Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Oh, yeah, major passive aggressive.

I also like that Scarly used "I HAVE AUTISM!" as an excuse for bad
behavior.  I have every intention of adopting that one for myself.
  

    
Yeah.  I'm off to cafepress to get the button made.
  

    
I loved that.  
  

    
Warren, what led you to the detective/noir genre? Why do you think
it's so generally compelling?
  

    
[Was there any reason that you decided Scarly would be gay?]

Something along the lines of "why the hell not?"  Gay people in the
sciences are more under-represented in fiction *than they are in the
sciences, even.*  I get angry at contemporary fiction that's that much
flatter and greyer than the contemporary world.
  

    
Hi Warren, 

Pleasure to meet you.  Okay so here is how it went down for me.  I
dropped and shattered the glass in my phone, I took it in for repair
yesterday and just so happens there was a Chapters a few doors over and
although I own a Kobo, (Canadian version of the Kindle)I still dig the
feel of paper in my hands, the excitement of flipping the page, there
is just something about that that I still find sexy.

So I went in and bought Gun Machine.  I have only just started reading
it but you have me smiling already.

"Two stood on either side of the old apartment building like smug
Botoxed thirtysomethings bracing an elderly relative"



 
  

    
and as you know that is only page 4.
  

    
Hi, Warren. Thanks for coming to The WELL. 

I just finished reading Gun Machine. Typically I don't go for the old
ultraviolence. But I give you credit here for how the brutal events in
book served to mirror the breakdown of the "rules" that we like to
think govern competition and rewards in civilized society. 

(So often thrillers seem to include these bloody set pieces purely
with an eye toward the screen adaptation.  I'm talking to you, Dan
Brown!)

Does any of that resonate, or have I been reading too much lit-crit? 
  

    
I get very bored when violent action, in any medium, happens without
consequences or the fear of consequences.  So, no, you're not
completely in the tall weeds there, Emily...!
  

    
[Warren, what led you to the detective/noir genre? Why do you think
it's so generally compelling?]

Crime fiction still has that general permission (that I think science
fiction kind of lost) to be social fiction.  It's had it since the days
of Chandler and Hammett, of course (whose careers cross over with HG
Wells, the big beast of "science fiction as social fiction").  It's
permission to study the mysteries of the human condition.  The sort of
private investigation that allows us to tip over, a little, into the
concerns of literary fiction.
  

    
Re: 34

Oh, good!  

It creates a big contrast, too, with the refuge Tallow finds with the
CSUs, where things actually do operate according to logic and
scientific reason, and a colleague's wife invites you over for dinner
and makes a great steak sandwich with a glass of good red wine. I'm
glad Scarly and her wife got settled on the edges of Park Slope before
the real estate bubble...

I loved the Hunter's visions of Manahatta, the towering trees and
packs of wolves and streams and wildness.  When you lived in NYC, did
you ever see "Time Landscape" on West Houston Street, the land art work
by Alan Sonfist? It's a patch of re-planted pre-colonial forest, that
has been growing since around 1978. It's gotten quite lush, and I love
to stare into it sometimes (it's fenced off) and imagine being
surrounded by that forest.

I've noticed in your works a real respect, if not veneration, for the
wild landscapes of North America.  
  

    

[SPOILER ALERT]

Warren, when the hunter was wandering through 21st century Manhattan
and seeing the overlay of 16th century Manahatta at the same time, I
was certain that he was some sort of interdimensional being who kept
slipping in and out of timestreams.  Did you know all along that he was
"only" a psychotic, or were you as surprised as the rest of us?

(And yes, this raises the question: how do we know psychotics _aren't_
interdimensional beings who can slip in and out of timestreams until
heavy doses of psychiatric medication deaden their ability and limit
them to the here and now?)
  

    
YES PROBABLY SPOILERS

No.  I knew all along what he was.  It did, however, please me to blur
the lines of it, here and there.  Hopefully, a few people hit one or
two of those scenes and questioned what kind of book it was they were
reading.

EMILY: I've not seen "Time Landscape" in the flesh, as it were, but I
believe I saw pictures during the book's research phase.  It does ring
a bell.
  

    
I love all wild and ancient landscapes.  I've stood under the geysers
at Geysir, walked the Ridgeway in the West Country, been pulled through
Lappish forests by dogs in winter and just stood and breathed in the
Arizona desert.  The presence of deep time.
  

    
Dude - Gun Machine rocked! I liked Crooked Little Vein, but GM is
absolutely what you (said above) you were striving for - a terrifically
mo-bettah novel.

Funny how the general bookstore down the street (in the Mission
District of San Francisco) didn't have the book but the science fiction
bookstore (Borderlands) did.

I am learning you backwards - reading your novels first - although not
strictly backwards, as I started with Crooked Little Vein and then
read Gun Machine. 

Now, what should I read next?
  

    
I got hooked on Freakangels, and serialized, graphic science fiction 
novel.   And, Warren, I wonder if you have any idea how pissed off some 
off us got when you guys took a week off and we couldn't get our fix.

It's still online, BTW, at freakangels.com.
  

    
Kevin asked what to read next.

Well, there's TRANSMETROPOLITAN, a big ambitious comic about a gonzo
journalist in a wonderfully crazed and detailed future. 

OCEAN was very satisfying one-shot SF story. 

GLOBAL FREQUENCY is another series. A near-future setting in which
civilian super-experts respond to terrorist threats and disasters. It
is said that there's a pilot to a TV series running loose on the web.
  

    
We have the Global Frequency pilot (should I admit that???)  Global
Frequency, the comic, is intelligent, innovative, exciting -- not a
"this guy is shooting that guy" kind of excitement, but a "oh my brain
what a great idea I want to be a part of this" kind of excitement. The
tv show is .. teevee.
  

    
I missed this before.  Jamais asked:

[I'm curious about the ways in which your process for writing
non-fiction differs from your fiction-writing process. Is there some
definable split between the two, or do you more-or-less work the same
regardless?]

Non-fiction for me, is a process of layering and testing.  I can't
just blast ahead for the next marker downfield the way I can with
fiction.  Non-fiction, for me, is... it's like laying down two bones in
a joint, and then adding the tendon and muscle and tissue, and then
the fat to plump it, and then the skin.  I find it hugely enjoyable,
but it's a very different process to non-fiction for me, these days.  I
have to disappear all the way into the non-fiction book soon, and I'm
looking forward to it, even though I won't come out for six weeks...
  

    
Thanks for the suggestions on what to read next, Team Inkwell.vue!
Yay!

Great metaphor for non-fiction v fiction.  I look forward to whatever
shape that new non-fiction will take...
  

    
yes! Warren, can you tell us any more about this non-fiction you're
diving into?
  

    
Warren, your TRANSMETROPOLITAN series was my first introduction. Since
then I've grabbed up most, or at least many, of your collected works
including both your novels. Just wonderful stuff. However, forgive me
for asking, but when might we see the conclusion of Doktor Sleepless?
  

    
Kermit, I have a FAQ on my site for just this sort of thing -- use the
search box.  But I'm hoping to return to and conclude that story by
the end of the year.  It's been a complicated kind of mess.
  

    
The non-fiction book is based around a talk I gave in Berlin the other
year, on the past and future of the city.  I don't recall right this
second how HTML works here, so here's the raw link:

http://vimeo.com/22943908

It's a sort of... well, someone described the talk as Fortean, as I
recall.  A wander around the idea of cities, what cities are built on
and how history leaks up to inform or haunt the ideas behind the cities
of the future.  Somewhere in there I hope to work in the London orgy
that apparently included Yoko Ono and Delia Derbyshire as participants.
  

    
That resonates with the depiction of NYC in Gun Machine. I had never
really thought much about the evolution of the city... framing it with
reference to Werpoes and the Lenape created a deeper, richer sense of
the place, and the dark corners within its history. Did you spend a
huge amount of time digging into that history? And a chicken/egg
question - did it drive you to the nonfiction, or did thinking about
the past and future of cities create a context from which the Gun
Machine plot and atmosphere emerged?