Oh, I got released from an NDA the other day, so I can finally say that I wrote a bunch of the groundwork, backstory and structure on the forthcoming EA videogame DEAD SPACE, which recently got a comic prequel from the hands of Antony Johnston and Ben Templesmith. I believe there was at least one other writer on the project, but I’m sure there’s some of me in there somewhere.

The EA team were a lot of fun to work with. I wrote all my DEAD SPACE documents…god, a long time ago, I don’t even remember… 18 months back? Two years? A long time ago. Game-making is a slow old business.

This is the third game I’ve been employed as writer on: the others were HOSTILE WATERS (known in the US as ANTAEUS RISING, I believe) and COLD WINTER.

Teleportation should be a matter of simply proving you’re somewhere else.

A teleportation device would be a little computer set up to run a single equation. And this equation would prove that you’re somewhere else entirely. You’d plug in the coordinates of where you want to be and press Enter. The machine would run, the equation would solve, proving to the entire spacetime continuum that you are in fact in the other place, and suddenly you’d be in the location relating to the provided coordinates. You wouldn’t appear inside another object, because the universe doesn’t like that. The only tricky bit, I figured, would be that the Earth moves through space around the sun and the sun moves through space with the Milky Way and the Milky Way is subject to the expansion of the universe. But people are clever and would find ways to allow for spacetime drift. I think that if you’ve cracked the mathematics to convince the universe that you’re somewhere else entirely, these small details would be easily attended to.

And the best bit is that it wouldn’t require the power demanded by "classical" teleportation — which, some say, demands the energy output of the sun in order to briefly render the teleportee into a controlled Hiroshima-scale nuclear explosion. I figure you could run my teleport device on a couple of AA batteries.

This is, of course, why I don’t really take drugs anymore.

NO HERO #1 is coming in a few weeks.

You saw this, right?

The podcast feed for The 4am is: http://warrenellis.com/?feed=podcast

14: Cemetery Windchimes

Cheerful Nutjob - “Left To Blame” (3.10)

Kemper Norton - “5 Black Yachts For Jean” (5.39)

Dorian Wood - “The Mutual” (5.13)

Brent Wilcox - “Dream After Anime” (0.59)

“Left To Blame” abstractly reminds me of Galaxie 500 for some reason. And that, frankly, is a good enough reason to play it.

It’s not a 4am without Kemper Norton spilling beer somewhere in the background, and here we have “5 White Yachts For Jean,” his remix of Ice Bird Spiral’s ” Five Black Yachts For Jean”

More old friends: Dorian Wood sent me a live version of his song “The Mutual”, with this note: “Bless your heart for posting my song “Kletka ot Sniag” last time. Thanks to you broadcasting it for thousands, I am performing in Stratford-upon-Avon in September. HUZZAH!”

And a bit of fun at the end from yet another, Brent Wilcox, just to let you know we’re all back. If you’re in Alaska, or otherwise capable of receiving KEUL (88.9 Girdwood AK) or KABN-FM (89.7 Kasilof AK), Brent broadcasts SMOKE AND MIRRORS on Sundays, 7-10pm. He posts the playlists at the link above, and they actually make me want to spend time in Alaska.

Next time: stuff by people you haven’t heard before.

* Anyone making zines? I’d like to see them.

* The "DJs posting their mixes" thread has come back to life.

* The monthly Self Portrait Threads remain curiously popular.

* As does the weekly "What Are You Listening To?" thread.

* Anyone know anything about "Kiki The Demented Girl"?

Imagine you’re the first person to discover you can milk a cow in history. You sick bastard.

– Ben Templesmith

This piece by Nick Currie (better known to many as Momus) introduces me to Analogue Books, an Edinburgh shop that’s selling a line of limited-run, lo-fi photocopied art zines. This, it turns out, is in emulation of a similar project in Switzerland that I was unaware of, Nieves.

I mean, obviously, I know the small press didn’t go away. But I love the idea that people are still getting new noises out of the plain old 12-page zine. Consumer-level photocopying is getting on for being a thirty-year-old technology now. We’ve all got a little conditioned into believing a technology goes away as soon as we stop looking at it. Analogue and Nieves prove, in their own small but significant ways, that print isn’t dead, and neither is DIY.

Elizabeth Bear said something interesting the other day: that the short fiction space is actually the equivalent to the club scene. It’s going to the underground place where people gather to dance to the new music, the experiments and the different sounds. Short stories as the white labels, dubplates and electronic battle weapons.

(And Bruce Sterling turning up with a laptop at 1am like Roedelius or a demented Bob Moog.)

In a sense, the notion kind of asks for this generation’s NEW WORLDS. Now that was a club scene.

Anyway. Interesting, I thought. Carry on.

Neal Stephenson wrote a book that was more than 3000 pages long, that had to be released in three volumes and then eight smaller volumes, and they still let him in the door. THE WIRE, possibly the most fascinating and annoying music magazine on the face of the planet (where else would a music reviewer stop in the middle of a piece to start jabbering about fucking Marx?) is still plugging away, and THE BELIEVER (a print magazine about print books, in the 21st Century? Surely madness!) seems to be going from strength to strength. Christ, SONGLINES just passed its fiftieth issue, and I never would have predicted that. British newspaper sales, as a whole, average an annual slip of around 3%, but some quality Sunday papers post continual rises — the Observer gains something like 5% per annum, I think. And, of course, newspapers like The Guardian have embraced the modern hybrid operation, running a very strong website.

All of which is to say: when I run the sf magazine figures, I’m not saying that Print Is Dead. I’m not even saying that No-One Wants Short Fiction. I’m saying, I’m afraid, that something is wrong with those magazines. Not even, necessarily, with the content. That’s entirely subjective. The objective view seems to me to be inescapable: the packaging and marketing just isn’t working. And I think it’s probably too late for them now. So, now, I wait for new entrants to take their place — be they a resurgent print magazine like WEIRD TALES, or an emergent leader from the web space.

And that, most of you will be glad to hear, will probably be my last thought on the topic. (Unless someone pokes me with a sharp stick.) I don’t see myself running these numbers next year, unless something wildly dramatic happens. From here, it looks like Game Over.

In the aftermath, a few publishers actually sent me their magazines. And, in the interests of fair play, I bought subscriptions to a few.

This next bit, I’ve rewritten a couple of times, and now I’m just going to edit it down to saying that I am not renewing those subscriptions, no matter how much money they expend in sending me letters asking for me to do just that. Everything else I wrote was coarse and unfair, and would excite more weird personal attacks from assistant editors on their Livejournals, oh noes. So let’s have a look at this year’s numbers:

ASIMOV’S: subscriptions down to 14084 from 15117, newsstand sales rose from 3419 to 3497. Not the huge overall circulation losses of previous years, but that’s still a thousand bodies going missing.

ANALOG: subscriptions down to 22972 from 23732, newsstand sales sank from 4597 to 4427. This is victory condition, in the face of posting seven- and eight-percent losses in the previous couple of years.

THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION: subscriptions down to 12831 from 14575, newsstand sales sank from 3691 to 3658.

No numbers available for INTERZONE beyond Dozois’ usual statement that circulation is in "the 2000 to 3000 copy range." Which I’m starting to find faintly absurd, and wish I could see some actual numbers on.

F&SF — whose editor asserted on the web last year that, if if hasn’t been for the hike in US postal charges, it would have been a good year for his magazine — has shed some 11% of its readership year-on-year. ANALOG came off best, though it should be noted that ASIMOV’S has staunched some horrific bleeding, having lost almost a quarter of its audience in 2005.

These are the walking dead.

Cases are always made that in fact these magazines are on strong — or at least survivable — financial ground. Even ignoring the fact that the money they offer for fiction is pitiful, I think that matters less than that they are reaching massively fewer people every year.

One of the reasons we care, of course, is that we associate print magazines with an intelligent curation process overseen by functional salaried adults. That’s why so many people still look askance at the online scene as "not proper magazines." The people who believe that got their wish last month, when one of the editors of HELIX SF had his covers pulled as a bigot with clear psychological issues by a disgruntled writer. It gives credence to the bias, unspoken or otherwise, that a print magazine is a job of work and an online magazine can be thrown up by any drooling lunatic with access to the net and a credit card. A fanzine by any other name.

Regular readers will know that I like sending traffic to the likes of CLARKESWORLD and FARRAGO’S WAINSCOT etc from time to time. Aside from (patchy, beautiful) McSWEENEY’S, these are the places I look to for short fiction now. No real fireworks yet, no real movement, none of them seem to be really cresting the other in terms of profile, but the best work there has been head and shoulders over pretty much anything I read from ASIMOV’S, F&SF or INTERZONE (with one exception in the latter case) over the last several months.

I live in hope that WEIRD TALES is preparing to post truly wonderful year-on-year figures. But, for the four magazines with available numbers (unless some communications failure has hidden a resurgence in INTERZONE numbers from the redoubtable Dozois)… it’s pretty much over.

As was stated over and over last year, any number of things could be done to help these magazines. But, naturally enough, the magazines’ various teams appear not to consider anything to be wrong. They’ll provide what their remaining audience would seem to want, until they all finally die of old age, and then they’ll turn out the lights. And that’ll be it for the short-fiction sf print magazine as we know it.

It’s time now, I think, to turn attention to the online sf magazines. I personally live in hope that, one day, some of them move from net to print, and create a new generation of paper magazines. But, regardless, it’s time to focus on them — on what they do, how they generate revenue, and what their own future is.

One hopes that community will run the pigs out of town before they find themselves having to lay down with them, too.

a) ignore work, make the most of an empty house by sitting around drinking, playing loud music and scratching my balls

b) draw up plans for an Internet Cult which does my bidding and pays me in blood and souls

c) same as above, but pays me in actual cash

d) give up everything, run away from home and indenture myself to a hypnodomme, just for the restfulness of it

e) go to Canada, take a ride on a coach, stab someone sixty times, cut their head off, wank into the stump, laugh, give name of “Joss Whedon” to other passengers, walk off into the night

f) form band that doesn’t exist, release exquisite covers for records that will never be made, beautiful flyers for gigs that were not arranged, mp3 “previews” that are nothing but the voices of young women crooning complete nonsense in Russian

g) audience participation

h) you can still send me tips on interesting stuff etc on degaussing at googlemail dot com.

The funny thing is… the first thing that came to mind was… well, he must’ve done something to deserve that. Was the guy snoring? Did he fart on his killer in his sleep? Did he accidentally trigger a homicidal rage by wearing patchouli oil, or smelling of eggs? He must’ve done something, right? It seems more reasonable than one guy deciding that today was the day he was going to take a long coach ride with a big fucking knife and saw the head off the first bloke who looked like he needed it. Or would like it. Maybe it was a long-held ambition, and he said to himself, today is my birthday and as a special treat to myself I am finally going to decapitate someone. On a coach journey. Because my parents wouldn’t let me and today I am a Man. The sort of logic that only sparks in a head full of bad wiring.

I am reminded, for some reason, of a terrible “joke” I heard the other day:

Q: How long does it take to cook a baby in a microwave oven?
A: I don’t know, I was too busy jerking off.