Jen's Book Thoughts Reviews the Gun Machine Audio
The unabridged version of Gun Machine is narrated by Reg E. Cathey and I don’t think they could have picked a better narrator for this gritty, hard boiled police procedural… . Ellis has populated Gun Machine with distinctively rich characters, characters I hope we will see again. Cathey extends the uniqueness of each character through his dynamic aural representations. I experience stories through all varieties of delivery and Gun Machine is a superb crime novel, but I’m especially glad I listened to Gun Machine. This is a top-notch audiobook and a sensational listening experience.
Did you know Reg E. Cathey reads the Gun Machine audiobook? Sample it here.
The Examiner Reviews GUN MACHINE
“Worth reading if you like your detectives sharp and smart and like your killers mean and diabolical.”
WHO DOESN’T?
Warren Ellis' Notebook: Okay. Someone asked me how I feel about writing fiction in a world...
Fiction speaks to people. Even fiction like mine acts to tell someone, somewhere, that they’re not alone.
You want tangible, social benefits to writing fiction? There are people walking around today because other people wrote words that spoke to them. That’ll do.
“One of the reasons why Warren Ellis’s dystopian work is such a joy to read: the reader can see that what the author is describing isn’t just inevitable, it’s already happening.”
“Every cylinder of Gun Machine gets loaded with something for both casual readers and casehardened fans of the detective genre. The action, characters, structure, and syntax travel with the speed of photons and connect with the unsentimental impact of hollow point rounds. Until the very last page, Ellis pulls the trigger on each and every one—sometimes taking his time to aim, sometimes shooting from the hip—but always hitting his mark.”
Ways I work. I like to have a Bluetooth earpiece, paired with phone, iPad and laptop. It lets me listen to podcasts (I subscribe to a lot), take phone calls and do (voice-only) Skype without manually switching or being pinned to the chair, while keeping one ear open, as I prefer. I had a Jawbone Era Shadowbox, but it’s been degrading for a while, and may actually have fallen out of my pocket recently, so I just replaced it with a Bose. Which should hopefully stay in my ear better than the Jawbone ever did.
This is how the magic happens.
“It’s that last bit that explains why we have guns. Not because of their simple availability or lethality—but because there is a pleasure to the rituals of gun ownership and the act of discharging weapons and the stories we tell about them. And I mean we: whether or not you own one, there are at least 270 million in the United States, probably more—one for you and one for me and one for every child. They’re going to be with us for a long time. They’re part of who we are now.”
The Morton Report Interviews Warren Ellis
- The Morton Report: One of the things that really struck me about this particular book was a strong sense of place as a living, breathing thing, a historical organism composed of both natural and man-made artifacts and creatures.
- Warren Ellis: I was after that sense of standing on the surface of deep time, and history reaching up into the present world. Of American cities, I thought that could be done most successfully with New York.
- The Morton Report: How different is working in prose from working on comics for you?
- Warren Ellis: Remember, what you see in a comic is just the visible part of the writing. Beneath that, I’m describing every panel on every page in enough detail for the artist to understand what I’m looking for. In a book, however, I’m trying to evoke the image, so that it lives in the reader’s mind—which, perhaps counter-intuitively, requires less specific detail. Broad strokes, texture and atmosphere as opposed to blueprint specificity.
