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The Light At The End Of The Tunnel Is A UFO
Orbital Operations for 17 May 2026
Warren Ellis
May 17, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Another really time-poor week over here - and I am five hundred quid lighter thanks to the plumbing issues that ate an entire workday - so I’m just going to lock this letter today, which is Friday, because I’m going out to dinner tonight and spend all Saturday at gigs.
In this letter:
a few peculiar things
The News, with Lordess Foudre
COLLIDE 01.03
Li’l Factory
Deliberate Disconnection with Rain DeGrey
Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery
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
A FEW PECULIAR THINGS
High Skull is apparently now a beauty trend.
Halupedia: a wikipedia made entirely of AI hallucinations.
Anyone remember I wrote a book called CROOKED LITTLE VEIN that features a scene of the then-niche practise of men inflating their scrotums with saline? Now it’s called ballmaxxing.
INSURGENT THOUGHT: I can’t remember where I came across this, but it’s a small online library of odd books - anarchist to Artaud, counterinsurgency to philosophy to mysticism and Bataille. It’s the internet version of tiny bookshops I used to visit in the Eighties and Nineties, when you really had to put effort into hunting that shit down. Grubbing around in the back of Housmans and the occult bookshops down the road from Covent Garden, that spinner-rack of weird zines hidden in the corner of Forbidden Planet where I found the transcript of the Jonestown Death Tape…
(Do NOT google “Jonestown Death Tape,” the audio is out there and you do NOT want to listen to it EVER)
The Nightly is a music appreciation society disguised as a radio station, specializing in the old, the gloomy, and the obscure.
Having belatedly discovered that most of our musical heroes are, confusingly, all but unknown, we’ve taken it on ourselves to build them their own doleful little museum. This takes the form of a sort of “numbers station” of songs, an endless, unalterable sequence of ballads & dirges that can be heard anywhere in the world at any time of day or night. Here we hope our idols can be loved as they probably more or less deserve, delaying as long as possible that mournful day they slip mankind’s memory once & for all.
The specialty of the house is a sort of twilit melancholia — moody & sweetly elegiac, avoiding anything overly bleak, morbid or jarring. We confine ourselves mostly to the mid-20th century — 1930 to 1970, say — with occasional forays backward to harvest tribal lullabies or the glittering residue of the strange Old World.
It’s (streaming) radio, so you won’t love everything they play, obviously, but I love that this thing even exists. Again, it feels like the sort of thing I would have tripped over at the end of the 20th Century, creeping through the radio dial on a night with good atmospherics, looking for something strange leaking out from the continent or a boat or a low-power transmitter somewhere down the coast or hidden in London…
The News, with Lordess Foudre
COLLIDE: Jerome Eyquem + Warren Ellis: 01.03
Jerome Eyquem is an artist and writer: here are his releases on GlobalComix. He’s also on Instagram.
ORBITAL
LI’L FACTORY
This is a hell of a thing. I was gifted the first three books from Li’l Factory AB this week:
Li’l Factory AB is an independent publisher of science fiction and fantasy. Every book we print is produced in limited and numbered editions. As a publisher of unique and poetic stories that shine strangely and brightly, we admit that we aren't trying very hard to make decisions that make commercial sense.
We just want to publish authors we like, that's all!
These are gorgeous hardback volumes - the author and title are on the spines, that code on the cover is analogous to the FAC Numbers, the old Factory Records cataloguing system. Every Factory Records production had a FAC number - the final FAC number, FAC 501, was allocated to the coffin of the late Factory Records co-founder Tony Wilson.
The company was founded in 2019 by David Polfeldt in order to manage his writing which resulted in a biography called The Dream Architects (published by Grand Central). As a reaction to the disadvantages of hybrid and self-publishing, the company was transformed in 2024 into an independent/niche publisher modelled on record labels, such as 4AD, Rough Trade and Heartwork.
In its reincarnated shape, Li’l Factory is focused on publishing odd stories that find no other home. The authors may be young and looking for their first breakthrough, or they may be veterans sitting on material that is rejected by trad publishers. Li’l Factory aims to make a string of beautiful books that reach breakeven and gives the author a boost to continue their work. The publisher covers all costs from editing to print - the main point being that the author should never take a financial risk.
There’s a note on their submissions page that I adore:
For additional taste references the list is very long, but to give you a brief idea, here's a mix of things that we find fascinating: Bladerunner, Severance, Twin Peaks, Prog Rock, dreaming, The Sundays, Opeth, The Innocence Mission, Quantum physics, the Space Race, Moebius, Tarot cards, Totoro, Lorenzo Mattotti, Brutalism, Animism, Dadaism, Cubism, Suprematism, Bauhaus, nature, Joy Division, Jon Bauer, Fumito Ueda, and sometimes beauty just for beauty's own sake. Everything doesn't need to be rational.
The Sundays! Mattotti! Brutalism! What a mix!
They only plan to release one to four books a year, which is understandable given the upfront costs to them as a small operation, but I have to say, these short books are beautifully made
Li’l Factory was brought to my attention by Stephen Oram, for which I thank him, and he is the author of one of their first three releases, BRAIN FRUIT.
lilfac.com is the place to go.
A message from our supporters this week:
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Rain keeps telling me I should write a piece here on how men moisturise too. I’ll tell you something else, too: skin products for men are half the price of skin product for women and it’s pretty much the same stuff. The Pink Tax is real.
(I also take a NAD+ precursor and stare in horror at the idea of taking peptides from Temu, which is apparently a thing now. I’m about to put “peptides” in my blocklist next to “AI”. There’s a whole chunk of the internet where people just talk about Chinese peptides, which, from a certain perspective, may be the most cyberpunk-sounding thing of the moment)
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.
(COLLIDE happened because Jerome wrote to me and said, hey, want to do something together? And that’s how you got the first serialised comic on the newsletter - the first of many, I hope)
OPS
For those of you who, like me, love the work of Laura Cannell, here’s a thing you need - a recording of her gig at Cafe Oto last year. I was AT that gig, and it was fantastic aside from the fact that I was seated near the bathrooms and apparently the crowd needed to go for a piss every fifteen fucking seconds for the entire night…
I believe that Raven Belasco, late of this parish, is still looking for professional comics creators to talk to about adapting her BLOOD AND ANCIENT SCROLLS novel series for comics, and if that’s you, you can contact her via her socials or her newsletter, I believe.
GOT MORE TIME?
LTD
I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. Currently, I do one post a day, with maybe an additional note in the evening to log stuff. The daily note is like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.
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And that’s me for this week. It’s been a difficult and annoying week, but those happen, and there’s no guarantee that tomorrow will be better or worse. But, generally speaking, I find that better days aren’t far away. Sit by the light, take a breath, and relax a bit. Better days come. 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 at VanderKloot Law. Please add
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