Warren Ellis has a new book coming out, called Crooked Little Vein. Publisher's Weekly calls it a "snappily paced homage to William Burroughs's Naked Lunch."
If that doesn't get your inner Mugwump ready for a trip to Interzone, he posted a piece of Crooked Little Vein in his Live Journal recently that might just do the trick:
The radio scanned around a bit and landed on something that sounded oddly amateur. Listening and smoking, I came to understand it was a micropower radio station. A couple of kids broadcasting out of a back room somewhere. And somewhere close by, too. The kids, only one of whom sounded hopelessly stoned, explained that their signal didn’t reach more than a couple of miles, and only that if the wind was behind it and you were standing downhill with your arms out and a wire coathanger stuck on top of your head.
The unstoned one was pretty smart. In between the music – which apparently was all by local unsigned bands, and some of it wasn’t bad – he talked about what they were doing and why. By playing local indie music, they were both supporting his community and broadcasting donated content that didn’t require a royalty payment. They weren’t, they insisted, pirates. They were even observing band adjacency, he said – this one, the guy who hadn’t smoked a field of weed, was obviously the Head Geek – broadcasting on 94.2, clear space between two “lite”/soft rock channels. And that was the point, he figured – most of Columbus’ dial was all eaten up by soft rock, country and Christian radio. All the major monolithic radio entities ran stations in Colombus, but they all broadcast exactly the same kind of material.
This excerpt doesn't do it justice, but it should make you interested enough to go read the whole thing, I hope.
Warren has been watching with awe as his Amazon ranking climbs steadily upward, (it's at 302 as I write this) and I thought I'd help him reach the double digits if I can, thusly: Buy Crooked Little Vein today and you will wake up as the owner of a mansion and a yacht, surrounded by beautiful women or men as you see fit.*
I remember watching Amazon rankings climb for Dancing Barefoot (I think it peaked around 21 or so for ten minutes) and hoping to watch Just A Geek (which I understand cracked the top ten, but can't prove because Amazon's ranking updating gremlins were all off getting loaded the day Just A Geek was released. I guess I should have taken that as a sign of things to come, but I was young and filled with naive optimism.) Warren, like me, has an awesome audience and a great relationship with his readers, who are massively supportive of his work, and I bet we could all come together into a giant Voltron of readers that would make Cheetara and the Baroness totally hot for us.
Uh. What? Okay, to wipe that image out of your mind, one more bit from Publisher's Weekly:
"At the start of this dark, demented fiction debut from Ellis, the creator of DC Comics' Transmetropolitan and The Authority, the U.S. president's heroin-addicted chief of staff hires 25-year-old Lower East Side PI Mike McGill to find the other Constitution. This is a secret document privately authored by several of the Founders detailing the real intent of their design for American society, which a debauched vice-president Nixon lost in the '50s. With half a mill in black ops money, Mike hires cute tattooed Trix Holmes to be his guide to America's deviant underworld, whence the 50-year-old cold trail begins. In their search for the missing document, reputedly bound in the skin of the extraterrestrial entity that plagued Benjamin Franklin's ass over six nights in Paris, the pair make some wild pit stops in Columbus, Ohio; San Antonio, Tex.; Vegas; and, finally, L.A."
* Offer only good if you are already the owner of a mansion and a yacht, or if your name happens to be Elmer J. Fudd. Beautiful women or men will only arrive if you are Tom Vu, and have made "Millons" in real estate and infomercial scams. Offer not open to residents of Guam, Ivory Cost, and Florida.
