Warren Ellis is an English author of comics, novels and television scripts well known for their exploration of transhumanist themes, particularly cryonics, nanotechnology and human enhancement. He has won numerous Eagle Awards for best comics writer. His first nonfiction book, Spirit Tracks, is due out this year (published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and looks at the “future of the city, the ghosts that haunt it and the science-fiction condition we live in.”

Vassili Christodoulou: Let’s kick off with science fiction. What sort of things did you read when you were younger, and how did this inspire your adult work?

Warren Ellis: I was a voracious reader as a kid. But I didn't really get a sense of what science fiction was supposed to be until my early teens, where in quick succession I discovered Michael Moorcock, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Jack Kerouac. Science fiction is social fiction, using the tools of science fiction as a scalpel with which to examine the present day. That's what science fiction is for, and that's when I learned it and what I learned from it.

On the association with Kerouac, I know William Gibson, who is also obviously a massive science fiction figure, names Kerouac in "the Beats" as his main inspiration. So where do you draw inspiration from?

Bill and I come from a similar thing in that we wanted to read stuff that sounded like the music we liked.

Which was what kind of music?

In those days it was plain old rock and roll. Jack Kerouac wrote like BeBop, and I wanted to write like the things I was listening to in the '80s and '90s. So that's the Kerouac association. It was the first prose both of us found that sounded like music, sounded like contemporary music. It was the sound of a present day.

You famously dislike superheroes and superhero comics, but what comics are you reading at the moment?

At the moment? God, people always ask me this, and I'm not reading a hell of a lot of comics right now. Mostly, I’m finding that the field is going through one of its fallow phases. The American comics industry is in trouble. People in comics are still trying to work out what the internet is for, and it's leading to a lot of close-minded thinking. So you're not really finding, at least in the commercial comics industry, a lot of experimentation or people trying to kick out new ground.

Ed Brubaker is doing some interesting crime stuff. Matt Fraction. Casanova, I think, is wonderful. I’m really liking what Brandon Graham is doing on Prophet. It's considered experimental, but it shouldn't be, because what he's doing is actually '60s and '70s European science fiction in 2012 American comics.

You mentioned that comic publishers en masse are not yet using the internet properly. FreakAngels was published first as a web comic, and then by Avatar in paperback. Do you think with new touch screen technologies and tablets we're going to see more experimentation, a move away from nine panel comics into something else?