WARREN ELLIS LTD Posts

I must have been around 14.  Rayleigh Library and the Oxfam shop a few doors down the high street from it, which someone was clearly using to pay things forward and warp younger minds. In a single year — may even have been just spring-summer-autumn — these things happened to me:

• ON THE ROAD, Jack Kerouac.  I wasn’t reading particularly widely at the time, so god knows why I picked it up.  I have a dim recollection of Alan Moore likening Eddie Campbell, whose comics I’d just discovered, to Kerouac.  It may have been the first time that prose spoke to me like music spoke to me.  An album I never wanted to end.  In the next four years I read everything Kerouac in print at the time. (UK) (US)
• NOVA EXPRESS, William Burroughs.  I was mostly a science fiction reader at the time.  This was exploded science fiction, a league beyond the Philip K. Dick I’d already devoured hundreds of pages of.  I loved, and love, Philip K. Dick, but this was the real unfiltered sound. (UK) (US)
• A CURE FOR CANCER, Michael Moorcock.  I read this before THE FINAL PROGRAMME, in fact.  And, in a weird way, it let me connect up Kerouac and Burroughs, in that you could fracture narrative and also be of your time and place no matter where it was. (UK) (US)
• CRASH, JG Ballard.  Which, to me, was the new horror fiction, and talked about landscape and society and change in new and thrillingly relevant ways to a kid who could see, literally week by week, the roads widen and the concrete spill over on to the woodland. (UK) (US)
• SHIKASTA, Doris Lessing.  Which was like dropping a bomb on the four other books.  That book is so underrated, even today, so misunderstood, with such brilliant, jewelled and incredibly human prose.  Even the pen-portraits therein feel like condensed books, and I would spend minutes staring into space and just thinking after each page. (UK) (US)

(Written 16 March 2015, recovered from morning.computer)

MALIGN VELOCITIES by Benjamin Noys is a recent work on the subject of accelerationism, a notion whose general thrust is that, in order to achieve the goals of revolution, capitalism should be unchained, turbo-charged, and driven to its natural conclusion so that it explodes and dies. Noys provides an extremely thorough historical context for the idea, and it’s a fascinating deep dive. I lingered on a wonderful bit about the Italian Futurists, which lead me into some memory-refreshment on the Vorticists. There are times, in the early part of the book, where it feels like Noys has some score-settling to do, but it quickly becomes a superb and largely non-technical exp;loration of a very interesting space.  For me, it didn’t sustain towards the end, with a Freudian seizure of a chapter on “anal capitalism” and a tangled final statement, but everything up to that was marvellous.

Accelerationism is, for me, worth studying briefly, as it seems to me to be a response to pervasive capitalism brought on by the mental illnesses that capitalism has induced in people. (Schizophrenia is talked about, a lot, e.g. “in Nietzsche’s ‘schizo’ delirium he announced ‘I am all the names of history’”) Noys himself calls them “the fetishists of capital” at one point, but I have a feeling, and Noys often implies, that it’s a deeper malaise.

Capitalism is lately cast as that Lovecraftian force that some people should not look directly at for fear of going completely mad and being banged up in the Arkham Sanitarium. Maybe meditating upon it as some Dark God From Beyond Space that is crushing the world into new shapes just leads some people to rub their mouths on it and plead for it to go faster. And never stop.

(Also: accelerationism, like speculative realism and its surrounding notions, kind of strikes me as Science Fiction Condition philosophical enterprise. its roots may indeed go back to the 19th Century, but the modern conception is something else.)

MALIGN VELOCITIES, Benjamin Noys (UK) (US)

(originally written 2 Jan 2015, recovered from morning.computer)