Why I love Warren Ellis
From one of his BAD SIGNAL emails:
"Alan [Moore] and I had a fundamental disagreement once. He felt that HP Lovecraft was the essential Western visionary of the 20th Century. I think it was Philip K Dick. I suspect some people discount Dick in the Mad Bastards League because the likes of Lovecraft and Blake made their art on the natural, while Dick was a notorious drug user. However, I think it's worth noting that in his later years a doctor told Dick that he had an unusually efficient liver that was processing out the amphetamines before they really got to work on him. Said Dick, who in many ways was not the smartest of guys, 'Oh, that explains why I like to take speed before I go to bed.'
I'm thinking a lot about Dick right now because, as confirmed a couple of days ago, he was living in the greater Los Angeles area (I can extend the ring around the city enough to include it) when he had his major sequence of visions and visitations that led him to the VALIS-related novels and his Exegesis. Visions of a vast active living intelligence system over LA? Information-rich pink lasers from space? That is certainly DESOLATION JONES territory, don't you think?"
Desolation Jones is awesome to begin with, and the idea that he'll be folding in stuff from Valis, the first Philip K. Dick novel I really read and one that continues to be a consumate mindfuck, pleases me to no end.
Plus I've always loved that story about his liver.
"Alan [Moore] and I had a fundamental disagreement once. He felt that HP Lovecraft was the essential Western visionary of the 20th Century. I think it was Philip K Dick. I suspect some people discount Dick in the Mad Bastards League because the likes of Lovecraft and Blake made their art on the natural, while Dick was a notorious drug user. However, I think it's worth noting that in his later years a doctor told Dick that he had an unusually efficient liver that was processing out the amphetamines before they really got to work on him. Said Dick, who in many ways was not the smartest of guys, 'Oh, that explains why I like to take speed before I go to bed.'
I'm thinking a lot about Dick right now because, as confirmed a couple of days ago, he was living in the greater Los Angeles area (I can extend the ring around the city enough to include it) when he had his major sequence of visions and visitations that led him to the VALIS-related novels and his Exegesis. Visions of a vast active living intelligence system over LA? Information-rich pink lasers from space? That is certainly DESOLATION JONES territory, don't you think?"
Desolation Jones is awesome to begin with, and the idea that he'll be folding in stuff from Valis, the first Philip K. Dick novel I really read and one that continues to be a consumate mindfuck, pleases me to no end.
Plus I've always loved that story about his liver.
