My advice to anyone in any field is to be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker.

William [Christensen, Avatar Editor-in-Chief] came to me, and basically wanted a female-led action comic, and apart from that, it was entirely open. That’s an incredibly open brief, so I sat back and started thinking. I was thinking about cyberpunk, and I was thinking about Riot Grrl, Judge Dredd, Tank Girl, Kill Yr Boyfriend… The most important thing, is that it’s a cop drama on Mercury. It’s the idea that, especially after Obama got in, people seemed to be thinking about the future again, the idea that we’re going to have a future. So a lot of the problems that we have today, are not problems in this particular world. Specifically, environmentalism becomes very important, as in Environmentalism is actually very close to what religion is now, but they still have this energy need. So what they’ve ended up doing is solar panels on Mercury. And Earth is kind of like a lived-in Utopia, but Mercury is a bit harsher, kind of the new Wild West. And the lead character is one of these cops, who goes to Mercury, and has to deal with crime there. Of course, The Heat. So the focus is both on Mercury, because it’s very, very hot, and the police.

One of the inspirations for it was… Whiteout! Not the film but the actual comic. Whiteout is fantastic because it takes a police procedural and then applies it to an unusual environment. And the environment becomes a character. I basically wanted to do the idea of ‘what would it be like to fight crime on Mercury?’. But Mercury’s incredible, one side melts lead, the other side freezes oxygen. These are incredible differences, how would you police it? In fact, how would the power plant work? How would the people live? How would the energy get back to earth? Mercury is very small, and it rotates very slowly. A Mercury day is about 88 Earth days long. It actually only rotates at around 10km/hr, in other words it rotates less than running speed. On Mercury, you can out-run the dawn. And that’s pretty much the opening scene, of somebody trying to out-run the dawn. And of course, you can out-run the dawn - just not for long. And that’s my noir-esque start of it. And the environment characterises and changes everything.

Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, ``Do you mind if I join you?'' They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?'' And after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?'' And after some more time I came in one day and said, ``If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?'' I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring.

(AVOID MISSING BALL FOR HIGH SCORE = ultrawriting)

Massive Attack's Blue Lines

KieronGIllen: And thanks. I should get Matt Sheret in here to talk about Titus Andronicus too.

This book wants to impress you. Very badly. Oh, it flails - you’ll half expect droplets of sweat to abruptly bead upon the surface of any one of these 32 b&w pages and drift upward into your eyes via some queer gravitational inversion, perhaps somehow prompted by the time travel inherent to writing creative works and having them published, perspiration privately paused and only later resumed for public pooling. Phonogram screams for attention.

I think Use of Weapons which hit me hardest