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Orbital Operations for 14 June 2026
Warren Ellis
June 14, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. It’s bloody cold.
In this letter:
no Doctor Who for you
The Solar Grid
The News, with Lordess Foudre
COLLIDE 01.07
a good record
Deliberate Disconnection with Rain DeGrey
Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery
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 WORLD SERVICE
DOCTOR WHEN
Surprising nobody, DOCTOR WHO was cancelled this week, Russell T Davies and producers Bad Wolf are out, and the BBC are putting the show out to competitive tender. The notional "Whoniverse" of a constant flow of new material turned out to be three specials, two seasons and a dismal miniseries called THE WAR BETWEEN THE LAND AND THE SEA. The huge influx of money from the Disney+ deal was, according to one comment I saw, spent on shooting the shows in 4K Ultra HD. This seems unlikely to me, but I'm not an expert.
I have immense respect for Davies as a writer - THE SECOND COMING is still a storming piece of work, and YEARS AND YEARS is worth a rewatch - but his new run on DOCTOR WHO felt to me like creative hesitation and his discovery partway through of a dry well. This was pitched as a clean start but it was riddled with callbacks to obscure lore, aimed at superfans rather than the new audience it had access to. I personally had no issue with the Heavily Gay version, and I kind of laughed when I saw the new main titles sequence with its Pink Energy Disney Princess TARDIS. But Davies, who relies strongly on emotional logic in his WHO stories, didn't have the conviction of his own set-up - the supposedly rehabbed and got-his-shit-together Doctor cries like an untreated trauma victim all the way through these seasons. (Emotional-logic storytelling always has to fall back on people crying to sell itself.) The episodes I saw gave the sense that Gatwa never had the time to find his portrayal. And that last move at the end of the second season was desperate, and has had the unfortunate effect of hobbling whoever takes over.
I still think the team was stuck on WHO as a kids show at heart, or at best "family friendly." Which isn't necessarily wrong, but I have a feeling the lens they were using was outdated, and I'm not sure the popular-culture references (Bridgerton, the fucking Eurovision Song Contest in space) did them any favours. If it's a kids show, why are you doing a Bridgerton bit? And if you're accepting that kids watch Bridgerton, why are you so committed to WHO being a Seventies kids show? The whole thing felt to me less like a fluid exploration than some people unable to find a firm vision to work from.
What if they were chasing a linear-tv “whole family around the telly on a Saturday evening” audience that simply doesn’t exist any more?
I keep coming back to the fact that they had all that money and that stated intent to build out a television universe, and circumstances somehow prevented them from fulfilling that. With David Tennant right there, a bunch of previous companions set up as working for UNIT (one of Davies' great ideas was having UNIT's Kate Stewart hiring as many of the Doctor's companions as possible, a serious story engine in plain sight)...
On the other hand, if they ever do a crossover event again, Christopher Eccleston will be available now Davies and Bad Wolf are gone.
But here’s an interesting side note.
DOCTOR WHO is gone. STAR TREK has reached the end of its cycle. The STARGATE reboot was cancelled. The new STAR WARS film did not do well, and I believe they only have one more film in the pipeline. The MCU is not in a great place and the shape of its future will balance on the two new AVENGERS films. SUPERMAN’s takings were soft and SUPERGIRL is tracking at less than half of SUPERMAN’s opening.
And the two biggest films of the last month were made for less than a million each by directors in their twenties.
One or two swallows don’t make a summer, but right now it looks like old science fiction inflected IP is reaching a hiatus point.
OPERATIONS
For a limited time only, Ganzeer's fantastic graphic novel THE SOLAR GRID is available as a digital download. This 480-page book contains a foreword from me:
"Ganzeer invents his own visual language. THE SOLAR GRID is the work of someone who doesn’t listen to anyone tell him what he can or cannot do. The sheer number of styles and methods he applies in this book is dizzying. Every page is an adventure. Like he’s discovering what he can do while he does it. By the time you’re halfway through you’ll think you’ve identified the point where he went nuts. It’s not. It’s where he launches into new territory."
You can either give him a straight up ten dollars at https://garage.ganzeer.com/product/TSG or do it as pay-what-you want via Gumroad - https://ganzeer.gumroad.com/l/TSG .
The News, with Lordess Foudre
COLLIDE: Jerome Eyquem + Warren Ellis: 01.07
Jerome Eyquem is an artist and writer: here are his releases on GlobalComix.
ORBITAL
WHERE LIGHT PAUSES
The good people at Klang Signals shared with me the new record Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun by Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri, and I have to share with you the fourth track of this remarkable record. Room-filling ambient that asks to be played loud. That moment at the three-minute mark where the strings come in is exquisite. Ten and a half minutes of being suspended in the summer sky.
It is time for the Tiny Awards 2026:
Each year we ask the online world to nominate their favourite creative, non-commercial website built in the past 12 months. A panel of selected expert judges drawn from across the wide world of web-based creativity then pick their favourites. Finally, the entire web then votes upon this list to pick its favourite. The winner, as chosen by public vote, wins a small prize and a small handmade trophy (and we hopefully give an even smaller prize to each nominee).
Go and nominate someone today.
Also, just arrived: AUTOREC sent me their self-titled record, dark cinematic ambient with an opening track that just kills. Also on Bandcamp, so you can stream the whole thing for free.
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.
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
THE REVOLUTIONISTS
Another idea newly influential in analytic circles at this time originated with Brian Jenkins, an expert at the Rand Corporation in California, who had studied art history and was steeped in the radical artistic production of the 1960s. He argued that the use of violence in terrorism was not ‘mindless’ but carefully designed to communicate a message to specific audiences: terrorism as theatre.
THE REVOLUTIONISTS is an immense, deeply researched and sourced work about extremists. The sort of people we now call "terrorists," but Burke has a position on that, and uses "extremists" for reasons. His view of the phenomenon starts post-war, gets going in the 1960s, and ends in the mid-Eighties with the radicalization of Osama bin Laden. It is exhaustive, whipping from squats in Germany to tape cassettes of Ayatollah Khomeini circulating rural Iran as audio samizdat, from the "snow murders" in Japan to a Swedish spy almost getting wiped out by Israeli jets. And, over and over again, a chubby-faced Venezuelan failson and borderline incompetent by the name of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez who loved money, sex and killing people, soon to be known as Carlos the Jackal.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine codenamed him Carlos. The Guardian, of all newspapers, called him The Jackal. The press during the period were about as helpful as the London newspapers during Jack the Ripper's run.
"All tended to portray Ramírez as possessed of near-superhuman powers. Many of the Western accounts should have stretched credulity. Journalists, politicians and other commentators routinely claimed that ‘Carlos the Jackal’ had participated in more or less every terrorist attack that had occurred in the previous decade, including the Munich Olympics attack of 1972, the hijacking that led to the Entebbe raid and the wave of violence in the summer of 1977. Ramírez was supposed to have masterminded the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, organised the fatal shooting of Nicaragua’s former dictator Anastasio Somoza in Paraguay a year later and led a team of Libyan assassins from Mexico across the Rio Grande into the US. An Italian magazine reported that Ramírez had links variously to the Italian Red Brigades, ‘neo-Fascists’, the Palestinians and a network of Freemasons. In one of the more spectacularly irresponsible reports of this sort, the weekly magazine New York, recently bought by the up-and-coming Australian businessman Rupert Murdoch, described in detail what might happen if ‘the most dangerous man in the world’ used a small nuclear bomb against an American city. Meanwhile, a series of cinematic blockbusters depicted an often thinly disguised version of Ramírez as an omnipotent mastermind of violence, as did books with names like The Carlos Complex or Brothers in Blood. Some accounts declared Ramírez dead; others said he was a master of disguise and very much alive. All placed him at the heart of an international terrorist network."
Which he really wasn't.
For another example: the Baader-Meinhof Gang or just Baader-Meinhof were actually called the Red Army Faction, and the most effective member was not the idiot Andreas Baader nor the brilliant but slightly mad Ulrike Meinhof (who opted to join the group a good while after they started operating, and whom the group later turned on), but Gudrun Ensslin. Baader-Meinhof just sounded better to the media.
‘Ulrike Meinhof speaks, turning her sharp mind mercilessly against herself,’ one wrote. ‘A self-made martyr, a self-elected Joan of Arc of proletarian internationalism, with no army behind her but the people who call themselves the RAF, a spectral image in her poor clever head.’
I found this whole book compulsively readable, and relatively easy to keep track of during all the location changes and shifts in focus. Of which there are a lot, because this is a global book. I could go on, but I won't: it's a fantastic piece of history writing, detailed without being overwhelming, sharp and clever and unsparing.
GOT MORE TIME?
LTD
I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. Currently, I do one post a day, with maybe an additional note in the evening to log stuff. The daily note is like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.
And that’s me, just under 2000 words! See you next week.
W
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