which happens to flow by way of du Pont and their famous employee Carothers, known as The Great Synthesist. His classic study of large molecules spanned the decade of the twenties and brought us directly to nylon, which not only is a delight to the fetishist and a convenience to the armed insurgent, but was also, at the time and well within the System, an announcement of Plasticity’s central canon: that chemists were no longer to be at the mercy of Nature. They could decide now what properties they wanted a molecule to have, and then go ahead and build it.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

I’m a materials scientist by training, and that means that I spend a lot of time thinking about the stuff that makes up our physical environment. How plate glass is an unappreciated marvel, manufactured by floating infinite ribbons of optically-clear glass on canals of molten tin. Or how aluminium went from being a gift for kings to being, literally, disposable with the advent of large-scale electricity generation.

And one of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is peak plastic.

The use of oil for fuel is dominant, and there’s a reason for that. Oil is remarkable—not only does it have an insanely high energy density (energy stored per unit mass), but it also allows for a high energy flux. In about 90 seconds, I can fill the tank of my car—and that’s enough energy to move it at highway speeds for five hours—but my phone, which uses a tiny fraction of the energy, needs to be charged overnight. So we’ll need to replace what oil can do alone in two different ways: new sources of renewable energy, and also better batteries to store it in. And there’s no Moore’s Law for batteries. Getting something that’s even close to the energy density and flux of oil will require new materials chemistry, and researchers are working hard to create better batteries. But this combination of energy density and flux is valuable enough that we’ll likely still extract every drop of oil that we can, to use as fuel.

But if we’re running out of oil, that also means that we’re running out of plastic. Compared to fuel and agriculture, plastic is small potatoes. Even though plastics are made on a massive industrial scale, they still account for less than 10% of the world’s oil consumption. So recycling plastic saves plastic and reduces its impact on the environment, but it certainly isn’t going to save us from the end of oil. Peak oil means peak plastic. And that means that much of the physical world around us will have to change.

Plastic is more than just water bottles and Tupperware. If you’re indoors, look around. There’s a good bet that much of what’s in your field of view is made of plastic. Paint. Carpeting. Upholstery. The finish on a wood floor. Veneer on furniture. And that’s before you go into your kitchen, or bathroom, and never mind a subway car or a hospital (disposable, sterile medical supplies, anyone?). Plastic is so ubiquitous that it’s almost invisible.

In the last century or so, chemists and chemical engineers have done as Pynchon described, and developed thousands of plastics for use in tens of thousands of applications, if not more. That means that we’ll need to find replacements for these oil-based plastics for every one of those uses, probably from previously unconsidered renewable sources. It’ll be a different world.

There’ll likely still be applications that really need petroplastic, so landfills will become goldmines. The characteristic drawback of plastic, its stubborn resistance to degradation (‘this plastic bag will still be around in ten thousand years!’) will become a virtue, as it sits unchanged in anaerobic landfills waiting for us to decide that it’s worth excavating and recycling. And one day we’ll do just that–there’ll come a point when the easy, albeit expensive, way to get a particular combination of properties (formability, degradation resistance, sterilisability) will be to dig up post-consumer plastics and reuse them.

And one day in the future, cool, slick petroplastics will become a repository of warm nostalgia. I like to imagine the Brooklyn-hipsters-of-the-future, on their rooftops, using vodka and bitter almond oil to make artisanal polyethylene.

Thanks to Clive, Tim, Tim, and Jamais for listening to my cocktail-fueled pedantry, and for their insight and feedback.

—

Thanks, Debbie, for taking the time to do this for me.  You can find her on twitter as @debcha.

• Lonely Highways in the Land of Jail – The New Inquiry
  "The suggestion of a ghostly tongue bath was perhaps too much for Foucault to swallow."
  (tags:writing )
• BBC News – Ancient virus DNA thrives in us
  "Traces of ancient viruses which infected our ancestors millions of years ago are more widespread in us than previously thought. A study shows how extensively viruses from as far back as the dinosaur era still thrive in our genetic material."
  (tags:med bio history )
• Three-toed horses reveal the secret of the Tibetan Plateau uplift
  "Fossils of the three-toed horse genus Hipparion that have been found on the Tibetan Plateau have provided concrete evidence for studying the uplift of the plateau, including a skull with associated mandible of Hipparion zandaense from Zanda."
  (tags:history )

Evan Mariah Pettit is a writer and assistant editor at Luna Station Quarterly.

Kemper Norton’s been a regular name here over the last few years, with his unique “slurtronic” wyrd ambient.  He’s just released a new collection – and “collection” does seem to be the word, as it’s really a gathering of sonic flotsam from the shores of his cider-drenched brain – and it’s free to download.  Listen here, click through to grab it.

At this link here, an article and short video by NASA illustrating and explaining these bright blazing anomalies in Saturn’s outermost ring.  It looks like it’s growing spines or barbs in places.

"I think the F ring is Saturn’s weirdest ring, and these latest Cassini results go to show how the F ring is even more dynamic than we ever thought," said Carl Murray, a Cassini imaging team member based at Queen Mary University of London, England. "These findings show us that the F ring region is like a bustling zoo of objects from a half mile [kilometer] in size to moons like Prometheus a hundred miles [kilometers] in size, creating a spectacular show."

• BBC News – MI6 inquest shown video of holdall in bath
  "As the pictures were shown to the court, Mrs Sebire and coroner Fiona Wilcox agreed that at no point did anyone seem to be following him." Because, of course, if you were a kill team tasked to kill a man without leaving an obvious cause of death, fold his body into a holdall and padlock it shut, and then probably leave four years' worth of women's clothes in his flat, you'd be DAMN sure to get yourself seen on CCTV, wouldn't you?
  (tags:crime pol )
• Sudan bombs South Sudan as Bashir vows not to negotiate | FP Passport
  "South Sudan announced last week that it was withdrawing from the disputed Heglig border region in order to avoid all-out war, but the scope of the current attacks seem to go beyond Heglig, and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has vowed not to negotiate until all South Sudanese troops are out of Sudan since southern leaders “do not understand anything but the language of the gun and ammunition." Last week, he referred to the South Sudanese leadership as "insects" and vowed to drive them from power."
  (tags:pol war )
• BBC News – Europe: A crisis of the centre
  "There were two "moments" in the defeat of liberal centrist politics in Germany, Austria, Spain etc. in the 1930s: the first, where polite society realised the working classes were swinging to the right and left, but patronisingly reassured themselves that the world of Jazz, surrealist poetry and foreign holidays could never end. That is, they said to themselves: the workers are clinging to the past, but we, avatars of a more liberal and progressive future, have economic history with us, which points only in the direction of liberalism and economic co-operation."
  (tags:money pol history )
• The “Classical” Button (MP3)
  "I like to think that this particular hotel radio is tuned to sounds leaking back from the future, a time when this kind of electronic noise, this light industrial piece, this static-laden minimal techno, is considered classical music."
  (tags:music sound future )

Am finding the time to cook a little bit, lately.  Nothing flashy.  I did a pasta sauce from scratch which I’ll probably note in MACHINE VISION this week.  But I also did a quick lunch, which went like this:

Small roasting tin.  Slice up a handful of tomatoes – I had 12 cherry tomatoes still in the veg box – into halves and quarters, and lay them skin side down in the tin.  Drizzle over a little olive oil, a tiny pinch of sugar, a twist of salt and a dash of balsamic vinegar if you have it.  It will all look quite appetising.  Enjoy it, because it’s the last time this tin will look appetising for some while.

Bang it in the over at around 190C (Gas mark 5 or 375F) for half an hour, or until the tomatoes are starting to char.

Get the tin out, and smash the tomatoes up a little bit with a fork, to release a little liquid.  Leave the oven on.

Now… what’s in your fridge?  I had a handful of Swedish meatballs and a couple of spring onions.  So I sliced those up and scattered them over the tomatoes.  I attempted to make a couple of shallow indentations in the mess.

(I wouldn’t recommend bacon, or chorizo, because they’d release fat into the tin, and I think that would end badly for you.  But if you habitually keep cooked meats in the fridge, as I do, this is a great way to use stuff up.)

I then took two eggs, fresh from the chicken’s bum, and carefully cracked them into the two indentations.  If you have some smoked paprika in the house, sprinkle some over the yolks.  Bang it back into the hottest part of the oven for ten minutes or so, until the whites go white rather than that sort of phlegmy transparent disgusting nonsense.

At which point you get baked eggs with smoked paprika tops on a bed of (whatever was in your fridge), spring onion and quick-roasted tomato.

Which, yes, does look like some terrible accident happened in your roasting tin involving a chicken and a dog that got run over by a bulldozer while throwing up.  But it tasted really good, and took no time at all.  It’s mostly just slicing stuff and tossing it into a tin.

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• GUEST INFORMANT: Anonymous (warrenellis.com)
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And we begin the week like this, thanks to the wonderful Ian Holloway.  This is the sound of warrenellis dot com this week:

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SPEKTRMODULE 10 Dirt Launchpad 27 minutes and 52 seconds

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

@warrenellis / warrenellis@gmail.com / merch

An uninterrupted mix.

1.  logotone

2.  “No Step” -  Filastine   (album: LOOT)

3.  “Turu Ru Ru” – Un Caddie Renversé Dans l’Herbe   (album: Fork Ends)

4.  “Universes All” -  Stag Hare   (album: Liight Being Traveler)

5.  “Teka Teka Šviesi Saul?” -  Etnografinis Ansamblis   (album: Senoji Lietuviu Liaudies Muzika (1971))

6.  “October” -  David Cain and Ronald Duncan  (album: The Seasons (from the BBC Radio Schools Series ‘Drama Workshop’))

7.  “space animals” -  Technicolour Sattva    (EP:  technicolour sattva)  

8.  “Wilt” -  Virgin Blood     (album:   Dreamt My Lover)      

9.  “Labor Day” -  Foie Gras     (album: HATE)    

10.  “Mantric” – Tomorrowland    (album: Sequence of the Negative Space Changes)  

11.  “Telstar” – Takako Minekawa   (album: Cloudy Cloud Calculator)

12.  logotone

Lack of speech in this edition (again) is due to two long phone conferences and an exceptionally fraught work period (which is why this is also a week later than normal).

PREVIOUSLY: 1 – Fire Axes In Space | 2 – The Lane | 3 – Comfort And Joy | 4 – Long Count| 5 – Underfoot | 6 – The Chamber | 7 – Spark Gap | 8 – Death Is No Obstacle | 9 – Misty Eyed

• The Pickers of Dandora – By Micah Albert | Foreign Policy
  "East Africa's most populous city, Nairobi, is a booming metropolis, regional headquarters to major international corporations like Coca-Cola and Google, and filled with upwardly mobile urban dwellers. And all the trash they produce has to go somewhere. It ends up in Dandora, the city's only municiple dumpsite, where thousands of workers — men, women, and children — pick through refuse daily, looking for food and recyclable scraps to sell. It's a hard, toxic life — but it's also the only job available…"
  (tags:eco photography pol )

Or, perhaps, ex-Anonymous. This is an old contact of mine, who, for obvious reasons, would prefer to remain an anonymous Anonymous. I’m not making any claims that this person is speaking for Anonymous, and neither is the person.  My respect for Anonymous is on record.  This is one individual’s statement about their role in the Anonymous campaign against Scientology. I found it a fascinating and somewhat unsettling read. I hope you find it interesting too.

Colonel Gadaffi: my part in his downfall or how Anonymous pwned the media

Well, no, that’s incredibly misleading and although Anonymous did play a part in facilitating secure communication and Internet access for all of the rebel groups across the Arab Spring, I’m not going to even try to suggest I was involved in the Libyan uprising in any significant or meaningful way at all. It’s just that there’s a copy of Spike Milligan’s excellent war diaries ‘Adolf Hitler – my part in his downfall’ in the pile of books that are all that’s holding up the other piles of books next to it, next to me. Unlike me, Spike Milligan actually was drafted and sent around the world to fight and in my opinion, his diaries tell far more about the Second World War and how it affected the ordinary people involved than anything else written. His war diaries are both hilarious and tragic and as tales from the front line, they’re a vital piece of history.

Now, what I’m going to talk about isn’t really a tale from the front line, as there wasn’t one. Spike, in his foxhole, getting shelled, trying to stave off terror by finding a way to brew up some tea whilst drawing naked ladies on his copy of the standing orders would doubtless have been extremely envious at that way I could get involved from the comforts of home, or my workplace, or out on the streets of London or the idyllic countryside around East Grinstead, even if that bit did involve hiding up trees in the rain, trying not to laugh as serious looking security heavies beat the bushes below and didn’t think to look up. Despite the relative tameness of this tale in comparison to virtually any and all war stories, Spike Milligan’s books are an inspiration in terms of getting down some of the stories of events you (the generic, Royal ‘you’, that is) were involved in, so here’s the tale of how I played a part in changing the way Anonymous interacted with the media, and the ways in which it did make a difference to a couple of individuals, even if the international impact is much, much harder to assess.

First, well, not first, maybe, as we’re three paragraphs in already, but at this stage, I’d like to add a disclaimer. It’s to save time really. Although a few people who know me may be able to put two and two together and work out who I am from things included here, if you’re either involved in law enforcement or the Church of Scientology, I wouldn’t bother. I’m not involved in protests anymore and I’ve not done anything illegal. I’ve not been involved in hacking or DDOSing websites at any point. I don’t have any information on other people who have been involved in this that I’m going to mention. I don’t even know the real names of the people I was working with back in 2008/9, except for the few whose names are public anyway. Long before his penis got him into trouble and back when he was just some guy in Australia, I did exchange emails with Julian Assange on a couple of occasions to discuss potential future help with media issues affecting Wikileaks, but nothing came of it, and I had no involvement there at all. I keep half an eye on how things are going with Anonymous, Lulzsec and AntiSec, but was completely out of the scene before the latter two operations started.

(more…)

When scripting comics, do you prefer to provide a detailed panel layout and detailed descriptions of each panel, or give a more general description of what should be on the page and let the artist do the rest?

matthewjacksonwrites

I’ve talked about this countless times, and some time spent with Google would probably find you a lot of it.  But let’s make it easy: here’s three of my comics scripts.  See for yourself.

If you grow a functional human brain in a jar, give it artificial stimuli capabilities (cameras for eyes, microphones for ears, etc.), and then give it  manufactured memories and a manufactured personality–assuming this would work–would that be considered Artificial Intelligence?

timkressfiction

Guh.

(Don’t ask me how this is a FAQ.  I have no idea.  But:)

There’s a lot of gimmes in there.  I think maybe I’d trade the word “artificial” for “synthetic”?  Which is a semantic handwave, I know.  I’m also reminded of the term “simulacra” – a copy of something that isn’t real, if you like.

Actually, try this: Cultured Intelligence.

FAQchive is here.  You can send questions to warrenellis@gmail.com or ask me on Tumblr.

• Ian Bogost – Aliens, but definitely not as we know them
  "Undermining positions understand reality as smaller bits, be they quarks, DNA or mathematics. Ordinary things such as sheep or battleships become fictions, tricks that deceive minds too naive to understand their depths. Overmining positions take objects to be less real than the processes and circumstances that produce them. Generally, the sciences tend to undermine, and the humanities to overmine."
  (tags:philosophy alien )
• the hauntological society;: Chris Watson
  (selected radio works)
  (tags:music )

Tomorrow afternoon my time, I begin a new email newsletter. It’s been two years since I closed down my previous, longrunning email thing Bad Signal. And this isn’t going to be the same as that. This will be a roughly weekly blast, and mostly about work — the forthcoming novel GUN MACHINE, and the one after that, and other projects as they develop. It’ll also be a download of whatever’s in my head that isn’t short enough for Twitter and not coherent enough to appear here. And about writing, and writers. And, really, whatever else is on my mind when I sit down to do it.

The first one goes out tomorrow. We’ve opened the sign-up system today. It’s at this link, or, if you scroll around this page a bit, in the right-hand menu bar.

The MACHINE VISION service is provided through the kindness of Mulholland Books.

I hope you’ll give it a go. Thanks.

• Bio-Armor: Printing Protective Plates From Patterns In Nature | Popular Science
  "On our face our pores are large, for filtering, while our back pores are small, to form a more protective barrier"
  (tags:war )
• Julian Assange’s TV debut
  "Things got a bit odd with Assange's last question, in which he asked the reglious extremist, "Isn’t Allah, or the notion of God, the ultimate superpower? Shouldn’t you as a freedom fighter also seek to liberate people from the totalitarian concept of a monotheistic god"
  (tags:tv pol war culture )

Comic pro con emergency supply received

Also:

@warrenellis actually spent the entire con making all those asking about FELL to promise they’d actually buy it when it’s back. They did.

— Ben Templesmith (@Templesmith) April 16, 2012