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Orbital Operations for 27 September 2026
Warren Ellis
September 27, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
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Just a brief one this week, as I’m across half a dozen projects at least - probably forgetting each one - and, try as I might, there aren’t currently enough hours in the day for everything.
We are busy putting together new material for this newsletter, and it should actually be arriving soon.
Anyway, I’m on the run here, sooooo:
Your weekly prep for a creative life in a weird world from Warren Ellis, an author from England who writes books and stories, graphic novels and television. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here for free.
The News, with Lordess Foudre
Graphic novella GHOST DRIVE STATION by myself and Lordess Foudre is out on November 18.
The order code/UPC is: 70985304934000111. If you want a copy, drop a note to your local comics shop or bookstore, or stop in there, and give them that code. Nobody orders for the shelf any more, so if you want to be sure of getting a copy, tell your store.
Here’s another page from the book, one of my favourite atmosphere shots from the whole thing. Lordess has KILLED it.
THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM is now out, from DC Comics, and there’s at least one other major reprint project in the works from them that I’m writing a large essay for right now.
OCEAN is being reissued from Image Comics on November 24. It just went to print.
COLLIDE: Jerome Eyquem + Warren Ellis: 02.00
COLLIDE part two coming soon.
Jerome Eyquem is an artist and writer: here are his releases on GlobalComix.
ORBITAL
Chorus Waves: “naturally occurring electromagnetic waves that ripple through the vast mass of charged particles, or plasma, surrounding Earth. Chorus waves are named for the sounds made by a radio receiver when it detects them.” I had no idea that was what they were called.
DELIBERATE DISCONNECTION: A Year In The Wild with Rain DeGrey
Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.
I learned this week that the audio drama series I did a couple of years back, THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT, has been downloaded more than 270,000 times. I kind of boggled at that. The whole thing is still available at this link for free.
Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery
Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.
If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.
OPS
TENTACLES
In so far as stories like these are part of the horror genre, they present horror less as a stimulus-response system, in which a threat elicits an emotional response of fear, and more as a kind of freezing of all affect, resulting in a combined state of dread and fascination – what theologian Rudolf Otto once called the mysterium tremendum. In stories like these, horror is a state of frozen thought, reason’s dark cyclopean winter.
TENTACLES LONGER THAN NIGHT by Eugene Thacker. Apparently I picked this up years ago, started it and then put it down for some reason. I finished it this week.
As you can see, it’s the third (and final) book in Thacker’s exploration of horror. It’s a bit more philosophically difficult than the other two at the start, and kind of dissolves into fragments at the end, like Thacker is emptying out the backs of his notebooks.
Our own era is one haunted by the shadow of futurity, precisely because there is no future.
As you can tell, it’s a lot of fun. Jolly. Summery.
But the joy of him emptying his notebook is the detailed references he makes to other works of philosophical horror, many of which I’d never heard of and have given me a list of things to look up. (It also reminded me that I bought Ligotti’s THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE and yet never read it.)
Sit with this:
Literary theorists often talk about “the fantastic” when discussing the horror genre. Tzvetan Todorov, for instance, defines the fantastic as a fork in the road. A character in a story confronts something strange and unexplained, and is presented with one of two options: either the phenomena in question can be explained according to the accepted laws of nature (and it doesn’t really exist), or else it cannot be explained (and does exist).
Perhaps there is a categorical imperative embedded within this literary tradition: act as if everything presented to you is not what it seems. That forest campsite, a despondent sea-side town, a sluggish rural village, a deserted and ennui-ridden city street, the affectless neutrality of the outskirts of town – these are not just settings for stories but sites of the fantastic, where it “takes place,” that ephemeral hesitation given an equal spatial ephemerality.
For writers of a certain kind, that shit is red meat.
Didn’t love it as much as the first two in the series, but there are some serious gems in this one.
GOT MORE TIME?
LTD
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AND FINALLY
SOEUR L’ENFER
This is my favourite of the shorts: full David Lynch vibe.
I’m wrapping this letter up on Saturday, having just missed one gig because I had to do too much at home, and hoping I get to tonight’s gig because sitting down and just listening to live music is good for me. Do something good for you this week. You deserve it.
W
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