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-ma
terial 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.
Table of Contents
How It Works
Five Thousand Miles
The Full Head Tingle
Nothing Happened
Up All Night
Undertow
Microcast
Rat Star
Future Underground
Your Actual True Hallowe'en Story
Elevator Lady
Mind Gangsterism
March of 2005
Stories, Drinking and the World
What Goes Into the Sausage?
Comics & Ideas
Public Intellectual
Drowning
Stabbing Mars
Bending Mars
Seven Songs
Everything Is Happening
Every Single Day
Rupture
Bugs
Inviting Death From Space
The Final Solution
On Teleportation
Oriana
Gaia Has A Bumhole
Experiments In Food
Battlesbridge
The Machines Of Desire
Comics and Time
Afterword
Warren Ellis, Shivering Sands: Seven Years of Stories, Drinking and the World
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