Setting His Sites: Review of Gun Machine by Warren Ellis
Gun Machine by Warren Ellis (Jan, 2013) Mulholland Books/Hachette
Review by Mark P. Williams
Warren Ellis writes astute, accurate fictions about the role of information in society.
He’s explored digital information’s possible and actual relationships to truth and deception through technology in the longer graphic novel series Transmetropolitan, about futuristic gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem, and in a more contemporary thriller framework through the episodic spy thriller Global Frequency. Now, in his second prose novel, he gives us a contemporary police procedural through which information flows in torrents in both electronic and more nebulous ways. Stylish and economically written, Gun Machine is part police thriller and part philosophy of information; it’s a darkly humorous and incisive meditation on the contemporary city scape.
All of Ellis’s fictions are structured by ethical questions about the implications of information networks for social relationships, whether that means the consequences for local people of global actions, or the feel of living in online worlds while trying to maintain offline relationships. Read more »