Saturday, April 20th 2013
This is indeed author Joe Hill here on Tumblr, with this evil question.
Off the top of my head this afternoon:
GREAT MAMBO CHICKEN AND THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION, by Ed Regis, was my deep introduction to transhumanism and fringe science. I’d read the odd issue of MONDO and the like as I could find and afford them, but GREAT MAMBO CHICKEN was the serious dose, from rocket man Bob Truax through to robot brain man Hans Moravec and back again. Wonderful book. Nowadays, I think it’d read as a marvellous time capsule.
WORDS AND MUSIC, Paul Morley. It may actually be one of the best books about music ever written, even though it’s not really about music so much as it’s about someone whom music happened to.
FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL ‘72 is the best book Hunter Thompson ever wrote, and it’s unfairly overshadowed by the others.
EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS by Peter Biskind. I find it hard to describe why I find this book so affecting. It’s basically the story of American cinema in the Sixties and Seventies, remarkably heavily sourced and researched, with a rich supply of funny, creepy and titillating detail — but it’s also about the multiple journeys of the commercial artist, and weirdly scary and heartbreaking, like a dozen car crashes in a row.
And DOOM PATROLS by Steven Shaviro, which he describes as “a theoretical fiction,” but it’s not, really. You can read it yourself for free and find out. In some ways, it’s almost like the flipside to GREAT MAMBO CHICKEN, where you immerse yourself in that Nineties moment where common culture breaks up into a swirl of Everything Weird Happening All At Once. It was like the light of an explosion reaching your senses before the sound and the shockwave arrived.
Tomorrow I would have a different list.
Ah, thanks for this, Warren.
Tuesday, March 26th 2013
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Sunday, March 24th 2013
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Tuesday, March 19th 2013
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Monday, March 18th 2013
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Thursday, March 14th 2013
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Sunday, December 23rd 2012
If I can read another 670 pages between now and midnight, New Year’s Eve, I can finish 2012 with 52 books read.
C’mon… squeeze the fuck in there…
This relates to Joe’s “system” (if we can call a combination of autodidact determination and clear mental illness a “system”) of reading a book a week. And logging them as he goes, for Listing Day (a strange tribal holiday practised in Maine, apparently). I have no idea where he finds the time to do this. But I would like to try this myself, regardless. The reading a book a week, not the listing. I have decided that Kindle Singles are not cheating. But I am clearly going to need a super-System of my own, because I already consume a massive amount of text from the net (and sometimes fall behind on that.)
But it would be a thing, wouldn’t it? Getting a book a week into me. Right now it’s a book every two or three weeks at best. And I have a terrible stack of unread works.
Ah, Joe Hill, you’re going to kill me yet.
- LIVING ARCHITECTURE: How Synthetic Biology Can Remake Our Cities And Reshape Our Lives (warrenellis.com)
- The GUN MACHINE Audiobook, by Reg E. Cathey (warrenellis.com)
Friday, November 2nd 2012
Very soon, the solar system was a mass of warm and grassy island computers. But Ariadne was far from finished. The best machines ever should be able to answer all the questions, and she knew there was more to see. And so there were soon trees that stood so high and strange that their silver tops crested up into the universe next door. Ariadne grew bridges across the multiverse, the set of all possible universes, just to see what she could see, which is of course the best reason of all. And, on the foot of every bridge she crossed, she gave Meadow to every Earth she found. As did Meadow itself, when it explored on its own, as it was a friendly kind of Damned Stuff, and also because weeds get bloody everywhere.
Words by Warren Ellis, pictures by Molly Crabapple.
ARIADNE 3/5 is available as a limited-edition print.
© Warren Ellis & Molly Crabapple 2012
Saturday, September 22nd 2012
ARIADNE AND THE SCIENCE: 2/5 – by Molly Crabapple & Warren Ellis
There was lots of names for the thing Ariadne made: computational flora, iGrass, memory trees, That Damned Stuff. There were lots of names for Ariadne, too, because when she got tired of nobody being able or willing to answer her questions, she just released Ariadne’s Meadow into the world. Fields began thinking, and forests began processing, and the world discovered that Ariadne’s Meadow was actually quite a nice place that just wanted to help. So much so that seven years later, when everyone discovered that Meadow probes had begun to break up Mercury, Venus and Mars for power, living space and computing strata, nobody really minded very much.
Words by Warren Ellis, pictures by Molly Crabapple.
ARIADNE 2/5 is available as a limited-edition print.
© Warren Ellis & Molly Crabapple 2012
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(via warrenellis)
Thursday, September 13th 2012
No-one knows how old Ariadne is any more. She’s said by many to live in seclusion within a cloaked and baroque lunar atelier, which is a strange thing for a woman known to have wanted to see everything there is to see. Some say that, by some hypercosmic string magic, she watches herself as a child, studying the day that curious young Ariadne had her idea. No-one had told little Ariadne not to ask questions, and when she worked out that plants were the best machines of all, she asked why they couldn’t be made to do things that her computer machines could do. And when no-one had a good enough response, Ariadne came up with the best answer of all: I will find out by learning how to make them do that. And that is why Ariadne lives on the moon, and why we are all here today.
- Words by Warren Ellis, pictures by Molly Crabapple. ARIADNE 1/5 is available as a limited-edition print.
Wednesday, May 9th 2012
The cover to my next novel, GUN MACHINE, by designer Keith Hayes. If you’re on my mailing list, you would have seen this yesterday. Apologies for the repetition if so.
Tuesday, April 17th 2012
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Monday, April 9th 2012
GUN MACHINE, my next novel, is due for release January 2013 in the US, I’ve just been told, and spring 2013 in the UK. From Mulholland Books.
I just started writing the novel that comes out after that, presumably in 2014. Because book publishing is slow.
This is going to be amazing.
