THE SUNDAY HANGOVER
004
WARREN ELLIS

I'm sitting on a wooden bench outside Woodchester Mansion, out in the Cotswolds in the west of England, watching the skies. There's a single cloud formation overhead that is, according to meteorologists, as wide as Everest is tall. I'm watching the skies because Woodchester, though dry today, is in a slight dip. And if it rains again we're all going to die. It's a bit apocalyptic here in God's own country today.

It's rained so hard that the surfaces of motorways have been destroyed. I mean, that's serious weather. Half the country is littered with dead cars. People had to sleep in their vehicles overnight, having left on road trips that ordinarily take less than an hour. This is, after all, a small country -- we can cross from coast to coast in a matter of three hours. It takes something special to turn that into a ten-hour (at best) run. Three months' worth of rain in one night, according to one estimate. One couch full of old people reportedly took off on a 3-hour run to a seaside resort for the near-dead yesterday afternoon. Thirteen hours later, they reached the first motorway service station on their route. Imagine a hundred crones trapped in a bus for thirteen hours. The gangway awash with brown urine, seats swampy with wet droppings reeking of tea and partially-digested biscuits, the driver with denture marks all over his neck. Desperate pensioners gnawing on each others' wigs for sustenance.

I'm in the middle of writing a new comics series about a flooded London. I could have done without the actual first-hand research on sunken England.

And in two days I'm off to San Diego (provided they let me into the country), where it never rains and in fact water vapour never actually enters the air. San Diego is an entirely dry-cured city, and is notable for largely looking like it was constructed last week. If you see Europeans laughing at signs seemingly at random in San Diego, it's because they've spotted the plaques announcing the "historic Gaslamp District." I have socks older than the historic Gaslamp District. In fact, there are probably still condoms laying in ditches and around the back of electricity sub-station in the Essex area that, for age and notable events alone, deserve the term "historic" more. San Diego, for me, encapsulates the Philip K Dick Condition in which we live today: just like his paranoid concerns, San Diego looks like it was assembled from flatpacks just before you got there, and will be folded up and put back in the warehouse an hour after you leave.

The postmodern condition, the 21st Century condition, is the Philip K Dick condition. We live in the world that he wrote about because he was afraid of it. This is how deep we are in it: someone created a Philip K Dick android with a computer brain full of his words. And then someone stole it. It's the future not as banal stasis, as JG Ballard would have it, not even as the sort of scary corporate dystopia Dick's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP was turned into -- but as, basically, a broken shithole. The sort of place where rain can break a country and people will somehow fall for a blatantly fake "historic district."

After that, I'm going to Mesa, Arizona, where the sun sears the meat off your bones and... well, I have no idea what else is there apart from crack houses and whatever I saw on THE HIGH CHAPARRAL when I was a kid. Cowboys who dress entirely in blue. Probably while smoking crack.

So next week I'll be speaking to you from the floor of the San Diego Comic-Con, where I'll be signing my new comics from Avatar Press, DOKTOR SLEEPLESS, CRECY and BLACK SUMMER, and my debut prose novel (which you might have seen in Entertainment Weekly this weekend), CROOKED LITTLE VEIN. I'll be the big Englishman with no hair slumped down by the dumpsters and weeping uncontrollably.

-- W