Shivering Sands: Seven Years of Stories, Drinking and the World

by Warren Ellis

SHIVERING SANDS is a bit of an part Greatest Hits collection, part late-night ramblings, all crackling text transmissions sent down the wire from anywhere Warren Ellis had access to a computer and something to say. These essays, stories, music reviews, the occasional chemically-induced rant, and a couple of recipes- because, for whatever reason, everyone seems to love his recipes-represent a cross-section of the past seven years' worth of Warren's writing online. From jumping around Britain, Europe and North America to just dragging his carcass up to the local pub for a think, this is the unedited spillage from the inside of the writer's head during the '00s. Some of it even makes sense.WARREN ELLIS is the award-winning creator of graphic novels such as Fell, Ministry Of Space, Planetary, and Transmetropolitan, and the author of the "underground classic" Crooked Little Vein.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Memoir, Comics, Criticism, Biography, Collections

175 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Warren Ellis is the award-winning writer of graphic novels like TRANSMETROPOLITAN, FELL, MINISTRY OF SPACE and PLANETARY, and the author of the NYT-bestselling GUN MACHINE and the “underground classic” novel CROOKED LITTLE VEIN, as well as the digital short-story single DEAD PIG COLLECTOR. His newest book is the novella NORMAL, from FSG Originals, listed as one of Amazon’s Best 100 Books Of 2016.

The movie RED is based on his graphic novel of the same name, its sequel having been released in summer 2013. IRON MAN 3 is based on his Marvel Comics graphic novel IRON MAN: EXTREMIS. He is currently developing his graphic novel sequence with Jason Howard, TREES, for television, in concert with HardySonBaker and NBCU, and continues to work as a screenwriter and producer in film and television, represented by Angela Cheng Caplan and Cheng Caplan Company. He is the creator, writer and co-producer of the Netflix series CASTLEVANIA, recently renewed for its third season, and of the recently-announced Netflix series HEAVEN’S FOREST.

He’s written extensively for VICE, WIRED UK and Reuters on technological and cultural matters, and given keynote speeches and lectures at events like dConstruct, ThingsCon, Improving Reality, SxSW, How The Light Gets In, Haunted Machines and Cognitive Cities.

Warren Ellis has recently developed and curated the revival of the Wildstorm creative library for DC Entertainment with the series THE WILD STORM, and is currently working on the serialising of new graphic novel works TREES: THREE FATES and INJECTION at Image Comics, and the serialised graphic novel THE BATMAN’S GRAVE for DC Comics, while working as a Consulting Producer on another television series.

A documentary about his work, CAPTURED GHOSTS, was released in 2012.

Recognitions include the NUIG Literary and Debating Society’s President’s Medal for service to freedom of speech, the EAGLE AWARDS Roll Of Honour for lifetime achievement in the field of comics & graphic novels, the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire 2010, the Sidewise Award for Alternate History and the International Horror Guild Award for illustrated narrative. He is a Patron of Humanists UK. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex.

Warren Ellis lives outside London, on the south-east coast of England, in case he needs to make a quick getaway.

Reviews

[Niklas Pivic · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short and very appealing read. To me, Ellis is noteworthy because of three things:

1. His world-building with words
2. His ability to build a story
3. His intelligence

Of course, the three above points mean very little when he is publishing notes from when he's been drunk or just rants like an old man with a huge love for technological gadgets, which doesn't happen rarely. Instead, it's a mix of the above with his heart that does it. To quote him from the beginning:

This Is What It Means To Be Me: wake up at 1pm. Check mail. Open envelope full of free money. Go to pub. Laugh. Because I am a Writer.

You have to be able decipher some tongue-in-cheek to be able to realise that Ellis isn't a plain town crier here, in this collection of stories from his blog.

When his points come across, they can be boiling and refreshing:

And certainly we're in a time where anger in art has largely gone away. This isn't the cool detachment of post-modernism, so much as just a turning inward. The kind of stuttery lurching rise of emo over the last couple of years is a case in point: a total defanging of pretty much any working definition of punk in service of whining about how you've got no fucking girlfriend. "Emotional punk" = Crying Ugly Kid Music. There should be a sign in guitar shops: "We reserve the right to refuse sale to people who want to write songs about wearing glasses and being dumped by girls who didn't know your name anyway." It's understandable, and certainly it doesn't hurt for Manson to bolster the "outsider" self-perception of his audience. But it bugs me nonetheless. Is it a creative reaction, to answer "nothing's happened" with "nothing's going to happen and you can't do shit about it"? Is that doing anything more than prepping an alienated audience for a doomed life of dyeing your hair back to brown and getting a job in insurance? Is that where we've ended up? That all popular culture has to say is, "well, fuck it"? Even as a transient pose? The lesson of the 1930s is that, in a time of encroaching conservatism and creeping repression, the correct response is not to flush your fucking spine down the toilet.

Other high-lights:

April 28, 2008 The last half of this month has felt completely out of sync. Like the planet jumped tracks. Everything's a bit 1986. Gather, children, and I will tell you of 1986. It rained all the time, no-one could smile without bleeding, and Boy George was on The A-Team. 1986 was one of those years where we were waiting for the spaceship to land... Things were so bad we were actually having to talk about Paul Simon's "Graceland" like it mattered. now, 1987, that was an interesting year... (descends lnto senescent unconsciousness) Where's my fucking coffee Buried under messages reading: "i was a discoloured zygote floating in the pool of beer and sperm that was my mothers womb in 1987."

On writing:

I sit down every day to tell myself a story. Usually full of either stimulants or depressants, playing some kind of soundtrack to the experience of writing, aware of my environment, sitting in my own little writer's movie and telling myself a story. Anyone who tells you they write to an audience is either an idiot or a fake. You write for yourself. If the story doesn't affect you in some way, it won't affect anybody else. I don't write for the trunk. I'm well aware that someone else is going to read this. But if I don't respond in some honest, gut way to whatever I'm writing, you'll never get to see it. I know writers who play Stone Soup with everything. They'll generate half an idea on the back of a fag packet, ring up half a dozen other writers, tell it to them and ask what they think, and at the end of a phone marathon they'll have their story, with all the ingredients chucked in by their friends. For me, writing happens on my own. It's exactly the same as a ritual, or sitting down at a campfire, or initiating a vision state in silent darkness. It has to come from me and the spaces in my brain.

...and intertwined with music (oh, when is it not?):

Did you ever hear My Bloody Valentine, around the time of "Feed Me With Your Kiss"? An ear-wrecking field of noise where they didn't play the note, so much as all the notes that get you to the note? It's kind of like that, without the note at the end. Just a field of dissonance. A song turned inside out and wearing its guts as its skin. A pretty picture, no? So, at this point, I'm playing wak-a-rat, running around with a hammer hitting all the bits that stick out and go off the progression to a note.

While travelling with Grant Morrison:

I'm in Glasgow with Scots comics writer Grant Morrison, who's just scored some brown acid off Bryan Talbot and is explaining to me how time works in comics. He explains to me his discovery that any comic is in fact its own continuum, an infinitely malleable miniature universe from Big Bang to heat death, and that in reading it you can make time go backwards, skip entire seons, strobe time itself, re-run geologic-scale periods in loops... reading a comic is in fact controlling time from a godlike perspective. He was, of course, very full of hallucinogens at the time. This is why people were warned about the brown acid at Woodstock.

...more about music and living like it's music:

[...] i don't think Bo Diddley met a second chord in his life, he made status quo look like Segovia for that. It's all about that beat. "I play the guitar as if I were playing drums," Diddley said.

And, as he says at the end:

The line I always quote in talks like these, the one I want you to take away with you, is something the comics writer Harvey Pekar said: "Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures." And the nice thing about comics, the blessing of the paper craft, is that there's really no-one to stop you.

Very recommendable for those looking for refreshment for the mind. It's like listening to the Ramones: if you don't like one song, don't worry, the next will be along in a minute.

[Joshua Pruett · Rating 5 out of 5]

From my favorite writer, in comics or any media upon which he sees fit to inflict his pen and his dark purpose. Full of hilarious observations, brief, pop-fiction-singlets and a few moments of unabashed romanticism and uplifting advice for living and writing. He's angry and talented - in other words, he's well worth your time and your dime. He almost makes me want to live in the world, and for that, I'll never forgive him. (Don't mention that 'romantic' bit to him - just go pick up ORBITER with Colleen Doran and just try and argue that it's NOT one of the best written pieces of romantic comic lit you've ever read - it practically sings - a sequential love letter to the human space program and why we need it so badly, ESPECIALLY when we can't afford it. While you're at it check out, The Authority, vol.1 with Bryan Hitch, Paul Neary and the goddess of color Laura Depuy (recently Martin) if want to see what real comics look like.)

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Possibly the last thing I'll read of Warren Ellis, since he was exposed as a creep and it was the only work of his I hadn't read (other than the The Batman's Grave which ends next month).

It's a pity as the guy was very talented and an excellent champion of promoting others work....but such a sleazeball.

As such, this old essays while often very good do give off a bit of an old dirty codger, waxing philosophic after a few drinks.

[Debra Bates · Rating 4 out of 5]

2nd read, years after I bought this book in Douglas, Wyoming in Sept, 1971. Love the 'lady in peril', romance, mystery. Carolyn is a pianist in her own right but the widow of a successful, world concert pianist, She leaves London to travel to Lovat Mill to discover what has become of her missing sister. Danger and a handsome man crop up as she searches.

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collective random musings on comics, music, science and culture from the twisted, glorious brain of the man who created Spider Jerusalem. If you've ever read any of his comics, you'll probably enjoy it. Clever, funny and brutal.

[Hamish · Rating 3 out of 5]

i love Ellis' e-newsletter, so this was all familiar territory. Wish there was more, and with some lengthier pieces, though. He'd do a fantastic essay collection.

[Artur Coelho · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mais conhecido pelo seu trabalho como argumentista de banda desenhada, Warren Ellis é um escritor e personalidade da internet com um dedo firmemente assente no pulso da sociedade contemporânea. Shivering Sands é uma obra atípica. Durante anos, Ellis escreveu ruminâncias que espalhou em diferentes locais na internet. Este livro é uma colectânea de alguns dos seus apontamentos, colagem díspare de ideias, resmungos, visões sobre a cultura popular, impactos mediáticos, futurismo agressivo e puros voos de sanidade duvidosa. Enfim, para quem conhece a sua obra, puro Ellis, não destilado e servido sem gelo.

O que torna a obra deste autor intrigante é a sua capacidade de digerir e incorporar na ficção as ideias mais vanguardistas da cultura e ciência em utopias distópicas pouco simpáticas. Ellis começa este livro dizendo que a sua fonte de inspiração é um fluxo constante de informação, que coalesce na sua mente e explode literalmente para as páginas que escreve. Ler Shivering Sands é ser atingido por uma explosão cerebral que liberta sobre o leitor uma violenta tempestade de ideias.

[Thomas Rohde · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've followed Warren Ellis's blog for years, so I've read perhaps a third of the essays collected in here previously, but nothing was lost in rereading them in this collection. I did my best to read this book in little sips because I didn't want it to end, which was very difficult-this book begs to be gulped. A new collection couldn't come soon enough (though it'll probably be a while since he's busy writing a novel that I'll devour immediately upon publication).

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good collection of essays, twitter postings, blog entries and emails from Warren Ellis. If you are a reader of Ellis's work, you will enjoy the reading the various essays, noting their dates and seeing how the ideas he was experimenting with in these writings made their way into his other work.

[Trung · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's Warren Ellis...I read things that are written by Warren Ellis, nothing else to really say about it. If you enjoy the man's writing, you will enjoy this book. If you don't know who the man is, you need to get with the program and pull your head out of your arse and read his goddamn words.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 2 out of 5]

He's all for immediate, maximum terraformation of Mars, but thinks Robert Zubrin's an idiot. That's a pretty sensible Mars position.

The book is a collection of his internet ephemera, and it's far from essential. Still, a lot of great ideas about the future.

[Chance · Rating 4 out of 5]

As much as I love Warren Ellis as the king of crazed genre ideas, I like his stream of thought essays more. Engaging and thoughtful his essays pull me in even more than his best fiction.

[Wolverina · Rating 5 out of 5]

You'll all be shocked to see another Warren Ellis fangirl find his strange blogs, rants and tweets wrapped up into book form, pretty much the best thing since sliced bread.

[Nathan Friedl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic articles/blog posts/snippets from Warren. DO NOT buy it from iBooks though.

[Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

A small miscellany by Warren Ellis. Funny, thoughtful, foul. Includes recipes.