Doktor Sleepless: Engines of Desire by Warren Ellis and Ivan Rodriguez

Warren Ellis is one of my favourite writers, both in comics and on the web. He always has something interesting, unique, bizarre and enlightening to say. His website is always worth a gander, though it has become a little less frequently updated this past year or two, although one or two updates a day compared to his old four or five is still pretty good.

Over the past half year or so I have been playing catch up on some of Ellis’ work that was not published by one of the Big Two comic companies (Marvel and DC), and just sat down with the first eight issues of Doktor Sleepless, (collected in Doktor Sleepless: Engines of Desire), published by Avatar Press. I really enjoyed the trip through the ideas that Ellis laid down on paper, even if it’s not a full story. The series stopped at issue 13, with three last issues promised but on an extended hiatus, (and none of the issues beyond the first eight have been collected and reprinted). So fair warning; if you pick this book up, don’t expect a complete story, but more a collection of ideas wrapped up within the first half of something that promises -with no guarantee- to be something greater down the line.

For me, this didn’t matter though. I want to find out what happens, but at the same time, it was the ideas that Ellis presented that I enjoyed the most, and I got that, so felt appeased at the end of the volume. If the book is ever finished, I will be happy, but I won’t feel slighted if I never get more, either.

What plot we do get is as such:  a man who witnessed his parents die a horrible death as a child comes back to his home town after being gone for a long time, and decides to take on the persona of Doktor Sleepless so that he can speak to the masses about his belief that we have all been cheated out of the future we were promised. Knowing that a symbolic figure is more readily accepted than a mere man when it comes to speaking against the grain of accepted worldviews, as Doktor Sleepless, he reminds people that the future isn’t all flying cars, and that the future is here, it’s just not the one we asked for. The ideas that the Doktor present come in fast spurts that are both a joy and a horror to read. Anyone who has read futurist writings or noses about the futureshock scene has heard a lot of this before, but having it laid out in an easily accessible comic with Warren Ellis’ spin on it means that the reader will be entertained, amused, and provoked into thinking about these ideas readily. Since reading the book, it has captivated a lot of my quiet mussing time, which is what I want from a book with Warren Ellis’ name on it.

These ideas are so much of the book, that for me, the plot is just there to fill in the gaps between ideas. This is why I am okay with having this one book and not desperately needing closure on the story. The characters and events are interesting and I do like the story, but the ideas were greater than the narrative. While I guess this could be a failure in the writing, it’s irrelevant to me because I got what I wanted and more out of it, (which is exactly what one should account for when deciding the merit of something).

In closing, I’m going to just post a few excerpts from the book. Maybe they will appeal to a few of you enough to go hunt down the book.

“You live in the future and you don’t even know it. … The future sneaks up on us. It leaks in through the small, ordinary things. … You want your jetpack, but you don’t even think about your IM lenses and your phones. Were you born with them? No. You’re science fictional creatures.”

“In 1999, Godspeed You! Black Emperor start releasing CDs in untreated cardboard. Intended or not, it denotes authenticity. Keeping it real. … Godspeed You! Black Emperor didn’t play the media game…[b]ut of course they had a brand. You can’t help but notice that Naomi Klein’s book “No Logo” had a fucking logo on the front. Godspeed’s brand was authenticity.”

“Ronald Regan had the right idea—convince the other side that he genuinely didn’t care if Armageddon came. …[The Soviets] saw him telling his young people that they may be the generation that faced the extinction of life on Earth and smiling his funny little smile—and, well, shit, how do you cope with that?”

“In the last month, three hundred billion liters of water were drunk—but four hundred thousand people died from waterborne disease. In fact, right now, here in the future, almost one and a half billion people still don’t have access to clean water. … I want you to think about this before you sleep: What can you do to bring about the real future? Because you know that this isn’t a future worth getting out of bed for.”