Warren Ellis's Blog, page 173

GUEST INFORMANT: Steve Aylett

Novelist Steve Aylett was recently described by Michael Moorcock as "the most original voice in the literary scene… become, if you like, his own genre." I've loved his work since SLAUGHTERMATIC back in '97, and enjoyed seeing him receive The Jack Trevor Story Memorial Prize in 06, the conditions of which are that, in the Jack Trevor Story tradition, "the money shall be spent in a week to a fortnight and the author have nothing to show for it at the end of that time." He's been a sort of distant acquaintance to me for years — I think, the last time Grant Morrison tried to get us together, I was in Denmark or something. Nonetheless, we've vaguely stayed in touch to the extent that I felt okay about throwing burning stuff at his shack in the woods until he agreed to write to you about whatever was in his head that day. And this is what he's thinking about:

AYLETT: IMPERVIOUS TO POPULARITY

Lately I've been considering the specific elements that brought my career to the miasma of screaming chimps and burning wreckage it is today.

APPEARANCE: These days it's good for an author to have an attractive visual. For instance, China Mieville looks like Conan the Barbarian emerging annoyed from a beauty salon. I myself, who more than anything resemble a giant hen, have to compensate by being a better writer.

PREDICTING THE FUTURE: Very easy to do, but people think it's hard and no-one likes a smart-ass.

INOCULATION: Readers tend to quote my stuff to their loved ones while gasping with laughter, so for every rabid fan a minimum of one bitter enemy is created.

KILLING FROM A DISTANCE: I sent a copy of my juvenilia The Crime Studio to William Burroughs – a week later he was dead. I sent a copy of Bigot Hall to Stephen Fry and he went temporarily insane. It really began when I got a copy of The Crime Studio into Broadmoor to get a blurb remark from Ronnie Kray. He didn't provide a blurb remark but decided he wanted to be a writer, and sent me a story about a young man on the way to be hanged, a tender bloom to be cut down like a flower. Fearing reprisals if I said it was crap, I decided to ignore the entire situation. This worked well for me, as Ron subsequently died. Years later I had forgotten these phenomena and sent a copy of LINT to Kurt Vonnegut, who immediately died.

MISSING THE POINT: When I got a big deal from Orion to write four books I was as happy as a dog in a sidecar, but failed to realise that this was my time to 'sell out' and write some sprawling fantasy containing nothing conspicuous. Instead I wrote the four Accomplice books (now collected in one volume as THE COMPLETE ACCOMPLICE), deemed some of the strangest and most unduly interesting books ever written, an inconvenience that ended my commercial career. One editor hinted that he wanted to break every bone in my body, forcing me to point out that the hundreds of tiny cartilaginous ones in my ears would take weeks of precision work, and that by the time he'd finished the second one the first will have healed and he would have to start the whole process again. It would in effect be like painting the Forth Bridge.

CORNERING A MARKET NO-ONE WANTS: People claim to want originality but when confronted with the real thing they're repelled . Because it's new there's no receptor slot in their head to comfortably receive it. But since this is all I write, I'm stuck dealing in a thing deemed poison to all.

SATIRE: There's a notion that if something is funny it's not to be taken seriously. Anyone who has suffered a hernia can tell you this isn't so.

STRANGE CONCERNS: Chefs, mimes, waiters. What do they want? Dogs, what do they mean? Snails, why? Let's tackle waiters – the restaurant represents a society in which those claiming to serve us are in fact our masters. They are called waiters but it is we who wait. Throughout the experience we are baffled and powerless, but will do anything to avoid admitting it. Waiters can go to hell.

EFFORTLESS INCITEMENT: I cause rage and concern by pointing the way with my elbows when asked for directions, bulging my eyes at arbitrary moments, saying 'Don't kiss me, I've got a cold' to men, addressing people as 'my liege', replying to the wrong person, inflating my forehead like the throat of a bullfrog, stepping with both legs at once, and carrying out every activity in such a way as to covertly draw attention to my chin. I am despised and pelted with fruit, which I catch in my mouth.

BEING CONCISE: What could be more unfashionable than an epigram? The devil is a black glove we wear to hide our own fingerprints. I blame you.

Steve Aylett is the author of LINT, Slaughtermatic, The Complete Accomplice, Smithereens and Rebel at the End of Time, as well as THE CATERER comic .

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GUEST INFORMANT: Charlie Huston (warrenellis.com)
GUEST INFORMANT: Rita J King (warrenellis.com)
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GUEST INFORMANT: Jamais Cascio (warrenellis.com)
The Complete Accomplice, by Steve Aylett – review (guardian.co.uk)

Returnal

I am returned from the dead of winter.

Mostly I sat around reading and occasionally pouring bottles of wine into me as a defense against The Swine-Thing Flu that's going around. Sometimes I went outside, fending off Nature with a lit cigarette while doing rustic things like Levering An Inch-Thick Plate Of Ice Off The Fishpond.

Things will probably be at half-power this week. First week back at work is always a nightmare, and January in general is usually a month I'd rather forget. Aside from deadlines and editors & publishers panicking because people took time off to see the sky friends and family, there's also paying for Xmas, paying some tax, and, this month, paying for a new laptop.

My current machine, the Little Black Book, had been making wheezing sounds through much of 2010, and just before New Year it started making the clear sign that it's praying for death to deliver it from more beatings. It's a Thinkpad X61, and it's been relentlessly hammered for the best part of three years now. Time to let it go.

Marc Weidenbaum on my Ubuweb selections +++ news story on the three books about my work being published by SeqArt in 2011

2011 is going to be an unusually intense work year, and so I eventually let people talk me into spending a scary amount of money on an unusually powerful laptop. The Thinkpad W701 with the Extreme Edition processor and 16GB of RAM. Sadly, the W701ds option, with the extra screen that slides out, isn't available for the UK. Although it probably wouldn't let me throw a feed reader on the extra screen anyway. But I'm sick of the 12.1 inch screen and the weedy metal brain that starts weeping when I run more than four applications at once. The W701 is basically the laptop version of HAL. I think I could run a reasonably-sized space agency on it.

(Before I got the laptop, I always had big beasts of desktop systems. It'll be nice to have a bit of power back.)

It will be here in two weeks. And then the work begins. I expect to be freed up in the next several weeks to talk about at least some of the many New Things I spent 2010 organising and working on.

Also this site needs some design surgery, which will happen when Ariana and I get enough spare brain cycles to work out what it actually needs.

Anyway. Yes. Back now.

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Marie, she said, had died at the age of 99; the next mo...

Marie, she said, had died at the age of 99; the next morning, Jacques packed explosives into his fishing boat, went to sea and blew himself up.
Note: ostentatious suicide.
Shared on January 2nd, 2011 from Kindle


Reflexions
by Richard Olney
See this item on Amazon.com

–

whitechapel 1jan11

on my message board on New Year's Day:

* WEBCOMICS WEEK (Jan 1-8 2011) -You do a webcomic? Tell me about it here.

* ALTERNATE WORLD REMAKE/REMODEL: Stanley Kubrick's IRON MAN – first artist/designer challenge thread of the year

* RED: EYES ONLY Out Today! – Cully Hamner's comics prequel to the RED movie

* Witch House Haus – where I get other people to post things for me to listen to, with luck

* Best Albums of 2010 – people are still arguing

* Comics on Sale This Week (jan 5)

Happy New Year. Stand on the neck of 2010 and throatpunch...

Happy New Year. Stand on the neck of 2010 and throatpunch the future.

And Out

Broadcasting for 2010 is now concluded. Broadcasting will resume on or around 1 January 2011.

Happy holidays to all who observe them, and a happy new year to all.

Warren Ellis

the frozen wastes of Essex

20 December 2010

Phantom Circuit #57 (15th Dec. 2010) by Phantom Circuit o...

Phantom Circuit #57 (15th Dec. 2010) by Phantom Circuit on Mixcloud

Thanks to the San Francisco Chronicle for listing PLANETA...

Thanks to the San Francisco Chronicle for listing PLANETARY Book 4: SPACETIME ARCHAEOLOGY as one of the best sf books of 2010.

Beefheart

Haven't listened to Captain Beefheart in years.  Hadn't even thought about him for a long while.  So it was a bit of a shock when Nika Danilova posted on Twitter that Don Van Vliet, the Captain, died today.  Mer Yayanos put a notice on Coilhouse, including a wonderful YouTube playlist that I'm listening to right now, and rediscovering the love of Beefheart.

links 17dec10

Yeah, so Yahoo changed their story and claim they weren't shutting down or "sunsetting" del.icio.us and are putting it up for sale instead. Because, you know, firing the team and having the news slip out and then issuing a statement 24 hours later doesn't at all sound like you're changing the story after half the internet called you a shitbird.

So, until I get an alternative service set up (that Reeder for iPhone can talk to, ideally), I'm doing links like this:

* "Analyzing the isotope ratios of ancient raindrops preserved in soils and lake sediments, Stanford researchers have shown that a wave of mountain building began in British Columbia, Canada about 49 million years ago and rolled south to Mexico. The finding helps put to rest the idea that there was once a Tibet-like plateau across the western US that collapsed and eroded into the mountains we see today." While I wasn't aware that people were running around screaming There Was Totally A Tibet Thing On America One Time, what I'm taking from this is — analysing ancient raindrops. I didn't know we could do that. That is actually a bit cool.

* "The costly launch failure that caused Russia to delay the deployment of its own satellite system was the result of a fuel miscalculation, a commission charged with probing the accident said Friday." Yeah, this is why Russian space travel has always worried me a bit. I fucking love the Soyuz, but, at the risk of promoting national stereotypes, it's generally still all a bit "we hit the tractor with the spanner until it ploughs a straight furrow."

Raikunov said the fault lay with the Energia Rocket And Space Corporation, which designed the carrier. He said that the company failed to account for the fact that the updated version of the rocket had bigger fuel tanks, which weighed more when filled to the top. "This increased the payload weight and the rocket did not have the energy to deliver the satellites to orbit," the space official said.

Let that sink in.

* Jim Jupp of Belbury Poly creates "the first in an occasional series of radio shows in which I'll be playing a few of my favourite tunes, giving you a sneak preview of forthcoming Ghost Box material and leading you all in devotional song." Or you can click through and stream it through a Mixcloud widget. So that's tonight's listening sorted.

* Music writer Simon Reynolds signs off for the year with a list of his favourite records of 2010. Which I haven't done myself, yet. I suppose I should try.

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