Perhaps you might like to listen to Erstlaub’s new record, a beautiful piece of fogbound electronic mystery called MARCONI’S SHIPWRECK.  You can find out all about it here.

First I will lay into the (compressed) audiovisual version, and then the Bandcamp streaming version (where you can also buy a digital version for little money, as well as the physical version).

Marconi’s Shipwreck from Erstlaub on Vimeo.

http://www.SilentJames.com – @SilentJamesL

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

Writing my talk for Improving Reality, the Brighton (UK) event I’m speaking at on September 6.

 [details]

And I’m looking at this phrase I noted down Saturday night.  “Vintage space.”  Or “vintage space travel,” in a clearer but less economical (or, somehow, pretty/doomy) turn.

Google tells me it’s not a new term.  First hit was Amy Shira Teitel’s blog.

It is, to me, an incredibly grim term, one I wish I’d had to hand when I wrote the foreword to ORBITER.

[amazon] [amazon uk]

Saturday night, of course, Neil Armstrong died. Soon – it is horrible to note – Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins will be gone, too, and the last of the vast team that put them on the Moon with 1969 technology.  A period that recently entered the realm of “antique.”  Hell, I think a car from 1975 now counts as vintage. In a few more generations, the likes of me will be gone, too, and there will be no-one on Earth who remembers what it’s like to have lived in a time when humans walked on the Moon.

Vintage space.  I’ll be damned.

(Port Morsby)

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.  It has been pre-emptively bought by Chernin Entertainment and FOX for development as a television series.  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.  Right now I’m co-writing a thing called WASTELANDERS with Joss Whedon and working on my next novel.

My most recent original comics work was SVK, produced in partnership with the design & invention unit BERG.

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.

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.

I can next be seen in public in Brighton, UK, on September 6, speaking at Improving Reality 2012. I may be doing something for the British Humanist Association next month, in my role there as a Distinguished Supporter.

Photo by Ellen Rogers.

SPEKTRMODULE 12   Dispatch Render Ghosts   30 minutes and 25 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

On a new computer, and trying to remember how I do this.  A short uninterrupted mix to begin season 2.

1.  logotone

2.  An excerpt from a NOGGIN THE NOG episode, “Noggin and the Pie” – narrated by Oliver Postgate, music by Vernon Elliott

3.  “Departure” -  Voice Of The Seven Woods    (album: The Journey)

4.  “Nerve” -  Laurel Halo   (album: Quarantine)

5.  “Economica” – Jim Guthrie   (album: Children Of The Clone)     

6.  “Dipping” -  Shackleton    (album: Music For The Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ)

7.  “Looking in the Ether for Meaning” -  Erstlaub   (album: Broadcasting on Ghost Frequencies)

8.  A clip from Tom Phillips’ and Peter Greenaway’s “A TV Dante”.  Voices are Bob Peck and Sir John Gielgud.

9.  “Wisteria of Albion” -  Time Attendant    (EP: Tournaments)

10.  “Cave Of Wild Horses” – Pine Smoke Lodge (album: Kambing Utan)

11.  “(Dub)” – Scott Tuma & Mike Weis    (album: Taradiddle)

12.  “Crash Deconstructed” -  Eluvium   (album: The Motion Makes Me Last)

13.  “Gedenkminute (fuer A+K)” -  NEU!    (album: NEU! 2)   

14.  logotone

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 | 10 – Dirt Launchpad | 11 – Dreams Of The Woodland Cult

Haven’t been around too much for the last week. Today was the last day of Lucretia Borgia Ellis, more commonly known for the last eighteen years as: Lucy, Satanic moggy, Ugliest Kitten Ever Seriously Who Knew Kittens Could Even Be Ugly, destructive furbag, friend and motherly companion of Lili, good girl.  After a fairly grim week, I had to take care of her today, and found a sunbeam to lay her down in, as she prefers.

You can find Juan Santapau at The Secret Knots and at @santapau.

THREE PANELS OPEN is an open invitation.  Perhaps you’d like to do one.  A comic that is three panels in duration and 640px wide.  I’m only going to run the ones I like best, I’m afraid. However, there’s no time limit on submissions.  You can email the image to warrenellis@gmail.com, and please include your name and the website and/or twitter account you’d like it to be associated with.

It would be really nice if more women were sending comics.  Or, indeed, if any women were sending comics.

I was going to complete a SPEKTRMODULE podcast tonight, but, after having watched the Olympic closing ceremony with Lili, I’m no longer in the mood.  It’s a silly, pointless thing to get angry about.  But, by the time it finally finished, I found myself weirdly furious.  I was somehow under the impression that it was to be an event about British musical culture.  And what it turned out to be was a flabby, lazy variety show notable for 1) preponderance of old white people 2) famous people who apparently didn’t want to turn up 3) no sense at all of British musical culture.

Don’t get me wrong, it was lovely to see Ray Davies and all that.  But anyone who watches that show looking for an understanding of how we do and did music here is going to come away with some very bad ideas.  I get that these things are difficult to put on, but it was my presumption that one hires the people who know how to do it.

The opening ceremony pointed to the future.  The closing ceremony – with a stated mandate of “A Symphony Of British Music” – ended with The Who.  It was like drawing a line under Britain.  All over.  “A Symphony Of British Music” is something that’s naturally going to catch my attention.  Sadly, it was no such thing.  You can’t just scrape off ten numbers from the top of the Guinness Book Of Records – and whatever the fuck that was that George Michael sang after “Freedom” – and call it Job Done.  Karaoke bars put more effort into the job than that.

It was as conservative, hidebound and bland as the Opening Ceremony was ambitious, demented and eccentric.  It played almost as an attempt to zero out what Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell Boyce achieved and said in the Opening.

And I remain, for no good reason, sad and angry over this stupid and petty thing, because it sought to tell the world that my odd, bittersweet, green and grey little country is not beautiful and mad in all the ways I have always known it to be.

Related articles

• The British Humanist Association (warrenellis.com)
• The Facebook Cortex (warrenellis.com)

Basically, it’s like this: people can see your public activity on Twitter.  Yes, even when you use your publisher’s official account.  And while you yourself might believe that book publishers go around publicly supporting tweets that denigrate authors from other publishing houses, I have to tell you that that’s not really the way it is.

13 AUGUST: EDITED TO ADD:

@warrenellis We saw this warrenellis.com/?p=14289 and were mortified. Purely a slip of the finger. How terribly embarrassing!

— Fantagraphics Books (@fantagraphics) August 13, 2012

@seanvanderm @warrenellis @mollycrabapple Certainly – we also plan on emailing an apology. Re: twitter.com/fantagraphics/…

— Fantagraphics Books (@fantagraphics) August 13, 2012

Cartoonist and escaped science experiment Chip Zdarsky has an open invitation here.

God knows why.

GUEST INFORMANT is where I ask friends and acquaintances to write about whatever they feel like discussing today.  And now you know what Chip wants to say.  He has a Wikipedia entry and everything.

The news popped yesterday evening, while I was at dinner. This is one of the things I’ve been working on for the last few months, and it eventually all happened last week (and then I took a long weekend to rest). Deadline.com has the press release: Fox Buys Thriller From Chernin’s Company Based On Upcoming Warren Ellis Novel.

Basically, this happened: Chernin Entertainment (in the form of a relentless and charming lady called Lauren Stein) bought GUN MACHINE pre-emptively, sight unseen, half a year before its publication.

Then we went looking for a showrunner, which we found in the body of Dario Scardapane. I went with Dario because he got the themes of the book immediately. Dario, with me mostly just sort of getting in his way, came up with a take on the book as a series. We got in a room with Fox Broadcasting (who partly arrived in the form of Jon Wax, an acquaintance and supporter) and told them what we wanted to do. And the next day I got a phone call telling me that we had successfully fooled Fox into buying it for development.

It’s important to note at this point that I take the credit for none of this. This is down to Dario, and Lauren Stein and Katherine Pope, and my agent Angela Cheng Caplan and my patient lawyer George Davis of Nelson Davis Wetzstein. And I have to take this opportunity to thank all of them. Particularly Angela and George, who save me from myself on a regular basis. Also, Lydia Wills, without whom none of this would have happened at all, and John Schoenfelder and Michael Pietsch for believing in the book at the start.

There have, of course, been a lot of jokes about Fox cancelling their series. I loved PROFIT, and I, too, would have liked to have seen that second season of HOUSE. Anyway. It’s all the luck of the draw, and I’d rather be in this position than not.

As I learned on GLOBAL FREQUENCY way back when, tv is a series of hurdles, and nothing’s a locked deal even when you’re actually out in the world shooting the thing. There are no guarantees in television, just like any other commercial creative art. But we’re in good shape at this point. Dario and I are talking a lot and agreeing on stuff. Next up, Dario writes the script, with me sitting on his shoulder screeching. Actually, trying not to screech, because if you don’t want your book adapted, you shouldn’t sell anyone the right to adapt it. At this point, though, I’m pretty involved in the adaptation, and having fun.

All of which is pretty good for a book that hasn’t been published yet.

You can pre-order GUN MACHINE at amazon.com and amazon.co.uk.

(At a later date I’ll assemble links for other bookstore services.)

This week, one of my recent favourites, award-winning and incredibly busy artist Francesco Francavilla.  You should click on the art or here for the embiggening.

THREE PANELS OPEN is an open invitation.  Perhaps you’d like to do one.  A comic that is three panels in duration and 640px wide.  I’m only going to run the ones I like best, I’m afraid. However, there’s no time limit on submissions.  You can email the image to warrenellis@gmail.com, and please include your name and the website and/or twitter account you’d like it to be associated with.

I finally broke proper ground on New Novel, after a few false starts.  This one’s fighting me, and I imagine it will continue to kick and bite through all projected 80000 words.  (Projected 80000 – I think GUN MACHINE ended up somewhere over 85000.)

This means that this goddamn thing is back for a few months.

DEATH BAR

In which I exercise some thirteen-year-old memories of beautiful Trieste and do a bad George Orwell metaphor that will not survive the second draft.  But when the book’s fighting, the important thing is to keep moving.

The book has a name, but I’m not allowed to say anything about it yet.  So, for a few months, it will simply be Next Novel. 

More news to come soon.  But for now, I simply note that Next Novel is properly begun.

From Gardner Dozois’ summation of the 2011 field in his 29th edition of The Year’s Best SF, available from bookstores and Amazon in the US and soon in the UK.

ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION is doing very strongly in digital editions.  Overall circulation is 22593, up by about 1500 units or 7.3%.  7500 of that overall number is down to digital subscriptions, and an average of 290 digital units sold per month on top of that.

That’s a terrific thing for them.  A 7% increase in circulation is something of a turnaround.  And suggests that the increase is down to new (or returning) readers, rather than a migration to digital from the existing base.

Their print subscriptions are at 12469.  Their average newsstand sale is at 2334.

ANALOG is at an overall of 26440, which is a rise of 0.2% on the previous year. 4100 digital subscriptions, and an average of 150 digital units per month in addition.

This tends to suggest that in a couple of years’ time, ASIMOV’S numbers will be on parity with ANALOG’s.

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION’s overalls dropped from 15172 to 14162.  They don’t release digital figures.

INTERZONE’s numbers are clearly not available to Mr Dozois, as he has forever stated that INTERZONE circulates 3000 copies per issue.  This is obviously nonsense.  Either INTERZONE have found three thousand people who cannot die, or he just doesn’t know the numbers.  Although the former explanation would further illuminate the mystery of how INTERZONE keeps on keeping on without any visible means of support.  I have always had a fondness for INTERZONE, but I am (pleasantly) baffled by their economics.  A recent post on their forum indicates that they’re looking at a format change that will put a spine on the magazine, shrink the page size a little bit – and add many more pages and more content.  Which sounds a bit like a magic trick.

It still seems to me like a space ripe for disruption.  Take a look at these reach numbers for online sf magazine CLARKESWORLD.  (Get well soon, Neil, by the way.)

You can compare these to 2009’s figures, if you’re interested.

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

Fábio Moon is the co-creator, with his brother Gabriel Bá, of the multiple-award-winning graphic novel DAYTRIPPER, and together with Matt Fraction they make CASANOVA.  You can find Fábio and Gabriel at their blog, and Fábio’s on Twitter as @fabiomoon.

THREE PANELS OPEN is an open invitation.  Perhaps you’d like to do one.  A comic that is three panels in duration and 640px wide.  I’m only going to run the ones I like best, I’m afraid. However, there’s no time limit on submissions.  You can email the image towarrenellis@gmail.com, and please include your name and the website and/or twitter account you’d like it to be associated with.