The Year of the Bastard

Well, as I suspect you’ve noticed, it’s comin’ up on election time. I know a lot of people who, despite complaining an awful lot about The Way Things Are really, honestly don’t care, and thus won’t vote. Obviously, I can’t tell you what to do, and equally obviously, many of you aren’t like this, but I suppose I want to urge you all to do the research on the candidates and head out there, when the time comes, to vote.

And, because I’m me, I have to do it in the most amusing way, to me, possible. Generally, that involved telling you to read something. This is no exception, as, in an election year, I feel compelled to offer up this particular suggestion: Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan.

Transmet features Spider Jerusalem, drugged out gonzo journalist in the style of Hunter S. Thompson (with notably more violence), and a fair number of volumes deal with his coverage of the election and subsequent clashes with the President as he tries as hard as he can to make an increasingly apathetic culture care about who will be running the country and how they'll be doing it.

For all the absolutely insane sci-fi elements to the story, the story definitely rings true to where we are in the world today. We live in a world where people remain gleefully uneducated about many of the most serious issues facing our nation while turning elections into a matter of “who’s the most like me?” We’re blinded by sound bites of flashy issues, ignoring follow through, ignoring compromise.



Transmet is hardly a new book, but there are a lot of people who’ve never heard of it, and a lot more who’ve never read it. It’s a frenetic, powerful book that’s wildly entertaining, and while it’s preachy at times, it’s relevant, and the scolding is well-deserved.

So, head up to your local library and ask about Transmet. Many public libraries have the full series, and others will think about ordering it if you ask. It’s a worthwhile read, especially in an election year, and if you aren’t interested in spending the money yourself, there’s no reason you can’t ask a library to do it for you.

Rant: Sci-Fi Lifestyle

"You are never going into space.
You will never own a jet pack.
Your car will never fly.
HIV will not be cured in your lifetime.
Cancer will not be cured in your lifetime.
The common cold will not be cured in your lifetime.
Don't these things bother you?

Suicide is the third biggest killer of teenagers in the United States.
In 1999 more people in America died from suicide than from homicide.
Do you think about this?

As anyone who ever read MyDeathSpace.com for any period of time know, the leading cause of death in America is automobile accident. This is generally interpolated into a number placed under the heading "accidental death." When the operation of cars is the leading cause of loss of life I'm not entirely sure how it comes under the term "accidental death." It wasn't a fucking accident, it was done by someone with a car. It's 2007 and we don't know how to operate cars without killing people. It's not a fucking accident if it was caused by someone getting into a one-ton metal bullet that cannot be operated with complete control at all times.

In Europe in 2004, 13000 kids – persons under the age of fourteen -- died due to poor water. It’s 2007 and the society does not yet understand how to operate water.

Are you thinking about this now?

People keep asking me what DOKTOR SLEEPLESS is about. This is what it's about.

Someone stole your future. Don't you ever wonder who?"

-Warren Ellis

Those ideas are what prompted Ellis to begin Doktor Sleepless, an ongoing comic that will shortly get the "Best Books You Aren't Reading" post.

But, despite the cause for that particular introduction to the post, that's not what it's about. And despite the heading, this isn't that much of a rant - more of a question, really.

What do you think the future will hold?

I mean, it's easy to throw out the vision of the future we all have from our childhood - the jet packs, the space ships, the machine-enhanced superstrength - but more and more, even if those are real, don't they seem...obsolete, almost? Worn out.

I mean, yeah, I wouldn't turn down any of that, and it is really freakin' cool to see all these things slowly coming into being. But how long until those are really feasible? What are the odds that, in my lifetime, I'd be able to buy any of those? And, I mean, as cool as any of it is, how long would it take for them to become commonplace? I mean, when I was born, what the hell was the Internet? A decade ago, who would believe that I can connect to the Internet while in a car? Think about things like twitter-feeds, RSS, and all that.

Think about how sci-fi the concept of RFID-tagging a VIP really is. Think about Second Life for a second. Hell, think about something as simple as sending a video you just took on your cell phone to your friend three states over.

The future is coming. Hell, the future is here. But, I still can't escape this niggling little feeling that we're all a little too cavalier about it. Maybe it's just me and the crowd I hang out with, but apathy seems to hold sway. Apathy's awesome for the things that don't matter, but for things like this...?

Don't worry - this isn't a drastic change in the blog's structure or purpose. This is more just something that I felt I had to share. I'll make other posts on this topic, directing you to sites like...

grinding.be

...where people with more time and skill are tracking outbreaks of the future in our modern society. But, the more I read, the more I realize that we can't wade through life as a culture proud of our illiteracy and apathy. So whenever I find something in my research that I find particularly interesting, I'll probably put it up - and I urge you to do the same, in comments here, on your own blogs, wherever. I know that it may be incongruous to place philosophy side by side with VS decks, but who really cares?

Now, it seems like there should be a message to end this, and I'm sure a cleverer writer would've found one. But...oh, well. This post was more an expression of recent thoughts than any sort of coherent, structured message to you. Still, if I can urge you to any sort of action, it's this: really think, sometime, about the future. About what you want the future to be like, and how you can help get it there.

Good night.

You're On The Global Frequency...

Warren Ellis is one of comics most popular writers, one of the VERY few known more for his creator-owned work than for his mainstream projects. His creator-owned projects range from the famous political satire Transmetropolitan to low-selling, darkly comedic fantasy Gravel. And while projects like Transmet have gotten a lot of publicity and mainstream recognition, Ellis has had two brief comics that I think deserve special mention: the currently-ongoing Fell, and the 2002-2003 series Global Frequency. If you can't tell from the title of the post, this'll mostly be about GF, but I'll get to Fell sooner or later.

Global Frequency ticks many of Ellis's strongest boxes. While he does just fine on mainstream, continuity-heavy, company-owned titles, his heart never seems to be in it. Instead, he seems to be at his strongest bucking the comics trend with small-press books that he owns, that don't have coherent 'arcs', but instead focus on telling the entire story in a single issue.

Global Frequency features with a global civilian organization of 1,001 agents working under Miranda Zero and a young woman known as Aleph to deal with the bizarre threats that have begun to crop up in the world, or simply with things governments can't, or won't, deal with. Ellis mines a number of sci-fi tropes to find a his plots, but he does a lot with them, given that he only has 22 pages to tell each story.

Each of the twelve issues of Global Frequency has a wildly different tone. Heaven's One Hundred is an old-school shoot-'em-up action comic. Superviolence is a brutal 20-page fight between two cannibal martial artists. Invasive deals with a memetic alien virus taking people over, while Big Sky is about a mass hallucination in Norway where every person in a village is driven insane after claiming to see an angel. The comics range from exciting to horrifying, but they're never bad.

If a series of interconnected sci-fi done-in-one stories sounds like something you might find in television, you'd be interested to learn that Global Frequency was, at one point, scheduled for adaptation to TV. A pilot was shot, though when the show was not ultimately picked up, it was leaked on to the internet. If you look search around, you should still be able to find it. It's a loose adaptation of the first GF issue, titled 'Bombhead', and while there were a number of changes made in the general tone of the series, including the introduction of two 'regulars' that weren't Aleph and Miranda, the pilot was still remarkably true to the comic. And while Global Frequency was declared by one UK newspaper as 'the most popular TV show never screened' for its cult following and frequent downloads, network execs were so frustrated by the leak (ah, 2005 - more innocent times) that they declared that the show would never be released in any official way. Ever. Forever.

Check out the comic if you want to enjoy one of the best sci-fi comics around. And if you want a little taste of what might have been, head out online to try and find the Global Frequency pilot episode. As we get further and further from 2005, it seems more and more likely that we really never will get a Global Frequency release, so I think that, even for the most squeamish of conscience, you can download this without worry that you're taking money from the good people who nixed the show.

Warren Ellis Presents: FreakAngels

If you're unfamiliar with Warren Ellis' work, or you don't read many comics, then here's an opportunity:

Warren Ellis Presents: FreakAngels

FreakAngels is, apparently, a free project Ellis is putting out with Avatar Press. While it may eventually be collected in trades and sold, it is for now being produced free online, so there's no reason not to give it a shot.

Ellis' work isn't always gold, but the amount of great stuff he produces is more than enough to warrant giving this a shot.