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WARREN ELLIS LTD Posts

status, week of 7apr26

Published April 7, 2026 by Warren Ellis

I have sowed 120 seed modules, planted 15 raspberry canes, repotted a bunch of other plants, planted bulbs in giant pots, lost some of said bulbs to squirrels and some giant invisible monster that could overturn a 30-liter heavy rubber pot full of soil, and threw my back out lifting a bucket of soaked coir compost out of the sink, so now I can hardly move and barely half of the spring prep has been done. It’s been great.

I haven’t been keeping up with making notes here, which I need to fix next week.

HERE WHERE WE LIVE IS OUR COUNTRY, Molly Crabapple (UK) (US+) was released here on Kindle last night. I dearly hope the pre-orders were enough to get it on to the NYT list.

OPERATIONS: moving around 20pp out of the house this week and getting started on some new projects, but:
STATUS: the sun is out and I am stuck indoors waiting on half a dozen deliveries. I’m out this weekend, and right now it looks like the weather is going to be pretty good all week, so once I can move properly, I’m going to be combining work bursts with being as outside and offline as I can.
READING: THE VISIONARIES, Wolfram Eilenberger (UK) (US+) – my reading has REALLY slowed down over the last month

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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in the meantime: 31mar26

Published March 31, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Music for Intersecting Planes by Leila Bordreuil + Kali Malone

Aphelion by Isolde & Isobelle

Vision Transmissions by zakè, Christina Giannone, Tyresta

Bodies of Water (music for a performance by Iván Pérez / Dance Theatre Heidelberg)
by Rutger Zuydervelt

Racked up 580 release notifications in my Bandcamp folder while I wasn’t looking. I need to get two pieces of work out the door today, so there’s no time for anything but writing and listening.

Tags: music
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died: 30mar26

Published March 30, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Alexander Kluge died. Just a couple of weeks after his friend Jurgen Habermas.

THE FACE magazine died, again.

Didn’t get as much done outside as I had hoped for – the weather kept turning, from sun to rain to gales to hailstones the size of Smarties. But with the clock springing forward, I have extra light at the end of the day, so I’ll be starting seeds later, as I cleaned out the mini-greenhouses yesterday. ALL the seeds. Also hoping to clear a patch of ground to start some of the red onions.

That said, my body is doing its usual spring “WHERE THE FUCK DID THAT HOUR GO” routine and my brain wants to crawl into a shallow grave.

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out: 27mar26

Published March 27, 2026 by Warren Ellis

I have all the writing to do today, and I have at least half a dozen deliveries coming in, some of which are plants, which means tomorrow the garden watch is going on and I’m going offline for two days, and today I am going to have pretty much every minute spoken for. I am very much looking forward to two days of cleaning and planting, and all I have to do is remember to batch some meals today for the weekend. How much do you want to bet that I totally forget to do that?

Saw PROJECT HAIL MARY yesterday and am writing up my notes on it today for Sunday’s newsletter, which you can subscribe to here if you arrived on this page by accident.

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sailing ship time: 26mar26

Published March 26, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Off to see PROJECT HAIL MARY today, and then I need to crack a story idea that’s been eluding me for two weeks, and tomorrow is solid scripting and prose writing all damn day, and then the weekend is all about washing out propagators and starting seeds. It’s going to be a cold weekend, and the light and spring warmth is supposed to come back next week… and I’m back to living in the weather changes. I suspect I’ll be losing an entire day next week to running the woodchipper and chopping holly wood into logs, in between planting raspberry canes and onions.

I missed this yesterday: NASA intends to send a probe to Mars on top of a nuclear-electric drive, Space Reactor-1 Freedom. It seems to be pretty much a test article – a year-long transit to Mars does not imply much in the way of breakthrough oomph, but the efficiency of nuclear-electric thrust does mean that once it’s dropped off its payload of helicopters at Mars there will be more than enough juice to send the thing off to Saturn.

Important to remember that this is nuclear-electric, not nuclear-thermal – therefore slower but “cleaner.” I don’t yet know enough to know if a bigger reactor will provide more nuclear-electric speed, so we’re still in sailing-ship transit times. I always thought I’d see a solved version of NERVA in my lifetime, but I guess not.


READING: NETTLES AND PETALS, Jamie Walton (UK) (US+),  THE VISIONARIES, Wolfram Eilenberger (UK) (US+)

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: space Mars
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moonbase: 25mar26

Published March 25, 2026 by Warren Ellis

I noticed yesterday that NASA announced “President Trump’s Moon Base” will be commenced before the end of 2028, therefore the end of the President’s term. Given that the delayed Artemis 2 mission is a lunar flyby and Artemis 3 was reconfigured from a lunar landing to a low earth orbit test of new spacesuits and the dock/undock of a lander – and note that Apollo did those missions the other way around, Apollo 7 crew-rated the boat and lander configuration in LEO, Apollo 8 was the lunar flyby – this may get a little scary/deathy. Twenty-five launches between now and the end of 2028, ten lunar launches next year alone, is a hell of a swing.

I took this ten minutes before the HAIL started.

Absolutely dismal day out there, with a “feels like” of -4 C and 40mph winds. The mancub has made it clear that he blames me – he hates the wind, and is punishing me for taking the sun away. For some reason, he made the very specific decision, not long after we got him, that the weather is always my fault.

Accessions:

OPERATION PAPERCLIP: NAZI SCIENTISTS IN AMERICA, Annie Jacobsen (UK) (US+)

BIOLOGICAL WAR: A SCENARIO, Annie Jacobsen (UK) (US+) – PRE-ORDER

OPERATIONS: Zoom call later, and I need to ship out eight pages, review some story documents and get 500 words down on another thing, as well as start Sunday’s newsletter.
STATUS: 7hrs sleep.
READING: NETTLES AND PETALS, Jamie Walton (UK) (US+), which I got given for Xmas and I’m opening now because food growing season has begun. THE VISIONARIES, Wolfram Eilenberger (UK) (US+), re-reading REALITY HUNGER, David Shields (UK) (US+)

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: space moon books
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old new year’s eve: 24mar26

Published March 24, 2026 by Warren Ellis

It is Old New Year’s Eve. The Julian Calendar wasn’t officially abolished here in the UK until 1752, and on that calendar the New Year started on what is now 25 March (also Lady Day).

A second chance to start the year.

Apple blossom is coming. This evening I am pulling out a notebook in which I will section off the garden on paper and start writing the list of tasks that need to be done out there before the end of this month. Yesterday I got an extra five 30L pots, I have some extra compost on the way, and I have a rough and probably quite chaotic planting plan.

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content break: 23mar26

Published March 23, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Spring is surging out there in the world. A few little flashes of cold, then some rushes of warmth. I have some big pots and extra compost arriving over the next couple of days. Bot traffic is expected to exceed human traffic on the internet by 2027, and, frankly, I can already tell. I note that The Economist is now referring to the current mess in the Middle East as The Third Gulf War, a term that has a bit of a chill on it. A review of two dozen clinical trials suggests that the supposed magic fix for depression through use of psychedelics seems to be mostly down to the placebo effect. Freeze-dried elflord Bryan Johnson is livestreaming himself smoking toad pus. One study suggests that 20% of more than 14,000 books self-published through Amazon are mostly written by AI. However, something like 3.5 million books were self-published last year, and they obviously couldn’t all be checked by that study. When the net tells you to go back out into the world, you should probably listen.

OPERATIONS: One of those “touching eight different things” days
STATUS: Sleeping poorly. 7hrs 52m, stress marker of 72. I need to take this damned FitBit off again. Watching the exchange rate go up and down like a yoyo.
READING: THE VISIONARIES, Wolfram Eilenberger (UK) (US+), re-reading REALITY HUNGER, David Shields (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: The Early Music Show

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: space weird society
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breathwork: 22mar26

Published March 22, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Another interesting night was had at Konsztrukting Soundz. Notably, Viv Corringham:

New newsletter is out.

I’m poking around the garden, assessing the winter damage – a branch snapped off an apple tree, most of the bulbs coming up blind, soil issues here and there – and getting myself back into the outdoor headspace.

STATUS: Taking a decompression day. Got tickets to see PROJECT HAIL MARY later in the week. As I wrote in January:

I actually liked the book, but I’m going to be curious to see if Drew Goddard addressed the underlying autistic note in and the apparent asexuality of the protagonist.


READING: THE VISIONARIES, Wolfram Eilenberger (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: The New Music Show: Icelandic Chill

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

Tags: music events
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The New Notebook System: Fourth Stage

Published March 19, 2026 by Warren Ellis

In which we discover that three notebook covers is not enough, because I simply have too much going on and each project needs its own notebook once it’s formed in my main daily notebook.

And so I went to InkitLeather, because I have a ton of Field Notes notebooks from when I was on their quarterly subscription service:

A black leather notebook cover. It smells so good. And it’s a custom design. It’s built to take SIX Field Notes notebooks.

And that completes the system. This gives me fifteen notebooks in use across four notebook covers.

All serious thinking is pen on paper. All memory-making is pen on paper.

PREVIOUSLY:

Tags: notebooks
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