Afterword

Written in October of 2009

I live on the Thames Estuary, where the majority of the Maunsell Sea Forts were built. Bunkers on sticks, sort of, sticking up out of the water. They're a bit before my time, both in terms of their original role-to fire at German bombers coming up the river towards London-and their partial repurposing in the Sixties. A few of them were turned into pirate radio stations, you see. Out there in the water, broadcasting free radio. By the time I was old enough to know what pirate radio was, pretty much all the classic pirate operations had gone away, save perhaps for Caroline, on a boat out in international waters.

They had great names, the sea forts. Names like Sunk Head, Knock John, and Shivering Sands.

Standing over this river their whole lives to date. Just like me, really.

The pirate radio metaphor has always informed the internet. Free broadcasting from outside the channels of the mainstream media. Even if much of it has always sounded like the pirate rave stations of the late Eighties, which were always just two guys in a box somewhere in London marking time until they could release the location of that night's rave, massively stoned and intoning "Yeah... safe... keep it locked... full-on... yeah... safe..." in a hazy cannabinoid loop.

Hell, I've been broadcasting since the Nineties. From a PDA, first, with a lumpy mobile modem bolted on to it and the whole thing shunted down into a foldaway portable keyboard. There was a word, "moblogging," and I was doing it before the word was coined, broadcasting a wandering diary from wherever I was sat to the thousands of people who were subscribed to receive it through email. And then there were blogs-I remember meeting Ev, inventor of Blogger, in 2001, looking at him and saying "you poor, doomed bastard." Tiredness enveloped him like a murky nimbus-he knew he was on to something, and he was clearly spending every waking hour making it work with hammers and wrenches and spit and blood. I'd already been picking at the machinery, seeing what I could make it do and what use I could find for it. By 2002, I was writing a daily blog, Die Puny Humans, using it as a remote research-material dump I could access from anywhere (without having to store it all on my desktop or print it out for filing).

And, a while later, I started writing longer pieces.

And so you get this book. A collection of things I've written for the internet, many of them written on the run or from the pub. Named for just one of the sea forts, because I still write for the internet, quite a lot, and sooner or later there'll be enough to fill a second book, which will be called Knock John.

Why do it? Well, for one thing, I thought it'd be nice to have my favourite bits from the blog and elsewhere collected in a single place, much as bits of the email list writings have been gathered into From The Desk Of and Bad Signal collections through Avatar Press.

For another, I wanted to test print-on-demand publishing. And so, with Ariana, my Number One Mechanic Who Fixes Things With A Wrench, I decided to make a big book and put it out through Lulu, much as friends like Wil Wheaton, Jamais Cascio and Lee Barnett have.

It's an odd thing for me to look at, now. All those words fired off into the dark. Often written just to clarify my own thinking on some things. Sometimes you need to get notions out of your head and out in front of you so you can see them properly. Sometimes, obviously, I'm just riffing for a laugh, to amuse myself (or, in tandem with the first thought, to see if the joke works). But mostly, I'm seeing, it's been a way to test my own thinking.

I'm writing this at the pub now. A bloke with a bogbrush haircut and no chin has just walked in. It's probably time to go, before he asks if I can get porn or the racing results on this netbook.

I hope you had some fun with this book. I seem to have had fun filling it up, after all.

Warren Ellis

by the river October 2009

SHIVERING SANDS MAUNSELL ARMY FORT, BUILT IN 1943

The Maunsell Army Forts, designed by and named for Guy Maunsell, were installed in the Thames and Mersey estuaries for anti-aircraft defence during World War II. Shivering Sands army fort-located at 51°2957"N, 01°04'29"E- was built in 1943. The fort originally consisted of seven towers: four Gun Towers, each mounted with a 3.7-inch anti-aircraft gun; a Bofors Gun Tower mounted with a 40mm Bofors AA gun; a Searchlight Tower; and a central Control Tower, to which all of the outer towers were connected via metal walkways. The Ministry of Defence decommissioned Shivering Sands in 1958.

CI. In the early 1960s, Port of London Authority installed wind and tide gauges in the searchlight tower for flood and weather monitoring and early-warning. In 1990 the top of the tower was removed to allow helicopter access for maintenance. Two years later, in 1992, the tower was deemed too dangerous for continued use, and the monitoring equipment was moved to a LANBY (Large Automated Buoy) moored near the towers.

u. On June 7, 1963, the 295 ton coaster vessel Ribersborg collided with the G4 Gun Tower in a thick fog. Although the vessel survived the collision, the tower was destroyed, separating the searchlight from the other five towers.

C. On May 27, 1964, Screaming Lord Sutch began broadcasting the pirate station Radio Sutch from the Gl Gun Tower.

u. Four months later, Sutch sold the station to Reginald Calvert, who expanded into all five of the still-connected towers, creating the pirate radio station Radio City. Broadcast continued until June 20, 1966, when transmitter crystals were removed from the station by members of Radio Atlanta. The next day, Calvert was shot and killed by Radio Atlanta's Major Oliver Smedley. In accordance with the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1947, the station was closed by the British Government for illegal offshore broadcasting on February 8,1967, at midnight.