Cunning Plans: Talks By Warren Ellis

By Warren Ellis

Cunning Plans collects several of NYT-bestselling author Warren Ellis' lectures on the nature of the haunted future and the secrets of deep history, given in recent years at events in London, New York, Los Angeles and Berlin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Warren Ellis
• Release date: Jun 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311317315

Warren Ellis

Warren Ellis is the award-winning creator of graphic novels such as Fell, Ministry of Space, Planetary, and Transmetropolitan and the author of the novel Crooked Little Vein. His graphic novel RED was adapted into the #1 hit film of the same name starring Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren. He lives in London.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Hello. My name’s Warren Ellis. I’m mostly a writer of graphic novels and comic books, sometimes a novelist and columnist, occasionally grist for the Hollywood mill, and, every now and then, someone who stands up on a stage and talks to rooms of people. Or, perhaps more correctly, someone who sits down on a stage and talks, because it is sometimes the amusement of conference organisers to provide a large chair for me to read from, with the words it’s story time with Uncle Warren. Here in Britain, we had a children’s television show called Jackanory, which consisted of actors and writers reading books to camera, and my talks are presumably the immediately-pre-apocalyptic version of that.

I don’t get asked to talk too often, and the opportunities sometimes bunch together. The only talks I’ve given so far this year were all on the same day. You will, as you read through them, see themes and ideas repeated, and explored from slightly different angles. In a way, this is a compendium of my public obsessions over the last few years: working them out during late-night writing sessions and then testing them on the poor unfortunates trapped in rooms with me. Rooms in Brighton, Manchester, London, New York and Los Angeles, in this book.

In a couple of months’ time, I’ll be on the road again to give talks. Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, and Dublin. I will, I think, be talking about new things. The pieces in this collection feel, right now, like a summation of a particular set of ideas and obsessions. Or, at least, like a surrounding of the space around them. I can see them better now. This is always the writer’s cunning plan – writing things down so that you can see them properly.

Your experience of these talks will be improved immeasurably by the subtraction of my mumbling, accidentally skipping a page on the Kindle I’m reading from, coughing on you and exuding whisky fumes from the glass or bottle almost invariably provided on stage by my very kind hosts. This book is dedicated to them, for giving me the rare chances to go out into the world and talk about what I’m thinking. I am grateful beyond measure. I hope you enjoy reading my plans, and that they might make you think about laying your own.

Warren Ellis

The Thames Delta

March 2015

HOW TO SEE THE FUTURE

A talk for the Improving Reality event, Brighton

September 2012

The concept of calling an event Improving Reality is one of those great science fiction ideas. Thirty years ago, you’d have gone right along with the story that, in 2012, people will come to a tech-centric town to talk about how to improve reality. Being able to locally adjust the brightness of the sky. Why wouldn’t you? That’s the stuff of the consensus future, right there. The stories we agree upon. Like how in old science fiction stories Venus was always a green hell of alien jungle, and Mars was always an exotic red desert crisscrossed by canals.

In reality, of course, Venus is a high-pressure shithole that we’re technologically a thousand years away from being able to walk on, and there’s bugger all on Mars. Welcome to JG Ballard’s future, fast becoming a consensus of its own, wherein the future is intrinsically banal. It is, essentially, the sensible position to take right now.

A writer called Ventakesh Rao recently used the term manufactured normalcy to describe this. The idea is that things are designed to activate a psychological predisposition to believe that we’re in a static and dull continuous present. Atemporality, considered to be the condition of the early 21st century. Of course Venus isn’t a green hell – that would be too interesting, right? Of course things like Google Glass and Google Gloves look like props from ill-received science fiction film and tv from the 90s and 2000’s. Of course getting on a plane to jump halfway across the planet isn’t a wildly different experience from getting on a train from London to Scotland in the 1920s – aside from the radiation and groping.

We hold up iPhones and, if we’re relatively conscious of history, we point out that this is an amazing device that contains a live map of the world and the biggest libraries imaginable and that it’s an absolute paradigm shift in personal communication and empowerment. And then some knob says that it looks like something from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and then someone else says that it doesn’t even look as cool as Captain Kirk’s communicator in the original and then someone else says no but you can buy a case for it to make it look like one and you’re off to the manufactured normalcy races, where nobody wins because everyone goes to fucking sleep.

And reality does not get