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Orbital Operations for 14 September 2025
Warren Ellis
September 14, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes
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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. We don’t do the news here. Breathe and relax. This is Orbital Operations.
In this letter:
QUAOAR!
There Are No Rules If You Decide There Are No Rules
this and that
Thought For The Day
for eyes and ears
LTD
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
QUAOAR, THE DATURA AVENGER
Quaoar is a ringed dwarf planet out past Neptune’s orbit. It was discovered twenty-odd years ago and has at least two moons.
It’s named after the creator god of the Tongva people of the LA Basin, back when the LA Basin was called Yaa. There were maybe a quarter of a million humans in California at the time of the Tongva, and fifty thousand of them were in Yaa. It was a conurbation even then.
They had their own ritual hallucinogen, a brew of the form of datura known as Californian jimson weed and salt water that apparently cast visions that lasted for days. I can’t imagine what that was like, as datura is evil shit. For shorter bursts, they’d eat jimson weed seeds. Poison control centres in America still report a thousand cases a year of someone showing up sick as a dog from eating datura seeds. And they cremated their dead. Cremated people don’t mostly fly up into the air to be forever lost in the wind. They come down as enriching ash for the soil. He was associated with winnowing trays, where matter is thrown into the air and then shaken in the tray to remove the chaff from the grain.
The deity Quaoar:
…was born, or first appeared, after the death of Wiyot,[2] a tyrannical ruler of the first beings, who was poisoned by his sons. Wiyot's murder brought death into the world, and as a consequence, the male creator Night divided the first human ancestors into distinct peoples, assigning them languages and territories.
I bet they did him with datura.
Quaoar was also known as Chingichngish, and there’s another good bit in that Wikipedia entry:
The most distinctive characteristic of Chingichngish beliefs concerned the existence of a set of "Chingichngish avengers" who spied on human beings and enforced the moral code. These figures included Raven, Rattlesnake, Bear, Mountain Lion, and others.
Are we ready for The Datura Avengers?
I think so.
OPERATIONS
THERE ARE NO RULES IF YOU DECIDE THERE ARE NO RULES
So an artist acquaintance wants to begin writing and drawing his own graphic novel sequence, and asked me for advice. After a little back and forth, I said this:
Orson Welles had done an awful lot of stuff in other media before he went to Hollywood to make a film. Therefore he had no idea what was possible. He had no idea what he was doing and had no idea how a camera or film sets worked. So he got someone to teach him how a camera worked and for everything else he just invented what he needed and decided he didn’t care if it was possible or not. That’s why we all still rewatch CITIZEN KANE today - he invented his own version of cinema.
Do that. Don’t get sunk in how-to books. Figure out your story and then decide for yourself how to tell it. There are no rules if you decide there are no rules.
And then I thought, maybe someone else needs to hear that too. So there it is.
ORBITAL
this and that
In the past, incongruous things often signaled importance. Now, incongruity is everywhere. Anomalous change is constant.
Basically, shit is going to stay weird.
I mean: what if time has three dimensions?
A Croatian freediver has managed to hold his breath underwater for 29 minutes and 3 seconds, beating the world record by five minutes. Most people struggle to avoid their phones for that long.
This new Humble Bundle of digital comics from the wild and woolly Image days contains three or four of my books, and benefits the Book Industry Charitable Foundation.
This may be the most demented journal/tracking system I’ve yet seen.
Recently: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM., THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition, the LIGHTS OUT Anthology.
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY with AJ Brady
In certain ancient Germanic traditions, it was believed that there was an island to the west of the world where souls migrated to after death. For some considerable time, it was held that that island was actually Britain. Look at the shore now, glittering with mantic light, shrouded in the smoke of burning bones. See the figures on the soot sand. They've been watching you for so long. Who's really to say that this isn't the island of the dead?
These are the collaborations between myself and painter AJ. Sometimes she sends me an image and I respond to it in text, sometimes I send her a piece of text and she responds with an image. Find her work at brady-pictures.com and her IG.
OPS
THE BIG BOOKS
I pre-ordered the new Mick Herron months ago and forgot all about it until it arrived around midnight on Wednesday. Won’t have time to get to it for a while. (UK) (US)
Listening to the new Laura Cannell a lot.
Music podcast Le Jardin is back with season 4.
Currently reading a vast book called CHOKEPOINTS by Edward Fishman (UK) (US) , about economic warfare in the recent past:
Of the Soviet Union’s fourteen non-Russian successor states, none was more important to Moscow than Ukraine. With more than 40 million inhabitants, a strategic location on the Black Sea, the world’s most fertile farmland, and a military-industrial sector deeply integrated into Russia’s own, Ukraine was in many ways the former crown jewel of the Soviet Union. It was also home to Sevastopol, where Russia operated its most critical warm-water naval port. “It cannot be stressed strongly enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire,” wrote Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Polish-born former U.S. national security advisor, in 1994. An Oxbridge don put it in less delicate terms: “With the Ukraine, Russia is a USA; without, she is a Canada—mostly snow.”
This is why I won’t get to Mick Herron for a while. Autumn and winter are for the big books. Come December, I intend to attack MOBY DICK again, and that immense Tokarczuk book that eluded me the first time around.
I’m in the process of detaching from my phone in the evenings after I’ve caught up with the news, aside of course from messaging. I have an older Kindle with a fucked battery that I’m using as my evening reader, and I’m gathering a list of the things I need to read.
GOT MORE TIME?
LTD
I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. Though I have managed to fall behind this week.
Morning Computer: a few useful things first thing in my day
notes on THE MANIAC, Benjamin Labutut
various other weird bits and pieces
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And that’s me this week. Take a damn breath and drop your shoulders. You’re in better shape than you think. See you next week.
W
I’m represented by Angela Cheng Caplan at the Cheng Caplan Company, David Hale Smith at Inkwell Management and Joel VanderKloot and VanderKloot Law. Please add
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