My friend and mentor, Warren Ellis, is an award-winning writer, and incredible human. I am grateful and incredibly lucky to have him in my life.

Warren’s been writing and sending out this newsletter called Orbital Operations for awhile, and the most recent one had two things in it that I loved so much, I asked for and was granted permission to share them here.

Okay, first up is this amazing page from his comic, KARNAK, which you really want to click to embiggen because it’s beautiful.

And here is the prose that grabbed me by the face and pushed my head into an as-yet-uncharted whorl in a nearby nebula:

I’m walking in New York City, listening to Julian Cope’s ODIN on earbuds.  It’s his seventy-minute vocal drone meditation on Silbury Hill, an artificial mound of ritual purpose in Britain.  Regardless of its scattering of electronic tricks, I always consider ODIN the sound of ancient Britain.  Proto-language, even.  The radiophonic wobbles and glitches, for me, act to reinforce that.  Early British electronic music always came with a powerful dose of haunted history to it, as did British science fiction of the period.  And, of course, Cope is also the author of the magnificent MODERN ANTIQUARIAN, a tower of research and meditation on the megaliths and earthworks of ancient Britain.
It is a strongly unheimlich thing to walk through the artificial canyons of New York while listening to breath-drone that summons stone circles and monuments.  I reach a cross-street.  It is early July.  I look down the street and the sun is setting between the buildings.  I only learn later that this is the Manhattanhenge phenomenon, where, twice a year, the sunset aligns directly with the city’s street grid.

The ancient world roars in my ears as red light crawls between the megaliths of New York towards me.

I’m sitting in drought-ridden Los Angeles, where they’re not good at history.  Up the other end of Sunset, a water pipe that hasn’t been touched since 1921 has burst open, spitting out several million gallons of water, and everyone’s acting like a fossil reared up out of the ground and bit the town.  1921 is deep history in some parts, out here.  I gave a talk in Hollywood last year, where I explained to a hundred people crammed into a century-old avocado grove barn that, five thousand years back, this whole area was called Yaa, and it was the biggest population centre in California even then.  They were both disbelieving and distracted, because the host had previously informed them that parts of this ancient structure were likely to collapse in on them if they breathed on it hard enough.  Out here, history is dangerous, and wants to come and get you.
I am warming my bones at a hotel that seems to be exclusively occupied by British rock session musicians over sixty, and Penn Jillette.  The whole place smells of better days long gone, when famous actors were fucking each other in the apartments and famous rock stars were pissing in the courtyard pool.  All the staff have the same slightly tired, slightly mournful smile.  I like it here.  I am on my balcony, which clings to its louche past with the provision of an ashtray, an increasingly alien object in this town, and I am reading THE WAKE by Paul Kingsnorth.  It’s possible that I am just a little homesick for the green and the grey of England, but Kingsnorth’s main claim to recent fame, The Dark Mountain Project, has been coming up in conversation with friends again lately, so I thought I’d try his novel out.
The thrust of Dark Mountain, if I can be unfairly blunt to Kingsnorth and his collaborators, holds that we are all environmentally doomed, so we may as well get good at it.  We may as well adjust, and sit on the floor and tell each other sad stories of being doomed.  Some see this as giving up.  Kingsnorth himself is a retired environmental activist.  The tenets of Dark Mountain, however, are that this is a completely reasonable response – not a retreat, but an acceptance and an attempt to actively parse our new circumstance.
THE WAKE is a story of the green and the grey of England, of doom, and one man’s nihilist response, couched as a reclamation of lost territories but coloured by delusion.  It’s a historical novel, but it’s tempting, too tempting, to read it as Kingsnorth testing some things out on himself, like Philip K Dick working out his own beliefs and experiences in the Exegesis he began in Orange County, thirty-five miles from me as I read THE WAKE on Sunset Boulevard.
In THE WAKE, set after the invasion of England by William The Bastard and the imposition of Norman law, one man begins a resistance campaign against the occupation.  It’s a fictional exploration of a little-known corner of British history, that there were actual insurgencies against the Normans.  But it’s not quite Robin Hood.  Buccmaster, the man, is far from a saint, and he’s having visions.  He is a man of the old gods.  He is English history, coming to get the invaders of the new.
The whole thing is written in a constructed language, what Kingsnorth calls a “shadow tongue.”  It’s Old English, but the sentences are configured in the manner of Modern English.  It takes some work to get into, but once you find the rhythm, the contexts become clear, and I only had to google a few words to obtain complete clarity.  It is, in that sense, a modern book – one that needs a network connection to fully decode.  I don’t recommend reading it on your Kindle on a plane, because you might end up muttering “what the fuck is a fugol” too loudly and making the flight attendants look at you funny.

Constructed languages, or “conlangs,” are networked culture.  Linguists found the early internet conducive to such experiments, and you can still find a few websites that collate conlangs.  My favourite is Brithenig, invented by the New Zealand writer Andrew Smith, which imagines what might have happened if Latin had colonized Old Celtic in Britain.  A Brythonic-Roman fusion that would have replaced Old English.  Al alternate world.  Deep history as science fiction.  Proto-languages.
To render the visionary experiences that are at the heart of British culture in this strange alternate language is to amplify their strangeness.  Sunset falls on the pool in the courtyard henge, staining it red. The ancient world roars in my ears, there on a balcony over the floodplains of Yaa, and the breath-drone of it threatens to bring the walls down, and history rears up out of the dirt to get me.

Warren’s newsletter is free and easy. He publishes it every Sunday, and you can sign up at Orbital Operations dot Com.