1.

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where we are once again knocking icicles off our crotches and staggering through powdery blizzard conditions.

I realised on Saturday that I'd missed the sight of icicles. I must have sat there and looked at the icicles on the roof of the covered area of my garden for five minutes.

I recently learned, from Max Adams' AELFRED'S ENGLAND, that old Norse and old English were mutually intelligible languages. They shared enough sounds and intents that Danes and English could understand each other. Imagine that. Sailing into the unknown, landing on what might as well have been an alien world, and discovering you could talk to the aliens.

The Danes settled in England and I come from one of their villages. In a couple of months, I'm heading up to York, which started out as the Roman fortress of Eboracum and became the Norse town of Jorvik.

I like icicles. The dream of Britain is one where people come and join us and we settle down and talk about the weather together. When we forget that dream, we stop being Britain.

2.

The British invented time, and that's why our clocks don't spring forward until after yours do. It's true. Coordinated Universal Time is also the same as the time in London. Hadn't you noticed that before? We invented time, and you can have your hour back when you say you're sorry.

Elon Musk is fun but 1) I'd like him to actually honour his extant contracts and crew-rate a goddamn LEO-capable vehicle 2) if he really wants to freak people out he should be looking at dumping a really big magnetic dipole at Mars L1. What does that actually mean? Mars doesn't have a magnetic field, and that's one reason why Mars will kill us if we just hang around on the surface. Planetary magnetic fields repel the solar wind and hard radiation. If you don't have one, the solar wind strips off your atmosphere and the radiation murders the surface. Side note: no decent atmosphere means you get unfiltered doses of ultraviolet. Chemical compounds called perchlorates, found all over Mars, are activated by UV even in deep cold. Perchlorates kill bacteria in no time at all.

So, you know, the Tesla and the Starman were a good time. I liked all this. But if you really want to go full Tony Stark? Sling a magnetic field up over Mars, inactivate the perchlorate mechanic, warm the place up, stabilise the atmosphere and make it generally less deathy. And after you've turned it into an environment that doesn't murder surface bacteria, you can go to town with giant dumps of engineered infections and grow yourself a planet worth landing on.

See? Even our unrestrained capitalist titans of breakthrough technology are kind of normal. I get so bored. This is why I always wanted to go full Hubertus Bigend (happy 70th, William Gibson). I don't even have time to create the miniature invisible-influence media empirelet I sometimes daydream of. I made a joke the other day to some friends: I should make a list called 10 Things I Should Never Do, just because there aren't enough hours in the day.

...sorry. It's been that kind of week. Everything is bugging me.

I have many thing to share with you from my networks and clicks this week.

3.

Bruce Sterling's SXSW keynote is about writing, somewhat, and art, a lot, and is frequently very funny even though I read Umberto Eco novels fuck you Bruce. Lots of stuff about speculative work.

SHEFFIELD: comrade Paul Graham Raven is speaking at this thing here on March 21. Paul notes in email: "I will be arguing that infrastructure is not invisible, but illegible, and will be conjuring a planet-sized theory through a juggling of Haraway, Guy Debord and Arthur C Clarke in order to explain..." So, yeah, go and see that. Wish I could be there.

A short algowave fiction by Leigh Alexander:

I explained to Veronica that the videos collectively composed an essay on structure and its collapse, the surrender of form under late capitalism, a hunger for a primordial state, a fascination with amnion. She said, “geez, you can spin gold out of any old bullshit, can’t you,” and I really loved her then.

4.

MORNING COMPUTER:

This is where I am during the week. A commitment to the Isle of Blogging. Re-commitment. Rebuild. Shifting my digital footprint a bit.

For years, I've had another blogging instance that I haven't done anything with. I'd intended to use it for fiction experiments, but after I had my Medical Thing, I needed to shed some cognitive load. I'm sometimes tempted to use it as a space for confused nightblogging, but, you know, hours in the day...

5.

VOID BLACK SHADOW by Corey J White is the sequel to KILLING GRAVITY, being the continuing science fiction tale of Mars Xi, an actual no-shit SPACE WITCH. That probably sold the books to some of you all on its own. (Space witch, complete with a cat-like gengineered-weirdo familiar that, in my head, always looks more like a ferret for some reason.)

VOID BLACK SHADOW was, for me, a really fast read. It just clatters along, and it packs a lot in - a lot more than I originally expected. Every time you think it's going to settle into "Oh, so this is where the rest of the book is set," White just blasts through it and throws a bunch of new stuff at you. White is due to be discovered as a John Scalzi-like crowdpleaser with sharper teeth and a real flair for the Big Stuff.

VOID BLACK SHADOW is a wild, explosive ride through the deep dark. You'll like it.

(UK) (US #amazonstorepage)

6.

The Isle Of Blogging

Marc Weidenbaum's Disquiet.

neonlike blue

Funranium Labs.

Craig Mod (always more structured and considered than most of us. By which I generally mean me.)

Additional note: this long interview with Craig was fascinating to me. Craig, for all his digital invention, is an offline guy. I'm doing one of my periodic rearrangements of life and networked interaction, and this gave me some food for thought. Also, this, a useful context:

\Offscreen] How has the omnipresence of the internet changed the rules of becoming a writer?
The barriers to entry are lower. It’s more democratic. If you put in the legwork, you can find an audience, be a writer. A similar shift has happened in photography. Whereas thirty years ago you had to spend tens of thousands of dollars on equipment, today you can make a name for yourself as a photographer with just your mobile phone.
The flip side of democratization is that making money as a writer can be more difficult. In part because many people are willing to do it for next to nothing. In part it’s because the Ad Bucks from the old generation of publishing are gone. So much “writing” online today is incentivized and measured by clicks and volume rather than quality or nuance. Volume can be a good forcing function to produce work, but rarely leads us to a state of nuanced thought.
I’ve been reading about John McPhee’s process of writing his giant New Yorker essays thirty or forty years ago, and wow, it sounds like an alien world. The process is so slow and deliberate. At the end, he would hand in an eighty-thousand-word piece. That’s a book! Whatever structure allowed McPhee to write this way back then, it barely exists today. Unless you cobble it together yourself, or hunt it down through non-profit institutions.

7.

Podcasts I'm currently into:

[RSS] The Monday Graveyard (music, glad to have it back, Mark)
[RSS] Kahvi Collective Podcast (XML) (music)
[RSS] syndae podcast (music)
[RSS] KEXP Song of the Day (literally one song a day. You won't like them all. That doesn't matter. You will encounter new things.)
[RSS] Deep State Radio
[RSS] Desert Oracle Radio
[RSS] The Future Grind Podcast: Science | Technology | Business | Futurism

I would like more short podcasts in my life, to be honest. Syndae is always exactly 30 minutes long, and I appreciate that.

8.

If you're just joining me and have forgotten why you subscribed: I'm Warren Ellis, author, comics writer, public speaker, screenwriter, producer, Doctor of the University of Essex, visiting Professor to York St John University, Patron to Humanists UK and writer/co-producer of CASTLEVANIA on Netflix.

Please add warrenellis@orbitaloperations.com to your address book.

If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you'd like to infect your friends with it, by driving them to http://orbitaloperations.com and forcing them to give me their email address.

My digital trail is on Twitter and random work photos are on Instagram.

9.

SPEKTRMODULE

Golden Shiner by Michiru Aoyama http://ift.tt/2IyKIxC

Hypnotism from Handmade Ocean by Rhucle - http://rhucle.bandcamp.com/track/hypnotism

These Gloomy Days by Endless Melancholy http://ift.tt/2FuQAub

Y1 by Jasmine Infiniti - http://jasmineinfiniti.bandcamp.com/track/y1 (really starts moving 90 seconds in)

AND:

Subterranean And Eternal Wind by velvawhip http://ift.tt/2FGH71V

Which I love. Thank you, Ruth.

From an article about Nils Frahm:

Mr Frahm went quiet. He retreated from the online world to experience “the luxury of being forgotten”, and kept his cultural consumption to a minimum to “feel hungry in a society which has everything”. He meticulously watched his time and that of those around him, aware of the finite nature of both. When his mood was low, he resisted the temptation to post a tweet or a snippet of a song to come, knowing the instant feedback would do little to fulfil his long-term goal of only offering audiences something that was complete. Accepting “there was no communication to do” was, he says, “pure luxury”.

10.

Yeah, it's all nuts out there. Roll with it. Don't let them frighten you. Fear is all they've got. Fear makes us stupid and angry and that's what makes us fall and stay down. Roll and keep going. These are not the things that will kill us. Give yourself something today. Even if it's only five minutes looking at some icicles.

Hold on tight. See you next week.