Like so many things in my life, it started out as a bad joke.
My girlfriend Niki will not thank me for revealing this, but during the first year or so of our daughter's life, she became a Star Trek viewer. Her story is that Lill would fall asleep on her, thereby pinning her down, at the same time every day - when Star Trek: The Next Generation came on. And, I dunno, she couldn't reach the zapper or her eyelids fused into the top of her head or something and she had to watch them all.
So, every now and then, we take a quick look at whatever new iteration of Star Trek is on. Mostly so I can take the piss out of her mercilessly. There we are one evening, taking in ten minutes of an awful, pompous, stupid thing called Star Trek: Voyager. It features an actress who chooses to essay, if you can imagine, Katharine Hepburn impersonating William Shatner. It is uniquely horrible.
And we're watching this, and making idle comments that our friend Patrick Stewart is really much better (once again glossing over the time when Patrick phoned and Niki refused to believe it was him, insisting that it was one of my friends doing a funny voice to fuck with us) and they should have gotten someone like him, because frankly if you don't have an actor of his strength anchoring the thing then you may as well go home, and all that, and then I have what is to me suddenly the most entertaining thought.
"They should get Ray Winstone as captain."
Ray Winstone is an excellent British actor who tends to play working-class London psychotics. Even when he's the good guy — he was Will Scarlet in a long-running Robin Hood TV show here, and portrayed a hero journalist type in Tank Mailing - he's usually fucking terrifying. Only once in (my) recent memory has he played against type in film, as the scared safecracker in Sexy Beast. See, everyone first saw Ray Winstone as a teenager
whipping other kids to death with a pool ball in a sock, screaming WHO'S THE DADDY NOW? WHO'S THE FUCKING DADDY NOW? I'M THE DADDY NOW! He's a force of nature, a thing driven by beer and cigarettes and kicking fucking heads in. He's got a chubby face and little boy's eyes that, in the moment, go black and dead like shark's eyes. Reduces London English to a series of grunts and yelps. He is, in fact, The Greatest Living Londoner.
And the whole thing unfurled as I spoke, like a flag that someone had wiped their arse on first. Insisting on smoking on the bridge. Ray Winstone has to have his fags (which in Britain means "cigarettes" - it's the first term we purge from our vocabulary when we travel to America). And beer. "Have one of our futuristic blue drinks with no alcohol, sir?" "Fuck off. Fucking pint, son. Right fucking now." That standard Star Trek moment when someone asks the captain if they can go now, and spouts some techno bollocks at him about how the course is set and all that. "Well, fucking go on then, son. Twat."
Ray Winstone, in one of his usual character types, as the captain of a spaceship. It was funny for a minute. We moved on.
A day later, story elements started occurring to me.
There was a lot of running around shouting "No, get out of my brain" and drinking of whiskey and firing flare guns up my nose and things.
None of which did a blind bit of good, of course. You have to give in to the ideas when they come. Somehow, this vision of Ray Winstone saying "Bollocks" in space had triggered some creative gag reflex, and all my loathing of that profoundly ordinary, polite, self-important and bland future presented by TV science-fiction came surging up. All yellow, and with bits in.
I'm not the only one this has ever happened to, of course. There's a lovely bit in Spider and Jeanne Robinson's novel Stardance where the two protagonists of the latter part of the book are taken aboard a military spaceship and given cigarettes and wrist-worn air-scrubbing fans to suck away the smoke. (The same authors who taught an impressionable young man that you have to keep sucking on your joint during dinner because eating takes the edge off your buzz.) These were people who were serious about their vices and did not see science fiction as a way to white-wash out everything that is fun about self-destructive habits and being human.
(Incidentally, I did indeed start smoking again around the time I was finishing this book. I'm going to quit again some time this year, although life keeps conspiring against me. I'm pretty sure I'm genetically hardwired for nicotine input, but it smells bad. It's no wonder people battling with cigarettes kept turning up in my work of the last couple of years. I may switch to heroin.)
I present to you, then, a joke. An extended gag at the expense of the colourless, clean SF of the big media. The anti-Star Trek if you like. Almost automatic writing; a joke told in my voice, full of my usual rubbish. I think it's a good joke, and worth the time it takes to tell it to you, otherwise it wouldn't be here and neither would I.
I'm just saying, be advised. This isn't me at my most blisteringly intellectual. SWITCHBLADE HONEY is, in fact, me drunk and wreathed in fag smoke (shut up) and having a laugh with my girlfriend.
Thank God Brandon McKinney was sober, eh?
My girlfriend Niki will not thank me for revealing this, but during the first year or so of our daughter's life, she became a Star Trek viewer. Her story is that Lill would fall asleep on her, thereby pinning her down, at the same time every day - when Star Trek: The Next Generation came on. And, I dunno, she couldn't reach the zapper or her eyelids fused into the top of her head or something and she had to watch them all.
So, every now and then, we take a quick look at whatever new iteration of Star Trek is on. Mostly so I can take the piss out of her mercilessly. There we are one evening, taking in ten minutes of an awful, pompous, stupid thing called Star Trek: Voyager. It features an actress who chooses to essay, if you can imagine, Katharine Hepburn impersonating William Shatner. It is uniquely horrible.
And we're watching this, and making idle comments that our friend Patrick Stewart is really much better (once again glossing over the time when Patrick phoned and Niki refused to believe it was him, insisting that it was one of my friends doing a funny voice to fuck with us) and they should have gotten someone like him, because frankly if you don't have an actor of his strength anchoring the thing then you may as well go home, and all that, and then I have what is to me suddenly the most entertaining thought.
"They should get Ray Winstone as captain."
Ray Winstone is an excellent British actor who tends to play working-class London psychotics. Even when he's the good guy — he was Will Scarlet in a long-running Robin Hood TV show here, and portrayed a hero journalist type in Tank Mailing - he's usually fucking terrifying. Only once in (my) recent memory has he played against type in film, as the scared safecracker in Sexy Beast. See, everyone first saw Ray Winstone as a teenager
whipping other kids to death with a pool ball in a sock, screaming WHO'S THE DADDY NOW? WHO'S THE FUCKING DADDY NOW? I'M THE DADDY NOW! He's a force of nature, a thing driven by beer and cigarettes and kicking fucking heads in. He's got a chubby face and little boy's eyes that, in the moment, go black and dead like shark's eyes. Reduces London English to a series of grunts and yelps. He is, in fact, The Greatest Living Londoner. And the whole thing unfurled as I spoke, like a flag that someone had wiped their arse on first. Insisting on smoking on the bridge. Ray Winstone has to have his fags (which in Britain means "cigarettes" - it's the first term we purge from our vocabulary when we travel to America). And beer. "Have one of our futuristic blue drinks with no alcohol, sir?" "Fuck off. Fucking pint, son. Right fucking now." That standard Star Trek moment when someone asks the captain if they can go now, and spouts some techno bollocks at him about how the course is set and all that. "Well, fucking go on then, son. Twat."
Ray Winstone, in one of his usual character types, as the captain of a spaceship. It was funny for a minute. We moved on.
A day later, story elements started occurring to me.
There was a lot of running around shouting "No, get out of my brain" and drinking of whiskey and firing flare guns up my nose and things.
None of which did a blind bit of good, of course. You have to give in to the ideas when they come. Somehow, this vision of Ray Winstone saying "Bollocks" in space had triggered some creative gag reflex, and all my loathing of that profoundly ordinary, polite, self-important and bland future presented by TV science-fiction came surging up. All yellow, and with bits in.
I'm not the only one this has ever happened to, of course. There's a lovely bit in Spider and Jeanne Robinson's novel Stardance where the two protagonists of the latter part of the book are taken aboard a military spaceship and given cigarettes and wrist-worn air-scrubbing fans to suck away the smoke. (The same authors who taught an impressionable young man that you have to keep sucking on your joint during dinner because eating takes the edge off your buzz.) These were people who were serious about their vices and did not see science fiction as a way to white-wash out everything that is fun about self-destructive habits and being human.
(Incidentally, I did indeed start smoking again around the time I was finishing this book. I'm going to quit again some time this year, although life keeps conspiring against me. I'm pretty sure I'm genetically hardwired for nicotine input, but it smells bad. It's no wonder people battling with cigarettes kept turning up in my work of the last couple of years. I may switch to heroin.)
I present to you, then, a joke. An extended gag at the expense of the colourless, clean SF of the big media. The anti-Star Trek if you like. Almost automatic writing; a joke told in my voice, full of my usual rubbish. I think it's a good joke, and worth the time it takes to tell it to you, otherwise it wouldn't be here and neither would I.
I'm just saying, be advised. This isn't me at my most blisteringly intellectual. SWITCHBLADE HONEY is, in fact, me drunk and wreathed in fag smoke (shut up) and having a laugh with my girlfriend.
Thank God Brandon McKinney was sober, eh?
Warren Ellis
Middle of the night, too pissed to see the clock
Fucking England, innit
Introduction to Switchblade Honey
Middle of the night, too pissed to see the clock
Fucking England, innit
Introduction to Switchblade Honey
