Warren Ellis - Shivering Sands

Prose and Graphic Novels by Warren Ellis

Crooked Little Vein

Available Light

Bad Signal: From The Desk of Warren Ellis

Come In Alone

Transmetropolitan

Global Frequency

Ministry of Space

Fell

Planetary

Desolation Jones

Ocean

Crecy

Aetheric Mechanics

Frankensteins Womb

Freakangels

INTERNATIONAL ELECTROPHONIC UNIT

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UNITED KINGDOM UNITED STATES

Published by arrangement with Lulu.com Publishing House.

SHIVERING SANDS

Portions of this book appeared as follows:

"Five Thousand Miles", "The Full Head Tingle", "Nothing Happened", and "Microcast" in Warren Ellis' Brainpowered at artbomb 2002-2003. "What Goes Into the Sausage?", "Comics & Ideas", and "Public Intellectuals" in Warren Ellis' The Ministry at the pulse 2006.

Copyright 2009 by Warren Ellis Design and editing by Ariana Osborne All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. For information contact the author: www.WarrenEllis.com First PrintingNovember 2009

ISBN-13: 978-0-557-16167-6 (pbk)

THE MOBILE PRODUCTION OF THIS BOOK ATE:

one Handspring Visor

one Palmspring Treo

one Nokia 810 tablet

six foldaway keyboards

more than seven thousand cans of Red Bull

sixteen thousand cigarettes

all my hair

and a playlist that if typed out would reach most of the way to the moon.

How It Works

An Introduction, of sorts

I still get asked with appalling regularity "where my ideas come from."

Here's the deal. I flood my poor ageing head with information.

Any information. Lots of it. And I let it all slosh around in the back of my brain, in the part normal people use for remembering bills, thinking about sex and making appointments to wash the dishes.

Eventually, you get a critical mass of information. Datum 1 plugs into Datum 2 which connects to Datum 3 and Data 4 and 5 stick to it and you've got a chain reaction. A bunch of stuff knits together and lights up and you've got what's called "an idea".

And for that brief moment where it's all flaring and welding together, you are Holy. You can't be touched. Something impossible and brilliant has happened and suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein's brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation.

That is what has happened to me tonight. I am beaming Sex Rays across the world and my brain is all lit up with Holy Fire. If I felt like it, I could shag a million nuns and destroy their faith in Christ.

From my chair.

See, this is the good bit about writing. It's what keeps you going.

It's the wild rush of "shit, did I think of that?" with all kinds of weird chemicals shunting around your brain and ideas and images and moments and storyforms all opening up snapsnapsnap in your mind, a mass of new and unrealised possibilities.

It's ten past two in the morning, and I'm completely wired, caught up in the new thing, shivering and laughing and glowing in the dark. Just as well it's the middle of the night. No-one would be safe from me right now. I could read their minds and take over their heartbeats with a glare.

Faster than the speed of anyone. That's how it works.

This Is What It Means To Be Me: wake up at 1pm. Check mail. Open envelope full of free money. Go to pub. Laugh.

Because I am a Writer.

Five Thousand Miles

Written in September of 2002

I hate Los Angeles.

I hate Los Angeles because it is a city not designed for humans.

It is designed for cars. Humans not required. One day it's going to be filled with nothing but robot cars, cavorting on the highways of a city where humans were never ever meant to be.

Having a cigarette after dinner elsewhere in LA tonight, I see a Crazy Homeless Guy with a megaphone. He raises it to his lips, makes to speak-to Announce, to make a Proclamation-and then thinks again, lowers it. Raises it again. But no. The time is not right. He gets on the bus, disappointed. Something was wrong. His megaphone hangs in his hand. Perhaps there wasn't an agent in earshot.

I also hate Los Angeles because it's not a city. It's six or seven cities stuck together by seventy five thousand miles of road. I write this in Burbank. Burbank appears to be one of those half-alive cities, like Canberra, that people drive to in the morning and utterly abandon at night. This hotel is like a colony on Mars. There's not another living thing in sight. And, in the distance, the cars jabber and scheme in the dark. The bastards.

Safety Dance

I am going to Cable TV Station, housed in Big Media Corporation building. I am told that there are two levels of heavy security here, as there are at all studios here. Level One is a bored Pinkerton drone who sticks a broom under our car to see if Osama Bin Laden is clinging to the chassis. Level Two is a guy slumped over a counter who asks my name and then writes it on a lapel sticker. Presumably this sticker renders me invulnerable to bombing outrages, anthrax showers and bags of sarin.

Los Angeles is disgusted with the world. It doesn't understand why terrorists haven't targeted it. It's Important. It's Hollywood. Surely the warty Al Queda baddies want to destroy Hollywood, right? So where are they? Was the meeting postponed? LA stares at its cellphone, desperate for the validation of meaningless mass destruction.

Action

I am meeting with my friends Producers and Screenwriter.

Screenwriter arrives pale and edgy. He is into the fifteenth rewrite of an adaptation. He's been in the business a long time and is very successful. But, despite being a professional screenwriter, he is still human. He has been asked if he can make the piece's second lead green. And Welsh. And a dog. He can't take any more. He makes an awful keening sound, like a stabbed dog. There's blood in his ears. He rips his pants down and shits on the floor.

The waiter passes, looks down, and says, "Who spilled this fine American food?"

Soon, it will be rinsed under the tap and put on the hotplate. And sold to me as breakfast for $20.99 plus tax.

July 21, 2009 Alive in LA. I has a balcony. I may give a sermon. After I sleep for 24 hours.

...Why does the minibar have a glowstick in it? Do I appear AS THE SORT OF MAN WHOD DRINK GLOWSTICK CHEMICALS?

July 22, 2009 Good morning from Los Angeles, sinners. Off to have seven thousand meetings.

Abandoned to feral roaming producers on the WB lot. Am fashioning a spear from the bones of interns.

The power of Hollyweird compels you. Or possibly me.

i have fooled you all. I use Twitter to steal your souls and increase my Powers. Which Compel you. (Yesimighthavehadadrinkshutup)

Trying to work out if aged poolside guy is really that hairy or if he's wearing an animal pelt of some kind

Yeah, you keep that towel on, buddy. I have a lighter.

The Full Head Tingle

Written in December of 2002

At the end of the Eighties, I became the manager of a small shop that sold books and comics. Finally off the dole, living in a room that was six feet by seven feet, black dustbin sacks taped to the window to keep the light out, I sat down the day after I got the job and wrote a letter to Savoy Books.

Savoy were and are a publisher based in Manchester, in the north of England, a couple of hundred miles away. In those days of no money, it seemed an ocean away, especially since I was struggling through a long-distance relationship with a girl who lived not far from Manchester. She had rich parents, and would come down to live with me for a few weeks at a time, but I could never get any further out than London, thirty-odd miles down the train line. Savoy were a march and a generation away from me. Publishers Dave Britton and Michael Butterworth emerged in the late Sixties/early Seventies, on the tail end of the New Worlds/New wave" sf movement. They actually published an issue of the groundbreaking New Worlds magazine, before putting old and obscure Michael Moorcock work into print, as well as an early graphic novel, Moorcock's Elric adapted into sequential art by Jim Cawthorn in raw Celtic style. They grew a list of selected reprints, an eclectic and vital catalogue; the Sixties TV criticism of fantasist and commentator Harlan Ellison, the newspaper columns of Jack Trevor Story, the gothabilly art of Cramps album illustrator Kris Guidio. And, apocalyptically, Dave Britton's transgressive novel Lord Horror. Which got them prosecuted on obscenity charges, slammed through the system by James Anderton, Manchester's notoriously Christian Chief Constable. Anderton was a creature that could only have existed in the slightly surreal atmosphere of Thatcher Britain; repressively conservative, of dubious competence, and given to worrying statements about hearing God's voice while Manchester filled up with guns and pushers. Lord Horror was strong drink, to be sure: a hallucinated vision of Lord Haw-Haw, the English traitor who broadcast Nazi propaganda into Britain during World War 2. It was difficult, horrifying work, the Nazi atrocities made superreal with the tools of DeSade and Bataille, very much an extension of the "New Worlds school" and its intent to use fantasy as a way to present the real world in a new light for our consideration. Britton is neither a self-hating Jew nor a childish monster. He is clearly haunted by the pre-1945 world.