I think the Tofflers were wrong, in that we’re a highly adaptive species who can handle any torrent of novelty, event, and innovation, but the price to pay is that, shit, it gets tiring.
LP: You sound tired. Are you tired?
WE: I’m always fucking tired. I’m forty-eight years old.
LP: Cop-out. I’m knackered by the whole thing and I’m still not thirty. Spent a week after Brexit basically unable to leave bed, typing on my phone. So, look, can we continue to get useful work done if we’re all hopeless and knackered?
WE: Well, I can. Dunno about you. Tiredness doesn’t stop me thinking. And post-Brexit, we’re all afraid to go to sleep for fear of what might have happened before we wake up.
LP: I relate to your problems and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. So, would you describe yourself as a futurist?
WE: No. I’m just a small-time comics writer who wanders in and out of many rooms, largely at random. Futurists get time to think about things in depth, and then get to talk in public about those findings. I’m just a working writer.
LP: Well, there’s always been a crossover between speculative fiction writers and the production of the future. I don’t think writers ever know how much they matter, or how deeply. But anyway, I want to try out a question on you that is slightly trolling. Feel free to shout and throw things.
Some people talk about your work as cyberpunk, whatever that genre ever meant—certainly you’re the only person still doing it in an interesting way. This book feels in some way like an elegy for cyberpunk, the hollow laugh at the funeral of the paleofuture.
WE: I don’t think of my work as cyberpunk—possibly because, in my head, cyberpunk was dead and buried by 1990.
It’s entirely possible to see Normal as the funeral for the techno-thriller—the unseen fourth act where the heroes of futurity are helped back to a distant hospital where they’re dosed up and left to cry in the corner or whatever.
LP: You do tend, in your fiction, to give your protagonists a real hell of a time …
WE: The techno-thriller has always been compelling because it’s solutionist fiction—experts and specialists running around being hypercompetent in their hyperfocused silos of excellence, right? And, you know, futurism is as marketed as anything else in the neoliberal space. So here’s the elegy—here’s all the broken heroes of solutionism in a hospital, and nothing they did ever mattered. From one perspective, I can see Normal looking like that. In the last twenty-four hours, I’ve seen the book called a thriller, a satire, and a science fiction novel.
Fiction is bench-testing aspects of possible futures. Also an early-warning station for bad weather ahead.
LP: Where does your hope for the future come from right now?
WE: Dunno. If you’d asked me three weeks ago, I might have had a different answer. Right now it’s all disaster planning and forward escape.
Right now, I’m just hoping the pound stays depressed long enough for me to be able to buy some kind of bunker or castle that I can pass on to my daughter and her friends.
And with that, Warren “Not a Futurist” Ellis disappears back into the Internet.
The Fog in the Trees: Interviewing Warren Ellis About Normal
By Geoff Manaugh
Normal, of course, is not a normal novel. Warren Ellis, already widely known for cracking open genres, characters, and storylines to find other, more aggressive and stranger things within, has set his eyes on something rather calmer. Or so it seems.
Strangers, forced to adapt to one another in a confined setting, a research complex built to function more like a convalescent home, rapidly realize that fate has taken them somewhere much harder to fathom than the world they’ve left behind. It is a small circle of voices—a string quartet of often bleak, and certainly very raw, personalities, leading one another both into and out of disharmony.
Normal drops us off at an elusive psychological research institute tucked away in an experimental forest near the Oregon coast, where the insects—and the buildings themselves—are not what they seem. Limiting my focus to part three of the novel, I asked Warren about setting, human agency, and the book’s satirical take on cities of the near future.
Geoff Manaugh: Given my own interests in architecture and design, I gravitated immediately to the novel’s setting. I love the idea of a reclusive psychological research facility sequestered inside an experimental forest in Oregon. I’m curious if you could talk about setting, in general: how an experimental forest in the Pacific Northwest is so different from, say, a desert complex in Namibia or a logistics warehouse in Los Angeles. How can setting, in and of itself, achieve the same sorts of things normally saved for plot and characters?
Warren Ellis: Well, initially, it was a personal thing to inform the writing. I’d recently spent a big chunk of time in the Pacific Northwest, and setting it in Oregon meant I could feel the air. That can help, especially in a story that is otherwise heavily internal and conceptual. I could see the fog in the trees.
Beyond that, the forest setting is one that speaks both of calm and of life. Slow moving but always growing and moving upward. The PNW is a soothing part of the world, and it’s big and quite empty looking to an old man from the English shore. For what amounts to a mental hospital, a forest is a healthier setting than a desert or warehouse, I should think. I was particularly delighted when I found an actual “experimental forest” in Oregon—I liked the implied meaning of a forest for experiments or a forest of experiments.
GM: In part three of the book, you write about a brain parasite that can alter the behavior of a specific ant species, setting up the violent, even grotesque circumstances for that parasite’s future reproduction. The ant becomes a behavioral slave. You also mention the human gut biome. “The gut records,” you write. “The gut knows.” The gut influences. This is a huge question, but I’m curious about agency: Where do you put the rudder of experience, so to speak, when our decisions might not even be our own? From another perspective, it’s as if we’ve gone from a world haunted by demons trying to lead us astray to a secular world of behavior-altering brain parasites and microbiomes—but do we exaggerate the strength of these influences in order to excuse ourselves of our own decisions?
WE: I don’t know about “excuse.” Well, maybe. There’s an old theory that suggests that communication between the left and right hemispheres of the brain was once believed to be the action of gods—eyeballing a river ford becomes Poseidon telling you it’s safe to cross at a certain point, for example. I mean, it’s probably nonsense, but it illustrates a point—agency doesn’t change, only the things we layer on top of it. We still live in a world haunted by demons—only the names have changed. We’re good at inventing them. They come with “secular” terms now, and sometimes even some great science, but there’s still a lot of metaphor going on, a lot of ways of explaining unseen things to ourselves in lyric forms.
I’m not remotely a scientist, or even a philosopher. I’m just a small-time writer. I’m interested in the metaphors and the ghost stories. I have no idea if that answers the question. I may be saying that the rudder of experience, as you put it, hasn’t necessarily altered—just the way we explain the action of wood in water to ourselves.
GM: The novel has a satirical edge, mocking urban futurism and its attendant world of high-tech solutions for everything—what you refer to as “dataism.” At one point in part three, a character remarks: “Africa is the environment we evolved for,” implying a lack of fit between our species and rampant urbanization. I suppose I’m curious if you think of cities as something we didn’t really evolve to live within or that humans must constantly struggle to inhabit. The novel’s setting—a remote experimental forest—is itself a place of deliberate urban withdrawal and psychological recalibration.
WE: This sort of brings us back to excuses, doesn’t it? Also, to the thing I was talking about in this space a week or two back, about the Tofflers’ “future shock” notions and how it seems to me that th
ey don’t speak to us as the highly adaptive species we actually are.
Ur was already fallen by the time Romulus and Remus were legendarily doing the fratricide dance over some unremarkable Italian hills. Communities gathered to process and store fish in Sweden over nine thousand years ago. It’s hard to argue that we’re not wired for conurbation on some level—I mean, we’re an advanced, tool-using species, we use combination and delegation to extend our affordances. (Adaptation and evolution being two completely different things that lots of people seem to find it terribly convenient to conflate.)
But, yes, there’s a narrative that cities are stressful, we have to forcibly adapt ourselves to them, and, often, we eventually have to bail out of them and “get our shit together in the country,” or whatever the narrative of the day is. Putting the Normal Head institute in the middle of nowhere, away from anything that looks like an artificial construct, is a nod to that kind of narrative, as well as a signal to the inmates that this is a low-stress environment.
We distrust our own adaptive nature. I still wonder why that is.
Weirdness of the Now: Interviewing Warren Ellis About Normal
By Lauren Beukes
Normal is the new serialized digital novella from Warren Ellis, the guy who packs more ideas into every page (or every panel, in his comics work) than many writers would use in a whole book.
His publisher FSG Originals asked me to ask Warren some questions about the fourth and final installment, which will be out in actual book form later this year. And it’s great. Normal is hectic and smart and brutal and funny, and queasy-making, too. Like William Gibson and Margaret Atwood, Warren is one of those writers who seem to have an all-access backstage pass to the total weirdness of the now.
In the Oregon woods is an isolated and disconnected convalescence facility called Normal Head that caters to professional futurists and spooks suffering from “abyss gaze.” But when a man disappears from his room, the new inmate Adam Dearden has to try to unite the factions in order to solve the mystery and deal with his own burnout event.
Lauren Beukes: Mansfield’s disappearance and the bed of bugs in his wake had a very Bram Stoker’s Dracula feel—his name evokes Renfield, and he’s also in an asylum thanks to his dark master. Is this me wildly free-associating, or is it an intentional nod to the attention-vampire nature of our tech and those info-sucking surveillance lords?
Warren Ellis: Asylum. Bugs. Renfield. I suspect we both have very similar brain damage. I don’t know that I made the specific association while I was writing it, but it was obvious on rereading. That part of the draft was written pretty quickly, and I have a theory that pulp writers working full pelt just spill out their ids and deep memories into the work without even noticing. I’m pretty sure I was in that zone when I pulled a name out of the air for that character and then put bugs in an asylum. The only consciously intentional part was Clough’s terrible joke at the chapter break, probably …
LB: I worry about your id, or rather what your id is osmosing from the riptides of the global subconscious. It strikes me that it’s not only futurists, but anyone who tries to parse the strangeness of the world we live in through any art or storytelling is probably more susceptible to abyss gaze. Is it something you’ve experienced?
WE: Okay. You want to know the terrible, awful truth?
I feel great.
Things are awful. Everything is terrible. And the worse it gets, the more energy I feel. It’s like some generator that only feeds on horror. I mean, I’m terrified for my kid, and for my own old age, but, goddamn, I love getting up in the morning (well, afternoon) and seeing what new shapes the world has twisted itself into. Everything is on fire and I love it. I dole out advice on how to deal with these ice storms of shit that we’re living through and counsel people on how to protect their brains from it all and console people and tell them that we’re all going to find ways to get through it, and I am seriously just sitting there with my feet up and an espresso in my hand and feeling fine as the planet eats itself. I’m a monster.
Don’t tell anyone.
LB: Your books are always techno-creepy, but this is the creepy-crawliest, from the heaving mass of insects on the disappeared man’s bed, a shout-out to everyone’s bestest mind-control fungus, Cordyceps, and my favorite character, Bulat, even shares an intelligence and a pronoun with the bug-mind of her gut biome. What’s up with all the bugs, Ellis?
WE: Well, first, obviously, it’s the gag. Bugs and bugging. Because I am history’s greatest monster. It’s also our relationship to the natural world. Sit and think about it long enough, and we find ways to be revolted by things we evolved alongside. From one angle, that’s kind of weird. But it’s also a shadow biology—we are now barely understanding gut biomes, the strange mentational pressures of toxoplasmosis, the possibilities of insect consciousness and even insect culture.
It’s that inner-space thing, maybe—not necessarily on the level of Ballard’s psychological definition of the term, but more literal, the “minds” inside us and crawling at our feet, exerting their weird controls and pressures. Even just knowing their presence without quite comprehending them. Just as we can’t, in surveillance terms, ever quite see all the things that are seeing us.
(Wasps injecting venom into ant brains to turn them into zombies!)
LB: As much as your work is concerned with the infinite weirdness of our present, and with pinging the future, there’s a lot of history and hauntedness, too—ghosts as well as spooks, electronic and otherwise … and forests. How are the psychogeographies of nature different to write about from the typical techno-thriller staging ground of cities?
WE: I dunno. I’m probably kind of perverse about this. I mean, you read Gun Machine—the first thing I did was look for the ancient trackways under the city. I’ve seen Manhattanhenge. While, obviously, footpaths and stone circles are human interventions, they’re also intended to work with, rather than against, natural landscapes. The micro-homes in Normal are intended to blend into the landscape to some extent. I tend to see what’s under things, and to see things as extensions of or emulations of nature. God, I wrote a science-fiction graphic novel about vast alien structures landing on Earth and called it Trees, for God’s sake. There’s something wrong with me.
LB: Is privacy really, absolutely, do-not-revive, no-zombie-resurrection, 100 percent dead? How does that make you feel, and as the parent of a young woman in particular? (Speaking to my own interests, with a seven-year-old growing into a future that’s going to be weirder than any we could have imagined.)
WE: Her generation is actually incredibly good at privacy. They saw the TMI Generation and the Web 1.0 Generation and said, Fuck that. It’s why so many of them went to Snapchat, while Facebook started to gray and Twitter hit a plateau, and why they were in IM systems rather than e-mail. They’re the generation that deletes their texts and doesn’t leave trails. They give me hope that we can adapt to this environment, too, and have our own work-arounds and protocols.
I don’t think privacy is dead. I think we’ve lost personal freedoms that we didn’t necessarily have words for—like the right to not have your personal information spread across a global communications network if you have a bad breakup with somebody, or if you express an opinion about the social politics of video games, or if you have the temerity to be female-identified. As a parent of a young woman, my first concern is that her voice not be essentially criminalized because it is female.
LB: You’re pretty generous with your source code, sharing curiosities and music and book recommendations and other interesting things you’ve found through your newsletter. It feels like a sneak peek into your own gut biome of influences. Do you keep anything back? And do you have an algorithm for that?
WE: I have a private newsletter that goes out to friends, comrades, and fellow-travelers that contains the stuff that doesn’t go out to the public Internet. And I still use local bookmarks for stuff that’s just for me, so, yeah, I keep some stuff back
. But, ultimately, all things good should flow into the boulevard. And in these days of loud, churning, and complex Internet spaces, curation still has its value. It’s harder, every day, to see and find the good stuff—so when I do find it, I like to elevate its profile as best I can. Which isn’t much, but artists and writers depend on that kind of thing, and I learned as a kid that when you have any kind of platform, that that is what you should use it for.
LB: And hey, listen, you mentioned in a previous interview in this series that you were hoping to buy a bunker for your daughter and her friends. Is there any room in there? Are you taking applications?
WE: Depends. What can you offer? I’m going to need a lot of alcohol. Also probably new internal organs. I’m open to negotiation here.
ALSO BY WARREN ELLIS
Dead Pig Collector
Gun Machine
Transmetropolitan
Crooked Little Vein
Red
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Warren Ellis is the author of FSG’s first digital original, Dead Pig Collector; the New York Times bestselling novel Gun Machine; and the underground classic Crooked Little Vein. He is also the award-winning creator of a number of iconic, bestselling original graphic novels, including Red, Ministry of Space, Planetary, and Transmetropolitan, and has been behind some of the most successful reimaginings of mainstream comic superheroes, including Iron Man. He has written extensively for VICE, Wired, and Reuters on technological and cultural matters and is working on a nonfiction book about the future of cities for FSG Originals. He lives on the southeast coast of England. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
Title Page