It's A Living

ALL QUIET OUT HERE ON THE THAMES DELTA

Nothing to report this week. Had our first all-hands pre-production meeting on the audio drama slate, which produced some really interesting casting choices that we're all very excited about. Pieces should slot into place next week. Meanwhile, I am in the middle of a long and complex outline and need to stay totally focussed on it.

So here's the text of a taik I have for a New Scientist magazine event in 2016. I hope it amuses.

Good afternoon. My name’s Warren Ellis. I’m a writer.

So. A little while after I agreed to appear here today, one of the organisers got in touch to say, “well, probably nobody in the room will have a clue who you are, so maybe you could just read them something.” And then there was a suggestion about showing you a film or something, which was kind of weighted with the implication that maybe they didn’t mean to invite me after all. But, sadly for all of us, here I am.

So what I’m going to do is read you something from my next book, which is coming out at the end of November. It’s a mystery story, set in a hospital in the remote forests of Oregon, that caters for only one kind of patient. It’s a home for futurists who have been emotionally damaged by thinking about the future for too long. Because that’s a thing that happens. Here’s a bit from the opening chapter:

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“Foresight strategists on this side. Non-profits, charitable institutions, universities, design companies, the civil stuff. On the other side? Strategic forecasters. Global security groups, corporate think-tanks, spook stuff. You know the score.”

He did. He was a futurist. They were all futurists. Everyone here gazed into the abyss for a living. Do it long enough, and the abyss would gaze back into you. If the abyss did that for long enough, and the people who paid you for your eyes would send you to Normal Head. The place was paid for by foundations and multinationals alike, together. Most of their human probes needed it, one way or another, in the end.

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You can’t start putting together ideas about the future until you take a good long look at the present – the systems and conditions that bind us. There’s a term I use in the book – Abyss Gaze – the thing that happens when you look into the abyss for too long and it starts looking into you.

The book’s called NORMAL.

So here’s a piece of it. The person who’s talking is Lela Charron, and she’s an urbanist – a person involved in seeing and developing the future of the city. And now she’s in Normal Head Research Station, she’s talking to a new arrival called Adam Dearden, and this is how she thinks. I’ve edited out most but not all of the swearing.

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You spend all day thinking of cities as machines for living in. And as the data piles up, and you realize the scale of the problems that cities are intended to solve, you start thinking of the city as a suit of armour to survive in. I mean, in theory and practice, that’s exactly what it is. That’s why cities used to have earthworks and walls around them. A city’s supposed to have everything in it that its citizenry needs to live. If I’m sick, and I live in a city, it’s almost certain that the care I need is closer to me than if I lived in a house in the country, because all the hospitals are in big towns and cities. People in what we think of as a basic Western city simply live longer. Basic, not, you know, collapsing or feral. Basic. Which means they fill up with old people. Huddled up against the health services they need and can afford, and all the other civic machinery that keeps their spaces liveable.”

Adam put his hand on the table, where hers had been, open. “I’m sorry. You don’t need to go on.”

“I do, though. I do need to go on. Because you need to hear it. Everybody does. I have to track shit, to do my job. Literally. I literally had to track the passage of shit through pipes in five major cities for six months, at one point. The way we move shit around in cities is vital. It affects the condition of the urban environment, the volume of humans that can be supported therein, the quality of the water and the state of the ecology outside the city. At least. And then, yes, I had to hand over my data to the city authorities, because that’s what I was hired to do. I don’t get to make the decisions. All I can do is overwhelm them with data and reports until they have no choice but to do the right thing. But they don’t, because nobody can hold the right thing in their heads. It’s too big. It’s too big and it’s too deep.”

“You know what I’m talking about. I got sent to New York. They pump more than thirteen million gallons of water out of New York every day just to keep the subway running. So that people can perform ten thousand felonies a year on it. And that’s the small number. New York needs to pump another two hundred million gallons of water out of four thousand five hundred acres of city every single day to stop the city from drowning in its own piss and bathwater and the sea creeping up to grab at the ankles of the two million people south of 71st Street. That is one system. Only one. And just on Manhattan. The five boroughs have to process more than a billion gallons a day. Remember Hurricane Sandy? Sandy took out half the pumps and almost all the treatment plants in a second. And it was just barely a Category 1 hurricane when it hit. A thirteen-foot surge over the wall by Battery Park. That released ten billion gallons of raw sewage into the city and the surrounding waters. Shit. Big storm comes and we can’t protect ourselves from our own shit. That’s the future, Adam whateveryournameis. Citystates rammed with ageing people huddling up against hospitals and looking up in terror for the big storm that will come and go and leave them floating face down in thirteen feet of shit. And I can’t do anything about it.”

“None of us can. We just look at this stuff, we look wider and deeper, and then just deeper and deeper, and all we can see is everything getting smaller and darker until it’s this infinite black dot of compressed shit and horror. And we get paid for that. That’s the amazing thing. We get paid to stare down the black silo of the future and gaze at the pebble at the bottom that’s nothing but the crushed remains of the species. That’s where we all end up. That’s all we do. And there’s a dollar value on that. We get given money for it. It’s like we’re the sin-eaters for the entire culture, looking at the end of human civilization because it’s supposed that somebody should. I’m fine, by the way. Stop looking for a nurse. I’m going back to work. Society needs people to stare at a ball of shit at the end of the world all day. It’s a living.”

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So. If you ever wondered why science fiction writers are a bit weird and sometimes kind of look like they’re surrounded by a murky cloud of restraining orders, this is part of the reason why. This is where we all start, when we begin to think about the future, and looking into that mess isn’t always good for you.

The subtitle of this session is “Who’s afraid of the future?” On some level, all of us who think about it are.

But we have to start extrapolating and speculating from somewhere, right?

I’m not a big fan of prediction in fiction – or, at least, treating fiction as an engine for prediction. Our job was never to predict the single true future.

Thinking about the future isn’t rocket science, and neither is it archery. Time’s Arrow is a seductive idea. The notion that time travels in a straight line, and that we rise into a single future. Or, if you’re feeling oppressed and cranky, that the future is a single cutting head diving down towards us. It simplifies things nicely, and makes passengers of us. It is convenient and sometimes comforting to believe we have no agency in the face of Time’s Arrow. The Future is coming and we’re trapped on the ride.

I stopped believing, a long time ago, that the future works in that way, no matter how many rocket scientists you throw at it.

It works like The Great Storm of 1987. If you weren’t in it, your friends and parents will have talked about it. I lived by the water’s edge on the estuary at the time, and woke up to a two-foot drift of sand piled against my front door. Walking to work was the full Walking Dead experience: totally alone, walking up the middle of the road through the debris and the shattered glass, the only real difference between that and a zombie show being the ancient trees laying across dual carriageways and sticking out of houses. You’d think that, as a bloody great 122mph meteorological convulsion that killed twenty-odd people and caused two billion pounds’ worth of damage, a Great Storm would be an unmissably large piece of the future smack dab in the middle of Time’s Arrow’s path. But no. The projections were off. Prediction will always get you into trouble, as anyone who ever talked about flying cars will tell you.

Part of that is down to the hyperbole that accompanies prediction. Part of it is down to the nature of single prediction, the stuff of futurism, itself.

From this perspective, the Great Storm was the mobile phone. It could be seen in the distance, along with a dozen other swirls of stormy weather, but we had no idea it would hit hard enough to change the shape of the world. It hit hard enough to break science fiction, one of our traditional early-warning stations, and it became interpolated into and interrogated by contemporary and popular fiction without science fiction ever getting to lay a finger on it. “Gene-editing,” as a phrase, has broken into the world without a science-fictional genesis. This will keep happening if we keep believing we’re on a single rail to the future and that single prediction is the way to see ahead.

But let me circle back round to something I just said there. Science fiction as an early warning system. Trying to do exact predictions is stupid, and not something that most science fiction tries. Science fiction gets hit with the label of the “fiction of prediction” because sometimes some writers just accidently hit on that one thing that happened. In my own personal case, it was probably Donald Trump.

What science fiction, as a field, is good for, is looking at ten thousand possibilities at once. Technological, social, political, whatever. And testing them all. Imagining them as real things and testing them in the laboratory of fiction to see what they do.

The left in this country was once really interested in eugenics. Even the likes of HG Wells was up for it. And then Aldous Huxley, beginning from the position of wanting to give Wells’ leg a good hard pull, decided to take a long look at, among other things, what a eugenics society would look like. He wasn’t engaged in prediction, but speculation. He wrote BRAVE NEW WORLD to show a version of a possible future, in all its clever and complex horror, and presented it for our consideration. Showing all the things we needed to think about if we head in that direction. An early warning system.

Science fiction isn’t prediction. It’s imagining storms from the prevailing conditions. We’re not a mirror to the future. We’re just your first, best weather station.

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NORMAL is a short novel available as paperback or ebook, and as an audiobook read by the magnificent John Hodgman, which my editor Sean McDonald surprised me with on the day of recording. As did John, who emailed me a photo of him getting started. It's been a hell of a life.

NORMAL (UK) (US)

Probably back next week, but don't email me if I'm not. I won't be dead, just working. In the meantime, take care of yourself, do the things you love, have yourself a glass of something cheerful and enjoy the light.

W