Hello from out here on the Thames Delta.  It is blazing hot outside.  I am indoors finishing a script, writing this, making notes on a rewrite tv episode draft I have to bang out tomorrow and dearly wishing I were in bed.

It's Father's Day, and I've already got my gift: a happy, healthy 21-year-old daughter. She's getting her degree in a few weeks, home from university for a while, and is currently laying on a sofa playing with cats.  What the hell else could I want?

Robert MacFarlane on Twitter:

Word(s) of the day: mångata" - shimmering path of silver light laid down by the moon on water (Swedish - lit. moon-street, moon-road)

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I made a joke on my private Instagram the other day that my next day off is in November. Suddenly that looks less funny.  I'm trying to remain open for speaking engagements, especially if they're in London or Europe generally. But. otherwise, I'm in 24/7 work condition until the end of the year.  

Summer looked like it might be gentle to me, but then I unexpectedly got commissioned to write a screenplay last week. With book ideas knocking on the front of my head. And very attractive other work offers that I have to weigh against general stress and health conditions. And the graphic novels I have to write, the tv work I have to finish out and the tv work approaching.  And not dying.

So I'll be turning the social media off again after July 7, I think.  July 7 being CASTLEVANIA Season 1 Day on Netflix.  Season 2 being what we're working on now, due next year. I'm recording with our wonderful actors again at the end of this week - we have additions to the cast in Season 2, and they're revelatory.  And, thank God, making my bad jokes work.  (I'm not allowed to name them yet. In fact, I'm not allowed to talk about CASTLEVANIA in any detail at all yet.)

My brain is against me.  I was drifting off to sleep around 3am when I suddenly realised I knew how to write a project that had been on hold since my Medical Event a couple of years ago. Realised how the whole thing would develop, how it'd tie into a talk I have to give this autumn, what it would be built on, everything. Really annoying.

I may be experimenting with bits of it on morning.computer soon, just to feel my way into it.  Proved the creek don't rise no more.

As you read this, I'm finishing INJECTION 15, completing the third volume. I cannot begin to tell you how ready I am for a coma.

If you're just joining me and have forgotten why you subscribed: I'm Warren Ellis, author, comics writer, public speaker, screenwriter, producer, visiting Professor to York St John University, Patron to Humanists UK and guest tutor to the Shadow Channel masters programme at the Sandberg Institute.

I don't play the violin, but I talked to the other Warren Ellis last week and he thinks we should switch jobs just to fuck with people.

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

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Tell me you don't want to read a book about a space witch.  Go on.  Space witch.

KILLING GRAVITY by Corey J White is as modern a piece of genre pop space opera as you'll find this summer, with a nicely diverse cast, a cute space ferret of death and a female protagonist most often referred to as a void-damned space witch.

I feel like you don't need to know much else.  It's a short book, with clear and snappy prose, very propulsive and cramming a lot into a small space.  It's distilled, like Corey's been waiting a while to tell the story and cooked it down into the strongest possible dose. With everything else going on in the world. you might want to lose a day to a politically-inflected yet light-footed yarn of surgical authoritarianism, non-binary space captains, cold vacuum and, I mention again, a space witch.  Go on.  It's fun.

KILLING GRAVITY, Corey J White (UK) (US)

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

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• Paul Graham Raven on science fiction as a research tool for energy futures. It's an academic paper - the abstract in the first paragraph is dry - but the rest is easy, fluid and clever.
• "Everything went dark, painful star by painful star." My longtime friend Catastrophe Jones has been writing a serial called DEATHWATCH, and she's put it all online for free.
• Gqom Oh! The Sound of Durban - great fucking record.
• Wishing much luck to our friend Sean Bonner of this parish, who is moving to Japan!

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Revolutions don’t stop.  Once begun, they continue to revolve.  There somehow remains, against the will of history, a presumption that they spin around to a state of grace, a better position on the wheel.  We fantasise this about politics, and in the digital space, in the creative world and within the engines of commerce.  It’s rare that we consider the wild machinery of revolution and understand that disruption is a runaway process, and that eventually even the most powerful disrupters will themselves be disrupted.  Only those actors crushed in the cogs of the process are remembered as “revolutionaries”.  Those who meet success become the establishment, and are themselves targeted by the operations of the dreamstate of revolution.

I wrote that four years ago, for some feature somewhere - I can't remember who for, now. It came to mind again, this month.

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I ended a talk in Manchester a couple of years ago with this:

Magic is our language and our story, and we can’t ride the ghost train into a future of haunted machines without them.

I can add something new to that thought.  Myth is the carrier wave of civilisation. Put simpler: astrology leads to astronomy leads to navigation.  Imbedded in the former are the conditions for the latter. This comes to me from STAR SHIPS by Gordon White, a book I read a couple months ago and is still haunting me to the point where I think I'm going to have to re-read it next month.

He speculatively reconstructs ancient belief systems and applies them to a broader-scale investigation of the emergence of humans from Africa. His background is in data analysis, I believe, and he combines being wild-eyed with being clear-eyed in a remarkable, entertaining and thought-provoking way.  

I seem to recall saying to Fraction, "I just want to read something that will freak my shit out," and mythemes from the Laurasian landmass informing intellectually advanced pockets in Micronesia were really just the top of this slide. White is careful about his own solves, scathing about the woolly-mindedness of others, almost completely skates around ancient-alien bullshit, and builds his speculations as clearly and solidly as he can. I want to re-read it and talk more about it.  It's a marvellous piece of work - it delights, informs, provokes and freaks your shit out.

STAR SHIPS, Gordon White (UK) (US)

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And I am out of time.  Hopefully, I will see you next week, when I will have many new things for you.  Take care of yourself.  Always reach out for those closest to you, but only after you've affixed your own lifeline.  You're no use to anybody if you're already dead, and I know your greatest days are yet to come.  Hold on tight.  Here we go.