- Orbital Operations
- Posts
- The Earth Radiates
The Earth Radiates
Orbital Operations for 21 July 2024
Warren Ellis
July 21, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
In partnership with
Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, and congratulations to Ian Holloway for marking ten years doing the fine Wyrd Britain.
INSPIRATIONS
SLIVERS
NEW ACTS
MURMURATIONS
THE EARTH RADIATES SONG
Letters about the creative life by Warren Ellis, a writer from England. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe.
INSPIRATIONS
🎙️ Conrad Schnitzler, SOLO BASS HEAD appears to be the title, and the opening piece is wonderful. Remember that weird gurgling bass note in the first Star Trek film? Like that.
🎞️ THE CONTRAPTION, a marvellously strange short film with a marvellously strange pedigree: written and directed by the guy that wrote FATAL ATTRACTION, and starring Richard O’Brien, who wrote THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW.
📖Where did you propose?’
‘I didn’t,’ Poe said. ‘Estelle proposed to me.’
‘That’s . . . unconventional.’
‘You don’t know the half of it. She lured me to a post-mortem and when I got there she’d spelled out “Will you marry me?” with finger bones.’
— THE MERCY CHAIR, MW Craven
OPERATIONS
SLIVERS
I can’t show you the two amazing covers I’ve had burning a hole in my desktop for the last few months, and it’s killing me. All I can do is show you two little slivers of them to prove they’re real and scratch the itch. And hope this doesn’t piss anyone off!
It’s been a year of schedules getting dropped in pools of molasses: I’ve just looked at the calendar and moved two books off the 2024 board and on to the 2025 board. Nothing happens fast any more, and I’m mostly okay with that, but once in a blue moon I just want to scream.
I am into the development of PROJECT BORLEY now - which is already sold and contracted, my co-creator artist is busy in visual development, and I 1) still don’t have six plots I like enough 2) am assembling the weird toolbox the project requires. It is not going to look like other comics I’ve done. It contains a bunch of tools I’ve been itching to try out, and I’m spending a lot of time in notebooks and staring at the wall visualising. If we can pull this off, it’s going to be… well, probably alienating and a colossal failure. But it will look amazing.
I have a lot of reference in front of me right now.
This showed up in the post the other day, so I guess it’s been reprinted (possibly in a larger size? It feels big):
I got to be on the same bill as Neal Adams.
(I still have a photo somewhere as proof I was once on the same bill as James Ellroy at an otherwise lonely literary festival, because I have always had terrible imposter syndrome)
And I got to write a story for Becky Cloonan to draw: still pretty sure she’s a better writer than me, but being able to write for that marvellous flowing line of hers and that liquid motion in it was a joy.
ORBITAL
NEW ACTS
I forgot to mention this last week: Julian Simpson’s new audio drama, TEMPORAL, is being released on Audible on August 1. His announcement:
I'm confident that this is the largest cast ever assembled for a show like this, and it includes Sanjeev Bhaskar, Jessie Mei Li, Nicola Walker, Jana Carpenter, Kyle Soller, Don Gilet, Phoebe Fox, Steven Mackintosh, Mark Bazeley, Barnaby Kay... Alongside pretty much everyone else you've ever heard in Lovecraft Investigations or Aldrich Kemp.
It was written by me, Bec Boey, Nosa Igbinedion and Richard Maclean Smith (who writes and hosts the excellent Unexplained podcast).
The story is mostly under wraps, but it concerns a Martian colony a thousand years from now, sending teams back in time to Earth to find out why the human race spontaneously vanished from the face of the planet.
That is a huge bloody cast, he’s right.
Seeing that, you may be wondering where my own audio drama projects are. That’s a bloody good question, and one I hope to have an answer to in a few weeks.
My old friend Scott Dunbier, once of Wildstorm and IDW, has announced his new project, ACT 4 Publishing, and here’s a flex: he got Chip Kidd to design the logo.
If you’re going to San Diego, he’ll be releasing more details at a panel there.
MURMURATIONS
A new Sarah Davachi album always gets my attention. Her work is somewhere between early music and modern electroacoustic music: often somewhere between the liturgical and lab-grown psychoacoustics.
OTHER
THE EARTH RADIATES SONG
Marc Weidenbaum sent me this, with the email header “geomicrobiology”:
We eventually reached another large spigot mired in what looked like wet clay, which varied in color from pale salmon to brick red. This, too, Casar explained, was the work of microbes — in this case a genus known as Gallionella, which thrives in iron-rich waters and excretes twisted metal spires.
The story’s on the NYT, and entitled The Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes That Sculpt Our Planet.
These intraterrestrial microbes tend to be quite different from their counterparts on the surface. They are ancient and slow, reproducing infrequently and possibly living for millions of years. They often acquire energy in unusual ways, breathing rock instead of oxygen.
Intraterrestrial!
This, though, might be my favourite:
Within some of the deepest samples, they found a single species: a baguette-shaped bacterium with a whiplike tail that endured temperatures up to 140 degrees and acquired energy from the chemical byproducts of radioactively decaying uranium embedded in its sunless home.
The piece has a wonderful final line:
Earth is a stone that eats starlight and radiates song, whirling through the inscrutable emptiness of space — pulsing, breathing, evolving — and just as vulnerable to death as we are.
This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv and:
Increase Your Amazon Position Before Oct Prime Day
Send free products to Micro-Influencers using the platform Stack Influence which automates influencer collaborations at scale (get thousands of collabs per month). Brands like Magic Spoon, Unilever, and Farmacy have been able to get to #1 page positioning on Amazon and increase their monthly revenue as high as 13X in as little as 2 months.
Pay influencers only with products
Increase external traffic Amazon sales
Get full rights image/video UGC
Increase your listings search positioning before Oct Prime Day is upon us!
Take it easy on yourself. It’s weird everywhere, worrying won’t change anything and it’ll just make you ill. See you next week.
W
I’m represented by Angela Cheng Caplan at the Cheng Caplan Company, Joel VanderKloot at VanderKloot Law and David Hale Smith at Inkwell Management. Please add [email protected] to your email system’s address book or contacts and move this to your primary folder when you get a minute, thanks.