Warren Ellis's Blog, page 30
February 14, 2013
booklist 2013: James Bond: My Long and Eventful Search for His Father, Len Deighton
This was a fun little thing. Len Deighton writes a gossipy, fond, sometimes rather sad history of how the James Bond films got made, how there came to be two Bond movies made at the same time (the unfortunate NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN being the stalking horse to the “real” movie cycle), and how almost everyone involved lived in grandeur and yet died in despair and poverty. Some lovely touches of detail, and fascinating sketches of a time somehow oddly past: the days of the well-dressed, well-lunched, somewhat gamey creative eccentric, staggering from country home to city bar to beachfront pile in a wine-sodden haze, trailing an industrial plume of cigarette smoke and legal paperwork the whole way.
A very enjoyable afternoon read. Cheers, Len.
February 13, 2013
February 12, 2013
THE HUMAN DIVISION And The Digital Serial
I’ve already talked about the first instalment of John Scalzi’s serialised sf novel THE HUMAN DIVISION here. I read parts two to five on the train into London today – I’ve been getting them auto-delivered every week, and intended to read a couple of parts on the plane, but got into David Byrne’s HOW MUSIC WORKS instead. (Still on track for a book a week in 2013, if you squint at it.) Anyway.
What I wanted to briefly note down is this. This is a thirteen-part serial. Each piece takes no less than ten or fifteen minutes to read, I think. Some, like the first episode, are much bigger. He’s taking a risk by varying the length of the episodes so dramatically, but I think he’s getting away with it. Each piece is costing me 99 American cents, or 64p. An mp3 runs me 99p on iTunes. A tv episode costs £2.49 on iTunes. Each episode of THE HUMAN DIVISION automatically downloads to my Kindle.
In modern-day terms, this is the equivalent of a cable television show season happening – but in a deeply participatory “cool” medium, and with a greater informational density than other cool media like tv or even comics.
It’s the instant nature of the ebook, with its automagic form of broadcast, that’s the killer. If there was a single serious misstep, it was that the publisher did not negotiate with Amazon (I don’t know if it’s true for other vendors) to create a one-click subscription for all thirteen parts. Perhaps that was impossible. I certainly would have liked it, though.
While companies like Netflix attempt to embrace the “novel for television” by making all thirteen parts of HOUSE OF CARDS available simultaneously, it’s interesting to see Scalzi and Tor go the other way by testing not a traditional serialisation but a “television season for novel.” The walls of the current standard of container are getting bent a little.
You can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Stephen King’s forays into periodical serial had been taken in the spring days of the e-reader, tablet and smartphone.
Yes, doing digital-only or (in this case) digital-first still feels a little exclusionary. But, honestly? Is it any more economically exclusionary than publishing in hardback? And it’s not like there’s not a substantial digital-first audience out there.
I don’t pretend to be informed enough to know if THE HUMAN DIVISION constitutes a signal suite of breakthroughs in publishing. But it’s the one in front of me, and it’s gotten me thinking. There’s a beauty to the idea of signing up to receive the digital broadcast of a prose serial. Buying a season of book and having each piece magically appear every week. And, conceivably, reaching an audience that won’t or can’t hit bookstores, through the developing momentum of word-of-mouth over thirteen weeks. And, frankly, getting to talk to people for an entire season, one week at a time.
Not Fully Baked, as a thought. But it’s nagging at me. There’s more to unpack, but I wanted to get this down now.
February 11, 2013
So I’ve Been Away
But now I’m back. I needed time away from everything, post-booklaunch. Am ever so slightly recharged. Forwards!
(Photo taken by me, yes.)
January 31, 2013
booklist 2013: LOVE IS STRANGE, Bruce Sterling
That is one peculiar fucking book.
You get the strong feeling that Bruce sat down one day and said, “A Paranormal Romance. People like those. How can I tear down the term ‘Paranormal Romance’ until it a) turns into something I would like to write b) makes people who like Paranormal Romances cry blood?”
Bruce likes breaking things in his fiction. I often see things his characters love getting ruined somehow. It’s hard to think of anyone else who enjoys the casual harrowing of his characters so much.
It is a romance. Bruce does in fact have fun playing with old romance-fiction tropes. There are points where you can almost hear him cackling as he rattles around a LOVE BOAT port of call and scatters poison romances across the sun-kissed trattorias and streets. There is the paranormal: or, at least, people who think they’re paranormal, and people who call each other paranormal. It’s also, to some extent, about the delusions around these things. The female romantic lead is a loon, the male romantic lead is a Silicon Canal alpha-drone, the supporting cast are grotesques and I’ll be surprised if Mr Sterling is ever again invited to a European futurism conference.
“Go to your Futurist Congress,” said Farfalla. “They are expecting you there. Your important friends will take good care of you. Nothing will happen to you there. Nothing ever happens when important people talk about the future.”
Bruce enjoyably tours the world with his romantic monsters, gleefully showing up the sooty old structures of the romance form while cracking its floorboards with brazen hodloads of science and politics. It’s a weird, lumpy, sometimes uncomfortable comedy about shitty people. It is the best and only romance novel you should read this year. It is fun and evil.
But it really is a peculiar fucking book.
Ebook only: find out more at this page.
January 30, 2013
FAQ 30jan13: Answers To Random Questions Normal People Wouldn’t Ask
How particular do you think new authors should be about which publishing house they get published through?
New authors should be more particular about how many complimentary copies of the book they get (and what it looks like), because that’s your calling card to other publishers, to show that someone else gambled their money on you. That’s the trick. Getting published once is often the biggest, toughest hurdle.
So, having just finished the slipcase/box-set of The Sandman that I got for Christmas… what are the chances Vertigo will do something equally lovely for Transmetropolitan? It definitely deserves the box set treatment.
You have to understand that I’m not the publisher, and I cannot cause these things to happen. THE SANDMAN was a best-selling, critically-acclaimed work that forms the backbone of the mainstream adult comics canon. TRANSMETROPOLITAN was a fairly obscure, nicely drawn container for a bunch of swearing. I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Howdy. I just wanted to clamour about "How to Burn Water". After all, you are the reason why I own and enjoy using a mandoline. And why I always keep a small jar of fresh cow tears in my cupboard. So a proper manly cookbook with a beard that would curbstomp my wife’s namby-pamby jamieolivers would really be appreciated.
No plans for the occasionally joked-about cookbook HOW TO BURN WATER. But I will give you this:
STUPID LEMON CHICKEN
I had two skinless chicken breasts and no idea what to do with them. So I did this:
Find a bottle of white wine. Remember the rule: don’t cook with anything you wouldn’t drink. So drink some.
Now get a roasting tin. Throw a large glass of the wine into it. Squeeze one lemon’s worth of juice into it. Stir. Throw some herbs in — I used thyme and chives. I grab some chives and a pair of scissors and just snip half-inch lengths of chive in to the pan. Stir it all again. Lay the chicken breasts in. Go away for five minutes and drink some more wine. Come back. Flip the breasts over. Wow, that sounds weird. Put them in the oven at 190 C (do the conversion yourself, you have the internet.) Every five minutes, open the oven and spoon some of the liquid in the pan over the chicken. And then drink some more wine. Until 25 minutes have passed. At which point it is cooked. It is not only stupidly simply, but you’re well on your way to being drunk. Excellent.
Hello Mr. Ellis, I apologize if you have already answered this, but what was it that made you want to write comic books?
The riches, the glamour and the seductive charisma such a career supernaturally gifts one with.
However, back in the real world: I love visual narrative media, and comics are the purest kind.
January 29, 2013
(Some Of) My Favourite PLANETARY Covers
The thing about John Cassaday was that you could just throw anything at him, and it’d work. So I did, and it did.
The overall concept for the PLANETARY covers was that, every issue, the book would simply look like nothing else next to it on the shelves, and that was how it would stand out. Look for the thing that looked like none of the other things. I think we mostly managed that. These are a few of my favourites.
Hong Kong Action Film issue. The title and credits were actually supposed to appear as film-style subtitles under the image, but that was a step too far even for the fairly laid-back editorial office. I’m still kind of sad about that.
I would often just throw shorthand and free-association at John, for the cover images. In this instance, I think I said something like, “doom, sorrow, monochrome, abstract, Joy Division. Yes. Joy Division.” And probably the title of the story, which was “Magic And Loss.” (Thereby also summoning Lou Reed.) This was just a perfect conjuring.
The Full Steranko.
In comics, when you say “Steranko,” you mean a pure shot of Pop-Art/Op-Art Sixties mad-science spy story.
”Steranko” may in fact be the best name anyone ever had.
Kubrick and 2001: A Space Odyssey. RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA and Seventies science-fiction paperbacks. At this point, we were putting letterer/designer Richard Starkings through such horrors every time that he started crediting himself on the covers as revenge, which we were perfectly fine with.
Our “Doctor Strange” issue, connecting that character’s Sixties origins with psychedelia. Right off a Fillmore poster, in classic period colours.
And this one. Which I provided no notes for, had no idea for, and had nothing to do with. The penultimate issue. And John just generated the perfect image. I remember just looking at this and saying, “you clever, clever bastard.”
Can you see the logo? It’s just a bit of type above the Wildstorm mark in the top left. By this juncture, we’d proven our point – readers found PLANETARY, every time we released an issue, by looking for the thing that did not look like the other comics. And that’s all down to the brilliance of John Cassaday.
January 28, 2013
The Instagramming Of Books
I have a terrible habit of using Instagram to capture interesting bits of books I’m reading. I provide the following, without explanation, shame or sourcing (I have the sourcing saved, but these go into a file where I can rediscover them independent of sourcing, so I can make new connections).
I personally think this should be a Thing People Do.
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