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.”
