Warren Ellis Writes Novels, Too!

From his blog, a brief description of his upcoming novel, entitled Listener:

"Listener is, god help me, a near-future sf novel. An accident at a military loading bay with an illegal biological weapon led to the extermination of almost everyone in America. Some years on, the British government is contacted by a colony of survivors Stateside who claim to have a cure for The Bite. An internet journalist — a man studded with audio implants turning him into an objective “listening post,” the Listener of the title - is engaged to travel with a fact-finding mission to the Seattle colony, where unaffected survivors are living uncomfortably close to a gathering of the Bitten, people in whom the bioweapon became chronic rather than fatal, and in whom the weapon may still be active. The Listener is there to determine what kind of society is emerging in post-Bite America; to separate the myths that have risen around dead American from the truth of what’s happening in the colony called Needle."

Doesn't that sound great? I recently lent an Ellis original graphic novel, called Orbiter (artwork by Colleen Doran), to my VP boss. I wanted to give him a break from the steady diet of superhero fare that I'd been passing his way, so I bundled up Orbiter and The Originals (written and drawn by Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame) and he told me this morning that he thoroughly enjoyed both. Ellis, the genuis behind Planetary, has an amazing ability to think up applications for technology that doesn't exist yet and make you go, "Yeah, that's exactly what they'd do with it if they had it!"