That is one peculiar fucking book.

You get the strong feeling that Bruce sat down one day and said, “A Paranormal Romance.  People like those.  How can I tear down the term ‘Paranormal Romance’ until it a) turns into something I would like to write b) makes people who like Paranormal Romances cry blood?”

Bruce likes breaking things in his fiction. I often see things his characters love getting ruined somehow. It’s hard to think of anyone else who enjoys the casual harrowing of his characters so much.

It is a romance.  Bruce does in fact have fun playing with old romance-fiction tropes.  There are points where you can almost hear him cackling as he rattles around a LOVE BOAT port of call and scatters poison romances across the sun-kissed trattorias and streets.  There is the paranormal: or, at least, people who think they’re paranormal, and people who call each other paranormal.  It’s also, to some extent, about the delusions around these things.  The female romantic lead is a loon, the male romantic lead is a Silicon Canal alpha-drone, the supporting cast are grotesques and I’ll be surprised if Mr Sterling is ever again invited to a European futurism conference.

“Go to your Futurist Congress,” said Farfalla.  “They are expecting you there.  Your important friends will take good care of you.  Nothing will happen to you there.  Nothing ever happens when important people talk about the future.”

Bruce enjoyably tours the world with his romantic monsters, gleefully showing up the sooty old structures of the romance form while cracking its floorboards with brazen hodloads of science and politics.  It’s a weird, lumpy, sometimes uncomfortable comedy about shitty people.  It is the best and only romance novel you should read this year.  It is fun and evil.

But it really is a peculiar fucking book.

Ebook only: find out more at this page.

How particular do you think new authors should be about which publishing house they get published through?

misterwil-son

New authors should be more particular about how many complimentary copies of the book they get (and what it looks like), because that’s your calling card to other publishers, to show that someone else gambled their money on you.  That’s the trick.  Getting published once is often the biggest, toughest hurdle.

So, having just finished the slipcase/box-set of The Sandman that I got for Christmas… what are the chances Vertigo will do something equally lovely for Transmetropolitan? It definitely deserves the box set treatment.

drewsof

You have to understand that I’m not the publisher, and I cannot cause these things to happen.  THE SANDMAN was a best-selling, critically-acclaimed work that forms the backbone of the mainstream adult comics canon.  TRANSMETROPOLITAN was a fairly obscure, nicely drawn container for a bunch of swearing.  I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Howdy. I just wanted to clamour about "How to Burn Water". After all, you are the reason why I own and enjoy using a mandoline. And why I always keep a small jar of fresh cow tears in my cupboard. So a proper manly cookbook with a beard that would curbstomp my wife’s namby-pamby jamieolivers would really be appreciated.

phuzzy

No plans for the occasionally joked-about cookbook HOW TO BURN WATER.  But I will give you this:

STUPID LEMON CHICKEN

I had two skinless chicken breasts and no idea what to do with them.  So I did this:

Find a bottle of white wine.  Remember the rule: don’t cook with anything you wouldn’t drink.  So drink some.

Now get a roasting tin.  Throw a large glass of the wine into it.  Squeeze one lemon’s worth of juice into it.  Stir.  Throw some herbs in — I used thyme and chives.  I grab some chives and a pair of scissors and just snip half-inch lengths of chive in to the pan.  Stir it all again.  Lay the chicken breasts in.  Go away for five minutes and drink some more wine.  Come back.  Flip the breasts over.  Wow, that sounds weird.  Put them in the oven at 190 C (do the conversion yourself, you have the internet.)  Every five minutes, open the oven and spoon some of the liquid in the pan over the chicken.  And then drink some more wine. Until 25 minutes have passed.  At which point it is cooked.  It is not only stupidly simply, but you’re well on your way to being drunk.  Excellent.

Hello Mr. Ellis, I apologize if you have already answered this, but what was it that made you want to write comic books?

wyokid

The riches, the glamour and the seductive charisma such a career supernaturally gifts one with.

However, back in the real world: I love visual narrative media, and comics are the purest kind.

The thing about John Cassaday was that you could just throw anything at him, and it’d work.  So I did, and it did.

The overall concept for the PLANETARY covers was that, every issue, the book would simply look like nothing else next to it on the shelves, and that was how it would stand out.  Look for the thing that looked like none of the other things.  I think we mostly managed that.  These are a few of my favourites.

	Hong Kong Action Film issue.  The title and credits were actually supposed to appear as film-style subtitles under the image, but that was a step too far even for the fairly laid-back editorial office.  I’m still kind of sad about that.
	I would often just throw shorthand and free-association at John, for the cover images.  In this instance, I think I said something like, “doom, sorrow, monochrome, abstract, Joy Division.  Yes.  Joy Division.”  And probably the title of the story, which was “Magic And Loss.”  (Thereby also summoning Lou Reed.) This was just a perfect conjuring.
	The Full Steranko. In comics, when you say “Steranko,” you mean a pure shot of Pop-Art/Op-Art Sixties mad-science spy story. ”Steranko” may in fact be the best name anyone ever had.
	Kubrick and 2001: A Space Odyssey.  RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA and Seventies science-fiction paperbacks.  At this point, we were putting letterer/designer Richard Starkings through such horrors every time that he started crediting himself on the covers as revenge, which we were perfectly fine with.
	Our “Doctor Strange” issue, connecting that character’s Sixties origins with psychedelia.  Right off a Fillmore poster, in classic period colours.
	And this one.  Which I provided no notes for, had no idea for, and had nothing to do with.  The penultimate issue.  And John just generated the perfect image.  I remember just looking at this and saying, “you clever, clever bastard.” Can you see the logo?  It’s just a bit of type above the Wildstorm mark in the top left.  By this juncture, we’d proven our point – readers found PLANETARY, every time we released an issue, by looking for the thing that did not look like the other comics.  And that’s all down to the brilliance of John Cassaday.

I have a terrible habit of using Instagram to capture interesting bits of books I’m reading.  I provide the following, without explanation, shame or sourcing (I have the sourcing saved, but these go into a file where I can rediscover them independent of sourcing, so I can make new connections).

I personally think this should be a Thing People Do.

We had great cover artists on that book.  I mean, in a perfect world, Darick would have done them all.  But it’s not, and so we had some of the greatest artists in comics taking turns with him.  Not a bad cover in the lot.  I was just thinking about it today.  Some of those covers live with me still, and never got the kind of applause they deserved.  Here are a few of those.

	John Cassaday.  We worked together on PLANETARY for years, where he amazed people with his covers.  But, weirdly, I still think this is the greatest cover he’s ever done.  It’s just too exquisitely imagined for words, really.  A beautifully drawn and incredibly simple, incredibly clever piece of work.
	Well, it’s Moebius.  Therefore your argument, if you had one, is invalid. Moebius was the pen name of Jean Giraud, one of the very best comics creators and artists France produced ever.  He was one of those rare people who genuinely deserved the tag “genius,” as far as I’m concerned. I’m fascinated by how raddled and awful Spider looks under Moebius’ ink, too.
	Jaime Hernandez.  Therefore, the comment above mostly applies here too.  How the hell my editors convinced these people to do covers is beyond me. What interested me here was that artists usually went to the frenetic or the scowly with Spider Jerusalem, but Jaime Hernandez cages up this moment of quiet desperation that I love.
	There is something purely Tanino Liberatore about JG Jones’ cover.  I don’t know what Jones is doing these days, but I presume it’s not kinky Euro-style science fiction, and I am sad for that.  Because this picture is just beautifully set up, and I like how it communicates Spider’s relationship with his “filthy assistants” – that they could basically kill him any time they liked because he was a physical wreck with all the implicit fighting ability of an old dishrag.
	My favourite of Darick’s own covers.  Pure joy, and yet, at the same time, pure Id.  Spider’s expression says “I am alive and having great fun” and somehow also “I just shat on somebody’s baby.”

Crop of a screenshot that Pamela Brown at Mulholland sent over, because I’m in the UK and therefore cannot access it.  But, this week, GUN MACHINE is Editor’s Choice on the Apple iBookstore, and if you’re in the US, you should be able to see it with this direct link here – as well as, of course, on the iBooks front page.

The book also made the Barnes & Noble, and ABA independent booksellers’, best-sellers lists last week.  It seems to be doing okay. 

Ian Rankin’s Detective Inspector John Rebus has long been the strongest of Britain’s crime-fiction police protagonists.  Ian’s determination for unsentimental reality in the Rebus books meant that, in 2006, the old bastard aged out and had to retire from the Edinburgh strength.  Here in 2013, though, retired coppers can work for cold-case squads in a civilian capacity, and so, like it says on the cover, Rebus is back.

He shares the book, though, uncomfortably, with Ian’s most recent protagonist, Complaints (“Internal Affairs”) plod Malcolm Fox.  In previous books, Fox has seemed compassionate and self-controlled.  Here – perhaps simply in contrast to Rebus? – he comes off as chilly and childish.  That said, they were never going to get along, especially as Rebus gets into full swing once more.  Loosed on the whole of Scotland, the reprehensible old git gives a good account of himself, and maybe even learns a new trick or two in the doing of it.

It’s not the very best crime novel Ian Rankin’s written, I don’t think.  But I do think it’s a really good novel.  It’s a novel about Scotland, its geography and its people, and the things they hide. It’s a late album from a rock act who have suddenly realised that, yes, they have all this to say, too.  It’s a magnificent read.

This is something I get asked A LOT.  It seems to be a thing that really paralyses a lot of first-time comics writers, particularly ones coming from other media. What is the picture?  How do I find the right panel to describe?

A useful starting place might be something the actor and comics writer Nick Vince said, back in the early 90s. It comes from cinema, as did Nick, and it goes like this: imagine the panel as your “print moment.” The frame that captures the essence of the moment. Imagine, say, thirty seconds’ worth of film, and that your job is to overlay those thirty seconds of dialogue over a single frame pulled from that ribbon of film that best encapsulates what’s going on.

That’s a very mechanical way of looking at it, but it might get you started. You’re looking for the image that captures the moment.

You’re also, wherever possible, looking for an interesting image. But don’t confuse “interesting” with “splashy.” You’re still trying to serve the demands of storytelling, telling the story as clearly and simply as possible.  In most forms of narrative, each panel must have a relationship with the panels on either side of it.  You’re plotting out a sequence of motion in a series of stills.  Imagine it like that, and you may be able to get a better sense of how a story in comics might flow.  It’s not a perfect analogy, but it might be worth considering if this is something you’re having trouble with.  You’ll develop your own view, approach and methods as you go.  Everybody does.

Late February.

Jason Howard can be found at @theJasonHoward.

From the event page at the Foyles site:

Twisted, gritty, spiked with mordant wit, Gun Machine is the latest bullet from the brain of Warren Ellis. It’s the kind of dark detective thriller you won’t have read before, but exactly what you’d expect from the award-winning creator of Transmetropolitan, Planetary and Red. Come and hear more from Ellis at Foyles in conversation with journalist and author Sam Leith.

Click through to buy tickets: a fiver, or three quid concession.  (I don’t charge or set prices, so don’t even think about complaining to me about it.)  Starts at 630pm.  By 730pm, the strain of having had to be coherent on stage for an hour will probably have killed me.  Come to see that!

As hosted by Vulture, to whom I am indebted.

(Ignore the blurb at the page, it’s all wrong and there are no devils.)

Director: Clayton Cubitt
Editing, Compositing, Effects: Jeff Dragon
Soundtrack: Meredith Yayanos
Grooming: Katie Wedlund
Wardrobe: Signe Yberg
The Hunter: Joe Heaps Nelson
Additional audio effects: CGEffex via Freesound

So John Scalzi’s doing this thing with publisher Tor where he’s releasing a weekly serial. It’s a novel, but designed to be experienced episodically. Scalzi:

The only problem is, the story I wanted to tell wouldn’t exactly work in straight-ahead novel format. Or more accurately, it could work as a novel, but it would (work) better as episodes.

The first episode, THE B-TEAM, popped just after midnight.  I read it in a single sitting.  I’m not incredibly au fait with John’s OLD MAN’S WAR science fiction setting, having read only one book in that sequence (THE GHOST BRIGADES), but I wasn’t in the least bit lost by this latest addition to the series.  I’d go so far as to say that you don’t need to have read anything in the sequence thus far to understand THE HUMAN DIVISION.

It’s a thing hard to talk about without spoilers, this story.  But let me try and frame it like this. Perhaps you remember one of Iain Banks’ impetuses for beginning to write military science fiction/ space opera.  I can’t find the exact quote right this second, but it was something along the lines of wanting to rescue a genre he loved from a bunch of American fascists.  The phrase “American fascists” is his, I’m pretty sure.  Anyway.  You get the idea.  From Heinlein and Campbell through to Niven and Pournelle and the current-day state of that end of the field, it’s a pretty flat and reactionary field, full of flat and reactionary characters.

What Scalzi does in these books is take the second strain of military sf, the more liberal and literary works like Joe Haldeman’s THE FOREVER WAR, and sew it into the classic form.  What comes out is rich and smart and funny – still very much a good-time rollercoaster entertainment, but also pleasingly human and self-aware as it rattles along its tracks, scattering spaceship wrecks, lethal diplomacy, species dieback and interstellar spookshow paranoia in its wake.

This first episode was basically a really good laugh, and I’m looking forward to the following episodes appearing on my Kindle.  As far as I know, all forms of ebook reader and retail can get you a copy: Kindle, Kobo, Nook, iBooks etc.  99 cents in the US, 64p in the UK.

At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, I walked across this.

I was in the Los Angeles Times yesterday.  Probably some other things have happened too, but here in the second week of Book Launch I am frankly pretty fried, and am looking forward to taking some time off and hiding somewhere at the end of the month.

Almost all writing stopped when the book launched, and I’ve been a professional emailer for ten or eleven days at this point.  I’m getting itchy: to go back into New Novel, to develop whatever SPIRIT TRACKS ends up being called, to work up some graphic novel ideas, to kick around a couple of notions for other media.  Or even for the time to finish reading this excellent Ian Rankin book before we interview each other next week.

I’m hoping that today is the day that everything calms down and I can get back to making things.  Which is probably ridiculously optimistic.  But my fingers always crackle a bit at the top of the year, wanting to write new things down and start some changes.

(This could be psychosis brought on by quitting Red Bull.)

This was today’s post.  One every weekday until I get all the way back on the horse.

By the skin of its teeth, after five days of sales, at least four of which were without any stock on shelves in Barnes & Noble stores and other locations, and selling out on Amazon twice.

(It’s been a bit of a week.)

That is a strange thing to see.

Thanks to all who pre-ordered it and sought it out on its first week of release.

UNDERGROUND ENGLAND: Travels Beneath Our Cities and Country, by Stephen Smith.  The prose style is frankly a bit arch and somewhat fusty in places, for me, but it’s done with good humour and, as you can see, it’s stuffed with fun things like this.  The man is fascinated by what lies beneath, and rattles all over the country (seeming not to stray across the borders, which I find a little sad) in search of caves, tunnels, mines, basements, secret passageways and your general array of holes in the ground.  Including, I should note, the underground town built for the Government and the Royal Family in event of nuclear war, named at various times Subterfuge and Site 3.  A secret buried town called Subterfuge.  How can you not love that?

Not what you’d call a serious exploration of England’s hidden spaces, but an amusing whistlestop tour, thickly littered with interesting pieces of information.

So the book finally launched last week.  We had a few hiccups, including physical copies not reaching Barnes & Noble bookstores (at best) in the launch week, and both Amazon and Amazon UK selling out twice, but it’s out there.  This link should tell you where to find it.  At one point, GUN MACHINE was the 112th best-selling book on Amazon.  This weekend has mostly been about people telling me they can’t find physical copies to buy, which is really not a warming thing for someone who would like to sell copies of their book.

Book Trailer 1 was exclusive at MTV Geek (thank you!) for a while, and now it’s on YouTube:

Jim Batt, Ben Templesmith and Wil Wheaton, folks.  They did me proud, and it’s not a thing I’ll ever be able to pay back.

The American reviews I’ve been shown have all been very kind.  The New York Times reviewed it twice, even.  Got one in the UK, yesterday, too, which was nice.  I was also on The Nerdist podcast – Chris and his team were just great.

Book Trailer 2 is coming, which will hopefully keep things rolling along.  I know it’s going to look amazing. 

Last week was mostly about watching screens and processing email (and blasting away my “holiday” time).  Today I go back to the actual job of writing things.  But if you’re one of the people who tweeted about the book, or blogged about it, over the last week: thank you.  Seriously.  You made the week a lot easier for me, and I’m grateful.

I’ve been enjoying Crooked Little Vein a lot, but I was wondering what motivated the narrative decision to make your protagonist be (and I hope I’m phrasing this properly) an essentially conservative character. By that I mean he tends to react with hostility to the oddballs his work brings him in contact with, and then defends people who, while seemingly being more socially typical, demonstrate close-mindedness.

alanmcmillian

The truth, I think, is that most people are essentially conservative characters, and I found it interesting to try and develop a character like that towards some kind of acceptance of the real face of the modern Western world without betraying his basic nature.  People can and/or should change during a story, but they shouldn’t transcend into completely new people, especially not in a short book.  My note to myself on McGill’s passage through the story was something like “Trix doesn’t magically fuck enlightenment into him.”

Aside from stuff Phillip K. Dick and Neal Stephenson, what’s on your must-read cyberpunk novels and comics list?

printedvelvet

Okay.  Deep breath.

Cyberpunk, also known as Radical Hard SF or The Movement, was born around 1980 and didn’t survive that decade.  (Some people map the end to 1992, with Neal Stephenson’s SNOW CRASH.)  Philip K Dick had no affiliation with the movement, and was dead by 1982, two years before William Gibson published NEUROMANCER.  People tend to associate Dick with cyberpunk because of BLADE RUNNER, particularly its visuals, which had nothing to do with the novel, but were so strikingly of the speculative zeitgeist that in 1982 William Gibson had to get out of his cinema seat and leave the screening because it looked too much like what was in his head.

Phil Dick was pre-cyberpunk.  He, JG Ballard and Alfred Bester were major touchstones for the movement.  Ballard’s CRASH and Bester’s STARS MY DESTINATION and THE DEMOLISHED MAN are essential.  Also John Brunner’s STAND ON ZANZIBAR, THE SHEEP LOOK UP, and, most importantly for cyberpunk’s ancestry, THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER.

(EDIT to note: yes, and about a hundred others, I’m sure.  These are the ones that occurred to me that day.)

Of the cyberpunk period itself, you will need William Gibson’s first trilogy, NEUROMANCER, COUNT ZERO and MONA LISA OVERDRIVE.  Also, Bruce Sterling’s THE ARTIFICIAL KID and ISLANDS IN THE NET.  Richard Kadrey’s METROPHAGE.  Rudy Rucker’s SOFTWARE and WETWARE.  Pat Cadigan’s TEA FROM AN EMPTY CUP.  That should keep you going for a bit.

I couldn’t help but notice your recommendations of cyberpunk writers a couple days back were all men. Are there any female writers of cyberpunk (or sci-fi) in general you recommend? Are there any that have influenced your own work?

lizvseverything

Um, Pat Cadigan is in that list, and she’s female.

A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of female speculative fiction writers whose work I’ve liked would include:

Ursula LeGuin, obviously, who’s influenced everybody.  Seek out and start off with THE LATHE OF HEAVEN, if you haven’t already.

Pamela Zoline.  Carol Emshwiller.  Mary Soon Lee (one of the single best short stories in sf in the 00s was her “Pause Time”).  CJ Cherryh’s early book DOWNBELOW STATION is warmly remembered.

Doris Lessing’s SHIKASTA had a *huge* effect on me.  Very influential, I think.

Cherie Priest, Elizabeth Bear, Cat Valente… I’ve written book blurbs for two of these, and those two have also written on my website, which it suddenly occurs to me you don’t read…!

Kate Wilhelm.  Mary Shelley counts.  Probably so does Angela Carter, at least in my head.

Lauren Beukes, of course, who is also a friend.

Obviously incomplete and written in two minutes, but a start.

But what Ariadne discovered on her walks with the Meadow was that there were bigger places to see.  The multiverse hangs in the metaverse, a room where all the universes hang like sheets on a great hypermagnetic wave.  And the Xenoverse is the weather outside that room that causes the wave.  And the Hyperverse is the weather system that causes those winds.  And the Omniverse is the impossibly giant ecology that contains all things.  Ariadne, of course, knew as well as you and I that weeds get bloody everywhere. So it was not an impossibly long time before she, in a boat of Meadow, could look down on all of creation and know that everything everywhere was really nothing more than things growing.  And she, no less than a clever woman who never learned not to ask questions, did look down, and smiled.

Words by Warren Ellis, pictures by Molly Crabapple.

ARIADNE 4/5 is available as a limited-edition print.

© Warren Ellis & Molly Crabapple 2012

#ariadnescience

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