Interviews
An Interview with Warren Ellis
Barnes & Noble.com: Your new DC Comics/Vertigo graphic novel, Orbiter, concerns an alternate future Earth where the space program has been halted for ten years due to the apparent loss of a space shuttle mission. What was your reaction when you heard about the recent Columbia shuttle tragedy?
Warren Ellis: Pretty much the same as everyone else. Stark bloody horror and deep sadness. It's impossible to be cynical about something like that. I think a lot of people had been expecting it for a while, but that doesn't make it any easier when it happens, and no one ever wants to be right about something like that.
And then, of course, the people who'd read Orbiter were emailing and phoning me. It's always a disturbing situation to be in, to have written a fiction that suddenly stands so close to the truth. It's happened to me before, and frankly it's no fun.
B&N.com: What do you think the future of the U.S. space program will be, in light of Columbia?
WE: I think the extent of the damage to the human space flight program in America isn't really yet known. There are too many question marks over both NASA's handling of the shuttle program and NASA's operation in general. The International Space Station, which has always been just begging to have the budget slashed out of it, as it really only exists to give the shuttle somewhere to go, is now on a skeleton crew serviced by Russian capsules. The clock's turning back.
Basically, I'm hoping that I'm not right, and that American human space flight isn't over.
B&N.com: You like to dabble in "alternate history," as you've done with the recent Ministry of Space series (which posits that the Brits got a hold of Von Braun, rather than the Americans). Do you read a lot of alternate history yourself?
WE: I don't, actually. I read a lot of history, but the only alternate history books I've read that I can think of right this second are Philip Dick's Man in the High Castle and Stephen Baxter's Voyage. There may be more, but that's all I've got right now. I guess I'd rather have the fun of monkeying with history myself than watching other people do it. I have a sister book to Ministry in early production for DC right now, kind of the flip side to it: American Space Force, utilizing lost innovations by scientists like Nikola Tesla and Thomas Townshend Brown to bring about Flash Gordon spaceships in an otherwise painfully real 1939 America...
B&N.com: Where did the concept of Planetary come from? Was it boredom with the typical comic book story?
WE: When I started working for American comics companies, I found I had to learn about superhero comics very quickly. The concept of Planetary came partly from desperately wanting to empty my head of all this research, and partly to show that the things that made the original superhero, pulp thriller, and early sci-fi concepts so wondrous and compelling have been lost through endless bloody repetition. I mean, there's no such thing as the "typical comic book story," just as there's no "typical" film or book, but it does kind of try to address one end of the spectrum and show why it's gotten so damn dull -- and why we were interested in that kind of story in the first place. Stripping the muck off diamonds, maybe.
B&N.com: What would your Transmetropolitan character Spider Jerusalem say about the current state of the real world?
WE: Something extremely rude involving sexual knowledge of farm animals. Because, really, Transmetropolitan was all about transposing elements of the real world into a fictional framework, where I could have a better look at it. Transmet is science fiction as social novel. Only with jokes about sexual knowledge of farm animals.
B&N.com: You're amazingly prolific. When do you do your writing?
WE: Well, constantly, really. It's not a job where you can just turn the power on and off. So I'm found most days in a pub with my handheld computer and a foldout keyboard and my morning energy drinks, and I'm still in the office at home at 3 a.m., because you have to work when the power's on….
B&N.com: Is there a classic comic book artist from the past whom you wish you could have worked with?
WE: Oh, so many. In particular, I wish I'd worked with Gil Kane, who was one of the early pioneers of graphic novels.
B&N.com: What future projects can our Barnes & Noble.com Warren Ellis fans look forward to?
WE: I've just signed the contracts for a new science fiction graphic novel at DC Vertigo. There should be several new collections out during the year, including my crime graphic novel Scars, and the penultimate Transmetropolitan collection will be out at the end of the year. I'm keeping busy.
