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Author: Warren Ellis

SLOW HORSES

Published March 10, 2019 by Warren Ellis

SLOW HORSES by Mick Herron.  First of a series of (checks Wikipedia) five novels and two novellas.

Here’s the deal.  The Security Service, known popularly as MI5, sometimes can’t outright fire people.  Political reasons, operational reasons.  But it would still like to get rid of them. So it puts them in Slough House, a dismal set of offices intended to make those consigned there so miserable that they just quit.  Those people are known as slow horses. Slough House, slow horse.  Slough House is run by Jackson Lamb, himself a slow horse of mysterious provenance, an impressively offensive creature who looks a bit like Timothy Spall if you stuffed Timothy Spall with old pork fat and left him out in the rain for six weeks.

(Side note: Herron “casting” Lamb as Timothy Spall is, in its own way, as devious as Jeffrey Deaver describing Amelia Sachs in THE BONE COLLECTOR as an impossibly hot actress/supermodel, thereby creating the space for the inevitable casting of Angelina Jolie in the film version.)

Herron likes an odd name.  The lens for the book is a new slow horse called River Cartwright, for example.  Herron enjoys himself immensely with names, and also details. The one thing you’ll take away from this book is that Herron is writing only to amuse himself, and having a whale of a time doing it.  The twists and tangles of the plot, involving right-wing extremists and about twenty bad choices, propelled me through the book at quite a clip, but I always paused to admire the amount of fun Herron was having.  Boris Johnson, or a legally deniable version thereof, shows up halfway through, pretty much note-perfect, and he’s there largely so Herron can hate him.

It’s got a big crowd-pleasing third act, the complex weave of plot threads is handled very well, and it’s basically an extremely skilfully tailored entertainment.  If you ever liked a spy novel or a crime novel, you’re going to kick back with this, have a good time and wonder why it’s not on tv with Timothy Spall.

SLOW HORSES, Mick Herron (UK) (US)

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On Watches

Published March 8, 2019 by Warren Ellis

new watch, in the style of a pre-WW2 pilot's watch

I always wore a watch, until I didn’t.

I remember spending birthday money as a nine-year-old buying one of the first digital watches, Star Wars-branded, where you pressed a button to bring up the red-LED time. I wasn’t allowed to wear it to school because it was too expensive and precious. I think most of my young life was counted on a basic Timex with luminous dial.

I started going without a watch when featurephones and smartphones became small-size with an always-on or one-touch clock front. It’s the “smart pocket watch” thing – really, all we were missing were fob chains for our phones. I personally am prepared to hold out for fob chains, pinstriped waistcoat with a long phone pocket, and Google Monocle.

And then — I think for an article? – I got myself a Pebble Steel smartwatch. And not only did my phone’s battery life literally double because I wasn’t always taking the damn thing out to read notifications, but I got used to having that weight on my wrist again.

When Pebble threw in the towel, I caved and got an Apple Watch. Which is both far more functional – in terms of the number of things it can do — and far more poorly designed. Having to learn that weird arm-lift hitch-and-twist to get the watch to accept that you want to look at it and see the damn time. The “digital crown” that basically does whatever it fucking wants. But it does mostly succeed in keeping me off my phone and pushing the notifications and actions I need to my wrist when I’m in deep with the work.

A while later, I fell into an article about micro-brand watches. This one crew, Trifoglio, were selling a watch based on a Fiat 500’s speedometer, the Veloce. It was going on Kickstarter for something like a hundred and fifty American. The article was clear that something like that would usually go for 750, and in fact Trifoglio now sell it for $435. So I bought it. Just for the hell of it, really — if nothing else, it’d be a nice curio for a shelf, with its strange disc movement.

It sits on my wrist really nicely. It gives me pleasure to look at it. It’s unusual, the modernist styling amuses me, and Lush’s “500 (Shake Baby Shake)” goes through my head.

The watch pictured above arrived today. For a similar amount to the Veloce, I bought the Dan Henry 1939, which came with a leather-and-canvas watch roll for three devices. It’s inspired by pre-WW2 air and navy chronographs. I’m not A Watch Guy. I’m really not. I own three now, including the Apple Watch. And, don’t get me wrong, I love the powers of the 21st Century that the thing can afford me. But you know what? I’m at the point where I’m okay with putting the phone in my pocket and having a solid piece of art on my wrist that just tells me the time. I may finally have reached the point, here in my dotage, where just putting on a nice watch is a statement of escape from work.

(Also, inescapably, a statement of privilege, I know, I know,: just as owning the Apple Watch is a statement of successful capitalist embedding, muting the phone and putting on an analogue watch is a statement about not having to be always-on, fuck it, look at the nice watch some people made just because they think everything should be beautiful.)

(This is definitely more of a jotting-down. Never knowingly not not-fully-baked, here,)

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5mar19

Published March 5, 2019 by Warren Ellis

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4mar19

Published March 4, 2019 by Warren Ellis

This reissue with bonus tracks was necessary

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TREES Volume 3 Is All Written

Published February 28, 2019 by Warren Ellis

I just sent the script for the fifth and concluding part of Volume 3 of TREES to Jason Howard. I think he’s finishing up issue 3 right now.

I imagine that once Jason’s well into issue 4, the serial will be solicited by Image Comics, so we’re probably looking at an autumn release date.

Here’s one of the covers Jason has already done. I am having a drink.

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On Not Public Speaking

Published February 28, 2019 by Warren Ellis

I decided last year that I was no longer accepting public speaking gigs. It’s on my identity site’s contact page. I still get the occasional request, and, sometimes, a query as to why I’ve decided that.

Well, it’s a big time sink for me, and right now I have to calculate everything I do against production schedules and writing time. And, frankly, there’s not enough money in public speaking to make me want to adjust my career balance. More often than not, there’s literally no money. Unless you’re famous, with a non-fiction book on the shelves, with a speaker’s agency behind you — and I ain’t none of those — public speaking is a thing you do for your own interest.

For me, that was meeting people, sometimes helping out (I’m never going to be anyone’s first choice, but sometimes events and festivals get stuck, so it’s nice to be able to get them out of a stressful bind), learning how to work to an audience and listening to new things.

It, however, ended up much like my experience of comics conventions, which I no longer attend. You show up, do your bit, and then everybody leaves and you sit on your own. Public speaking, for me, is mostly about losing three days of work and undertaking yet another adventure in room service food.

The audiences are very kind, and generally laugh at the bits that are supposed to be funny. But I increasingly found myself just sitting on my own somewhere, looking at my watch and counting down the time until I had to leave for the airport. It stopped being edifying or fun, and, honestly, if I’m just going to sit around alone for hours and days on end, I can do that much more comfortably at home.

And now I have a FAQ post to point to for the next time someone asks.

#FAQ

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future leaks 27feb19

Published February 27, 2019 by Warren Ellis

I found a gif on the wonderful TV NEON tumblr that captures two seconds from 1989 which may in fact have predicted the whole of the mainstream cultural present and I am weirdly fascinated by it.

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Fog Notes

Published February 22, 2019 by Warren Ellis

Last night I laid in bed and listened to the foghorns sounding over the estuary. I haven’t heard them that loud and clear in years. The sound reminded me of the brief period I lived in America. There, I would lay and listen to the trains lowing as they came into the yard down by the river. American train horns are sad, haunted sounds. Especially compared to the triumphant fanfares of British trains. The Thames Delta’s foghorn is an old beast rearing up and letting you know it’s still there and still watching, ancient and tired as it may be. It’s here, it sees you, and it’s reaching its arms out to guide you.

The fog is rolling back in, laying a white veil over the treetops. I look forward to going to sleep to the note of the river tonight.

#jotter

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SPECTRES

Published February 21, 2019 by Warren Ellis

Just arrived today, SPECTRES, from Shelter Press. Essays on composing and listening from, among many others, Félicia Atkinson, Stephen O’Malley, Jim O’Rourke, Eliane Radigue and Chris Watson. All essays presented in English and French. Details and ordering at this link here. Really looking forward to spending some time with this.

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