Martians And Hailstorms

Orbital Operations for 16 March 2025

Author

Warren Ellis
March 16, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. This week’s letter is a bit of a hodgepodge, because, honestly, that’s just where my brain is at this week.

In this letter:

  • A short story about weather and having no friends

  • Routines

  • 1966 and all that

  • Observations

  • Sound

  • LTD

Letters about the creative life by Warren Ellis, a writer from England. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here for free.

THE WORLD SERVICE

WIND ON THE WATER

Living out here on the Thames Delta, you get sensitive to the weather. Weather systems can get stuck on an estuary. I’ve been in a plane overhead and watched a snowstorm literally bounce between the two coastlines and the river mouth before.

I was on Rathlin Island for a stag weekend once, and went for a walk down the coast one morning. Light breeze at my back. I reached the bay and saw something weird. From my perspective, the water on the left hand of the bay, facing out to sea, was calm. The right hand, from halfway across the bay to the shore, was disturbed. Mizzled with a million little ripples. It took me a minute to realise what was happening. Two weather systems were rubbing against each other, and the ripples were an oncoming hailstorm. The surface of the water was cleanly cut in half by it. Absolutely surreal. I have a photo of it somewhere, which I snapped before kneeling by a drystone wall and tipping my hat down. The hail smashed over me for a few minutes before passing. Huge bloody hailstones. I looked up and saw the hailstorm make proper landfall and curl into the island.

I decided to walk back to the pub. I didn’t need to be wandering around with a hailstorm bouncing about.

I got there just as my compatriots were about to go out on a manly hike around Rathlin. I begged off, and before I could explain why, I suffered a couple of minutes of verbal abuse about being a lazy fucker who wanted to sit around with his stupid handheld computers and shit.

So I decided to keep quiet and have a nice drink indoors instead as they tramped off.

An hour later, they burst back into the pub with fresh red welts all over their heads yelling YOU BASTARD YOU KNEW 

I did. And this is just one of the many reasons I have no friends.

also has no big red welts from hailstones

OPERATIONS

ROUTINES

As I’ve noted over on LTD, I have gone to Intensified Analogue in daily work life. To the point where I may update the “Morning Routine And Work Day” posts there, because it’s changed and because for no reason those posts still get hits. There’s a fascination out there with the routines and methods of creative workers, I guess. Which can just as easily be a function of the procrastination of the creative worker. Here’s a note I wrote two years ago:

The thing about daily routines is that, in the end, they slip and slide. I was reading over my most recent Daily Routine notation from earlier this year (that I somehow managed to misname as Jan 2022) and, boy, it’s the end of May and I don’t do all of that any more. Winter went on forever, there was family health stress, a few deadline-intensive jobs, getting DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT up and running, various other things and, frankly, a large dose of fuckit.

This leads me back to the start of the loop, where you begin thinking about “productivity” and what you need to change or begin doing. And the thing about thinking about “productivity” is that you can easily find yourself in a space where thinking about “productivity” becomes the only activity you’re performing, and the things you’re trying to design to make work easier or better become the entirety of the work.

So I went outside and planted strawberries in the raised bed instead.

Sometimes I feel like I need to staple this note to the wall.

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ORBITAL

1966: WE ARE THE MARTIANS

It's 1966. Delia Derbyshire pays for Pink Floyd's taxi as they visit her at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett is months away from going mad. Yoko Ono is months away from being naked on Delia Derbyshire's floor for no particular reason. The INTERNATIONAL TIMES recently commenced publication, launching at a Pink Floyd gig. The film THE WITCHES, written by Nigel Kneale, has been released. And writer Alan Grant's a few months away from getting a job at DC Thomson, Britain's oldest continuous publisher of comics. In Dundee there is a hotel with a stone plaque on an outside wall reading "God give the blessing to the paper craft in the good realm of Scotland."

1966: University of Strasbourg Student Union funds are lifted by Situationist sympathisers to print Andre Bertrand's short comic RETURN OF THE DURUTTI COLUMN, which used stills from Hollywood movies in a process then termed detournement: familiar materials recontextualised in opposition (or at strange angles) to their original intent. This is something so common on the internet now that most people may not know there's a word for it. The only useful Google hit I can find for Andre Bertrand today is, funnily enough, the Wikipedia page for an attorney who specialises in copyright law.

The Student Union's next stunt is to release a polemic notable for praising Spies For Peace. The British anti-war group The Committee Of 100 was affiliated with Spies For Peace. Comics writer Grant Morrison's father did prison time as a member of the Committee. Committee-related demonstrations against Greek royalty visiting London in 1963 led to the arrest of, among others, comics artist Donald Rooum (whom I knew in the 1980s as a sweet and lovely illustrator of kids' comic strips – it was quite a shock when I later discovered him doing anarchist comics). Donald was nicked and framed by one Det. Sergeant Harold Challenor, who was later found to have been a functioning paranoid schizophrenic since approximately 1944.

(Twelve years later, Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus, not quite yet having formed Factory Records in Manchester, put together a band out of bits of other local bands. Wilson would have been entirely aware that that the title RETURN OF THE DURUTTI COLUMN deliberately misspells the name of Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti, but names the band The Durutti Column. Mostly, I suspect, so he can call the first album RETURN OF THE DURUTTI COLUMN. A well-read man, Wilson employs another Situationist notion, and sells the record in a sleeve made of sandpaper, so that it will slowly destroy the other records in the owner's collection.)

1966 is smack in the middle of a period where fringe culture is pop culture is cool culture. Ten years earlier, the whole of Britain used to go home to watch the Nigel Kneale-written QUATERMASS serials, fringey gothic science fiction that was nonetheless common culture. Deeply weird tv with the equivalent audience reach to THE X-FACTOR. In 1966, in fact, we're only a year away from the successful film remake of the third QUATERMASS serial, QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, and its resonant final message for the people of modern Earth, the new people of psychedelia, the weirdos in shiny alien clothes freaking the mundane out on streets all over the western World: “We are the Martians.”

A few years ago, certain chemists started claiming that life may have been brought to Earth by Martian rocks.

the international title for QUATERMASS AND THE PIT

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM. 2025: FELL: FERAL CITY new printing, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition, the LIGHTS OUT Anthology.

OBSERVATIONS

Recently discovered the very striking work of Patricia Martin.

Lordess Foudre is on an enforced break from The News, but her store is still open!

all available on Amazon

OTHER

SOUND

Recent grabs off Bandcamp:

I sometimes miss the music compilation podcast I used to do. I also sometimes entertain the notion of doing a spoken-word podcast, right up until I remember that I hate the sound of my own voice.

I would still recommend Libsyn as a podcast host, though.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

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And that’s my brain this week, such as it is. Hope yours is doing better. Take care of you, and I’ll see you next week.

W

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