summerdaze

Orbital Operations for 12 July 2026

Author

Warren Ellis
July 12, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. It has been rather warm here, and it’s softening my brain. I almost lead out with the announcement of a reprint project, assuming it had been solicited because I saw a single link to it on the internet and then realised some store had just gotten the information early. I have no idea how these things work any more. Looks like PROJECT WALLOPS will actually be announced around the same time as graphic novella PROJECT LOST SIERRA, whose solicitation is now in the system. That book will be out in November, unless it’s not. Who the hell knows any more?

Screw it. It’s summer. I had a glass of Norman Soul Pear Liquor at the end of my dinner at a Michelin Guide restaurant last night. I’d never had it before. Apparently there are only a hundred bottles of it in the UK this year. DC Comics paid me some money to hold on to the rights for something for another year, so I took us out to dinner and tried some things I’ve never tried before, because trying new things is how you stay alive and happy.

In the mornings, the mancub emerges from the garden, says “hiiii” or occasionally “heeee-llooo” and pats my leg until I reach down and stroke him. And then we just sit together and bake in the daze of summer.

In this letter:

  • generation x, mate

  • Pink Beam Press

  • Soeur L’Enfer

  • COLLIDE

  • Deliberate Disconnection

  • Graveyard Gallery

  • Phenomena

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

So, listen, one of the internet memes is true. If you were born in the late sixties, survived the seventies and can’t remember much of the eighties... my generation, we really do think we’re still thirty. Which, coincidentally, is the age of the kid we had in the nineties. See, here’s the problem - I’m fifty eight and I feel fucking great. So long as I don’t, you know, pick up an empty cup at the wrong angle or breathe at an incorrect volume. Because random injuries caused by being alive are absolutely real. 

The thing is that my generation should absolutely be extinct. For most of our childhoods we were only allowed in the house when it was time to eat food that was almost exclusively created in labs and came in colours that did not occur in nature. Nobody knew where we were during daylight hours until the age of 12 or 13 and then nobody knew where we were after sundown until we moved out. Which we did as soon as we could. Our generation were treated like feral monkeys, fed machine-washable bread and understood love to mean that someone expressed less disappointment in us than usual. We never asked for help, never trusted anyone, and started fires just for something to do. And yet. Freeze-dried elflord Bryan Johnson was recently diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis after years of eating nightmarish-looking plant slurry (no correlation I’m sure) but what if a Lean Cuisine from the Eighties might have preserved his tissues with its chemical stomach grouting? What if E Numbers sealed our organs in a manner similar to lamination? What if the fact that my generation are all dangerous sociopaths is an evolutionary advantage? Winston Churchill lived to 95 on a diet of whisky, cognac, ten cigars and literally two PINTS of Pol Roger champagne a day. That is 1.14 litres. This was our role model. Even vegetarian food was unhealthy. Even soft drinks rotted their own factories from the inside out. Alcohol was safer, as in the Dark Ages, when beer was less dangerous than water. 

What if I’m still shouting at you for the next FORTY YEARS?

I mean now that I’ve written that I’ll be dead by Xmas but STILL

OPERATIONS

PINK BEAM PRESS

PINK BEAM PRESS is a new publisher coming out of the organisation around the Philip K Dick Festival, leading out with a slate of seven sf novellas.

The plan is to release all seven novellas simultaneously in August in collaboration with the upcoming Philip K. Dick Festival at Cal State Fullerton, August 20-23. There is no dedicated website yet, so go to https://www.philipkdickfest.com/ and add yourself to their mailing list for updates.

I’ve been gifted all seven as advance copies and am hoping to get into them next week. Looking at the blurbs, they all seem PKD-inflected, but very much updated and wandering off into their own territories.

PINK BEAM is an ongoing project - I happen to know that they’re going to be publishing a collection of microfictions by the excellent Richard Kadrey later in the year.

COLLIDE: Jerome Eyquem + Warren Ellis: 01.11

Jerome Eyquem is an artist and writer: here are his releases on GlobalComix.

ORBITAL

SOEUR L’ENFER

I’ve been talking with musician Nina Courson over the last couple of months, as she readies her solo project Soeur L’Enfer. The first piece of the album just appeared this week, and you can click on the above to watch it. The video was actually shot by Dan Schaffer, whom some readers may remember from the comics series DOGWITCH.

If you’re into Chelsea Wolfe or turn-of-the-century PJ Harvey, you’ll like this. This particular track also puts me in mind of Kate Bush for some reason.

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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

BRAIN WARFARE

During the Iran hostage crisis, President Carter was seen carrying a file with a tab marked “Grill Flame.” GRILL FLAME was the US Army’s remote viewing unit.

Over the next few weeks, the two men exchanged a series of letters. In addition to his support, De Kruif issued a prescient warning. “All creation, including science, is a war against precedent. Science, to be vital, must grow out of competition between individual brains, foils one to the other, each man mad for his own idea.” Conformity was a scientist’s death knell, said De Kruif. “Beware the Establishment!” he warned.

PHENOMENA by Annie Jacobsen starts during World War Two and propels along on rockets through to 2016. It’s a big book, but it feels like a fast read and I found I hated putting it down. I picked it up on a whim, having liked her NUCLEAR WAR: A SCENARIO, even though I knew a fair bit about the subject of PHENOMENA. Or at least I thought I did. I was wrong.

For one thing, it seems that remote viewing worked.

As a result of his remote-viewing abilities, a concept called “the eight-martini results” was born. What Price seemed able to access through as yet unknown means was so unnerving that the CIA handler involved sometimes had to drink eight martinis in order to process the unfathomable nature of whatever “it” was.

The Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA and various other governmental entities used psychics long before anyone thought they did, and long after everyone assumed they stopped. This is the story of a shadow programme to try and turn psychic phenomena into military assets. And it’s not the whole “Men Who Stare At Goats” thing, that was the decadent end of the programme when the whole thing was being largely run by the soft-brained. At its peak, there were intelligent, flinty people attempting to understand and weaponise psi, in America, Russia and China.

(And the guy running the Chinese programme was HS Tsien, who co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, worked on the Manhattan Project, interrogated von Braun for the US Army and was made the first director of the Guggenheim Jet Propulsion Center at Caltech before McCarthyism denied his application for US citizenship, had him under house arrest for five years and eventually returned him to China as part of a POW exchange. He dedicated the rest of his life to revenge on the US:)

Almost single-handedly he revolutionized China’s technological capabilities from bare bones to cutting-edge. He created and developed the Chinese rocket program, its satellite program, and its manned space program. His work on China’s atomic bomb project allowed that nation to produce nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. Further, he was deeply committed to the science behind anomalous mental phenomena, including extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, and teleportation.

The great powers were convinced: perhaps not that these things actually existed, but that if they did exist and somebody else had access to them, then we were all in trouble.

And so Jacobsen follows the thread of military and intelligence exploration of weird mental phenomena from World War Two onwards, and it’s a hell of a ride. Jacobsen takes a value-neutral approach, and simply tells you what was said, what was written down and what people told her.

The book is extensively reported. She talks to hardened skeptics, true believers and everyone in between, and sources the rest in deep research, including material recently declassified at the time of writing (2016). And at the end of the book, she makes it clear the mission is ongoing:

In 2014, the Office of Naval Research embarked on a four-year, $3.85 million research program to explore the phenomena it calls premonition and intuition, or “Spidey sense,” for sailors and Marines. “We have to understand what gives rise to this so-called ‘sixth sense,’ says Peter Squire, a program officer in ONR’s Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare and Combating Terrorism department.

And here’s one more thing I didn’t know:

The Operation Warrior Wellness program, offered at Army and Marine bases and Veterans Administration medical centers across the country, teaches Transcendental Meditation to PTSD sufferers. The TM-based Resilient Warrior Program has been the subject of 340 peer-reviewed studies and has received more than $26 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health. Key findings of the program—with its NIH caveat, “unproven as medicine”—include a 40 percent to 55 percent reduction in symptoms of PTSD and depression, a 42 percent decrease in insomnia, 30 percent reported improvement in satisfaction with quality of life, and a 25 percent reduction in plasma cortisol levels. The man behind Operation Warrior Wellness is the film director David Lynch, who has been meditating since 1973 “twice a day, every day. It has given me effortless access to unlimited reserves of energy, creativity and happiness deep within. This level of life is sometimes called ‘pure consciousness’—it is a treasury. And this level of life is deep within us all,” says Lynch.

Excellent book. You would like it.

PHENOMENA, Annie Jacobsen (UK) (US)

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. You can subscribe to the site to get every post by email. Hopefully I’ll post more than twice next week! I blame the heat.

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I’m out. You should be too. Go out and enjoy your life. Because, trust me, no matter how shitty it might seem right now, there are still things you love and still things you can enjoy. So go and do one of them. You’re allowed. See you next week.

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