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

In McKenna's vision, the Tunguska event is the result of a nuclear device exploded in the other timestream as an experiment to see if the bifurcation can be bridged. They're trying to reach us, their orphaned brothers and sisters, to save us.

  It's a story of how history could have gone, but it was also a parable. It served his purposes as an illustration of how the psychedelic people of ancient South America could have emerged into the wider world with influence, and a statement against the stultifying influence of Christianity and western priestcraft in general. And it also opened the listeners' minds to new possibilities, to thinking outside the box.

  McKenna was a great believer in the notion that plant and fungal psychedelics were other; that what they showed and told him did not come from his brain, but from the materials themselves. Like Philip K. Dick writing books to try and find the true source of his own visions-trying out stories that fit the experienced facts to get at the truth of them-McKenna tested many explanations of his experiences. His favourite was that mushrooms came from outer space and contained an alien intelligence synergetic to mammals. I don't know that he ever considered the possibility that it was the other half of his brain speaking to him-the side we never hear from.

  In certain forms of magic, ritual and derangement of the senses are intended to effect conversations with the angel, to channel alien consciousness. But that's just a term of art. The process is intended to get at the subconscious, the dark half of the brain, the parts that we don't consciously use and cannot ordinarily get to. And a ritual is nothing but a performance-a story. We tell ourselves a story in order to reveal something to ourselves.

  Which is the same thing I do.

  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 that's one reason why I stay in comics. Any other visual narrative medium is hopelessly compromised by committees and executives and notes and queries. In comics, it's just the writer and the illustrator and the editor. You only have to get two other people, at most, on the same wavelength as you. And you get to speak in a masscommunication medium-where the sales are still better than genre novels or indie music, in many cases-without filters. You get to say what you meant to say.

  So if I want to get drunk and talk about secrets and mysteries and all the other crap I've bored you stiff with over the last few minutes, I can.

  And, if I'm good and if I'm lucky, I can change the way you think, just a little bit. I can tell you my secrets, and reveal things to you, and get you a little drunk with ideas, and dramatise the world you live in, just for a little while.

  That's what stories are for. And that's why I'm here. Thank you.

  What Goes Into the Sausage?

  Written in March of 2006

  Well, I missed last week due to a confluence of good and bad news: I got commissioned to produce something in another medium and had a crisis on one of my comics serials foisted upon me in the same 24 hours, and that just ate my Ministry producing time.

  This week has similarly been nothing but chaos, ending up with me working on less than six hours' sleep today. My leg's given out again and I'm back on my cane, I can barely see out of my left eye and this needs to be with Jen in a couple of hours. Let's see what I've got.

  Life's A Riot With Meathook Vs. Noospheric

  I'm currently developing a new project that has proved to be an absolute bugger to break. It started off as no more then a collection of intents, and a publisher-a small outfit I've been friendly with for years who need an "anchor" book for the direct market. The artist is in place, the format (32 pages, no ads, colour, USD $2.99) is in place, I even know the style I'm going to be producing it in. All I'm missing are the story and the characters and the title.

  Yeah. It's like that sometimes. Makes no sense, does it? That's because you never get to see what goes into sausages.

  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.

  I've made more mileage out of mining the material of the 20th Century than most, and there's still tons there left to go, things that need reconsideration after that fastest of centuries. But I'm really trying not to go there, for this project. Four years after the end of Transmetropolitan, I'm going back to social speculative fiction, to see how the landscape's changed. I'm hunting outbreaks of the future again, in a longform work.

  I wouldn't think there's much doubt that things are getting strange again. And not the good kind of strange. A woman married a dolphin yesterday. Seriously. A US senator has declared that no woman can get an abortion in his own state unless she's a committed Christian virgin who's been beaten to within an inch of her life and anally raped. He said it on television. Quantum physicists are teleporting light. The truth behind that old "where's my bloody jetpack" view of the future is that the future is clearly not going to be that simple. In the last few months, I've started to get the feeling that maybe old miseryguts J. G. Ballard isn't right all the time, and the near future, at least, is going to be anything but banal. Unless, of course, you're already so dead inside that anything short of Jesus Robots descending en masse from the centre of the sun dispensing immortality juice and flying cars makes you yawn.

  The future's getting weird and scary. My futurist friend Matt Jones said to me the other day that, in one sense, the future is a race between the Bright Spime Future and what other smart friend Dr. Joshua Ellis has termed the Grim Meathook Future. What's the Grim Meathook Future? Take a look at New Orleans-what is now called the K-Hole, the hole that Hurricane Katrina left in the United States. Everyone knew in advance that the 2006 hurricane season was going to be a freak one. The K-Hole is the remains of a massive system failure. That's the Grim Meathook Future: infrastructures that cannot cope. Dead bodies laying for two weeks on the street corners of the most powerful nation on earth: that's the Grim Meathook Future. Things turning backwards. I live on an island that's just been informed that there's probably not enough water to go round this summer. Turn that sentence around in your heads a few times. So, anyway, it has to encapsulate that too. Whatever else it is, it's the story of a race between two futures.

  Oh... Spime Future? No, I'm not totally convinced of the Spime Future, or, as it is also sometimes known, The Internet Of Things. The idea is close to that of the noosphere, an invisible world of information flows. A Spime is an object (or blobject, or blogject) that exists as, around and within a constantly-updated, totally-recorded flow of information. In Sterling's words, "A Spime is an object that ate and internalized the previous industrial order."

  In practise, it's probably going to turn into that dumb idea of internet fridges that email shopping lists to
the supermarket. If it's anything like my local Tesco online delivery service, the groceries won't turn up for four days and will be missing half the stuff you ordered anyway. Bruce Sterling wrote an excellent book on spimes called Shaping Things, published by MIT Media Lab, which I recommend to you. A lot of people are thinking about this right now, and the conversation will soon start leaking into the wider world. There's also a fair chance that more and more people will be implanting hacked Radio Frequency ID tags and the like into themselves over the next few years. Which leads me to:

  There's a middle distance between the complete collapse of infrastructure and some weird geek dream of electronically knowing where all your stuff is. (I'm cheating: the end result of pure spime theory is electronic omniscience, which is not a useless concept.) Between apocalyptic politics and nerdvana is the human dimension; how this stuff is taken onboard by smart people at street level. You all know Bill Gibson's saw from his cyberpunk novels, that the street finds its own use for things. It still holds. But, right now, I think there's an urgency and a sense of envelope-pushing in exactly what uses are found for these things.

  Josh says it in the GMF text: "I think the problem is that the future, maybe for the first time since WWII, lies on the far side of an event horizon for us, because there are so many futures possible. There's the wetware future, the hardware future, the transhumanist future, the post-rationalist (aka fundamentalist) future."

  And that's where the story lies. In the spread of possible futures, and the people down on the ground facing them. The story has to be about people trying to steer (or condemn) other people to one future or another, using everything in their power. That's a big story.

  That's what I'm working on right now. Aren't you sorry you asked? I told you I was tired.

  §

  Thinking a lot about Augmented Reality as Activated History: smartphones/street computers drilling down into buildings'pasts.

  §

  How many people could you house inside a dead whale?

  If you shored it up inside? Biodegradable new floodplain-shanty housing.

  §

  Comics & Ideas

  Written in Mlarch of 2006

  One of the things I like best about comics is their innate facility for education. Comics communicate ideas with clarity and simplicity, and can be replayed countless times without cost at any speed you like, in any direction you like.

  Collector's mania for comics can sometimes be considered to have started when editorial notes-which, from one perspective, are early hyperlinks-appeared directing the reader's attention to contextual information in previous issues. "* See issue #12 for the origin of Grim Fin-Headed Backdoorman!" Linking you back to an older comic in your box or on your shelf. Or even "* See Other Series #34 for more on bombastic Boobsock Girl's three-headed baby!", linking you across to another series entirely. Provided you had the money and the access and the bug for it, you could assemble an entire universe shot through with non-linear links that went up and down the timeline, across lives and geographies.

  Primitive as hell, of course, but it worked. Particularly for early Marvel, when there was a single writer, Stan Lee, guiding all the books. And he wanted you to read all the books. He didn't want Avengers fans or Spider-Man fans, after all. He had to make the entire line culturally sticky. Due to the nature of Marvel's distribution at the time, which was run through National Periodicals-DC!-Marvel could only release a limited number of books per month. So he needed Marvel fans, full stop, so that every book in the line paid off. He couldn't afford any slack. That was the brilliance of the man-that he created, from scratch, the Marvel fan.

  The above is, in part, what Grant Morrison's talking about when he starts declaiming about the DC Universe as a live thing. Since it grows and makes connections while under the command of forces almost totally invisible to the populations within the comics, it fulfills one of the conditions for life inside a creationist universe. This is one of the reasons why people think Grant is mad.

  I spoke a few weeks ago about the possibility of a book throwing off a "data shadow"-printing a URL on the back of a book that leads you, should you type it in to an internet-enabled device, to a network of information about a book. This is something that all comics could do. On the assumption that in the Western world few people buying comics are too far away from a library or internet cafe at the very least, the potential exists to build an accessible data shadow above any book.

  In fact, it could be done in very sophisticated ways. Electronic hyperlinks could be built right into the pages.

  In Japan, there's a system... I have to go back and find the name, I'm in the pub right now and all this is just occurring to me in a stream-of-consciousness rush-there's a system where a link can be encoded into a small square codon-rich graphic that's readable by enabled mobile phones... QR. It's called QR Barcode.The phone reads it and spits a stream of information about the thing the graphic's stuck to, right back to your phone screen.

  In Japanese supermarkets, people use QR-enabled camphones to scan the QR tags on food labels. (This connects right back to Spimeworld, see?) The QR kicks your phone over to a phone-optimised website that tells you where the food came from, right down to the name of the farm, what was used to grow it, and even the composition of the soil it came out of. You can even buy things called Stamkeys that let you make your own QR code blocks. Hell, some people are turning them, not just into mobile-formatted links to websites and blogs, but actual blog content in and of themselves.

  (I found out about all this via Our Man In Tokyo, designer and event curator Jean Snow.*)

  Imagine this, then: reading an issue of, say, Grant's Invisibles, and King Mob's just said something about Guy Debord. And buried in the bottom right corner of the panel is one of those little QR blocks. Shoot it with a phone and the Wikipedia entry on Guy Debord comes back to you from the book's datashadow.

  I used Invisibles not only because I'd previously mentioned Grant, but because Vertigo books from the '90s-Invisibles, Preacher, Transmetropolitan-were books about ideas. The three of us were writing about our discrete areas of interest, and, in large part, we were telling you about the things we knew. Which isn't a bad thing. Some people balk at writers having any opinion, interest or intent beyond banging out a neutral yarn, but, you know, fuck that noise. Comics are an educational tool, used for anything from instructional pamphlets for civil disobedience to workplace hygiene. The best fiction, like the best reportage, is about the writer telling the reader where they think they are today, and what they think it looks like.

  * http://www.jeansnow. net

  Sadly, QR coding hasn't caught on outside Japan. But it's an interesting thought to consider. In the meantime... well, we don't have access to anything quite that sophisticated, here in the West. But I'm thinking about trying something with a project I'm developing right now. I'm thinking about building a wiki on top of a comic.

  A wiki, from Wikipedia's definition: "A wiki is a type of website that allows anyone visiting the site to add, remove as well as edit all content, quickly and easily, without the need for registration, which makes it an effective tool for collaborative writing. The term wiki is a shortened form of wiki wiki which is from the native language of Hawaii (Hawaiian), where it is commonly used as an adjective to denote something "quick" or "fast" . In essence, a wiki is nothing more than a simplified system of creating HTML web pages, combined with a system which records and catalogues all revisions, so that at any time, an entry can be reverted to a previous state. A wiki system may also include various tools, designed to provide users with an easy way to monitor the constantly changing state of the wiki."

  Just go and take a look at Wikipedia to see one in action. The use occurred to me several weeks back, when I discovered that fans of the TV show Lost had generated a wiki for the show.

  If you generated a wiki-essentially, a networked, highly hyperlinked directory of information-in advance of a comics series' release, and stamped the book
with the URL of the wiki... and, conceivably, even somehow marked pages and panels with URLs that take you inside the wiki structure, in any of a variety of ways from subtle to as blatant and clunky as that old editorial-note caption box that littered Marvel comics of old... you invite a peculiarly modern involvement in the work. With a single book, in fact, you can create

  the sense of immersion in a universe that came, in the Sixties, from buying eight different lightly-connected Marvel comics. Immersion and, in a sense, interaction. Internet culture has become defined in part by what can be termed "extended consumption." Mash-ups. Making music videos out of mp3s and recut anime. The explosion of fanfiction. These things don't always necessarily qualify as art, to some, but they do express a change in the way we relate to and handle our arts.

  That would be an interesting way to do a modern comic. One that has its own electronic universe standing behind it, accessible through an URL printed on the front of the book, or multiple URLs seeded throughout the book. The book would not rely on them for its effect and textual integrity, but it would be supported and extended by a directory of information about the book, produced both by the creators and those of its audience who wished to extend their consumption of and involvement with the book.

  (Hideously open to vandalism, of course, like Wikipedia itself, but I'm talking pure blue-sky concepting here, so please indulge me before I pass out from the sheer strain of holding a train of thought this long.) (Shit. Too late.)

  Public Intellectual

  Written in April of 2006

  The other week, during a speech at SXSW, Bruce Sterling accused me of "becoming a public intellectual." Which is a terrible thing for one writer to say about another, because it causes you to re-examine what you've been saying for signs of, I don't know, actual intellectual content.

  I remember one of those weird faux-reporter people from the US-Walter Cronkite, maybe-talking about how he thought the Master And Commander books were "crack cocaine for intellectuals." By his definition, then, people who read the news on commercial television for a living are intellectuals.