Warren Ellis's Blog, page 104
August 17, 2011
Death Rat City
My piece on the hellish "rodent universes" of John Calhoun is now online at Cabinet magazine. Researching overcrowding, Calhoun built elaborate "utopias" for rats and mice, in which they enjoyed unlimited resources and freedom from disease or predation – but limited space. Once population density passed a certain point, the mouse heaven always became mouse hell, rife with violence, rape and asocial freakery. This research formed a cornerstone of the overpopulation and anti-urban doom-mongering of the 1970s – and informed fictions from Stand on Zanzibar to Soylent Green.
Interlude
Give this three minutes or so to get going. Around 2.45 it goes from a sedate apache lope to Godspeed!-y squall and hammers, and really starts moving from there.
Saturday I Died by Pets With Pets
Also, I recently discovered that 1) deviantArt is still going and 2) I still have an account there. If people want to email the addresses of dA accounts worth watching to warrenellis@gmail.com, that'd be great.
Laurie Penny's PENNY RED
Pluto Press are publishing PENNY RED, a collection of works by journalist Laurie Penny, well known to our parishioners here.
We're extremely excited to be publishing Penny Red: Notes from the New Age of Dissent a collection of Laurie Penny's most essential writings over the last few years. And excitement makes us do crazy things, like run an extremely generous pre-order offer which means you can get the book for a low, low price and read it in the first week of October, before it hits the shops and Amazon. What's more, 10 lucky pre-orderees will receive copies signed by Laurie in her 'savage red pen of justice'.
Peckham Outer-Space Initiative
Jones of BERG just showed me this:
POI – The Peckham Outer-Space Initiative is at the forefront of search & development, and tasks itself with the utilisation of space for not simply the preservation but evolution of the human species and its culture. A primary objective for POI is to develop and establish in-transit non-Earth living situations. These situations are proposed as solutions to current forms of planetary based society and living, and as such POI employs the manifesto/slogan:SHIPS NOT SHELTERS
There's even a related book, which I believe I must own.
See, this is your proper British science fictional condition. It's the British Interplanetary Society, and Bernard Quatermass building rockets in middle England, and Archigram's inventing nine futures per page on crap paper for tuppence-ha'penny. That the book is grainy black-and-white is just perfect. Using the spare resources of austerity to launch mad ideas into the noosphere.
Tongue-in-cheek and self-aware, and yet utterly determined to see the idea through. It warms me cockles, it does. I said cockles.
August 16, 2011
Night Music: Antique Shade
This EP by Antique Shade is also a free download, if you click through.
Good night.
The Kaibils
I had heard the stories about how the Kaibils were made to not only raise a pet dog and then kill it, but also to eat it raw.
Really interesting little bit on Al-Jazeera about the Kaibils, Guatemala's special forces, and the Kaibil Academy that trains them and others. A place that turns out incredibly honed and gifted mad people who then go on to work for the Zetas or the Hand With Eyes or for the patrons of state violence because the Guatemalan government hasn't thought of a thing to do with the creatures they create at the Academy.
At the entrance of the school there is a sign: WELCOME TO HELL.
Also, take a look at this Google Maps hack that shows drug-war hotspots in the region.
flickrgeist 16aug11
A snapshot of my network:
1. @miranda_july That cat was mega-creepy and hilarious. #ihaveseenthefuture, 2. Ape, Man, Machine, 3. 14:31, 4. A secret location in Japan that will be featured in @milesobrien @NewsHour story I worked with him on, from Japan. Bet you can't identify…, 5. Shard on shard, 6. St Dunstan-in-the-East, London, For The Colourblind/Drugged I
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