Cunning Plans: Talks By Warren Ellis
By Warren Ellis
()
About this ebook
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.
Warren Ellis
Warren Ellis is a graphic novelist, writer, public speaker and author of the bestselling novel Gun Machine (Mulholland, 2014). He contributed the foreword to Penny Red (Pluto, 2011).
Read more from Warren Ellis
Crooked Little Vein: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Normal: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Elektrograd: Rusted Blood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5James Bond: The Complete Warren Ellis Omnibus Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Red Phone Box: A Darkly Magical Story Cycle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fell Vol. 1: Ferrel City Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Penny Red: Notes from the New Age of Dissent Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Cemetery Beach Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Cunning Plans
Related ebooks
The Cyberpunk Fakebook Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLiminal States Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Nightmare Magazine, Issue 123 (December 2022): Nightmare Magazine, #123 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5DIABLERIES: A Trip To The Underworld Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Pigspurt's Daughter: A Mythic Dad / A Legacy of Lunacy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Heroes in the Night: Inside the Real Life Superhero Movement Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Steel Animals Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSci-Fi From Sonoma: Jack London, Frank Herbert, & Philip K. Dick Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHauntologies: ALPHA: Hauntologies Omnibus, #1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRapid Eye 2: The Plague Yard Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Top Rankin': A Punk/Ska Noir Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Hashish Eater: An Apocalypse Of Evil Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hex-Rated Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Damage Per Second Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Nightmare Magazine, Issue 100 (January 2021): Nightmare Magazine, #100 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Universal Subject of Our Time: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Machine Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDisassembly Required: A Field Guide to Actually Existing Capitalism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Lotus Crew Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGreat Big Beautiful Tomorrow Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Rat Killer and other Weird War Tales Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGather, Darkness! Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Kiln People Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFell Vol. 1: Ferrel City Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Eclipse Penumbra Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Silicon Embrace Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTwilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Weirdbook #36 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Science & Mathematics For You
Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters--And How to Get It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fantastic Fungi: How Mushrooms Can Heal, Shift Consciousness, and Save the Planet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Big Book of Hacks: 264 Amazing DIY Tech Projects Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Joy of Gay Sex: Fully revised and expanded third edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Think Critically: Question, Analyze, Reflect, Debate. Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Psychology of Totalitarianism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Systems Thinker: Essential Thinking Skills For Solving Problems, Managing Chaos, Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Activate Your Brain: How Understanding Your Brain Can Improve Your Work - and Your Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Free Will Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Crack In Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Metaphors We Live By Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/52084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gulag Archipelago: The Authorized Abridgement Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Woman Who Changed Her Brain: And Other Inspiring Stories of Pioneering Brain Transformation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Cunning Plans
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Cunning Plans - Warren Ellis
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