Shivering Sands: Seven Years of Stories, Drinking and the World

by Warren Ellis

  The future is information. The future is about information. It's also about making the word "culture" mean what you want it to.

  We seem to be currently in the grip of what me and novelist Alex Besher call "future fatigue". It's what Bruce Sterling is talking about when he playfully advocates switching the word "futuristic" with the word "futurismic." The future as we have imagined it seems tired, boring, ordinary. The Space Shuttle is a classic car now, as aesthetically historic as a finned Fifties car. It comes from a time before Bara and Tristan Risk were born. It's what Matt Jones is getting to grips with as he designs user interfaces for Nokia phones. It's what William Gibson nods to when he notes that his hugely influential Neuromancer, which conjures a cyberspace the world still hasn't lived up to, missed out on one hugely disruptive, worldchanging technology-mobile phones. He mentions this in illustrating science fiction's great power-not in hard prediction of a probable future, but in informed and energetic speculation of a possible future. One is tech journalism, the other is social fiction. Sf only gets a bad futurist rap from people who confuse one with the other. That my Nokia 3650 outperforms Captain Kirk's communicator ten-to-one isn't the point.

  I've been talking with a lot of people, lately, about What Happens Next. We're living in a science-fictional world now. Someone reminded me that J. G. Ballard once said "the future will be boring," and damn if old miseryguts wasn't right all along. The future is sold to us as a commercial experience-and that was how it was going to be, all along. It almost doesn't seem enough that I come from the last generation of sf writers to produce material on typewriters.

  We've used up our available consensus futures. We've outlived them. They didn't work. 2001 is as much a historical object as is Apollo. We thought we were going to space, but we're really not. On current projections, we're some sixteen years away from putting human crews anywhere that we have not already been. VR turned out to be a bust, which put away fully ten years of cyperpunky novels featuring 3-D immersive user interfaces. (Perhaps interestingly, most of the new sf novels I see are space-opera high fantasies that seek to retain their own credibility by enforcing hard relativistic physics. Which is a bit like anchoring some trip with elves by detailing how their teeth would drop out from lack of brushing with fluorides.)

  The body modification crowd interest me, in this context, because they're attempting to make a new physical future out of what they've got. Their only available canvas on which to paint the future is their own bodies and whatever tools are laying around right now. Trace it back, if you like, to Gibson's one big flash of clarity in the Eighties (and most people don't even get one-Gibson's had three or four): "the street finds its own use for things."

  The internet has come to work for people in much the same way. I saw Stewart Brand lecture, a few years ago. Standing there like he'd just wandered in from a foresty log cabin, Swiss Army knife and compass mounted on his belt, he talked about how we'd become a workaround society. We have become entrained to step outside the stated rules of a device's operation in order to get it to do what we want. Put another way: we're all hackers now. That's exactly what bodymod people are doing-hacking the properties of the device they're born into.

  We stand here now in a time so advanced that innovation is boring.

  Is unnoticed. McKenna never predicted a time, on his Timewave Zero graph, where novelty lost all value and no-one gave a shit anymore.

  We're in the post-future. Brand co-created The Long Now Foundation, to make people aware of the true scale of time and human impact- but there's no mention in his book on the subject of the Long Now being spent in the living room being pounded into a coma by reality television. This is the Long Now-a present without a future.

  All this speaks to the central problem of sf. Sf is a social fiction; it stands in a speculative zone from which to consider aspects of the present condition. But if the future is old and tired, then it's historical fiction. It needs a future. It needs to show us where we could go, not where we've been. It needs what Samuel Delany terms a novum: a piece of the future, of novelty, of something as yet unseen.

  Nova are why some people find sf difficult to read. Sf is a destabilising prose. It's slightly deranging. It has too much in common with surrealism (which is a contraction of "super-realism"). Faced with a line like "the door dilated," the brain has to do a little extra work to make it make contextual sense. It's one reason why sf has an affinity with the medium of comics, where the brain has to do an extra comprehension trick to make the transition from panel to panel make sense-"closure", in Scott McCloud's term. In picking up a piece of sf, you accept the experience of processing strangeness and applying it to the world you know.

  You telling me the world couldn't use a little more strangeness?

  In fact, are you telling me we couldn't use more ways to process the inherent strangeness of the advanced post-future we're living in? This place with mice growing human ears on their backs and human brain tissue being worked on to computer chips? That we somehow just dismiss as business as usual?

  Hack the devices you've got. Make them say something new. It's the simplest and most potent trick in sf. Take a hard look at where you are now and then wonder what it could look like the day after tomorrow-with no reference to any other dream of the future. 1984 = 1948. "Brave New World" was the terminal iteration of the left-wing "enlightened eugenics" of the early 20th Century Huxley was writing from.

  When Ken Kesey, novelist, prankster and experienced hallucinogen man, took the synthetic superpsychedelic STP, the doors of perception ripped open so wide and so loud-immense and yet anticlimatic-that it finished him. It took him a while to put into words the aftermath that left him drifting in the present. Something in him was missing after taking STP, becalmed on a Long Now. Eventually, he found the word "tiller". STP burned out his tiller. He was unsteered, and the world left him in still cold waters.

  Immense and anti-climatic defines these post-millennial years, after that great burning peak of anticipation. Tillerless and timeloose, we're just kind of hanging here, waiting for something to happen. Rats in a maze with no exit, basically reduced to playing with our tails and shitting in the corners.

  If there's no exit, then you make one. Break open the top of the maze and let starlight in.

  Future Underground

  Written in April of 2004

  Tracking the future.

  Susannah Breslin, mildly dislocated by jetlag, perversion and the London chill, grimaces at the elderly Vauxhall Bridge Road locals staggering around the smoky little pub in beer-smeared footballfan facepaint. Susannah's a writer, over here in her occasional role as a presenter for the Playboy Channel's Sexcetera to cover an English bukkake shoot. Bukkake is a Japanese innovation in porn video wherein groups of men masturbate en masse over a single girl. A successful bukkake concludes with one brain-damaged woman looking like she's had a bucket of cake icing upended over her head. It transpires that most of the male participants pay to attend. Ninety pounds sterling to jerk off like an ugly ape in humping season along with a dozen other fellow middle-aged married businessmen who've probably all told the wife that they're off on a salesman training course in Slough. Bukkake made it to America a few years ago, and now it's here in Britain; the cutting edge in depersonalised, heartless, gutless sex. Which is why it fascinates Susannah. But Susannah tracks the future of commodified sex. In her head, she's already moved on.

  She gleefully tells me of Rob Black, an American pornographer already in trouble with the law and facing an obscenity charge. He was apparently instructed by his lawyers to keep a low profile and behave himself. But he's a second-generation porno guy, and has the family honour to uphold. He has therefore invented what is termed The Ass Milkshake. This involves several men ejaculating into one woman's rectum, and then introducing milk and cream into the cavity with the aid of a speculum. The mixture is then decanted out of her backside into a glass, and presented for her to drink.

  And you know that, somewhere, Rob
Black is wondering how he's going to top that before his court case.

  In Japan, of course, bukkake is history. Susannah describes to me the new fetish video craze there, which I can only term Dizzy Girl Spinning Eye Movies. A girl is set to spinning around on the spot in a bedroom. Around and around. Soon, she's too dizzy to stand up. She falls down on a bed. And the camera zooms in hard on her eyes, to see her eyeballs spinning around in their sockets, circles within circles. That's the money shot, in porn terms. Spinning eyeballs.

  Susannah grins and takes another sip of German beer.

  In Germany, of course, courts were coming to the conclusion that inviting cannibalism fetishists to your home, killing them and eating them does not constitute murder. Armin Miewes got an eightyear sentence for picking up a man on the internet with seductive enticements to (quoting from his Usenet posts) "eat your horny flesh." The victim came to Miewe's home, where Miewes hacked his penis off. They ate it together. And then the meal got into a warm bath and waited to bleed to death while Miewes sat in the kitchen and read a Star Trek novel. After a while, Miewes decided dinner wasn't dying quickly enough. So he stabbed the silly bastard in the neck and ate him.

  "Eat Your Horny Flesh" is going to be a band name inside three years, I swear.

  Sometime after Miewes decided it'd be too much like hard work to grind dead boy's bones into flour, the police came to visit. Being German, they came right out with it, and asked him directly if he had eaten human flesh. Miewes gave the classic answer: "I might have done."

  Turns out that if you want to be eaten, the diner is, at best, guilty of manslaughter. And will be out on the street in four years, tops.

  Welcome to the future. It's the world you're living in.

  People are disappointed with the future they're living in. Since 2001, the refrain has gone up, louder year by year: "This is the future. Where's my flying car? Where's my fucking jet pack?" Pre-millennium, we were living in an unprecedented density of imagined futures, and we assumed it was all waiting for us around the corner. And here we are, around the corner, and none of it is standing here.

  All that means, of course, is that 98% of our predictions have failed us. Which shouldn't have come as much surprise. We treat science fiction as predictive fiction, which it isn't and should never have been. William Gibson's Neuromancer loses none of its fictive power for failing, as Gibson himself recently said, to predict mobile phones. Mobile telephony has proved a technology of massive change-not least of which has been in the field of fiction itself. Possession of a triband handset makes about a hundred years' worth of thriller plotting irrelevant. My own Global Frequency graphic novel has fallen foul of the future. It's currently being adapted for American television, and we've run into an unexpected problem. When I developed the mobile phones that the members of the Global Frequency extreme rescue service carry, I was working at the hard edge of available technology- two years ago. Today, a Treo 600 smartphone from Palmspring does pretty much everything the GF Phone does. So I'm having to consult with a futurist at Nokia to ensure the TV version of the phone does more than something you can pick up at the supermarket.

  It's not the future we expected, being able to shoot video with a telephone and wirelessly beam it into someone's hand on the other side of the world. I don't know that anyone predicted that people could be driven to orgasm by images of a girl's spinning eyes. Evan Batailles would have looked twice at the Ass Milkshake. Somewhere, there's a mouse with a human ear growing out of its back, and a rat that produces monkey sperm. Mars is being explored by two motorised skateboards. Wernher Von Braun, who designed a Mars expedition for a crew of two hundred using available technology in the 1950s, would have shat blood in anger. Space, in his conception, was a heaven to be reached with power and glory. He would have sneered at the rocket sticks the rovers were launched on-where were his mighty chariots, to shake the ground in their passing?-and blanched to discover that his great machines and two hundred heroes had been dropped to make way for a couple of glorified rollerskates. He would have concluded that something evil had happened, and that this was not his future.

  No nuclear space arks, no jetpacks. Robot skateboards and butterflies that glow green.

  We all forgot that the future is yet to be written. No-one knows how it's going to turn out. The best we can do is track the future as it happens, and use our fiction as a tool with which to understand where we are.

  By the time you read this, everything in it will be history. The future's a moving target. That's why it needs tracking.

  Your Actual True Hallowe'en Story

  Written in September of 2004

  A friend of mine was working, some fifteen years back, for a roadside recovery firm. You know, the people who come and tow away wrecked cars and the like. And poor old Trev, bless 'im, was having to work on Hallowe'en, which meant he wasn't getting to entertain the locals with his usual Hallowe'en trick of drinking three bottles of Jack Daniels, picking a fight with an inanimate object and passing out in a ditch with his wallet up his arse. But anyway. He's on call that night. So the boss rings him up and says, take out the tow vehicle, the police have advised them of a serious accident, there's a car needs pulling. But the police are having a busy night, there's no officer on the scene, so for fuck's sake don't touch anything.

  Middle of the night. Deserted road out in the arse end of nowhere.

  Wrecked car on the verge with one headlight beaming weakly out into the dark. And there's Trev, pulling up in front of it, no other bugger for miles around. He walks up to the car with his torch. And the driver's still inside the car. Clearly in shock, not moving, leaning against the door a bit, just staring.

  "Hello," says Trev. Nothing, no reaction at all.

  Trev flashes his torch in, taps on the driver's side window. No reaction. The poor sod, thinks Trev. Must be scared shitless, eh? Let's calm him down and get him out of the car so I can hook it up for towing, he thinks. So he opens the driver's door.

  The top half of the driver slides out.

  When the car crashed, a big piece of metal was thrown back into

  the interior at hip level and sheared the driver in two, killing him instantly.

  Trevor's standing there holding half a bloke in his hands.

  And he's suddenly remembered that he wasn't supposed to touch anything.

  Well, what would you do?

  He very carefully shoves the top half of the guy back into the car.

  Kind of, you know, lines him up again. Which takes a little while, sliding the upper half this way and that until it looks like one piece again. And, gingerly holding the driver in place, goes to shut the car door again.

  Which won't close.

  It's not often you find yourself on a deserted road past midnight frantically kicking a car door shut in order to keep a corpse inside.

  §

  October 31, 2008

  I went to a Halloween party a few years ago and heard someone say, "LOOK, THAT MAN CAME DRESSED AS WARREN ELLIS."

  It's getting dark. I must go downstairs to urinate in the bucket containing the sweets for trickortreaters.

  Trick, you little gits! Trick! Traumatised small children by telling them our cauldron full of sweets has a snake in the bottom. Small child I scared the crap out of: "That was... a tricki A trick! (looks at her frlend and giggles with glee) That was our first trick!"

  §

  Elevator Lady

  Written in October of 2004

  I've been listening to nothing but singles all day.

  I've been going on about singles in my mailing list on and off for some months. Singles have informed my thinking about certain types of comic for ages, and they're going to be a big part of the intent behind a new monthly project I'll be launching next year.

  Complete experiences in three minutes, that you can replay again and again.

  Listening to "500" by Lush at the moment. That big, plangent guitar with a hint of mythic echo on it, picking through the central riff, and
then Miki Berenyi (and all great pop is sung by women like Miki Berenyi) opening up one of the greatest lines of the last twenty years, Emma Anderson's perfect-pop apotheosis: "Shake baby shake / you know I can fit you in my arms."

  The singles mix I have on right now goes from there to "Maps," a song that I spent the better part of a week obsessed with. I do this. Writer's disease: if something affects you, you spend an obscene amount of time picking it apart to find out how it achieved the effect and whether it can be adapted and replicated. I did that the other week with Johnny Boy's "You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve." To get near that faux-Phil Spector sound, you'd have to be out on a city street at night, and there'd have to be something like the theatre's Greek Chorus in the background. Pixies'"Hey": "And the whores like a choir..."

  But "Maps": "Wait. They don't love you like I love you." If that doesn't knock you flat, you're already dead.

  I always loved Lauren Laverne's voice. She does the vocals on Mint Royale's "Don't Falter." Please. Stay with me. And never miss a chance to kiss me.

  These are the things that get past your forebrain and all your filters and reach into your chest. Like the first time you hear the Polyphonic Spree's "Soldier Girl," or Sigur Ros' "Svefn-G-Englar." That the majority of the words are gibberish, or, in Sigur Ros' case, somewhere between Icelandic and a language the singer made up, doesn't matter a bit. There's always that sound and that sharp little line hiding inside it, like a razor in a chocolate.

  In this sort of mode, there's two quotes that tend to loiter in my head. Nik Cohn on rock'n'roll, lauding what was for him the indispensable aspect that made it Great: "the glorious burst of incoherent noise." Awopbopaloobop. And Phil Elliott, talking about his work: "I just want to make comics that strum at the heartstrings."