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35 pages, ebook
First published August 1, 2015
How are we supposed to live in the future when the future just abandons us to the night?
– Alia Noton in Elektrograd: Rusted Blood
The future is coming, and we’re going to win.
– Warren Ellis, Orbital Operations
Morning comes and the building blocks rise up on their groaning, rusted mechanical legs. Shaking the snow off its shoulder, the city walks off into a brand new day.
Towering green flailing devices, intended to quite literally fling crafts into orbital space shoot out of the ground like the tentacles of a giant squid.
The decrepit carcasses of construction robots serve as shelter for the homeless.
This is Elektrograd, built as a test bed for experimental architecture. This is a city meant to represent the future.
And the future has just murdered somebody.
Warren Ellis is back with another novella and we are all grateful for it. It is a murder mystery, a genre in which the writer has been playing around in on and off for the last couple of years. And he’s getting fearfully good at it.
So the future has murdered someone, and the people who live in it need to find out why.
Discussing the writing process behind The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon said that, for that particular story, the setting came first, and then it was just a matter of conceiving a character who would be able to guide the reader through all the different aspects of said setting. And so he bethought himself of a detective. Historically, Chabon says, detective have always been ideal vehicles in fiction, having access to both the highest tiers of society, down the lowest of lows. It is the reason why speculative fiction has so many stories that use mysteries as their focal point (the aforementioned and mighty excellent Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, The Last Policeman, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, a handful of Philip K. Dick’s stories). Stories like these need someone who can guide us through an Inferno and, well, Philip Marlowe makes a damn good Virgil.
In Elektrograd: Rusted Blood, we get our own Virgil in the form of Ervin Frauss, an aging, cantankerous-yet-always-charming Detective Inspector in Mekanoplatz, Elektorgrad’s northernmost district.
The murder narrative, truth be told, is nothing out of this world. The main mystery, although interesting and engaging enough, turns out to be not that terribly mysterious. (Indeed, Ellis seems to be aware of the fact, as a character is introduced right in the middle of the story, with a sign practically over their heads, in which THIS IS THE MURDERER WHO MURDERS WITH MURDER is written in giant block letters.) But the whodunit is not the point of the tale, rather the setting is – and settings are one things at which Ellis exceeds superbly. From the sprawling and disorienting City in Transmetropolitan, to the bleak and desolate Snowtown in Fell, to even his realistic, albeit grim, depiction of Los Angeles in his Dead Pig Collector novella, Warren Ellis knows how to create an atmosphere. Elektrograd is no exception. You leave the story wanting to explore its other districts. You leave the story wanting to know more about the city’s history, its genesis. You leave wanting more, and what higher praise could there be for a story?
(In the afterword, Ellis writes that there are still six other districts in the city left to explore, and that he wishes to write these six other stories. One can only hope he gets the chance to do that.)