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The Department Of Midnight
Orbital Operations for 15 January 2023
Warren Ellis
January 15, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT
We are pleased to announce the audio drama podcast serial THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT.
THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT stars James Callis (Battlestar Galactica, Castlevania, Picard), is created and written by Warren Ellis and is produced by Kevin Kolde, Fred Seibert, Brian Guicciardo and Warren Ellis with casting and voice direction by Meredith Layne.
In THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT, haunted scientist Dr. John Carnack is employed as a crash site investigator by the Department Of Experimental Oversight: colloquially known, after the Doomsday Clock that ticks down to 12, as The Department Of Midnight. When a breakthrough, esoteric scientific experiment goes wrong, he’s there to find out why, and to save who he can. THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT presents six stories of mad science and otherworldly horror.
THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT will be released this spring. Further details to follow.
Hello from out here on the Thames Delta.
So happy to finally be able to put a public name to PROJECT WRITTLE 1. THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT is fully in train, and I can't tell you how delighted I am to be working with so many of my CASTLEVANIA comrades again. (If you're not aware, Meredith Layne was the casting and voice director on all four seasons.)
I hope you had a very fine holiday season and New Year. Ours was frankly fucking terrible - there's sudden and escalating disabling illness in the family, and my partner and I spent four hours on the road on Xmas Day to feed and tend to people. Not what we had (extensively) planned for, but we made it work. It was nobody's fault. Sometimes that's just what the world throws at you, right?
Still. We were fucking exhausted for a week and now I'm behind on everything. I did, however, get a couple of Xmas gifts of note. Lots of seeds, I'm glad to say. Also:
I got an AXE.
AN AXE, people.
And a real left-field thing. A countertop coffee bean roaster. Turns out bags of green beans are super cheap. I have no idea how to roast my own coffee, and am looking forward to learning. When I was a little kid, there was a shop on Southend high street that roasted its own beans and it always made the high street smell amazing, and I never got to go in there. I'm wondering if the back room of my house will smell the same once I learn to do this, or whether it will stink of burning and failure. Either way, I'm excited to find out.
Yes, hermit life intensifies.
POST-CHRISTMAS CHEER
Over a decade ago now, my partner started travelling to Peru once or twice a year, to live and work with the indigenous peoples in the jungles of the Amazon basin. She had several different reasons for going, but the thing she discovered was her first real experience of poverty in the raw. We've done some work out there since, but the one thing we do regularly is send money to one of our friends there every December to throw a Christmas party for the kids of the villages in that area. Even when times are tight here, as they were this year: it's not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, and this year's party gave a gift, food and drink, and arranged games and music to nearly five hundred kids. And every year we get a ton of photos back as our post-Christmas cheer, which this year we needed.
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My name is Warren Ellis, and I’m a writer from England. These newsletters are about the work I do and the creative life I try to lead. I send them every Sunday to subscribers. Feel free to send your friends to orbitaloperations.com , where they can read the most recent letters and subscribe for their own.
I’m represented by Angela Cheng Caplan at the Cheng Caplan Company and David Hale Smith at Inkwell Management. Please add [email protected] to your email system’s address book or contacts.
FICTION
INTERZONE
Congratulations to Gareth Jelley on becoming the new editor and publisher of INTERZONE, the most important sf/fantastika short fiction magazine in Britain. It has a snazzy new website at interzone.press and, now, a digital-first sister site at interzone.digital. I've been telling you for forever that short fiction anthologies and magazines are the lifeblood of storytelling, so I hope you'll take a look at these soon. I'm delighted to see INTERZONE renewing itself yet again.
Gareth sent over some proofs from the new issue, number 294. THE BLACK BOX KILLER by Kat Clay is a really clever piece about human redaction that impressed me from the start.
Nobody knows his name, and that’s how he likes it. A condition of working the redaction department is anonymity. If he isn’t anonymous, then he could be open to bribery.
Sometimes schoolchildren come to the department on excursions, taught the history of the redaction laws from an early age. Sometimes they pass by his desk, looking on in awe, although he knows they can only see a pixelated projection of a face...
There's Alfred Bester in there, and Philip K Dick, but it's very much its own thing, and it bodes well for this new era of INTERZONE. I'm saving the rest for next week and will tell you about those next Sunday.
GOT MORE TIME?
KEEP READING
WARRENELLIS.LTD is my personal notebook, in which I make new entries several times a day. Think of it as all the things I can't fit into this newsletter, from links and bookmarks to reviews, random thoughts and life notes. If you use a RSS reader, it generates a feed at https://warrenellis.ltd/feed/ .
Now running daily status posts so people know why I'm not answering email.
MONSTROUS: The Buddha In The Pit - Notes on a fun Korean folk-horror tv series.
GLASS ONION (2022) -Notes on the very entertaining film.
Yes, this year I am trying to make notes on the films I watch. I've been trying to do this for years and never keeping up with it. Let's see how I do.
And a whole bunch of other things.
Okay, I need to get back to the grindstone, stick a bucket over the rhubarb crowns I managed to save in my otherwise dead garden, and try and clear some space in the small and overstuffed back room to get the coffee roaster on the counter. Which I'm looking forward to. If you can, do something you've been looking forward to this week. You deserve the treat. This year's rule is that you get to be good to yourself. Nice to be writing to you again. Hope to do it again next week.
W