Jun 11, 2008 07:30 AM
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San Francisco, 12:46 PM
Tue Feb 9
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Searching to mix his fascination for speculative fiction and ever-more-unusual attempts to outrage, writer Warren Ellis has been sharing his desire to push SF writing in a new direction. He wants to splice the verbage of a certain genre of spam emails with the short sharp shock mentality of 1970s punk. The result is... well, singular, to say the least.
Ellis explained his new tossed-off form thusly:
I had a sort of infernokrusher/BRUTE! moment in July of 2005. A searing rupture in the sf paradigm: the certain knowledge that in fact what sf needed was both an upgrade and a retrograde. A science fiction dominated by obsession with penis size, an adolescent terror of sex, sickening violence and massive, random, senseless explosions. Written with the sort of ugly, naive bluntness with which a disturbed teenager might craft the self-produced pornographic material that just barely prevents him from going off the rails and fucking all the neighbourhood pets to death. Imagine, then, a lobotomised fourteen-year-old Stephen Hawking who’d been sexually abused by nuns since the age of three, turning his hand to the great game of science fiction. I felt that, somehow, this would produce the perfect science fiction, the truest response to the early pulp-magazine sf.
Sadly, it wasn't to be:
Luckily for everyone, I sobered up a day later because my family was coming home. The only products of that 24-hour fugue state were the following two sketches. And thank god there weren’t any more.
The two sole existing results of this aborted new literary movement read like Jeff Noon's Bizarro clone stuck in a particularly awkward adolescence trying to rewrite Grant Morrison's The Filth; which is to say, weirdly enjoyable but ultimately kind of crap:
I grabbed a handful of my own semen out of Mother Teresa and flung it at the oncoming cops. They all got instantly pregnant and fell over. Even the men.
“I’ve had better,” said Mother Teresa, sparking a match off her nipple and lighting up a joint.
It was then I knew I had to kill everyone in the city. With my penis.
I flexed my flaming meathammer. The road cracked in half. The cops exploded. So did the buildings. Everybody died.
Except me.
Result.
The end. Fuck off.
That said, it's so simple and inelegant that there's something compelling about it, isn't there? I ask you: Why doesn't more science fiction focus on "an adolescent terror of sex"? Seems like I've never heard of that in SF before.
Rupture [Warren Ellis]
Send an email to Graeme McMillan, the author of this post, at graeme@io9.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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