Shivering Sands

How It Works

An Introduction, of sorts

I still get asked with appalling regularity "where my ideas come from."

Here's the deal. I flood my poor ageing head with information.

Any information. Lots of it. And I let it all slosh around in the back of my brain, in the part normal people use for remembering bills, thinking about sex and making appointments to wash the dishes.

Eventually, you get a critical mass of information. Datum 1 plugs into Datum 2 which connects to Datum 3 and Data 4 and 5 stick to it and you've got a chain reaction. A bunch of stuff knits together and lights up and you've got what's called "an idea".

And for that brief moment where it's all flaring and welding together, you are Holy. You can't be touched. Something impossible and brilliant has happened and suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein's brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation.

That is what has happened to me tonight. I am beaming Sex Rays across the world and my brain is all lit up with Holy Fire. If I felt like it, I could shag a million nuns and destroy their faith in Christ.

From my chair.

See, this is the good bit about writing. It's what keeps you going.

It's the wild rush of "shit, did I think of that?" with all kinds of weird chemicals shunting around your brain and ideas and images and moments and storyforms all opening up snapsnapsnap in your mind, a mass of new and unrealised possibilities.

It's ten past two in the morning, and I'm completely wired, caught up in the new thing, shivering and laughing and glowing in the dark. Just as well it's the middle of the night. No-one would be safe from me right now. I could read their minds and take over their heartbeats with a glare.

Faster than the speed of anyone. That's how it works.

This Is What It Means To Be Me: wake up at 1pm. Check mail. Open envelope full of free money. Go to pub. Laugh.

Because I am a Writer.

Five Thousand Miles

Written in September of 2002

I hate Los Angeles.

I hate Los Angeles because it is a city not designed for humans.

It is designed for cars. Humans not required. One day it's going to be filled with nothing but robot cars, cavorting on the highways of a city where humans were never ever meant to be.

Having a cigarette after dinner elsewhere in LA tonight, I see a Crazy Homeless Guy with a megaphone. He raises it to his lips, makes to speak-to Announce, to make a Proclamation-and then thinks again, lowers it. Raises it again. But no. The time is not right. He gets on the bus, disappointed. Something was wrong. His megaphone hangs in his hand. Perhaps there wasn't an agent in earshot.

I also hate Los Angeles because it's not a city. It's six or seven cities stuck together by seventy five thousand miles of road. I write this in Burbank. Burbank appears to be one of those half-alive cities, like Canberra, that people drive to in the morning and utterly abandon at night. This hotel is like a colony on Mars. There's not another living thing in sight. And, in the distance, the cars jabber and scheme in the dark. The bastards.

Safety Dance

I am going to Cable TV Station, housed in Big Media Corporation building. I am told that there are two levels of heavy security here, as there are at all studios here. Level One is a bored Pinkerton drone who sticks a broom under our car to see if Osama Bin Laden is clinging to the chassis. Level Two is a guy slumped over a counter who asks my name and then writes it on a lapel sticker. Presumably this sticker renders me invulnerable to bombing outrages, anthrax showers and bags of sarin.

Los Angeles is disgusted with the world. It doesn't understand why terrorists haven't targeted it. It's Important. It's Hollywood. Surely the warty Al Queda baddies want to destroy Hollywood, right? So where are they? Was the meeting postponed? LA stares at its cellphone, desperate for the validation of meaningless mass destruction.

Action

I am meeting with my friends Producers and Screenwriter.

Screenwriter arrives pale and edgy. He is into the fifteenth rewrite of an adaptation. He's been in the business a long time and is very successful. But, despite being a professional screenwriter, he is still human. He has been asked if he can make the piece's second lead green. And Welsh. And a dog. He can't take any more. He makes an awful keening sound, like a stabbed dog. There's blood in his ears. He rips his pants down and shits on the floor.

The waiter passes, looks down, and says, "Who spilled this fine American food?"

Soon, it will be rinsed under the tap and put on the hotplate. And sold to me as breakfast for $20.99 plus tax.

July 21, 2009 Alive in LA. I has a balcony. I may give a sermon. After I sleep for 24 hours.

...Why does the minibar have a glowstick in it? Do I appear AS THE SORT OF MAN WHOD DRINK GLOWSTICK CHEMICALS?

July 22, 2009 Good morning from Los Angeles, sinners. Off to have seven thousand meetings.

Abandoned to feral roaming producers on the WB lot. Am fashioning a spear from the bones of interns.

The power of Hollyweird compels you. Or possibly me.

i have fooled you all. I use Twitter to steal your souls and increase my Powers. Which Compel you. (Yesimighthavehadadrinkshutup)

Trying to work out if aged poolside guy is really that hairy or if he's wearing an animal pelt of some kind

Yeah, you keep that towel on, buddy. I have a lighter.

The Full Head Tingle

Written in December of 2002

At the end of the Eighties, I became the manager of a small shop that sold books and comics. Finally off the dole, living in a room that was six feet by seven feet, black dustbin sacks taped to the window to keep the light out, I sat down the day after I got the job and wrote a letter to Savoy Books.

Savoy were and are a publisher based in Manchester, in the north of England, a couple of hundred miles away. In those days of no money, it seemed an ocean away, especially since I was struggling through a long-distance relationship with a girl who lived not far from Manchester. She had rich parents, and would come down to live with me for a few weeks at a time, but I could never get any further out than London, thirty-odd miles down the train line. Savoy were a march and a generation away from me. Publishers Dave Britton and Michael Butterworth emerged in the late Sixties/early Seventies, on the tail end of the New Worlds/New wave" sf movement. They actually published an issue of the groundbreaking New Worlds magazine, before putting old and obscure Michael Moorcock work into print, as well as an early graphic novel, Moorcock's Elric adapted into sequential art by Jim Cawthorn in raw Celtic style. They grew a list of selected reprints, an eclectic and vital catalogue; the Sixties TV criticism of fantasist and commentator Harlan Ellison, the newspaper columns of Jack Trevor Story, the gothabilly art of Cramps album illustrator Kris Guidio. And, apocalyptically, Dave Britton's transgressive novel Lord Horror. Which got them prosecuted on obscenity charges, slammed through the system by James Anderton, Manchester's notoriously Christian Chief Constable. Anderton was a creature that could only have existed in the slightly surreal atmosphere of Thatcher Britain; repressively conservative, of dubious competence, and given to worrying statements about hearing God's voice while Manchester filled up with guns and pushers. Lord Horror was strong drink, to be sure: a hallucinated vision of Lord Haw-Haw, the English traitor who broadcast Nazi propaganda into Britain during World War 2. It was difficult, horrifying work, the Nazi atrocities made superreal with the tools of DeSade and Bataille, very much an extension of the "New Worlds school" and its intent to use fantasy as a way to present the real world in a new light for our consideration. Britton is neither a self-hating Jew nor a childish monster. He is clearly haunted by the pre-1945 world.

And they sent him to prison. And I sent my letter, because I wanted to sell Savoy books.

The Savoy PR guy was a brilliant man called Martin Flitcroft.

Within a week, he sent me ordering details-inside a huge fucking box filled with one copy of everything Savoy had in print. I had no idea they were making records, and especially not with the mental Sixties rock'n'roll star P.J. Proby. Piles of stuff by Kris Guidio, lurching between the drawing board and the hospital, his artistic recordings of a time just past when everyone in London, in his words, were "dressed like tattooed undertakers." His stuff, as anyone who saw one of his Cramps covers will tell you, radiated a kind of weird junked-up heroic ideal. Pen and needle, he was living in his own graphic novel world, no difference between him nodding out in front of "a nurse with an ass DeSade would have died for" and his credo of "let's make our heroes wear black," his private reimagining of a toxic intake of crappy old comic books.

Comics had a grip on Savoy still. In the box was the beginning of a serialised Lord Horror graphic novel, written by Britton and illustrated by Guidio.

I don't see Britton as a drug-fiend, but it reads like what you'd get if Grant Morrison liked smack. The serial is something of a prequel to the novel, illustrating how Horror left Britain for Germany. It's saner, more considered than the book. Horror is never quite sympathetic-he can't be-but the graphic novel reveals him as a smaller man, trapped between monsters bigger than himself. Britain is a sick place, and in his naivete he expects strong Germany to be somehow cleaner. By the penultimate episode, Horror, broadcasting from a concentration camp, has plainly gone quite mad.

Before that, though, we have met Horror's extended family and circle of class traitors. In the former camp is a gloriously nuts portrayal of James Joyce, killing policemen at night with switchblades and fighting clockwork assassins sent by Churchill: "To fuck Horror!" In the latter is Unity Mitford, one of the English aristocracy who supported Hitler, cast here as one of Horror's lovers-Britton's tool to expose Britain as a sinkhole of hatred and stupidity. Stuck in Germany, his poison dreams dashed, he turns on contented Unity in a graveyard, excoriating her and upper-class England for their beautiful emptiness, their happiness at being ruled by the unbalanced and the monsters, their wilful blindness. She stares at him, his last intimate, her assumed fellow-traveller: "Leave now, or by Christ I'll show you why they call me Horror."

The final piece-at least, the final piece that I saw-is illustrated by John Coulthart, and is a long, silent consideration of the concentration camp. No-one can argue that this is pro-Nazi, incitement or infantile shit-throwing.

A year later, the bookstore shut down, a victim of circumstance. I became a full-time writer, which meant I was astonishingly poor. I fell out of touch with most people. I split up with the girl up north. When I got a phone again, I called Martin Flitcroft. But Martin Flitcroft was dead.

The pressure on Savoy from the police was constant. People said Martin felt it more than most. He felt things hard. Wanted to feel things hard. Put a drink in him and he'd talk about "Wagnerian soul music" and feeling "the full head tingle."

He walked out in front of an oncoming train in the dead of night.

Turned his back on it. Balled his fists and threw his head back. The train driver never had a chance.

The full head tingle.

Savoy publishing got patchy. Court fees, imprisonments, distribution troubles. I wanted to order them in the first place because they just weren't penetrating bookstores or comics stores. Some comics kept trickling out, mostly the inferior comedy Horror spin-off, Meng AndEcker. They seemed never to sell that well, but it gave Kris Guidio something to do; in Martin's words, he had "a hungry arm", and that costs money, and he was their friend. I don't honestly know if he's still alive. It'd be funny if he'd finally outlived Johnny Thunders.

Savoy have a website, but I haven't kept up with it. Go and look.

It's the secret history of comics publishing in Britain. It's important. They were important. And, ten years down the line, I still miss my friend.

Nothing Happened

Written in December of 2003

21st Century, all the millennium tension went away, 2001 went from science fiction to historical artifact, and the majority of people looked around and saw that things were pretty much the same on this side of the line as they were on the other side. And that was that.

Today (Monday), I read an interview with Marilyn Manson where he explains his evocation of Cabaret in his recent work as a reaction to present times, Thirties vaudeville as a haven from politics. Notably, however, Manson describes himself as broadly apolitical, which makes you wonder exactly who said haven was devised for. To me, it's an interesting mess. Cabaret's paean to decadence only gains its enduring power from context-the knowledge that the Third Reich awaits it upstream, which lends it the authentic final doom of all true legends, Ragnarok and Robin Hood's final arrow shot to mark his grave. Wearing the clothes of the period doesn't reiterate the lessons of the time or the film-that you can't hide from evil, that the machinery of conservative societies will always find a way to crush the Too Much Fun Club-but it does produce other, perhaps graver signifiers.

Popular artists generate two forms of address. They produce a sense of collusion with those who already agree with them-through this CD, this book, this graphic novel, I'm telling you that it's you and me against the world, I am your friend/ally/leader in this, I understand you-and they also, unavoidably, tell the receptive mind what to think and what to identify with. Through this work, I am telling you that this is an apolitical time, that voting doesn't matter, and we may as well go to the Kitty Kat Keller while we can.

Post-millennium relaxation. Nothing's happened, nothing's changed, and you and me, we can't change anything.

Now, I have a lot of time for Marilyn Manson these days. Much of his music doesn't do a lot for me, but I enjoy his persona, himself as art. He's a clever man, and I suspect his apolitics are not all artifice. He's thirty-four years old now, an experienced artist and an experienced media operator, and he must know his audience. And America, and Britain, currently exist in a political dead zone. George W. Bush does not have credible opposition, and whoever's put up against him in 2004 will likely be crippled by the nomination process in any case. In Britain, the same holds-the leader of the opposition, Michael Howard, is a leering, unelectable monster with criminal tendencies who was until recently shunned and vilified by his own party as a moral mutant.

In the face of all that, it's an understandable message to broadcast:

find a place away from politics, because this is a time in which voting genuinely doesn't matter. We're all fucked. Apathy is nothing to be ashamed of. Anger is pointless.

And certainly we're in a time where anger in art has largely gone away. This isn't the cool detachment of post-modernism, so much as just a turning inward. The kind of stuttery lurching rise of emo over the last couple of years is a case in point: a total defanging of pretty much any working definition of punk in service of whining about how you've got no fucking girlfriend. "Emotional punk" = Crying Ugly Kid Music. There should be a sign in guitar shops: "We reserve the right to refuse sale to people who want to write songs about wearing glasses and being dumped by girls who didn't know your name anyway."

It's understandable, and certainly it doesn't hurt for Manson to bolster the "outsider" self-perception of his audience.

But it bugs me nonetheless. Is it a creative reaction, to answer "nothing's happened" with "nothing's going to happen and you can't do shit about it"? Is that doing anything more than prepping an alienated audience for a doomed life of dyeing your hair back to brown and getting a job in insurance? Is that where we've ended up? That all popular culture has to say is, "well, fuck it"? Even as a transient pose?

The lesson of the 1930s is that, in a time of encroaching conservatism and creeping repression, the correct response is not to flush your fucking spine down the toilet.

Up All Night

Written in December of 2003

Think about something tonight. Go out under the stars, and think about this.

When we point telescopes into space, we're looking into the past.

It's old light their mirrors collect. What we see has already happened, and the light that shone on those events has been moving towards us at a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. When we look at Alpha Centauri, four point seven light years away, we're seeing it as it was a little over four and a half years ago. The further we look, the further back in time we go. If we could see across ten billion light years, the light we gathered would be the first light-the Big Bang.

But the universe is more than ten billion light years across.

The other side of the universe, which physics already has early measurements for, is far away enough to constitute infinite breadth. We could travel at the speed of light for the remaining duration of the universe itself and still not get there.

In an infinite space, it turns out that science allows, and in fact cannot avoid, repetition of structures. In an infinite universe, there exists the significant mathematical possibility of an entirely replicated Earth, on our own timeline but separately developed.

Another Earth we'll never see because it's on the other side of the universe, past the ten-billion-year boundary of our sight, far enough away for the mathematics to allow it to exist.

There could, in fact, be a ring of Earths around the edge of the universe, ten billion light years apart, all alone and living through the same days.

And you know what? It doesn't matter what went wrong in your life today. Because up there, in the dark, somewhere past the limits of your vision-

-you got it right.

i always forget how much i love this train journey at night. Streetlights for campfires, great long rows of amber flares leading me home. Run away with me. (I promise not to sell you for food later on.)

Undertow

Written in December of 2003

What if Mr. Hyde had had kids?

For as long as humans have thought, we have sought to dramatise our landscapes.

A hundred thousand years ago, in what is now Israel, we daubed the bones of our dead, and the places we laid them, in red ochre paste. The places of our dead were made red to mark them. In Callanish, in the Orkneys, the standing stones present the sun's rise and procession as a production of majesty. It makes dramatic art, rich with portent, of natural events and features. In Avebury there is a ritual walk designed specifically to make mystery and drama of the surrounding landscape. Features are hidden and revealed by the walk to create wonder and awe in the walker.

We want fiction overlaid upon our lives. We want our places to be even more vivid than they are. We want broad bluebell-spangled fields to be faerie sidhes, we want Green Men in our woodlands. In a graphic novel I'm currently planning, archaic Britain is known as The Henge And Green, and that speaks directly to the ways our ancient populace fictionalised their world to enrich and consider their daily lives. In the same way, the Greeks placed a layer of fiction over the happenstance of their lives. That theirs took the form of big blokes with beards and scary businesswomen managing their lives from a mountaintop office block indicates only that at heart they were wino surrender-monkeys who gave it up for a bunch of Italian fascisti in leather skirts.

These things always go down better with a bit of national slander, eh?

We invite fiction to leak into our lives. This is part of what Grant Morrison is talking about when he gives his gloriously wild-eyed interviews about creating a fictional world that will emerge into selfawareness. Memetic theory has been an obsession of his for twenty years-the notion that ideas can communicate and replicate like viruses. Lately, what he's talking about is the equivalent of biological weaponeering-specifically designing a cluster of virulent ideas with, at the very least, implicate consciousness.

In a way, we've had one of those before. Jack The Ripper.

Everything we know about Jack The Ripper outside of the forensic documentation of those five murders is fiction. Even the name is a fabrication. The Jack The Ripper letters, in the most optimistic reading, constitute the actual killer creating a fictional framework for himself. And Jack operated in a landscape already primed for his presence by dramatisation. Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde presented a monster whose identity was unknown to the public, turning the streets of 1880s London into a killing zone. A monster, it transpires in the story, from the educated classes-as Jack, with his apparently trained eye for vivisection, almost certainly was.

For all we know of Jack The Ripper, he could have been Mr. Hyde, released from fiction into Whitechapel.

And now we fictionalise that, telling stories of repressed Jekyll letting wild Hyde out on to whore's street corners in the dead of night, exploding Victorian morals in a storm of fucking and killing, leaving Jekyll with Puritan guilt and a hangover in the morning.

Imagine how that would have been, if Hyde had gotten out of the pages into the East End. A whorer and a murderer, leaving bastard children with the hookers he didn't chop up. Even if he'd disappeared after the Ripper killings, dead inside doomed Jekyll within that grim little chemicals shed at the end of the garden... by 1889, the first of his children would have been born.

Imagine the children of Edward Hyde. Inhumanly strong Id things clawing their way out of scabby wombs. 1880s London already had a serious social problem with the number of children living on the street; stealing food, attacking passers-by, killing each other, fucking on the pavement as soon as they were old enough to manage it. By 1900, the streets of London could have been littered with dead children. Dead children laying on the cobbles, dirty snow filling their open mouths and the hollows of their staring eyes, as the children of Edward Hyde grow older and stronger, following their twisted genetic programming, obeying the demons of their nature.

By 1900, London would have been a nightmare zone. And a few years later, those children would be breeding.

The 21st Century's first great cultural disappointment, the Matrix films, are predicated on the concept that we've been fully inserted into a fictional landscape, and reality is that the world is a poisoned rock gripped by nuclear winter. One of the many things that sorry trilogy never properly addresses is that freeing the world from fiction into reality requires boosting people out of comfortable late 20th Century life into a hellhole and convincing them that real experience in a denuded landscape incapable of supporting basic agriculture is the preferred option. But that is a fictional framework around our own lives, dramatising the landscape we live in today-telling us that seeing the world properly, in all its horror, is preferable to the managed and fictional version of reality our handlers would have us live in.

Don't let fiction out into the world. You don't know what's in it.

Come here, I wish to do Science to you with my bare hands

AND ALSO A SPANNER.

Microcast

Written in January of 2004

American Big Media has recently announced the last dark little gem in its triple crown of doom for 2003. First, the music industry registered a major downturn. Then the movie business released reduced figures despite increased ticket prices and some of the widest release patterns in history. And now American network TV has revealed a reduction in viewing numbers. This last is apparently significant enough that advertisers are reportedly gathering to negotiate a reduction in the ad rates network TV charge. And since network TV is little more than a delivery system for advertising, people are starting to run scared. To the point where Jeff Zucker at NBC has suggested the previously taboo-that perhaps too many suits are involved in the creative process, issuing too many conflicting notes and generally pissing in the drinking water.

On one hand, the answer to the problem of the triple crown is blindingly obvious. 2003 was just a hideous year for the popular arts in the mainstream. Even going by Theodore Sturgeon's cranky old dictum that 90-odd percent of everything is complete toss, 2003 was an unusually bad year.

On the other hand, it's entirely possible that the mediascape has caught up with a certain reality of the human condition-that no two people will agree on what exactly constitutes that 90-odd percent of worthlessness. Certainly some works will accrue a broader consensus than others. But when otherwise intelligent people like Oni Press editor in chief Jamie Rich can write of the pleasure he derived from the new Britney Spears album, you know there's more going on than subliminal messages or inoperable tumours.

(We're ignoring for the moment the fact that Jamie has infamously hideous taste in music and will don Laurenn McCubbin's cat ears and lipstick at the drop of a hat.)

(Hello, Jamie.)

Art does not have intrinsic absolute value. Art is a purely subjective experience. That a year can be characterised as a bad one for the popular arts, therefore, would seem on the face of it to be my usual intolerant bullshit. But it was also a year without massive popular consensus.

Commentators are bringing up "the good old days" a lot, lately.

The days where the majority shared the experience of watching a single TV show, hearing a single song. The days of a homogeneous popular culture, essentially. But these were also the days, in Britain, of two, three or four TV channels. Of four radio stations. Of cinemas that only had one or two screens. And, of course, days before the Internet.

With the digital explosion in media channels (and also, over here, of radio deregulation), you don't necessarily have to, say, not turn on the radio until 10pm to hear the music you like. In fact, if it's John Peel at 10 you're waiting for, you can do something else at 10 because you can stream it off the BBC website next day. But you can find whole channels of what you want at most times of the day across media. As I write here in the pub, my girlfriend's zoned out in front of the Kerrang! Channel at home. Fifteen years ago, you had to wait until Saturday night to get two hours of that crap on the Tommy Vance show on Radio 1.

This is variously termed niche broadcasting, narrowcasting and microcasting. It eschews the usual network values and delivers a stream of a single form of content. And this is what's breaking up big media. The multiplicity of channels and screens means that, in theory, you can find what you want, not what you're given. The failures of big media lay in their death-clutch on the old game, where we take what we're given and like it.

We don't. And so we head off in a million different directions, following the dictates of our own unique set of interests. The old consensus block is broken up and shared across a hundred channels, two dozen radio stations, the dozen films the multiplex serves up each week, and the vast array of internet-based materials.

And I'm not necessarily talking about copyright-breaking downloads. I'm unconvinced about the numbers cited by big media in relation to profit-loss from downloading. I fired up KaZaA last night as an experiment, and it told me three million people were online. But, frankly, unless every single one of them were downloading Paycheck or whatever, the numbers don't hold up. And, in fact, human nature dictates that they weren't. I take a look at BitTorrent every now and then-I pay my licence fee, so I've paid for BBC programming, so I don't feel bad about grabbing episodes of Spooks or other things I've missed from BBC1 or BBC2. The most popular downloads have, at best, 200 people leeching at any one time, and BitTorrent files tend to die after a week because people stop seeding them.

The mass audience is breaking down into smaller sets; and beyond that, into what Dr. Joshua Ellis (no relation) terms "taste tribes"- people whose group status is defined by their particular cultural apprehension. Where one says, I know and interact with this person on the initial basis that we share tastes. Not that we all trade notes on Star Trek-not a fan thing-but that we share a cultural sphere. This creates and defines a loose community of its own, stitched together by cultural communication. And with the net in place, taste tribes are borderless.

As TiVO and RSS allow us to build personalised content channels, and emergent taste tribes begin moving content between themselves, it's possible to see the building blocks of a system that microcasts to tribes, and tribes that expand the coverage of a microcaster. I spent some time at the end of last year writing a bible for a small record label that'd allow them to build an active online community behind their music, driven by early mp3 releases and streaming audio. It speaks directly to the new media condition: an audience that can and will select their culture from many hundreds of different streams can and will get tribal about it.

Even if 2003 was not The Year That Big Media Broke, it was certainly the year that its grip slipped. And even if you're not a producer of content, the tools are in place for you to make truth out of one of the central tenets of a 1980 document I've recently been re-reading, The Rozz-Tox Manifesto: "If you want better media, go make it."

October 3, 2008 I am watching with some astonishment an ep of Law & Order Svu in which the dead victim was sodomised with a violin bow. a violin bow. I mean, all the shit that was talked about the "horrible,weird" stuff in my novel: and there on us network tv violin-bow sodomy.

Yeah, I'm the bad guy, but Mariska bloody Hargitay just got another Emmy for tearily muttering "sodomised...with a violin bow." fucksticks. 15 years of "Warren, why put disgusting stuff in these nice comics?" On TV: "sodomized with a violin bow. now look at some doritos ads."

This is how people become serial killers, you know.

Rat Star

Written in March of 2004

So this guy designs a miniature communications stratellite. A stratellite is a satellite that hangs in the stratosphere instead of beyond the atmosphere. Imagine a thing the size of a pack of smokes, hung under a cuboid balloon the size of a paperback. And the balloon's made of solar-electric panel fabric.

He's got a hundred friends around the world on a private website with whom he shares the specs. All of them are building these things in their back rooms. The things are designed to make use of stuff you can obtain on the "prosumer", professional-use consumer goods level. Between them, they're going to release twenty thousand of them into the air on a set date.

The stratellites hack wireless phone signals. Maybe they project a 100-mile wi-fi footprint down on earth, and convert all wireless phone signals into Voice Over Internet Presence. They're carrying real-time translator chips for every major language-something IBM, among others, are working on right now. Photonic chips, maybe-computing with light, very fast, currently in active development. The stratellites go up and they hack into and randomise every phone system on earth. Every activated mobile phone on the planet suddenly rings. And you answer yours, and someone on the other side of the planet is on the line, having answered theirs. And they're speaking to you in English, in a reasonable facsimile of their own voice, regardless of whether what's coming out of their mouth is Mandarin or Inuit. And the phones will keep on ringing until you actually start talking to the person you've been randomly connected to. Because you can't sweep twenty thousand stratellites out of the air quickly, and they're going to just keep on going. And, all of a sudden, the world gets even smaller.

Half an idea, from a graphic novel I'm writing. There's a future there. Two or three steps away from where we are right this second, reach exceeding actual grasp a little, not exactly the steely extrapolation so prized by some observers of sf and futurism. But it's a future.

For as long as I can remember, the primary goal of my work has been to force outbreaks of the future.

When I was a kid, my favourite part of going to the cinema was the preview section. Trailers from films not yet released, perhaps not yet finished. A collection of 120-second leaks from the future.

In Alan Bleasdale's immense novel-for-television GBH, the suicide girl who so impacts Michael Murray's life leaves behind a note which reads, in part, "I want to know what happens NEXT."

Not long before his death, that terrible old fake Tim Leary publicly anointed Terence McKenna as his successor in bringing word of the Future to the people. (Of course, he also said, "All energy comes from our beloved synergetic partners, the vegetable queendom. Yeah, a round of applause, ha ha heh, to the vegetabllllles!" So fuck him.) Terence McKenna, a genuinely brave and open mind who entertained any crazy idea for the single dewdrop of the future that might have been breathed upon it, spent the time before his death simply considering what would happen next. In the DMT hallucinogenic experience, he-and some 60% of everyone who takes it-was transported to a kaleidoscope landscape populated by jewelled spheres containing within themselves the language at the end of time, the sum total of every language that ever was and ever will be. One of McKenna's theories-and he tried many on the experience-was that DMT propelled living consciousness into the afterlife. This low-lit drugspace was the afterlife, the Sumerland, the Bardo, Heaven. He once said that he couldn't understand why this wasn't front page news: that living beings had made real-time contact with the afterlife. That the ayahuasceros and other DMT-using shamen were necronauts, working in the realm of the dead. His conclusion was that society works very hard to prevent outbreaks of the future. Which sound a little paranoid, but then, he did smoke epic volumes of weed.

"Culture is not your friend," said McKenna. But he meant society, or at best the monoculture or "the" culture. It sends people to kill strangers in places they can't find on maps for reasons that defeat understanding. Wars freeze time, in McKenna's view. The reality is more complex. Violence hothouses technology. You don't get radar without the Second World War. In McKenna's own theory, it was psychedelic mushrooms that activated human potential-early humans found them growing in the droppings of prey animals, and upon eating them discovered that they improved visual acuity, making them better hunters. Mushroom-eating humans outhunted and therefore outlived straight humans. Put bluntly, mushroom-eating Og had a better chance of braining straight-edge Ug with a leg bone from thirty feet. Mushrooms, in McKenna's conception, were a neurotechnology that improved the human brain's uptake of information.

The future is information. The future is about information. It's also about making the word "culture" mean what you want it to.

We seem to be currently in the grip of what me and novelist Alex Besher call "future fatigue". It's what Bruce Sterling is talking about when he playfully advocates switching the word "futuristic" with the word "futurismic." The future as we have imagined it seems tired, boring, ordinary. The Space Shuttle is a classic car now, as aesthetically historic as a finned Fifties car. It comes from a time before Bara and Tristan Risk were born. It's what Matt Jones is getting to grips with as he designs user interfaces for Nokia phones. It's what William Gibson nods to when he notes that his hugely influential Neuromancer, which conjures a cyberspace the world still hasn't lived up to, missed out on one hugely disruptive, worldchanging technology-mobile phones. He mentions this in illustrating science fiction's great power-not in hard prediction of a probable future, but in informed and energetic speculation of a possible future. One is tech journalism, the other is social fiction. Sf only gets a bad futurist rap from people who confuse one with the other. That my Nokia 3650 outperforms Captain Kirk's communicator ten-to-one isn't the point.

I've been talking with a lot of people, lately, about What Happens Next. We're living in a science-fictional world now. Someone reminded me that J. G. Ballard once said "the future will be boring," and damn if old miseryguts wasn't right all along. The future is sold to us as a commercial experience-and that was how it was going to be, all along. It almost doesn't seem enough that I come from the last generation of sf writers to produce material on typewriters.

We've used up our available consensus futures. We've outlived them. They didn't work. 2001 is as much a historical object as is Apollo. We thought we were going to space, but we're really not. On current projections, we're some sixteen years away from putting human crews anywhere that we have not already been. VR turned out to be a bust, which put away fully ten years of cyperpunky novels featuring 3-D immersive user interfaces. (Perhaps interestingly, most of the new sf novels I see are space-opera high fantasies that seek to retain their own credibility by enforcing hard relativistic physics. Which is a bit like anchoring some trip with elves by detailing how their teeth would drop out from lack of brushing with fluorides.)

The body modification crowd interest me, in this context, because they're attempting to make a new physical future out of what they've got. Their only available canvas on which to paint the future is their own bodies and whatever tools are laying around right now. Trace it back, if you like, to Gibson's one big flash of clarity in the Eighties (and most people don't even get one-Gibson's had three or four): "the street finds its own use for things."

The internet has come to work for people in much the same way. I saw Stewart Brand lecture, a few years ago. Standing there like he'd just wandered in from a foresty log cabin, Swiss Army knife and compass mounted on his belt, he talked about how we'd become a workaround society. We have become entrained to step outside the stated rules of a device's operation in order to get it to do what we want. Put another way: we're all hackers now. That's exactly what bodymod people are doing-hacking the properties of the device they're born into.

We stand here now in a time so advanced that innovation is boring.

Is unnoticed. McKenna never predicted a time, on his Timewave Zero graph, where novelty lost all value and no-one gave a shit anymore.

We're in the post-future. Brand co-created The Long Now Foundation, to make people aware of the true scale of time and human impact- but there's no mention in his book on the subject of the Long Now being spent in the living room being pounded into a coma by reality television. This is the Long Now-a present without a future.

All this speaks to the central problem of sf. Sf is a social fiction; it stands in a speculative zone from which to consider aspects of the present condition. But if the future is old and tired, then it's historical fiction. It needs a future. It needs to show us where we could go, not where we've been. It needs what Samuel Delany terms a novum: a piece of the future, of novelty, of something as yet unseen.

Nova are why some people find sf difficult to read. Sf is a destabilising prose. It's slightly deranging. It has too much in common with surrealism (which is a contraction of "super-realism"). Faced with a line like "the door dilated," the brain has to do a little extra work to make it make contextual sense. It's one reason why sf has an affinity with the medium of comics, where the brain has to do an extra comprehension trick to make the transition from panel to panel make sense-"closure", in Scott McCloud's term. In picking up a piece of sf, you accept the experience of processing strangeness and applying it to the world you know.

You telling me the world couldn't use a little more strangeness?

In fact, are you telling me we couldn't use more ways to process the inherent strangeness of the advanced post-future we're living in? This place with mice growing human ears on their backs and human brain tissue being worked on to computer chips? That we somehow just dismiss as business as usual?

Hack the devices you've got. Make them say something new. It's the simplest and most potent trick in sf. Take a hard look at where you are now and then wonder what it could look like the day after tomorrow-with no reference to any other dream of the future. 1984 = 1948. "Brave New World" was the terminal iteration of the left-wing "enlightened eugenics" of the early 20th Century Huxley was writing from.

When Ken Kesey, novelist, prankster and experienced hallucinogen man, took the synthetic superpsychedelic STP, the doors of perception ripped open so wide and so loud-immense and yet anticlimatic-that it finished him. It took him a while to put into words the aftermath that left him drifting in the present. Something in him was missing after taking STP, becalmed on a Long Now. Eventually, he found the word "tiller". STP burned out his tiller. He was unsteered, and the world left him in still cold waters.

Immense and anti-climatic defines these post-millennial years, after that great burning peak of anticipation. Tillerless and timeloose, we're just kind of hanging here, waiting for something to happen. Rats in a maze with no exit, basically reduced to playing with our tails and shitting in the corners.

If there's no exit, then you make one. Break open the top of the maze and let starlight in.

Future Underground

Written in April of 2004

Tracking the future.

Susannah Breslin, mildly dislocated by jetlag, perversion and the London chill, grimaces at the elderly Vauxhall Bridge Road locals staggering around the smoky little pub in beer-smeared footballfan facepaint. Susannah's a writer, over here in her occasional role as a presenter for the Playboy Channel's Sexcetera to cover an English bukkake shoot. Bukkake is a Japanese innovation in porn video wherein groups of men masturbate en masse over a single girl. A successful bukkake concludes with one brain-damaged woman looking like she's had a bucket of cake icing upended over her head. It transpires that most of the male participants pay to attend. Ninety pounds sterling to jerk off like an ugly ape in humping season along with a dozen other fellow middle-aged married businessmen who've probably all told the wife that they're off on a salesman training course in Slough. Bukkake made it to America a few years ago, and now it's here in Britain; the cutting edge in depersonalised, heartless, gutless sex. Which is why it fascinates Susannah. But Susannah tracks the future of commodified sex. In her head, she's already moved on.

She gleefully tells me of Rob Black, an American pornographer already in trouble with the law and facing an obscenity charge. He was apparently instructed by his lawyers to keep a low profile and behave himself. But he's a second-generation porno guy, and has the family honour to uphold. He has therefore invented what is termed The Ass Milkshake. This involves several men ejaculating into one woman's rectum, and then introducing milk and cream into the cavity with the aid of a speculum. The mixture is then decanted out of her backside into a glass, and presented for her to drink.

And you know that, somewhere, Rob Black is wondering how he's going to top that before his court case.

In Japan, of course, bukkake is history. Susannah describes to me the new fetish video craze there, which I can only term Dizzy Girl Spinning Eye Movies. A girl is set to spinning around on the spot in a bedroom. Around and around. Soon, she's too dizzy to stand up. She falls down on a bed. And the camera zooms in hard on her eyes, to see her eyeballs spinning around in their sockets, circles within circles. That's the money shot, in porn terms. Spinning eyeballs.

Susannah grins and takes another sip of German beer.

In Germany, of course, courts were coming to the conclusion that inviting cannibalism fetishists to your home, killing them and eating them does not constitute murder. Armin Miewes got an eightyear sentence for picking up a man on the internet with seductive enticements to (quoting from his Usenet posts) "eat your horny flesh." The victim came to Miewe's home, where Miewes hacked his penis off. They ate it together. And then the meal got into a warm bath and waited to bleed to death while Miewes sat in the kitchen and read a Star Trek novel. After a while, Miewes decided dinner wasn't dying quickly enough. So he stabbed the silly bastard in the neck and ate him.

"Eat Your Horny Flesh" is going to be a band name inside three years, I swear.

Sometime after Miewes decided it'd be too much like hard work to grind dead boy's bones into flour, the police came to visit. Being German, they came right out with it, and asked him directly if he had eaten human flesh. Miewes gave the classic answer: "I might have done."

Turns out that if you want to be eaten, the diner is, at best, guilty of manslaughter. And will be out on the street in four years, tops.

Welcome to the future. It's the world you're living in.

People are disappointed with the future they're living in. Since 2001, the refrain has gone up, louder year by year: "This is the future. Where's my flying car? Where's my fucking jet pack?" Pre-millennium, we were living in an unprecedented density of imagined futures, and we assumed it was all waiting for us around the corner. And here we are, around the corner, and none of it is standing here.

All that means, of course, is that 98% of our predictions have failed us. Which shouldn't have come as much surprise. We treat science fiction as predictive fiction, which it isn't and should never have been. William Gibson's Neuromancer loses none of its fictive power for failing, as Gibson himself recently said, to predict mobile phones. Mobile telephony has proved a technology of massive change-not least of which has been in the field of fiction itself. Possession of a triband handset makes about a hundred years' worth of thriller plotting irrelevant. My own Global Frequency graphic novel has fallen foul of the future. It's currently being adapted for American television, and we've run into an unexpected problem. When I developed the mobile phones that the members of the Global Frequency extreme rescue service carry, I was working at the hard edge of available technology- two years ago. Today, a Treo 600 smartphone from Palmspring does pretty much everything the GF Phone does. So I'm having to consult with a futurist at Nokia to ensure the TV version of the phone does more than something you can pick up at the supermarket.

It's not the future we expected, being able to shoot video with a telephone and wirelessly beam it into someone's hand on the other side of the world. I don't know that anyone predicted that people could be driven to orgasm by images of a girl's spinning eyes. Evan Batailles would have looked twice at the Ass Milkshake. Somewhere, there's a mouse with a human ear growing out of its back, and a rat that produces monkey sperm. Mars is being explored by two motorised skateboards. Wernher Von Braun, who designed a Mars expedition for a crew of two hundred using available technology in the 1950s, would have shat blood in anger. Space, in his conception, was a heaven to be reached with power and glory. He would have sneered at the rocket sticks the rovers were launched on-where were his mighty chariots, to shake the ground in their passing?-and blanched to discover that his great machines and two hundred heroes had been dropped to make way for a couple of glorified rollerskates. He would have concluded that something evil had happened, and that this was not his future.

No nuclear space arks, no jetpacks. Robot skateboards and butterflies that glow green.

We all forgot that the future is yet to be written. No-one knows how it's going to turn out. The best we can do is track the future as it happens, and use our fiction as a tool with which to understand where we are.

By the time you read this, everything in it will be history. The future's a moving target. That's why it needs tracking.

Your Actual True Hallowe'en Story

Written in September of 2004

A friend of mine was working, some fifteen years back, for a roadside recovery firm. You know, the people who come and tow away wrecked cars and the like. And poor old Trev, bless 'im, was having to work on Hallowe'en, which meant he wasn't getting to entertain the locals with his usual Hallowe'en trick of drinking three bottles of Jack Daniels, picking a fight with an inanimate object and passing out in a ditch with his wallet up his arse. But anyway. He's on call that night. So the boss rings him up and says, take out the tow vehicle, the police have advised them of a serious accident, there's a car needs pulling. But the police are having a busy night, there's no officer on the scene, so for fuck's sake don't touch anything.

Middle of the night. Deserted road out in the arse end of nowhere.

Wrecked car on the verge with one headlight beaming weakly out into the dark. And there's Trev, pulling up in front of it, no other bugger for miles around. He walks up to the car with his torch. And the driver's still inside the car. Clearly in shock, not moving, leaning against the door a bit, just staring.

"Hello," says Trev. Nothing, no reaction at all.

Trev flashes his torch in, taps on the driver's side window. No reaction. The poor sod, thinks Trev. Must be scared shitless, eh? Let's calm him down and get him out of the car so I can hook it up for towing, he thinks. So he opens the driver's door.

The top half of the driver slides out.

When the car crashed, a big piece of metal was thrown back into

the interior at hip level and sheared the driver in two, killing him instantly.

Trevor's standing there holding half a bloke in his hands.

And he's suddenly remembered that he wasn't supposed to touch anything.

Well, what would you do?

He very carefully shoves the top half of the guy back into the car.

Kind of, you know, lines him up again. Which takes a little while, sliding the upper half this way and that until it looks like one piece again. And, gingerly holding the driver in place, goes to shut the car door again.

Which won't close.

It's not often you find yourself on a deserted road past midnight frantically kicking a car door shut in order to keep a corpse inside.

October 31, 2008

I went to a Halloween party a few years ago and heard someone say, "LOOK, THAT MAN CAME DRESSED AS WARREN ELLIS."

It's getting dark. I must go downstairs to urinate in the bucket containing the sweets for trickortreaters.

Trick, you little gits! Trick! Traumatised small children by telling them our cauldron full of sweets has a snake in the bottom. Small child I scared the crap out of: "That was... a tricki A trick! (looks at her frlend and giggles with glee) That was our first trick!"

Elevator Lady

Written in October of 2004

I've been listening to nothing but singles all day.

I've been going on about singles in my mailing list on and off for some months. Singles have informed my thinking about certain types of comic for ages, and they're going to be a big part of the intent behind a new monthly project I'll be launching next year.

Complete experiences in three minutes, that you can replay again and again.

Listening to "500" by Lush at the moment. That big, plangent guitar with a hint of mythic echo on it, picking through the central riff, and then Miki Berenyi (and all great pop is sung by women like Miki Berenyi) opening up one of the greatest lines of the last twenty years, Emma Anderson's perfect-pop apotheosis: "Shake baby shake / you know I can fit you in my arms."

The singles mix I have on right now goes from there to "Maps," a song that I spent the better part of a week obsessed with. I do this. Writer's disease: if something affects you, you spend an obscene amount of time picking it apart to find out how it achieved the effect and whether it can be adapted and replicated. I did that the other week with Johnny Boy's "You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve." To get near that faux-Phil Spector sound, you'd have to be out on a city street at night, and there'd have to be something like the theatre's Greek Chorus in the background. Pixies'"Hey": "And the whores like a choir..."

But "Maps": "Wait. They don't love you like I love you." If that doesn't knock you flat, you're already dead.

I always loved Lauren Laverne's voice. She does the vocals on Mint Royale's "Don't Falter." Please. Stay with me. And never miss a chance to kiss me.

These are the things that get past your forebrain and all your filters and reach into your chest. Like the first time you hear the Polyphonic Spree's "Soldier Girl," or Sigur Ros' "Svefn-G-Englar." That the majority of the words are gibberish, or, in Sigur Ros' case, somewhere between Icelandic and a language the singer made up, doesn't matter a bit. There's always that sound and that sharp little line hiding inside it, like a razor in a chocolate.

In this sort of mode, there's two quotes that tend to loiter in my head. Nik Cohn on rock'n'roll, lauding what was for him the indispensable aspect that made it Great: "the glorious burst of incoherent noise." Awopbopaloobop. And Phil Elliott, talking about his work: "I just want to make comics that strum at the heartstrings."

After a while, I start typing in rhythm. Oasis' "She's Electric" is much reviled as their "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," but I'm fond of it. It's the kitchen-sink, strange-domestic version of what Kieron Gillen called their "triumphalism": it's the sound of having the best girlfriend in the world. I had a girlfriend who I'd go to a lot of gigs with-a dancer and singer, red-headed Irish with a soprano show voice and a body that showgirls spend small fortunes on replicating-and she once told me that after a while I start kissing in time with the music. I can't hold a note to save my life-I once lived with another singer, who admitted she'd rather smother me than hear me even hum bars while I worked-but my head locks on to a beat like a missile. Grant Morrison once described my stuff as "very musical and percussive." My dad was a drummer, in his youth. One night in the early Sixties, he was approached by two Liverpudlians who said they needed a drummer, and they might have some gigs in Germany... he told me this not long before he died, and I remember him sitting over his cup of tea, staring into space: "I swear it was them. I can't think about it too much, though."

I just switched cadences. The Pixies' "Levitate Me," the song I intend to have played at my funeral. My dad had some thing by Jon Anderson played at his funeral. Jon Anderson's voice hurts my head. I wanted my dad to get out of his coffin so I could smack him, but I realised he would have been laughing at me too hard to mind. So that was okay. So I sat there running the conversation we would have had in my head, trying not to laugh, while my brother and step-brother dissolved into tears. The men in my family tend not to last much past sixty. We run too fast, do too much, stay up too late, shoot around the world and leave blackened bones. It'll be my turn soon.

You'll think I'm dead, but I sail away... on a wave of mutilation... (You know I can fit you in my arms.)

Mind Gangsterism

Written in October of 2004

Have you ever wanted to just drill someone to the spot and make them gasp, with nothing more than what came out of your head? Ever heard "Telstar"? Instrumental from the Fifties, created and produced by Joe Meek. Inspired by the launch of the first telecommunications satellite, of all things. And it's one of the most purely joyful things you ever heard. I knew a guy who seemed to spend half his life collecting versions of "Telstar." I'm listening to a live recording of a band called Laika And The Cosmonauts covering it at the moment. Joe Meek was Britain's first independent record producer. His later stuff, with the Blue Men, still sounds weirdly contemporary. The best Joe Meek songs, like "I Hear A New World," are like sitting in an alien church. Music that imparts joy and glory from another planet. Joe Meek was a Mind Gangster.

I think either Chris Sebela or Matt Fraction introduced me to the term, talking about Phil Spector. The term derives from something Brian Wilson said during his craziest period: he believed that Phil Spector was telepathic allystealing all his ideas, and called him "a Mind Gangster". Warren Ellis

Go grab a copy of, say, "River Deep Mountain High," which a critic once described as the sound of God hitting the world and the world hitting God back. Possibly the apotheosis of his Wall Of Sound technique, that immense wave of presence. He was way ahead of his time. When he started out, the Hollywood recording studios he strived in didn't have the capacity to contain his sound-the mics couldn't cope with the vast surge of information being thrown at them. But when the apparatus caught up with him, my God, Phil Spector could drill people to the spot. He almost single-handedly invented teenage angst in music.

Mind Gangster.

Andrew Loog Oldham invented thievery in Western music. When people talk about "pop Svengalis", they're talking about Oldham. He managed, produced and essentially invented the Rolling Stones, at age 21, a feverpitch criminal brain showing Jagger and Richards how to creatively steal from the blues and their contemporaries and any other damn thing that was laying around, and making their every breath into a Media Event. (And, on the side, pretty much signing Brian Jones' death certificate.) In the days before miniature tape decks and dashboard CD players, Oldham was the guy who had a record player in his Rolls Royce. Unlike Spector, he barely touched the production board. He created the ambience. He had the Knowledge. He was conducting, his head out in the Superflow, waiting for the sound that'd make the world skip a beat under its needle.

Mind Gangster.

These are all stories from the days when rock and roll was new, the music business was small, everyone knew everybody but no-one knew anything. There was space.

Joe Meek killed himself. Phil Spector went crazy. Andrew Loog Oldham fried himself with money and drugs and now lives quietly in South America. Because, you know, crime doesn't pay, and even Mind Gangsters come up hard against natural law in the end.

But isn't it worth it, for those blazing years when you can control someone's breath and take them somewhere they didn't know existed?

March of 2005

Written in March of 2005

SMS chirps across the pub. 2005 in Britain and it sounds like 1998 in Iceland. The cars creeping past the window have barely changed shape in ten years. White boy in a flop hat and a hideous backpack that looks like repurposed Seventies furniture strides past: drainpipe jeans and shiny new Adidas. Indian kids on the corner in blue baseball caps and nylon hoodies. Tiny little blonde toddler in Nike knockoffs and a yellow fleece poncho. A pale lime new-style Beetle that hasn't been washed since the day she bought it, looking like it's been shoved up a chimney as it parks by the Chinese medicine place. She comes out wearing an 80s A-line skirt and old man's knitted fingerless gloves.

The local junkies hover by the payphone: the early Nineties kind, that just takes coins and has no internet access. Ten minutes' walk from here to the nearest public internet booth.

A resigned-looking middle-aged woman in three-quarter length blue jeans with turned-up cuffs walks slowly next to an old man in a green jogging suit, aviator shades and grotesquely swollen feet, buzzing along in an electric mobility scooter.

There's not a sign here, not one, of being in the 21st Century.

The old guy makes a face at me as he trundles past the pub window.

I give him the finger, and wonder if those electric vegetable cart things can be made to explode.

Ah, such quaint ferocity. So 90s/80s/70s/60s/50s. We don't have time for that sort of thing, here in the sparkly 21 C. Our rock stars are crackheads who sing songs about being Peter fucking No-Mates and not being loved enough and sorry I broke into your gaff and stole all your shit and sold it for rocks but I'm really fucking sensitive and the world is very hard. 21 C is far too sedate for that noise. The sound of the new year: Amy Winehouse, for people who found Sade too threatening. The Bravery: Steve Strange's Visage without the make-up or fucking, with that standard-issue Julian Casablancas vocal filter that every NYC rock band has to use by law now. It's all recordcollection shuffling by the nutless and the hopeless. Recapitulation time, still. We've spent the last few years using the new perspective we've gained over the whole of the last mad century. I have a huge case of beentheredonethat about the whole enterprise now. It was both fun and important, at one time. But, my god, five years of being hunched over the 20th century now?

Y'know, babies aren't afraid of leaving their cribs. They clamber over the fuckers like hump-maddened gibbons detecting a scent of estrus-swollen arse on the breeze. So why the hell are we so afraid of leaving the 20th century?

The Situationist writer and translator Christopher Gray once said, "Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit."

Bruce Sterling's gig as house visionary to design students in California is about imagining, preparing for and selling the future. Note how quickly and insidiously his students have learned the game. Tasked to reinvent something as simple as apple juice for five years up the line, they produce:

"ORGANICANA 100% Naturally Enhanced Apple Drink.

A Pepsico organic foods category killer."

If the Situationists had been this good at the Game... well, they were always a bit shit, to be honest. But look at this. You can't sue someone for false advertising over a name that simply contains the word "organic" as an element. Doesn't it just evoke purity, abundance and health? "100% naturally enhanced." Sterling is growing a clutch of New Automatic Satans over in Pasadena. He doesn't care. We're acquainted enough that he can mock me for always looking shattered and deadline-blasted in website photos. When he got a digital camera, he told me that he would only ever appear in fighting trim, radiating health and "accompanied by fine consumer products."

Bruce has a higher ethical purpose: he's hugely involved in the new green movement, trying to make people understand that controlling carbon and fighting climate change isn't about eating granola and hugging trees. But there's a demonic little bastard inside him: he wants you to buy nicer, kinder, cooler garbage disposal units. He will implant the Viridian, Worldchanging purpose into his plainly extremely gifted students. But, ultimately, he will send them out into the world of work with that particularly Nippo-American viewpoint that informed the cyberpunk Movement he was a central part of: people want to buy the future and have it on their table at home. Make it a good future, sure. But make it something that the drones will yank off the hypermarket shelves in their slavering fucking droves.

J. G.Ballard,2002:

"Thirty years on, the future will still be boring. I see an endless suburbanization, interrupted by notes of totally unpredictable violence: the sniper outside the supermarket, the bomb outside the suburban hypermarket, the madman with the Kalashnikov in McDonalds. But this random violence is totally without connection to peoples everyday lives. This will lead to a feeling that the world is arbitrary and illogical, insane even. That's a frightening kind of landscape."

Thirty years on, or three?

April 28, 2008

The last half of this month has felt completely out of sync. Like the planet jumped tracks. Everything's a bit 1986.

Gather, children, and I will tell you of 1986. It rained all the time, no-one could smile without bleeding, and Boy George was on The A-Team. 1986 was one of those years where we were waiting for the spaceship to land... Things were so bad we were actually having to talk about Paul Simon's "Graceland" like it mattered. now, 1987, that was an interesting year... (descends lnto senescent unconsciousness) Where's my fucking coffee Buried under messages reading: "i was a discoloured zygote floating in the pool of beer and sperm that was my mothers womb in 1987."

Stories, Drinking and the World

Written in June of 2005

The literary critic Harold Bloom once said that we weren't fully human until Shakespeare began writing: that Shakespeare completed our sapience. Which is both interesting and stark, utter bullshit. Stories are what make us human. They're an advanced form of play. Cats have play. Sometimes very sophisticated, dramatised forms of play. But they're not communicated or externalised. So far, only humans use stories to dramatise the way they see the world.

And we've always had them.

Go out to the ancient standing stones at Callanish in the Orkney Islands, at sunrise. You stand in the middle of the stone circle and turn to follow the sun. From that position, the sun is alternately occluded and revealed by the curves of the surrounding hills. The sunrise is dramatised as a struggle. As a performance. Shadows fall and twist around you like spokes, until the sun claws free of the hillside and sends light right down the middle of the circle and on to your face.

Walk down the great processional avenue to Glastonbury Tor, and you experience a similar effect. The walk is designed to sequentially reveal and present aspects of the surroundings, until the Tor is brought out of the backdrop to stand in front of you. It's intended as a religious experience-a walk that becomes an experience of mystery and revelation. It's a plotline.

Cave paintings are comics. Standing stones are art installations. It's all stories.

And I don't mean that in an ethereal Gaimany "the world is made out of stories, mine's a nice cup of tea" kind of way. I mean that we make the world into stories. From scratching our perceptions of the day into cave walls to dramatising the landscapes we're born into, we make the world into stories to make living in it all the sweeter.

Millions of us, every day, add art into our daily mundane experience of the world by playing a personal movie soundtrack into our ears.

I knew a guy who'd put a tape into his car's player and would wait until Lemmy tore into "Ace Of Spades" before standing on the accelerator and pulling out into the street. I must've nearly died a hundred times because of that bastard.

An acquaintance of mine had a Lemmy story. He was living in an apartment building in New York, and heard a terrible banging outside his door. Going out into the corridor, he found Lemmy, throwing himself into the walls, gripping a huge wooden spoon in one hand. Lemmy, he said, why are you outside my door with a wooden spoon?

You know how some people have a little silver coke spoon? Lemmy said. And then he held his wooden ladle up like it was Excalibur and yelled, This is MINE!

Which brings me to drugs, which accompany storytelling cultures. Being southern English, my own culture is an alcoholic one. Mead culture. I'm from a village that began as a Norse settlement. Thundersley. It translates from the old English as thunder clearing or Trior's clearing. It was a small centre of worship for Thor. There was and is another Thundersley, fifty miles north, and the old story was that every Thursday Thor would fly over both of his English clearings. Thundersley was all forest and weir, back then. When I lived there, the weir has been paved over, and the only trees in the centre of the village were around the school I went to, on a gloomy tree-lined alleyway called Dark Lane. A dramatised little passageway. We still do it. Over in rural Rayleigh, five miles away, there's a road called Screaming Boy Lane. I've never found out why it's called that.

My dad told me about that. He never found out either, and it was one of those things that bugged him to his grave. He was one of those people who stories happen to. He was a drummer in the Sixties. One night after a gig, a couple of Liverpudlians came up to him and asked if he wanted to join their band, as they were without a drummer at the time and on the promise of playing some gigs in Germany...

"I can't think about that too much," he used to say.

He was in the Household Cavalry, the Queen's mounted soldiers, and once responsible for giving the Queen a horse with the shits to ride during a public event. He was in the Merchant Navy, and once imprisoned on Fiji for accidentally jumping ship-said prison being a thatched hut that he was asked to return to at night, if he'd be so kind.

You become part of your father's story, and you can feel like maybe you haven't done enough to live up to his stories. My dad was an unpublished writer, and I didn't realise until late on that he felt that he'd become part of my story, and that he loved it. I'd phone him on my mobile from other Countries, places he'd never visited, or had only seen once. From my usual hotel in San Francisco I can see Telegraph Hill, where he'd gone during his single trip there. I called him from the black shoreline of Reykjavik. Our stories, then.

Dad and I had similar histories in our drinking. Both woke up in our late teens/early twenties finding ourselves doing a bottle of something in a single sitting without trying. For the rest of his life, I never saw him have more than a small can of beer at Xmas. I just control mine, ferociously. I know to the drop the point at which I can't return from, and can fine-tune my drunkenness so I don't wake up naked and halfway up a tree. Again.

Alcohol, of course, is as much a drug as anything else, and I use it to get to a certain place just as any psychedelic person uses acid, mushrooms or some brew of vines mixed in and served out of a shaman's arsehole. Some stories just can't be found on the natch, as it were.

Terence McKenna, a writer I'm fond of, found his best stories in psychedelic visions, the muck stirring up the muddy boghole of learning and dreaming that filled his head. An Irish-American from Colorado, he should have been an epic bardic drunk, and indeed he was a bullshitter par excellence. But he took drugs to screw with his forebrain and make new connections.

My favourite McKenna story was the vision of a time bifurcation he had. It's basically a science fiction story, but the level of detail and the obvious reconnection of memory pathways in his drug-scrambled head makes it something remarkable, as does the clear sense that it speaks directly to his perception of the world-that we're in a world that's gone very badly wrong.

All he does is subtract Jesus from the equation of history. A soliton of improbability, he called it-a particle of change in the event stream, passing through the earth until it struck Mary's womb and sterilised an ovum.

No Christianity means that Hypathia, the genius Greek mathematician, isn't stoned to death by Christians, and gets to live to complete her work. Hypathia was by all accounts stunningly beautiful, and took no bullshit. When a younger guy claimed to be in love with her, she gathered the rags she used to staunch her period and waved them in his face on the end of a stick, saying "this is what you love, young man, and it isn't beautiful."

And what was her work? The elaboration of the calculus, which we didn't get until the time of Newton. Right there, human invention gains a thousand years back. Steam trains in ancient Greece. A Roman Empire that takes in sun worship without the destabilising Christian cult. A technological flowering that gets Greco-Roman civilisation to South America before the Incan civilisation climaxes. McKenna's vision showed him a Roman emperor attending the coronation of Three-Flint Knife in Tikal at the end of baktun 8. Humans on the moon by the year 1250 or so. The human race is bought a thousand extra years to sort itself out.

In McKenna's vision, the Tunguska event is the result of a nuclear device exploded in the other timestream as an experiment to see if the bifurcation can be bridged. They're trying to reach us, their orphaned brothers and sisters, to save us.

It's a story of how history could have gone, but it was also a parable. It served his purposes as an illustration of how the psychedelic people of ancient South America could have emerged into the wider world with influence, and a statement against the stultifying influence of Christianity and western priestcraft in general. And it also opened the listeners' minds to new possibilities, to thinking outside the box.

McKenna was a great believer in the notion that plant and fungal psychedelics were other; that what they showed and told him did not come from his brain, but from the materials themselves. Like Philip K. Dick writing books to try and find the true source of his own visions-trying out stories that fit the experienced facts to get at the truth of them-McKenna tested many explanations of his experiences. His favourite was that mushrooms came from outer space and contained an alien intelligence synergetic to mammals. I don't know that he ever considered the possibility that it was the other half of his brain speaking to him-the side we never hear from.

In certain forms of magic, ritual and derangement of the senses are intended to effect conversations with the angel, to channel alien consciousness. But that's just a term of art. The process is intended to get at the subconscious, the dark half of the brain, the parts that we don't consciously use and cannot ordinarily get to. And a ritual is nothing but a performance-a story. We tell ourselves a story in order to reveal something to ourselves.

Which is the same thing I do.

I sit down every day to tell myself a story. Usually full of either stimulants or depressants, playing some kind of soundtrack to the experience of writing, aware of my environment, sitting in my own little writer's movie and telling myself a story. Anyone who tells you they write to an audience is either an idiot or a fake. You write for yourself. If the story doesn't affect you in some way, it won't affect anybody else. I don't write for the trunk. I'm well aware that someone else is going to read this. But if I don't respond in some honest, gut way to whatever I'm writing, you'll never get to see it.

I know writers who play Stone Soup with everything. They'll generate half an idea on the back of a fag packet, ring up half a dozen other writers, tell it to them and ask what they think, and at the end of a phone marathon they'll have their story, with all the ingredients chucked in by their friends.

For me, writing happens on my own. It's exactly the same as a ritual, or sitting down at a campfire, or initiating a vision state in silent darkness. It has to come from me and the spaces in my brain.

And that's one reason why I stay in comics. Any other visual narrative medium is hopelessly compromised by committees and executives and notes and queries. In comics, it's just the writer and the illustrator and the editor. You only have to get two other people, at most, on the same wavelength as you. And you get to speak in a masscommunication medium-where the sales are still better than genre novels or indie music, in many cases-without filters. You get to say what you meant to say.

So if I want to get drunk and talk about secrets and mysteries and all the other crap I've bored you stiff with over the last few minutes, I can.

And, if I'm good and if I'm lucky, I can change the way you think, just a little bit. I can tell you my secrets, and reveal things to you, and get you a little drunk with ideas, and dramatise the world you live in, just for a little while.

That's what stories are for. And that's why I'm here. Thank you.

What Goes Into the Sausage?

Written in March of 2006

Well, I missed last week due to a confluence of good and bad news: I got commissioned to produce something in another medium and had a crisis on one of my comics serials foisted upon me in the same 24 hours, and that just ate my Ministry producing time.

This week has similarly been nothing but chaos, ending up with me working on less than six hours' sleep today. My leg's given out again and I'm back on my cane, I can barely see out of my left eye and this needs to be with Jen in a couple of hours. Let's see what I've got.

Life's A Riot With Meathook Vs. Noospheric

I'm currently developing a new project that has proved to be an absolute bugger to break. It started off as no more then a collection of intents, and a publisher-a small outfit I've been friendly with for years who need an "anchor" book for the direct market. The artist is in place, the format (32 pages, no ads, colour, USD $2.99) is in place, I even know the style I'm going to be producing it in. All I'm missing are the story and the characters and the title.

Yeah. It's like that sometimes. Makes no sense, does it? That's because you never get to see what goes into sausages.

Did you ever hear My Bloody Valentine, around the time of "Feed Me With Your Kiss"? An ear-wrecking field of noise where they didn't play the note, so much as all the notes that get you to the note? It's kind of like that, without the note at the end. Just a field of dissonance. A song turned inside out and wearing its guts as its skin. A pretty picture, no?

So, at this point, I'm playing wak-a-rat, running around with a hammer hitting all the bits that stick out and go off the progression to a note.

I've made more mileage out of mining the material of the 20th Century than most, and there's still tons there left to go, things that need reconsideration after that fastest of centuries. But I'm really trying not to go there, for this project. Four years after the end of Transmetropolitan, I'm going back to social speculative fiction, to see how the landscape's changed. I'm hunting outbreaks of the future again, in a longform work.

I wouldn't think there's much doubt that things are getting strange again. And not the good kind of strange. A woman married a dolphin yesterday. Seriously. A US senator has declared that no woman can get an abortion in his own state unless she's a committed Christian virgin who's been beaten to within an inch of her life and anally raped. He said it on television. Quantum physicists are teleporting light. The truth behind that old "where's my bloody jetpack" view of the future is that the future is clearly not going to be that simple. In the last few months, I've started to get the feeling that maybe old miseryguts J. G. Ballard isn't right all the time, and the near future, at least, is going to be anything but banal. Unless, of course, you're already so dead inside that anything short of Jesus Robots descending en masse from the centre of the sun dispensing immortality juice and flying cars makes you yawn.

The future's getting weird and scary. My futurist friend Matt Jones said to me the other day that, in one sense, the future is a race between the Bright Spime Future and what other smart friend Dr. Joshua Ellis has termed the Grim Meathook Future. What's the Grim Meathook Future? Take a look at New Orleans-what is now called the K-Hole, the hole that Hurricane Katrina left in the United States. Everyone knew in advance that the 2006 hurricane season was going to be a freak one. The K-Hole is the remains of a massive system failure. That's the Grim Meathook Future: infrastructures that cannot cope. Dead bodies laying for two weeks on the street corners of the most powerful nation on earth: that's the Grim Meathook Future. Things turning backwards. I live on an island that's just been informed that there's probably not enough water to go round this summer. Turn that sentence around in your heads a few times. So, anyway, it has to encapsulate that too. Whatever else it is, it's the story of a race between two futures.

Oh... Spime Future? No, I'm not totally convinced of the Spime Future, or, as it is also sometimes known, The Internet Of Things. The idea is close to that of the noosphere, an invisible world of information flows. A Spime is an object (or blobject, or blogject) that exists as, around and within a constantly-updated, totally-recorded flow of information. In Sterling's words, "A Spime is an object that ate and internalized the previous industrial order."

In practise, it's probably going to turn into that dumb idea of internet fridges that email shopping lists to the supermarket. If it's anything like my local Tesco online delivery service, the groceries won't turn up for four days and will be missing half the stuff you ordered anyway. Bruce Sterling wrote an excellent book on spimes called Shaping Things, published by MIT Media Lab, which I recommend to you. A lot of people are thinking about this right now, and the conversation will soon start leaking into the wider world. There's also a fair chance that more and more people will be implanting hacked Radio Frequency ID tags and the like into themselves over the next few years. Which leads me to:

There's a middle distance between the complete collapse of infrastructure and some weird geek dream of electronically knowing where all your stuff is. (I'm cheating: the end result of pure spime theory is electronic omniscience, which is not a useless concept.) Between apocalyptic politics and nerdvana is the human dimension; how this stuff is taken onboard by smart people at street level. You all know Bill Gibson's saw from his cyberpunk novels, that the street finds its own use for things. It still holds. But, right now, I think there's an urgency and a sense of envelope-pushing in exactly what uses are found for these things.

Josh says it in the GMF text: "I think the problem is that the future, maybe for the first time since WWII, lies on the far side of an event horizon for us, because there are so many futures possible. There's the wetware future, the hardware future, the transhumanist future, the post-rationalist (aka fundamentalist) future."

And that's where the story lies. In the spread of possible futures, and the people down on the ground facing them. The story has to be about people trying to steer (or condemn) other people to one future or another, using everything in their power. That's a big story.

That's what I'm working on right now. Aren't you sorry you asked? I told you I was tired.

Thinking a lot about Augmented Reality as Activated History: smartphones/street computers drilling down into buildings'pasts.

How many people could you house inside a dead whale?

If you shored it up inside? Biodegradable new floodplain-shanty housing.

Comics & Ideas

Written in Mlarch of 2006

One of the things I like best about comics is their innate facility for education. Comics communicate ideas with clarity and simplicity, and can be replayed countless times without cost at any speed you like, in any direction you like.

Collector's mania for comics can sometimes be considered to have started when editorial notes-which, from one perspective, are early hyperlinks-appeared directing the reader's attention to contextual information in previous issues. "* See issue #12 for the origin of Grim Fin-Headed Backdoorman!" Linking you back to an older comic in your box or on your shelf. Or even "* See Other Series #34 for more on bombastic Boobsock Girl's three-headed baby!", linking you across to another series entirely. Provided you had the money and the access and the bug for it, you could assemble an entire universe shot through with non-linear links that went up and down the timeline, across lives and geographies.

Primitive as hell, of course, but it worked. Particularly for early Marvel, when there was a single writer, Stan Lee, guiding all the books. And he wanted you to read all the books. He didn't want Avengers fans or Spider-Man fans, after all. He had to make the entire line culturally sticky. Due to the nature of Marvel's distribution at the time, which was run through National Periodicals-DC!-Marvel could only release a limited number of books per month. So he needed Marvel fans, full stop, so that every book in the line paid off. He couldn't afford any slack. That was the brilliance of the man-that he created, from scratch, the Marvel fan.

The above is, in part, what Grant Morrison's talking about when he starts declaiming about the DC Universe as a live thing. Since it grows and makes connections while under the command of forces almost totally invisible to the populations within the comics, it fulfills one of the conditions for life inside a creationist universe. This is one of the reasons why people think Grant is mad.

I spoke a few weeks ago about the possibility of a book throwing off a "data shadow"-printing a URL on the back of a book that leads you, should you type it in to an internet-enabled device, to a network of information about a book. This is something that all comics could do. On the assumption that in the Western world few people buying comics are too far away from a library or internet cafe at the very least, the potential exists to build an accessible data shadow above any book.

In fact, it could be done in very sophisticated ways. Electronic hyperlinks could be built right into the pages.

In Japan, there's a system... I have to go back and find the name, I'm in the pub right now and all this is just occurring to me in a stream-of-consciousness rush-there's a system where a link can be encoded into a small square codon-rich graphic that's readable by enabled mobile phones... QR. It's called QR Barcode.The phone reads it and spits a stream of information about the thing the graphic's stuck to, right back to your phone screen.

In Japanese supermarkets, people use QR-enabled camphones to scan the QR tags on food labels. (This connects right back to Spimeworld, see?) The QR kicks your phone over to a phone-optimised website that tells you where the food came from, right down to the name of the farm, what was used to grow it, and even the composition of the soil it came out of. You can even buy things called Stamkeys that let you make your own QR code blocks. Hell, some people are turning them, not just into mobile-formatted links to websites and blogs, but actual blog content in and of themselves.

(I found out about all this via Our Man In Tokyo, designer and event curator Jean Snow.*)

Imagine this, then: reading an issue of, say, Grant's Invisibles, and King Mob's just said something about Guy Debord. And buried in the bottom right corner of the panel is one of those little QR blocks. Shoot it with a phone and the Wikipedia entry on Guy Debord comes back to you from the book's datashadow.

I used Invisibles not only because I'd previously mentioned Grant, but because Vertigo books from the '90s-Invisibles, Preacher, Transmetropolitan-were books about ideas. The three of us were writing about our discrete areas of interest, and, in large part, we were telling you about the things we knew. Which isn't a bad thing. Some people balk at writers having any opinion, interest or intent beyond banging out a neutral yarn, but, you know, fuck that noise. Comics are an educational tool, used for anything from instructional pamphlets for civil disobedience to workplace hygiene. The best fiction, like the best reportage, is about the writer telling the reader where they think they are today, and what they think it looks like.

* http://www.jeansnow. net

Sadly, QR coding hasn't caught on outside Japan. But it's an interesting thought to consider. In the meantime... well, we don't have access to anything quite that sophisticated, here in the West. But I'm thinking about trying something with a project I'm developing right now. I'm thinking about building a wiki on top of a comic.

A wiki, from Wikipedia's definition: "A wiki is a type of website that allows anyone visiting the site to add, remove as well as edit all content, quickly and easily, without the need for registration, which makes it an effective tool for collaborative writing. The term wiki is a shortened form of wiki wiki which is from the native language of Hawaii (Hawaiian), where it is commonly used as an adjective to denote something "quick" or "fast" . In essence, a wiki is nothing more than a simplified system of creating HTML web pages, combined with a system which records and catalogues all revisions, so that at any time, an entry can be reverted to a previous state. A wiki system may also include various tools, designed to provide users with an easy way to monitor the constantly changing state of the wiki."

Just go and take a look at Wikipedia to see one in action. The use occurred to me several weeks back, when I discovered that fans of the TV show Lost had generated a wiki for the show.

If you generated a wiki-essentially, a networked, highly hyperlinked directory of information-in advance of a comics series' release, and stamped the book with the URL of the wiki... and, conceivably, even somehow marked pages and panels with URLs that take you inside the wiki structure, in any of a variety of ways from subtle to as blatant and clunky as that old editorial-note caption box that littered Marvel comics of old... you invite a peculiarly modern involvement in the work. With a single book, in fact, you can create

the sense of immersion in a universe that came, in the Sixties, from buying eight different lightly-connected Marvel comics. Immersion and, in a sense, interaction. Internet culture has become defined in part by what can be termed "extended consumption." Mash-ups. Making music videos out of mp3s and recut anime. The explosion of fanfiction. These things don't always necessarily qualify as art, to some, but they do express a change in the way we relate to and handle our arts.

That would be an interesting way to do a modern comic. One that has its own electronic universe standing behind it, accessible through an URL printed on the front of the book, or multiple URLs seeded throughout the book. The book would not rely on them for its effect and textual integrity, but it would be supported and extended by a directory of information about the book, produced both by the creators and those of its audience who wished to extend their consumption of and involvement with the book.

(Hideously open to vandalism, of course, like Wikipedia itself, but I'm talking pure blue-sky concepting here, so please indulge me before I pass out from the sheer strain of holding a train of thought this long.) (Shit. Too late.)

Public Intellectual

Written in April of 2006

The other week, during a speech at SXSW, Bruce Sterling accused me of "becoming a public intellectual." Which is a terrible thing for one writer to say about another, because it causes you to re-examine what you've been saying for signs of, I don't know, actual intellectual content.

I remember one of those weird faux-reporter people from the US-Walter Cronkite, maybe-talking about how he thought the Master And Commander books were "crack cocaine for intellectuals." By his definition, then, people who read the news on commercial television for a living are intellectuals.

Umberto Eco: now there's a public intellectual. Here's a strange thing for you. Italy is about as intellectually debased as a European country can get. It supports five daily national newspapers devoted entirely to football. Its prime minister own TV stations. You whining Yanks complain about Fox News, but imagine a situation where George Bush owned CBS. That's where the Italians are. I think pretty much every English-speaking Italian I've met told me that at least one impetus to learning the language was so that they could listen to BBC news, the first unbiased news source they ever experienced. The current Italian election campaign is high comedy-if you happen not to live there-with Berlusconi pulling stunts that'd make Richard Nixon wriggle in his grave with envy.

And yet Umberto Eco, professor of semiotics and world-renowned author, has a regular newspaper column. And he's not unique. Eco himself had said that he's simply following a tradition of Italian intellectuals speaking in public. In a country that mad, intelligent men and women understand that part of their job is to speak to the public.

And we're not talking about mysterious pronouncements from the dusty depths of academe. Like the best fiction, this is an element of pure reportage: conscious people telling you where they think they are today and what they think it looks like.

Today, for me, this ties into a query left on The Engine last night, relating to Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. The question was simply this: why aren't there any other books like this? From one angle, The Invisibles was a snapshot of the counterculture at the millennium. It was Grant's perception of where he stood 1994-2000 and what he thought it looked like. And, in commercial comics (putting to one side for the moment actual journalism-comics like Joe Sacco's bibliography or the work of Marjane Satrapi)-yes, for the last few years, it's been hard to find works like that.

For one thing: frankly, doing any highly-structured piece of social fiction longer than 1000 pages just kicks the shit out of you. For another, you mine a lot of material out of the world, and you have to wait for the world to change appreciably in order to have anything new to say about the condition.

On top of that, a lot of us have been taken up with the business of a new century: which is to say, there's been work to do in tying off the stump of the old century and getting a good look at it. And that's still ongoing business. Even now, DCs superhero title Infinite Crisis is getting its arms around DCs first century of operation, organising and understanding the myriad changes its story went through and attempting to settle its affairs before moving forward.

This business of looking back and getting a perspective of a century in the medium, though, means that we're not moving forward yet (I restrict this to commercial "mainstream" comics, if for no other reasons that it's where the economics flow from and that it's what most of you are interested in). We're not in the situation of the '90s where people in the position of Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis, Peter Milligan are passing on new information and presenting new perceptions in the course of their work. In some sense, these were the "public intellectuals" of comics; people with something to say, who said it through story. People with themes, and intent, and knowledge to pass on.

Of the current crop of working writers, Brian Vaughan seems closest to that tradition (if you want to call it that). In Ex Machina, he clearly has something to say about the American political condition. I think it's possibly an aspect of his particular take on things that it doesn't come out with a single direct clarity of purpose to me. It's hard to come away with a single statement from the work aside from "this is all more complex and more fucked-up than you expect"-which may well be his intent. As a writer, he's a terrific second guitarist on Ex Machina: in Ronnie Wood's phrase, "he knows how to keep a track cooking." And Ron was talking about Johnny Marr, so that's not a pejorative, you know? I don't think anyone's writing better cliffhanger pages than Vaughan right now. On a personal level, I'd like him to step out from behind his artists and rip out a big swaggering riff every now and then. But that's just me, and his modest, unshowy style (much like Greg Rucka or Geoff Johns) may be more suited to his time.

I like that he's got something to say outside just working the plot.

Especially in a period where readers seem to have mistaken plot for the whole of writing. Those readers are well-served by countless writers, many of whom have devoted themselves to mastery of the craft aspect and produce some excellent comics. I look for something else. I try to be something else, when I write Transmetropolitan or Desolation Jones or Fell. But, certainly, when I look for something to read, I want it to be something from someone who's aware of their world and is telling me something new about what's in it and how they perceive it.

"Public intellectuals" is a clunky term with lots of weird baggage.

But it'll do for this minute. Quit muttering and tell me where you think you are today, and what you think it looks like.

"Cultural leper" is actually a good metaphor for "comics writer" shunned by normal people, but leaving little bits of myself everywhere.

I PERSONALLY THINK I WOULD MAKE AN EXCELLENT

President of Earth. Though I think I

PREFER THE TERM PARAMOUNT LEADER.

Drowning

Written in August and November of2007

Most of the music writing I do takes the form of brief fragments surrounding a link or an mp3. These two are a little longer, but don't really constitute full pieces. Since they were written close together, and share themes (and one of them got listed in a Best Music Writing Of The Year book, even), I'm presenting them together.

Okkervil River-"Iohn Allyn Smith Sails"

John Allyn Smith is the real name of American poet John Berryman. When Berryman was a kid, his father killed himself outside Berryman's bedroom window, and Berryman grew up a walking braindamage case, inept at everything, a (scary-crazy) teacher too drunk to teach and a poet too drunk to read. He threw himself off a bridge in the winter of '72: missed the water and smothered to death on the frozen shoreline.

"John Allyn Smith Sails" is the standout on the new album by Okkervil River. I've always been a bit lukewarm about Okkervil River -I figured that "No Key No Plan" was probably the one song of theirs I'd ever like. They tend to the musically unremarkable and the overwritten. The skill and ruthless wit of the first two minutes and thirty seconds, on their own, would make it a pleasant occasional play. But then they do something at 2:30 of pretty incredible ambition, that they shouldn't be able to pull off. They stop dead and then do two minutes of a rewritten "Sloop John B."

Most people know it as a Beach Boys tune. It probably dates back to around 1900, and has variously been known as "Hoist Up the John B. Sail," "Wreck Of The John B" and "I Wanna Go Home." John B, John Berryman. "They both kind of wreck," says Okkervil River's Will Sheff. The other connection is Carl Sandburg, whose career as a poet would have been the long patriarchal shadow over Berryman's own, and who found and collected "Wreck of the John B" into publication in 1927.

The rewrite ties it all back to Berryman, and it becomes this huge, heartbreaking thing, storming and shaking. It takes some balls, a stunt like that. I think they pull it off. I've been listening to it all night. You try.

Burial-Untrue

Ghost Hardware EP was as Ballardian a record as I've ever heard: the sound of a drowned London. "Ghost Hardware" is on Untrue, but Untrue is an attempt to turn away from the watery cemetery of the EP, to make a "glowing, buzzing" record. I'm not so sure that he achieved that. Like his eponymous debut, like Ghost Hardware EP too, it's head music, it's contemplative. The textures of the thing are incredible. The beats come from under the road, the breaks come from three rooms away, and some of the vocals come from over your shoulder and thirty years ago. People sing with the crackle of dusty old vinyl. The ghosts of old musics.

I'm on the twelfth listen, and I still don't feel like I've nailed what this album is. Because I don't think Burial set out to make a funeral for soul music. But none of these lush R&B voices are alive. They're all haunting broken speakers. They're all coming from abandoned houses, the middle of empty streets, the floor under your flat where sometimes you hear someone tapping at the walls but that can't be right because no-one's lived down there in years. Vocals loop like the old stories of ghosts returning to perform the same motions night after night. The non-singing voices, the captures of people talking in the street, or even whispering, are way further up in the mix. I'm reminded of the oldstyle ghost hunters, training their mics on haunted rooms, and playing back the recordings to hear, under the bustle of ordinary life, the sound of dead people trying to make themselves heard to the world of the breathing.

It's not as immediately doomed a record as Ghost Hardware EP.

But it's not as benign a record as it wants to be, or as it wants you to think it is. Even the final track, "Raver," sounds like the 21st Century sadly closing the casebook marked "1992" and locking it in the filing cabinet of failing memory. Throwing it back to the ghosts.

Stabbing Mars

Written in June of 2008

It's hard to get excited about robots. Unless, like a singer acquaintance of mine, you have what's termed a "clunk" fetish. Once a year or so, she asks me if I'll write a comic about robots fucking.

I imagine she's waiting with ragged breath for the Phoenix Lander to stab its metal cock into the Martian regolith to see if the planet is wet for it. Sometime today, I think, the robot explorer will slide a probe into the rusty crust in the search for ice and biochemical presence. We already have the photo that may show exposed Martian ice for the first time-unless it's a photographic artifact, a trick of light and lens and no more real than the Face On Mars.

Somewhere, Robert Zubrin is chewing on his John Lennon hat in barely controlled anger, or so I like to imagine. Zubrin's been advocating immediate human exploration of Mars for decades. He even costed out a mission, Mars Direct, using already-extant space technology, that came in at a fraction of NASA's own estimates. Zubrin's programme could have done it for the price of a couple of Hollywood summer tentpole movies. And, somewhere, he's hissing that the first person off the Mars Express lander could have told us if that was ice or not. He's had people pretending to be on Mars in simulated lander stations dropped in remote frozen locations for years.

The problems with Zubrin's plans are many and various, of

course, and begin with the fact that both deep space and the Martian environment are powerfully iniquitous to human life. Playing pretend astronauts in an FMARS tent in the frozen north is not the same as having to erect an anti-radiation shelter (or, more likely, digging yourself a Martian burrow) to ensure you don't come home as a tumour in a spacesuit. Nor is flying to your simulator location the same as flying a spacecraft nine months out from Earth's protective magnetic field. There is no test article for a vessel that'll stop you taking at least twice the human rad limit on your voyage.

No-one seems to be listening to Robert Zubrin, who once allied himself with Newt Gingrich if memory serves, anymore. He plugs on with his Mars simulations with his eager faux-astronauts, and continues to hold gatherings of his Mars Society, which is taking on the pall of those other 90s groups of similar hubris like the people trying to build ocean habitats or intentional space societies. One of those, as I recall, turned themselves into something called the Living Universe Foundation and tried to buy themselves some scrubland outside Bastrop in Texas for a compound.

Maybe that's an option for the Mars Society now. Buy some frontier land and ritually smash effigies of the radiation-hardened robot lander currently clunking away at the Martian maidenhead.

i want human bacon People in my house are annoying me and i has A KNIFE AND I STILL want human bacon

Stop wriggling woman it's for Science and yes okay also bacon

Washing off blood and making coffee

Bending Mars

Written in June of 2008

Is putting humans on Mars important? Yes. Humans need land to live on, and, in a dynamic environment, they need land to move to.

Closed systems are bad because they remove options. A single planet is a closed system. And the thing about land is, as a history teacher of mine used to say, they don't make it anymore.

Put aside the grim meathook future of our coming environmental doom for a moment. What if something drops on us? What if some natural freak event like a sequence of volcanic incidents drops us into faux-nuclear winter? We've come close to that before, in the 1880s. What if something no-one ever thought of happens to make human life no longer viable on this planet? Do we just shrug and say fuckit?

I believe that exploration is necessary to the human spirit. But even if you don't share that particular delusion, I think most people would agree that any kind of extinction is bad. Except maybe for dogs.

Mars is the best local option for setting up a colony and, eventually, a second life for humanity. It's a bit of a crap option: no magnetic field to speak of, cold as hell, and currently no guarantees of usable water. But Venus is a shithole, Mercury's a suicide trip and the Jovian system is a radiation trap. Forget everything you heard about asteroid habitats, it's bullshit. Right now, it's Mars or an extrasolar planet, and an exoplanet is going to stay out of our reach, barring a dramatic breakthrough in propulsion engineering, for at least fifty years.

There has long been a movement to preserve Mars. It's said that terraforming Mars is nothing but another wart extruded from the human imperialist tendency, and it should remain the equivalent of a national park, unspoiled. The same people have said that if we go to Mars, we should "do it with class," eschewing nuclear-drive options.

I'm currently working on a project written from, if you like, the pro-Mars Id. The chances are good that in fact there is no life on Mars beyond the odd super-tough bacterium. And while I did indeed just say that no kind of extinction is good, it should also be pointed out that giving up a bolthole for human breeding pairs-which are, make no mistake, the stakes on a Martian colonisation drive-on the basis that we might kill something less substantial and self-aware than a cough is no way to run a railroad.

So my characters-and the dark side of my conscience-say what are we waiting for? Let us now bend Mars to our will (and I'm aware of the overtones of both "run a railroad" and "will") and fix the place up for human habitation. Let's cover the bastard in GM lichen and bugs, thicken up the atmosphere, drop a few nukes on Tharsis, do everything we can think of, fast and dirty, because the universe is hiding the stopwatch from us and we don't know how much time we've got left. Let's get a bit of air pressure happening, see if we can force out some of that water, do what it takes to at least get some overground stations into a safety zone.

Because it's not doing us any good as a national park. And we are barely clinging to the surface of our world. And not through any fault of our own. Successful human life was a fluke on this planet even before we started poisoning ourselves. Playing the "we need to learn how to look after our planet before we go to another" lament is utterly beside the point. Think about your favourite art, your favourite memories, the best things people ever did. Does that have to go away because some people want Mars to always look like that quarry in Wales where they always shot Doctor Who episodes in the 1970s?

Fuck the Martian bugs, one of my characters says. In forty years I want my grandkids to email me from a .mars address. It's not like we have to hunt whales or give a Tasmanian Devil face cancer to do it. It's just sitting there. Why not bend it?

Seven Songs

Written in June of 2008

"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they're listening to."

These things circulate like a dose of the intellectual clap. "I fucked this disease into your brainmeat. Confess your shame in public and then fuck it into seven other people." You find yourself looking at your friends and fellow-travellers, wondering which of them you hate enough to infect.

1; "Denaissance"-Kemper Norton Collective

I once played this on a podcast, but I'm listening to it again since Kemper included it on his recent CD-R. Again and again. Because it's joyous, in its own doomed and drunken way. It's big and it stomps and there are lots of instruments and lots of people singing and playing and just fucking daring the sun to go down.

2: "Live at ICC. Tokyo"-Philip Teck

Do not listen to Philip Jeck on earphones in a darkened Oslo hotel room at three in the morning. Philip Jeck's association by others with the emergent field/passing game of sonic hauntology is half-founded on the fact that he can haunt a room. I never really "got" Jeck until I saw him live-he creates a thoroughly supernatural chill in acoustic space-and I found this recording afterwards. Put it on my phone to listen to during my recent trip back to Norway. Usual hotel room insomnia brought on by sleeping alone. Pushed in the earbuds and pressed play. Fuck me, that was a mistake.

3: "Late Night"-Belong

Someone else playing with haunted audio: the sound of an obscure cover version playing on an AM car radio as you walk past it at night. Washed out by the ambience of 21st Century life. Almost but not quite lost in it: that gorgeous sad-smile chord change at the top of the chorus still comes through. It's a thing that makes me pensive.

4: "Reed Sodger"-Clive Powell

Yes, still obsessed with this, a couple of months after I first wrote about it here. It probably comes out of my current fascination with "haunted music/music that haunts." With the weird accompaniment of distorted and filtered instruments, it's almost like the clearest Electronic Voice Phenomenon you ever heard-the strong, sweet voice of Northern Britain of decades and centuries past coming back to us through the Doctor Who time-tunnel howlaround effect.

5:"Ghosts IV32"-NIN

My favourite piece from Ghosts I-IV. That prowling, pulsing rhythm has a real motorik feel to it, that slightly sleazy driving-atnight propulsiveness. It's the piece on Ghosts that I can slip into and go with.

6: "Guest Informant"-The Fall

Ancient, I know. I'm in the process of replacing all my crumbled old Fall tapes and unusable Fall vinyl with CDs. The "Brix years" of the Fall tend to be looked down on a bit, these days, and my own favourite Fall is still Hex Enduction Hour... but I rediscovered my love of this garagey bit of impenetrable twanging madness off Frenz Experiment. I spent a significant chunk of winter 1988 trying to work out what the hell Brix was yelling in the background all through the song. Turns out it was "Baghdad/ Space Cog/ Analyst."The new album's not bad, either, Mark E. Smith full on as The Last English Psychotronic Bluesman...

7: "We're Gonna Rise"-The Breeders

Weird thing. This came up on my mp3 player just as I was finishing the last page of Cormac McCarthy's The Road in the departure lounge in Oslo Gardermoen the other week. It's insidious like "Fortunately Gone," the opening song on their very first album, but in a different way. It creeps up slowly, winds its way into your head, and before you know it you're just kind of looking out the window wistfully.

Everything Is Happening

Written in June of 2008

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.

June 3RD, 2008

Decades before people were hyping themselves in rap, Bo Diddley was doing nothing but singing songs about

Bo Diddley (while ripping the piss out of "Hush Little Baby") and inventing the Bo Diddley beat (while actually trying to teach himself some old Gene Autry saw).

The first time I remember hearing Bo Diddley was actually a clip played on some BBC TV music quiz show, probably in the early 80s. I said something like, "What the hell...?" and my dad said, "Ssh. Listen. Listen to his guitar." And THAT was it. Because it's the sound of your heart skipping a beat. boom-ba-boom-boom bam-boom. i don't think Bo Diddley met a second chord in his life, he made status quo look like Segovia for that. It's all about that beat. "I play the guitar as if I were playing drums," Diddley said. See, my dad had been a drummer, and that's what he picked up on. People thought he was weird because he had women in his band-musicians like Peggy Jones and the Duchess, who could crank out primal blues riffs that would've made John Lee Hooker stand to attention.

Bo Diddley died today, aged 79.

Every Single Day

Written in June of 2008

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?

I REALLY, REALLY, HAVE TO STOP STANDING NAKED IN

THE BACK GARDEN AT NIGHT. ONE DAY THE NEIGHBOURS'

MOTION-SENSOR LIGHT WILL SNAP ON...

Rupture

Written in June of 2008

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 fourteenyear-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 piranha 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.

Bugs

Written in June of 2008

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 bacteria, 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?

The thing about travelling into the future is that it kills you one day at a time.

Inviting Death From Space

Written in June of 2008

Given the choice, how would you prefer to announce the presence of your species in local space? Imagine all the ways you could describe the emergence of a digital-age society on this planet. All the ways you could explain our species and our environment and biosphere, and explain that, no, we're not perfect, we're still fighting, we still haven't resolved our relationship with nature, there are still hungry people and sick people. But we're trying, and in some places we're winning, and although we can't reach you, we could really use a friend. All the ways in which you could hope to open up a conversation with the Other, wherever it may lie.

Or you could just send them a Doritos ad.

Because, yes, on the morning of June 12,2008, the EISCAT high powered space transmitter station on Svalbard used its array of radars to beam a Doritos ad at a solar system 42 light years from here.

For six hours, the MPEG video file was repeatedly pulsed at system 47 UMa, in the Ursa Minor constellation, which was chosen because it seems to have a circumstellar habitable zone. 47 UMa does have two Jupiter-class planets outside the HZ, although one of them is so massive that it very probably does weird gravity things to the outside edge of the HZ. This means that, if there are Earth-like rocky planets inside the habitable zone that we just can't see yet, there's a fair chance they'll be small, lumpy, thirsty and ugly. Like a man in a Foster's commercial. Or, presumably, a Doritos one.

EISCAT, which has had funding problems, has received an undisclosed but presumably substantial donation from Doritos in return for the broadcast, which will help them meet their actual aims of performing radar astronomy experiments. The director of EISCAT is quoted as saying: "Some years in the future, the money that comes from this kind of commercial service could be used to fund pure research."

This would seem to open the door to polluting local space with the grottiest capitalistic artifacts conceivable in return for being able to do a bit of science. That's a pretty high cost-of a piece with the recurring nightmare in fiction of the Coca-Cola logo being permanently sprayed on the surface of the moon. Others will champion this as private enterprise giving science the boost it needs, which is usually where I'm told to wave my hands in glee that Richard Branson and his mates have created a zippy goshwow 21st Century space business on the same kind of suborbital lob Alan Shepherd managed in 1961 (and a fair distance short of the full orbital flight Yuri Gagarin made).

Fuck that. I don't care. Attempting to announce our presence to any intelligence that can get in front of the signal by sending them something made by a company that sells crunchy shit in bags is not the way to the maturity of the species.

According to the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence's Permanent Study Group, it's been argued that "a civilization which hopes to detect radio evidence of other civilizations in the cosmos is obligated to reveal its own presence. Others maintain that it is suicidal to shout in the jungle."There is, therefore, a San Marino Scale measuring risk in these matters. You can play with an online calculator, if you know a few specifics, to work out whether or not a signal broadcast into space will in fact bring down the alien hordes ov chewy doooom. And if it does, you know damn well that their first words will be "Sponsored by Doritos?"

Amazingly (to me), it's not the first time we've fired signals at 47 UMa. Notional lifeforms in-system will also one day be privy to The 1st Theremin Concern For Aliens. They're due to get that in the summer of 2047. The funny thing about that, of course, is that the theremin was usually used to announce the presence of spooky space aliens in 1950s science fiction films...

We're just asking for it, really.

The Final Solution

Written in June of 2008

Did you know that only two species can be removed from the biosphere with no knock-on effects whatsoever? Wasps and dogs.

Seriously. I have no reason to lie about this.* Delete either of those two from life on earth, and there's no effect on the foodchain, planetary ecology, nothing. They are surplus to requirements. The wasp exists to just bug people, and the dog is the planet's way of reminding us that pure, genetic Evil exists in the universe.

Which makes me wonder why no-one thought of this before:

A street-sweeping truck has sucked a dog up through its bristles on a New York street, leaving its horrified owner holding nothing but the lead."

How did this act of stark, shining genius have to happen by accident? This is the ultimate Eureka moment for the human race. Send sweeper trucks through the streets every six hours to denude our roads of dogs. No more of their plotting on street corners, their shitting under human feet, their watching, their constant awful watching for signs of weakness. Oh, yes, a human's best friend. Until you show a sign of weakness. And then they eat you. Cats eat dead bodies because they get hungry, and, let's face it, they made it clear they couldn't give a shit about you from the start. Dogs lure you with that masquerade of unconditional affection. But they've been thinking about eating you the whole time.

My friend Zo lost her dog Moo some weeks ago. What do you think happened to that little dog, now no-one's keeping their eye on it? That's right. That dog is now living on the fucking moon, collaborating with Nazis. Prove me wrong.

Yeah, you can laugh. But I can hear you. It's that shaky, uncertain kind of laugh. Deep down, you know I'm right. You fear the Dog, but I Hate it, and that's why I can say these things out loud. The Dog is the natural enemy of the Human. We should all have street-sweeping trucks. Packs of us should be trundling up and down the streets every day, sucking the yappy bastards up for the good of our children and our children's children.

Find that street sweeper guy and give him a medal. He has shown us the way of the future.

June 16, 2008

The word Annwn,'the name of the Otherworld in Welsh mythos, apparently translates as "very deep." Possibly, quite literally, "underworld."

The Hounds of Annwn were Xtianised as "The Hounds of Hell," but Annwn, the Welsh Otherworld, was a paradise.

Hence: The Hounds Of Heaven. The Hounds of Annwn were a portent of death. Interestingly, their growling and barking was said to grow softer the closer they came to you. Imagine, then, hearing the soft rumbling of The Hounds Of Heaven, here to portend your transition to paradise & otherworldly eternal youth. Now those are good dogs.

* I might actually be lying about this.

On Teleportation

Written in August of 2008

Years ago, back when I was prone to laying down for many hours in conditions of significantly altered consciousness, I had an Idea. Following the pattern of behaviour that makes such people so unpleasant and scary to decent folks, I spent the next several weeks explaining my Idea to everything that moved, and a few things that didn't. Because you know what it's like when you're pretty sure your brain has exceeded the speed of light and your heart sounds like a badly abused motorcycle engine and you think that maybe other people can hear it so you need to stick eggboxes to the walls and tape rubbish bags to the windows and play Diamanda Galas very very loud at 4am to drown out the sound and paint special pictures on the door with your own blood and semen to keep the police and the Upside Down People away and anyway. Idea.

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.

Acid always lied to me. There is no white light, i am not in touch with the pulse of the Earth, and I am not The Pumaman.

If you need to physically assault someone, I find dressing up as a Care Bear first really helps.

Also, nice people give you fun pills after.

When you're doing the punching, of course, you are Scare Bear. But after the pills you are just Stare Bear.

Oriana

Written in August of 2008

I was just sorting through a stack of CDs, and found a postcard somehow interleaved between them. I'd gotten some old photos from my stepmother when my father died a few years ago, and this was among them. God knows how it got separated from the others.

My dad was a sailor for a while: he always said he simply couldn't resist the idea of being paid to see the world. And, as far as I know, he served chiefly on the Oriana. I think it may have been the first passenger liner of its type to have a swimming pool-he was certainly under the impression it was. His career as a sailor seems to have been as fraught as his career in the Queen's Lifeguards (where he was once complicit in giving the Queen a horse with the shits for a public appearance), the high point probably being his missing the ship entirely during shoretime on Fiji and being "imprisoned" for jumping ship in what was basically a hut he was politely asked to return to at nights.

He was in his early twenties when he sent this postcard-presumably nicked out of the ship's shop-to my grandma. I'm not sure which direction the Oriana would have been steaming in, at this point. Research tells me that she was off Long Beach in March 1962, getting a gash cut in her side by an aircraft carrier. Dad never mentioned it. He never talked a lot about those years, because it bugged my mother, who had never gotten to travel and somehow resented my dad for his experiences. So I never got many details: just the sense that travel was worth doing, and that my dad believed he'd been made a better man by it.

I didn't get to New Zealand and Australia until my early thirties.

But I got there. It's a weird thing, I suppose, to see the path of your father's footsteps curling around the entire world. But I like it.

I also like that the silly bastard's pen ran out during that unintelligible squiggle at the end and he just had to get a pencil to explain that.

Gaia Has A Bumhole

Written in September of 2008

So I wake up this afternoon to Alex Steffen informing me that We're All Doomed. To wit, the executive editor of Worldchanging.com was telling me that permafrost on the Arctic seabed has been warmed away, allowing vast underground pockets of methane to ascend in great "chimneys," causing the sea to foam and scientists to fall over in horror because methane is a greenhouse gas twenty times better at its planet-cooking job than good old CO2. These underground deposits were lidded over before the last ice age, apparently, and would have stayed bunged up if, ha ha, there hadn't been rapid climate change in the Arctic over the last twenty years.

Should all concerns be confirmed, it appears that we're all going to die from the escape of monstrous planetary farts from beyond history.

Funnily enough, though, Spook Turds From The Bottom Of The Sea are washing up on the shores of New Zealand. Now, this is New Zealand for you: a six foot long barnacled white lump of fatty crap turns up on the beach. What do the locals do?

"Mrs. Wilkie was keen to cut the greasy lump into blocks and sell it as moisturising sunblock."

Because that's the first thing you think of when an alien turd the size of a Smartcar plonks itself on the sand. Not "what in hell did that come out of?" But "can I screw a few dollars out of people by conning them into rubbing sea-monster shit on their skin?" You can at least rely on the English to try and screw it or smoke it first.

I can't yet construct a workable theory explaining that these things were fired out of an underground sphincter in the Arctic. But I'd like to, if only to make James Lovelock swallow his tongue. Wouldn't it be lovely to explain to him that we discovered where all the indigestible trans fats that we place into the earth in the form of dead people actually go?

Man cook meat with fire. Organic ribeye steak, grilled to within an inch of its blackened little life, with cherry tomatoes and fresh bread. Man cook meat with fire. Not "man show fire to meat and then eat it while it still squirts and pulses." Kill it ded with fire yus.

"medium rare" = "good vet could get it up on its feet in an hour or two. "That's not cooked with fire. That's threatened with fire. I do not season steak. start seasoning steak and before you know it? youre french. no. I go to my personal butcher and say, "give me a piece of meat that's been sawn off an animal." and they throw me a chunk of animal. And then I say "show me the animal this meat was sawn off." And they show me a picture of a crying cow with a gaping hole in its side. And I say "did the animal cry when you sawed my piece of meat off it?" And they show me a ziploc bag full of cow tears.

And I say, "Rub that on my steaki Let that be my seasoning!"

Experiments In Food

Written in October of 2008

For no good reason I can see, my insane publishers stuffed the rear of the paperback edition of Crooked Little Vein with some of the experiments in food I'd put on my mailing list Bad Signal. They were put on the Signal either by request or because I was worried I'd forget them. The response I'd get from those was, frankly, weird in its enthusiasm.

So tonight I randomly experimented in the kitchen. So randomly, in fact, that I was basically making it up as I went along. And now I'm thinking I'm probably going to forget what I did. So, before it all fades away into the same haze that occludes things like What I Did Yesterday, Whether Or Not I Went To The Toilet In My Pants or What Sex Is Like, I give you Experiments In Food:

First, some notes: Everything below is made for two very hungry people in a cold country on a rainy day who have had at most a very light lunch previous to this meal. Adjust accordingly.

I am not an exact cook. Not big on precise measurements. Trust your instinct/Zen/The Force/Flying Spaghetti Monster/whatever.

I use organic produce wherever possible. Organic produce often costs a little more, and looks a little funny. It does, however, taste a lot better, and it is better on your system. Trust a man who is 95% toxins on this.

Salt. I use Maldon sea salt. You'll have access to sea salt of some kind where you are. Use it. There's a difference between that and plain old table salt. Don't get silly and let people talk you into smoked salt. You should shank those people.

Sweet Potato & Roasted Garlic Mash

Roasting garlic: Pull a good length of tin foil. Fold it in half. Fold the edges together, a half-inch or so, to make a seam. Fold it in half again. Fold a seam along the sides, leaving the top open. See what you've made? A tinfoil pocket. A shiny silver scrotum from the future. Now get a garlic, a whole head. Find a knife and slice the very top off, so you can see the tops of the individual cloves inside. Put it in the tinfoil pocket.

Open a bottle of beer. Not fucking Budweiser or Labatts-a proper beer, damnit. During this experiment, I used the outstanding Black Adder ale from Mauldons. A good bitter, an ale, an IPA-a proper fucking beer, you know what I mean. Pour some down your throat. Now pour some in the tinfoil. A mouthful or so. Spit your mouthful out into the pocket if you'd like. I mean, it'd be disgusting, but the person you're cooking for will never know, right? Close up the pocket, so you now have a sealed tinfoil bag full of a head of garlic and (possibly regurgitated) beer.

Sling it in the oven. Your oven is set to 190° C, which is 375° F or Gas Mark 5. It's going to be in there for an hour. Have some more beer. Swallow it this time, you freak.

Sweet Potato Mash: This bit is going to take you half an hour. So time it so the end of this coincides with the garlic popping out of the oven.

Fill a reasonably large saucepan about halfway up with water, put two or three twists of salt in it, and put it on the hob to boil.

Take three sweet potatoes and peel them. This is a pain in the arse. Use a small knife and pare off the skin in motions that go away from your body, like Sarah Palin field-dressing a moose. Five or ten minutes later, you'll have a complete fucking mess and three nude sweet potatoes. Which do in fact look a bit creepy, like mutant stillborn moles or something. Unless that's just me. Anyway. If you've got a stronger, bigger knife, grab it, and slice the sweet potato into coins. If you end up with some big thick ones, cut those in half.

Once the water's boiling, fling the bastards in. You can pretend they're screaming as they hit the boiling water if you like. Try not to let people catch you making the noises.

They're going to boil for twenty to thirty minutes. It's okay to turn the heat down somewhat if they boil over the side of the pan, but keep em bubbling. When a knife goes through a bit of sweet potato effortlessly, they're done.

Combining: Drain off the cooked sweet potato-just set the lid on it slightly off-centre and upend the whole thing over the sink, letting all the water out while leaving the sweet potato in there. Once it's drained, bring it back to your work surface. Where you now need to look for a masher. If you haven't got one... fuck it, use a big spoon or something, this isn't hard.

Get the garlic out of the oven. Be very careful how you open it. So, once you've slashed or chewed it open and seared your face off, take the garlic out. There's no easy way to do the next bit, so-open up the tops of the cloves with your knife and squeeze the garlic out into the sweet potato. Roasting it turns it into a hot paste, and it just squidges out of the skin like delicious zit pus. (You can also just smash it down on the counter top under the flat of a big knife, and scoop up the paste as it shoots out obscenely).

Mash it all together. If you have some ground cinnamon, you can throw a pinch in, and it's good, but not essential.

Sweet potato is a superfood, and garlic is a medicinal plant that retains a lot of its potency even after cooking. This is actually pretty good for you.The next one... not so much.

Onion Marmalade

This is a hot marmalade made in small quantities as a fresh accompaniment to meats. This is going to take you about half an hour too, but bear with me,

One large onion. See how the onion clearly has a top and a bottom, as defined by the hairy bits. Stand it on its bottom. See the top. Imagine now you are considering the head of a small animal. Like a seal. See the little seal head. Now take a knife and slice off juuust enough of its skull that you can see the very very top of its brains. Yes? Excellent. Now turn it on its side and slice downwards, so that you're getting relatively thin rings. Pop out the rings-within-rings, and you've got a big pile of rings there. Cut some of them in half, or quarters, randomly, just to get a little variety happening.

Take a smallish saucepan. Put a knob of butter in it. Just curl one out with a knife, big as the top half of your thumb or thereabouts. Get some heat happening under the pan-you don't want to be there all day, crank it up to three-quarters. The butter will melt, and a little while later you're going to see the surface of it prickle with little bubbles, and start to shimmer. Chuck all the onion in there. Now, there's loads of onion, and it's a little pan. So you need to be turning the onion so it all gets buttery and nothing burns. Five or ten minutes of that, and you'll see the onion getting soft and paler.

What you really want to do is shake a bottle of balsamic vinegar over it three or four times. Red wine vinegar will also do the trick, I'm told, but you should really obtain, borrow or steal a little bottle of balsamic vinegar, as it's useful stuff. Three or four splashes of it. It's sharp and aromatic and adds a layer to the flavours.

Do you know what a dessert spoon is? It's the spoon that's the same size as a dining fork-not the little teaspoon, not the huge tablespoon. Fling two dessert spoons of sugar in there.

(I use a raw organic demerara sugar. Which sounds flash, except that I get it from the local Co-op supermarket, which means it's not fucking flash at all, is it?)

And then chuck half a bottle of beer over the top. Call it... 200 or 250ml of beer. Good beer, mind. See above. If you wouldn't drink it, don't fucking cook with it. (This doesn't mean that you should use meths just because you drink it.)

Stick a lid on it. You're done. You should come back and stir it every five minutes or so, but basically that's it. That's going to take twenty or twenty-five minutes to cook down to a dark, glossy pile of Cthulhu droppings. Seriously, it's a bit grotesque-looking. And, yes, sometimes it moves when it thinks you're not looking. But it goes great with sausages, so what the hell.

Battlesbridge

Written in April of 2009

It's a national holiday here today, so I decided to play truant (read: child and its mother whined at me until I agreed to leave the house).

Stopped off at Battlesbridge during the day's travels to get Lili some new riding gear: left them in the shop and walked to the water. This is the River Crouch, at lowish tide. I should have taken a shot of the sailing barge that was moored next to me, because it occurs to me that not everyone's seen a classic east coast sailing barge, but the two grim old people sitting by its wheel glaring at me over their mugs of tea kind of dissuaded me. You don't mess around with barge folk. Unless you want a boat bok up yer bum.

You can't really get any more inland (westward) from here on the Crouch, unless maybe you're in a kayak or coracle. Eastwards, the Crouch is navigable for the fifteen or so miles that get you to Holliwell and Foulness Points, and out into the North Sea. Foulness Point is the tip of Foulness Island, which is mostly owned by the Ministry Of Defence, who use it as an artillery range and experimental proving ground. The bangs and whumps echo down the Southend coast when the wind is right, and every now and then you'll meet someone in a pub with interesting scars or shattered-looking eyes who'll tell you tales of unlucky Foulness menials who had various bits of themselves blown off in unusual ways...

In centuries past, of course, the Crouch and particularly its eastern tributary, the Roach, were pirate waterways. Smugglers, in the middle of the night, carefully angling their agile boats down the creeks they grew up around and knew like the lines in their own salt-hard palms, away from the big Inland Revenue cutters crewed by strangers in uniforms. This was their territory, their water.

And there's been generations of mine, too, standing here by the water's edge, with a cigarette in their hand, watching the Crouch go by. When I stand here, I'm standing with my dad, and my grandad. Nothing between us but years. And you learn, after a while, that years mean nothing at all.

The Machines Of Desire

Written in April of 2009

I would read any comic that was full of stories about humans interacting with each other, facing a constantly shifting future and trying to define the 21st century condition while framed by the presence and use of giant fictional machines.

This is partly because I am in my early 40s and grew up with Gerry Anderson productions, and therefore I frame everything in terms of giant fictional machines, hideous future disasters and scientific adventurer-pilots relaxing after barely-thwarted eschatalogical events with martinis and cigarettes in their elegant volcanic-island home bases. It's possible that my long desire for a volcano base meant not that I have a deep-seated need to be a James Bond villain, but that I have an intense repressed wish to be Jeff Tracy.

This is also partly because we live in an age of giant fictional machines.

Possibly also that we are in fact passing beyond that age of giant fictional machines, and yet, like much of the 20th Century's chattel, have not quite come to terms with it yet.

(This may additionally be partly me projecting, as it appears that, no matter how I struggle, I seem to still be dealing with the business of the 20th century as a writer.)

And, I think, partly because I'm terminally infected with the metaphor: that we can build our way out of anything, bound not by our imaginations but only by the speed at which we can develop the necessary skills to make what we see in our heads. I mean, if we're going to be in the business of selling fantasies, I don't think it's a bad one to sell.

I would connect this excuse for a thought with Design Fiction, which Julian Bleecker defines thus:

"Design Fiction is making things that tell stories. It's like sciencefiction in that the stories bring into focus certain matters-ofconcern, such as how life is lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating bout the course of events; all of the unique abilities of science-fiction to incite imagination-filling conversations about alternative futures. It's about reading PK. Dick as a systems administrator, or Bruce Sterling as a software design manual. It's meant to encourage truly undisciplined approaches to making and circulating culture by ignoring disciplines that have invested so much in erecting boundaries between pragmatics and imagination."

And a term Matt Jones threw at me during a drinking session the other month: Engineering Fiction.

Yes, we're generally talking about speculative fiction here. But I come from the classic British tradition, where science fiction is social fiction. Therefore, in my head, the most valid way to come to terms with The Age Of Giant Fictional Machines and the terrifying miasmic presence of the 21st century is in fact to frame the whole discussion in terms of monstrous chunks of implausible technology, remaking the world by drilling or blasting or generally stabbing it with nucleardriven metal bits, trying to stop things from exploding, and having the Cigarette Of Victory afterwards.

I think stories like these contain important lessons for our children. My child, of course, watches Supernatural and gets all her news from Mock The Week. So we're all doomed anyway. But I wanted to note the thought down.

Comics and Time

Written in June of 2009

Hello. Forgive me from working from notes. No time to write a full talk in the end. Because I'm a working writer in a deadline business. Which is why I'm here.

I think I'm supposed to be talking about my career in comics, providing some kind of summation to a conference about the relationship between comics and time. To which I'd first offer this, inscribed on a stone plaque embedded in the courtyard wall of the hotel across town I'm staying at:

"God give the blessing to the paper craft in the good realm of Scotland." That stone was cut in 1870.

120 years later, I'm in Glasgow with Scots comics writer Grant Morrison, who's just scored some brown acid off Bryan Talbot and is explaining to me how time works in comics. He explains to me his discovery that any comic is in fact its own continuum, an infinitely malleable miniature universe from Big Bang to heat death, and that in reading it you can make time go backwards, skip entire seons, strobe time itself, re-run geologic-scale periods in loops... reading a comic is in fact controlling time from a godlike perspective.

He was, of course, very full of hallucinogens at the time. This is why people were warned about the brown acid at Woodstock.

That said, we can now thank Grant for solving the mandate of this conference while in the grip of profound psychotomimetic hubris, and move on.

What I do is the Paper Craft, and there are few better places to talk about it than here in Dundee, where ink has run in the town's blood since even before 1870, but thick and dark since 1905, when D.C. Thomson was founded, Britain's oldest continuous publisher of comics... making this place the storied city of Jam, Jute and Journalism.

I've been writing comics since the 1980s-grew up reading Alan Grant (who was in the audience)-and doing it full time for approaching twenty years. I do a lot of other things too-first novel a couple of years ago, journalism, animation, anything that looks like it'll pay a bill. Because I'm a working writer. But comics were my first love, and I still spend most of my time writing them. I love visual narrative, and comics are the purest form of visual narrative.

I've worked in television, and there are a hundred people between you and the audience. I've worked in film, and there are a thousand people between you and the audience. In comics, there's me and an artist, presenting our stories to you without filters or significant hurdles, in a cheap, simple, portable form. Comics are a mature technology. Their control of time-provided you're not intent on reversing universes (or even if you are)-makes them the best educational tool in the world. Hell, intelligence agencies have used comics to teach people how to dissent and perform sabotage.

When done right, comics are a cognitive whetstone, providing two or three or more different but entangled streams of information in a single panel. Processing what you're being shown, along with what's being said, along with what you're being told, in conjunction with the shifting multiple velocities of imaginary time, and the action of the space between panels that Scott McCloud defines as closure... Comics require a little more of your brain than other visual media. They should just hand them out to being to stave off Alzheimer's.

Although I think a headline of "Grant Morrison staves off dementia" might be a little premature.

The line I always quote in talks like these, the one I want you to take away with you, is something the comics writer Harvey Pekar said: "Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures."

And the nice thing about comics, the blessing of the paper craft, is that there's really no-one to stop you.

Afterword

Written in October of 2009

I live on the Thames Estuary, where the majority of the Maunsell Sea Forts were built. Bunkers on sticks, sort of, sticking up out of the water. They're a bit before my time, both in terms of their original role-to fire at German bombers coming up the river towards London-and their partial repurposing in the Sixties. A few of them were turned into pirate radio stations, you see. Out there in the water, broadcasting free radio. By the time I was old enough to know what pirate radio was, pretty much all the classic pirate operations had gone away, save perhaps for Caroline, on a boat out in international waters.

They had great names, the sea forts. Names like Sunk Head, Knock John, and Shivering Sands.

Standing over this river their whole lives to date. Just like me, really.

The pirate radio metaphor has always informed the internet. Free broadcasting from outside the channels of the mainstream media. Even if much of it has always sounded like the pirate rave stations of the late Eighties, which were always just two guys in a box somewhere in London marking time until they could release the location of that night's rave, massively stoned and intoning "Yeah... safe... keep it locked... full-on... yeah... safe..." in a hazy cannabinoid loop.

Hell, I've been broadcasting since the Nineties. From a PDA, first, with a lumpy mobile modem bolted on to it and the whole thing shunted down into a foldaway portable keyboard. There was a word, "moblogging," and I was doing it before the word was coined, broadcasting a wandering diary from wherever I was sat to the thousands of people who were subscribed to receive it through email. And then there were blogs-I remember meeting Ev, inventor of Blogger, in 2001, looking at him and saying "you poor, doomed bastard." Tiredness enveloped him like a murky nimbus-he knew he was on to something, and he was clearly spending every waking hour making it work with hammers and wrenches and spit and blood. I'd already been picking at the machinery, seeing what I could make it do and what use I could find for it. By 2002, I was writing a daily blog, Die Puny Humans, using it as a remote research-material dump I could access from anywhere (without having to store it all on my desktop or print it out for filing).

And, a while later, I started writing longer pieces.

And so you get this book. A collection of things I've written for the internet, many of them written on the run or from the pub. Named for just one of the sea forts, because I still write for the internet, quite a lot, and sooner or later there'll be enough to fill a second book, which will be called Knock John.

Why do it? Well, for one thing, I thought it'd be nice to have my favourite bits from the blog and elsewhere collected in a single place, much as bits of the email list writings have been gathered into From The Desk Of and Bad Signal collections through Avatar Press.

For another, I wanted to test print-on-demand publishing. And so, with Ariana, my Number One Mechanic Who Fixes Things With A Wrench, I decided to make a big book and put it out through Lulu, much as friends like Wil Wheaton, Jamais Cascio and Lee Barnett have.

It's an odd thing for me to look at, now. All those words fired off into the dark. Often written just to clarify my own thinking on some things. Sometimes you need to get notions out of your head and out in front of you so you can see them properly. Sometimes, obviously, I'm just riffing for a laugh, to amuse myself (or, in tandem with the first thought, to see if the joke works). But mostly, I'm seeing, it's been a way to test my own thinking.

I'm writing this at the pub now. A bloke with a bogbrush haircut and no chin has just walked in. It's probably time to go, before he asks if I can get porn or the racing results on this netbook.

I hope you had some fun with this book. I seem to have had fun filling it up, after all.

Warren Ellis

by the river October 2009

SHIVERING SANDS MAUNSELL ARMY FORT, BUILT IN 1943

The Maunsell Army Forts, designed by and named for Guy Maunsell, were installed in the Thames and Mersey estuaries for anti-aircraft defence during World War II. Shivering Sands army fort-located at 51°2957"N, 01°04'29"E- was built in 1943. The fort originally consisted of seven towers: four Gun Towers, each mounted with a 3.7-inch anti-aircraft gun; a Bofors Gun Tower mounted with a 40mm Bofors AA gun; a Searchlight Tower; and a central Control Tower, to which all of the outer towers were connected via metal walkways. The Ministry of Defence decommissioned Shivering Sands in 1958.

CI. In the early 1960s, Port of London Authority installed wind and tide gauges in the searchlight tower for flood and weather monitoring and early-warning. In 1990 the top of the tower was removed to allow helicopter access for maintenance. Two years later, in 1992, the tower was deemed too dangerous for continued use, and the monitoring equipment was moved to a LANBY (Large Automated Buoy) moored near the towers.

u. On June 7, 1963, the 295 ton coaster vessel Ribersborg collided with the G4 Gun Tower in a thick fog. Although the vessel survived the collision, the tower was destroyed, separating the searchlight from the other five towers.

C. On May 27, 1964, Screaming Lord Sutch began broadcasting the pirate station Radio Sutch from the Gl Gun Tower.

u. Four months later, Sutch sold the station to Reginald Calvert, who expanded into all five of the still-connected towers, creating the pirate radio station Radio City. Broadcast continued until June 20, 1966, when transmitter crystals were removed from the station by members of Radio Atlanta. The next day, Calvert was shot and killed by Radio Atlanta's Major Oliver Smedley. In accordance with the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1947, the station was closed by the British Government for illegal offshore broadcasting on February 8,1967, at midnight.