|
1e80187
|
Saul was going to kill Anansi. They both knew it. Saul was going to kill Anansi and Loplop and King Rat, and Saul was going to die, all in an effort to prove that he was not his rat-father's son.
|
|
nature
instincts
|
China Miéville |
|
d434a44
|
The Romanovian method becomes one of appointing adventurer after incompetent after nonentity to grand offices of state. The liberals and the sharper-witted right grow ever more apoplectic.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
537d5d2
|
This gentleman is cactus," said Doul."
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
d9edb79
|
He was cheered by this. He was a scientist, not a mystic.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
5a8691e
|
What you up to, Isaac? They're so egalitarian . . . well . . . Their society's all based on maximizing choice for the individual, which is why they're communistic. Grants the most uninhibited choice to everyone. And as far as I remember the only crime they have is depriving another garuda of choice. And then it's exacerbated or mollified depending on whether they do it with or without respect, which they absolutely love . . .
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
086feb6
|
If the fucking Scar exists," whispered the Brucolac, still without turning, "and if they get us there and by some gods-fucked miracle we survive, then they'll still destroy us. We are not an expeditionary force; we are not on some fucking quest. This is a city, Uther. We live; we buy; we sell; we steal; we trade. We are a port. This is not about adventures." He turned and faced Uther Doul with his eyes caustic. "You know that. That's why yo..
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
0ce3590
|
Termagant!" he moaned after her. "Shrew! Harridan! All right, all right, you win, you, you . . . uh . . . virago, you spitfire . . ." He rubbed his head and sat up, grinned sheepishly. Lin made an obscene gesture at him without turning around."
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
423d62d
|
A haggard man used one of the huts as a home. He lay on a sagging mattress, his head on his pack, surrounded by rubbish - paper, porcelain shards, food remains and unidentifiable debris. His hand was over his eyes. He looked like a failed soldier. Dirt seemed so worked into him that the lines of his face were like writing.
|
|
simile
|
China Miéville |
|
0eee789
|
One moment it was a calculating machine, attempting dispassionately to keep up with the gouts of data. And then awash in those gouts, something metal twitched and a patter of valves sounded that had not been instructed by those numbers. A loop of data was self-generated by the analytical engine. The processor reflected on its creation in a hiss of high-pressure steam. One moment it was a calculating machine. The next, it thought.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
4398fcc
|
Houses built on bridges are scandals. A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, an unspace to link One-place-town to Another-place-town over a river or a road or a tangle of railway tracks or a quarry, or to attach an island to another island or to the continent from which it strains. The dream of a bridge is of a woman standing at one side of a gorge and stepping out as if her job is to die, but wh..
|
|
dream
bridges
bridge-dreams
bridging
continent
gaplessness
houses-on-bridges
railway-tracks
unspace
road
island
quarry
river
arrogance
shape
bridge
failure
|
China Miéville |
|
b697e3b
|
I closed my eyes then but it was too dark to clearly see that vision that my body would conjure out of blood and the inside of skin when light hit it, but I'd seen it so often, examined it so carefully, that it wasn't hard for me to call to mind.
|
|
call-to-mind
closed-eyes
conjuration
the-inside-of-skin
too-dark
examination
remember
eyes
|
China Miéville |
|
f89c95a
|
staggering out of Language, into language
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
b99e68f
|
Vessels knocked together for hour upon hour, like bones, like someone infinitely stupid and patient at the door of an empty house.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
2f33a81
|
Officers looked at the antique once-animals that eyed them back, at the no giant tank, at the nowhere anything so big and missing as Architeuthis could be.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
22eb163
|
I have mixed feelings about zoos. Some days, it makes me sad to see animals in confined habitats, under constant observation by an alien species. Other days, I see the amount of care and love provided by the zookeepers; I remember how dangerous the wild is, particularly for endangered animals. I tear up a little when I see a kid staring at some weird creature from another continent - I know that kid is going to learn everything about that a..
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
eede372
|
Why should we not shep naches from the accomplishments of our machines? This vicarious joy or success sounds somewhat odd, but it shouldn't be. We get excited when our sports team wins a game; why should it disturb or disappoint us when our creations turn out to be more accomplished than ourselves?
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
fd093fe
|
This is kraken year zero," Moore said. "This is Anno Teuthis. We're in the end times. What d'you think's been going on?"
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
6ac4b24
|
That's what gets converts these days," Baron said. "It's a buyers' market in apocalypse. What's hot in heresy's Armageddon." --
|
|
religious-beliefs
|
China Miéville |
|
661283d
|
Outside the wind had picked up a little. Isaac sheltered his prize and walked quickly up the little alley that adjoined The Dying Child with Paddler Way and his workshop-home. He pushed open the green doors with his bum and backed into the building. Isaac's laboratory had been a factory and a warehouse years ago, and its huge, dusty floorspace swamped the little benches and retorts and blackboards that perched in its corners.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
5c0467d
|
Collingswood frowned at the clouds, like she did not like what they wrote.
|
|
cloud-cover
kath-collingswood
|
China Miéville |
|
7f428b8
|
The first couple of times she had come here, she had been sure that he changed overnight, that the shards of physiognomy that made up his whole reorganized when no one was looking. She became frightened of her commission. She wondered hysterically if it was like a task in a moral children's tale, if she was to be punished for some nebulous sin by striving to freeze in time a body in flux, forever too afraid to say anything, starting each da..
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
9bb4794
|
Into sleep's benthos and deeper. A slander that the deepest parts are lightless. There are moments of phosphor with animal movement. Somatic glimmers, and in the trench of sleep those lights were tiny dreams.
|
|
dreams
benthos
phosphor
sleep-s-benthos
somatic-glimmers
the-trench-of-sleep
tiny-dreams
slander
|
China Miéville |
|
1a6ffe7
|
Surrealism comes for us all, Thibaut thinks.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
5fded83
|
I was too abstract. I was not worthy of respect. There...was a madness...I was mad. I committed a heinous act, a heinous act..." His words broke down into avian moans. "What did you do?" Isaac steeled himself to hear of some atrocity. "This language cannot express my crime. In my tongue..." Yagharek stopped for a moment. "I will try to translate. In my tongue they said...they were right...I was guilty of choice-theft...choice-theft in the s..
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
99f9383
|
In 1964 a coalition of activists, technologists, and academics delivered "The Triple Revolution", an open memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson. The signatories pointed out that "wealth produced by machines... is still wealth", and used this to argue for more a equitable distribution of global profits."
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
a55d8cc
|
The assumption - and I think it's correct - is that the technology is going to happen anyway, so the best thing is to get it distributed as quickly as possible and see what people use it for, and keep an eye out for any problems that arise.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
ac84867
|
As autom, Ehrsul had neither rights nor tasks, but so far as it was understood an owner, a settler of some previous generation, had died intestate, and she'd never become anyone else's property. There were variants of salvage laws by which someone might theoretically have tried to claim her, but by now it would have seemed abominable.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
4717011
|
I was bad at money but had amassed some. I couldn't claim that marriage was my real skill, but I was better at it than many. I'd had two previous husbands and a wife. I'd lost them to changes of predilection, without rancour--as I say, I wasn't bad at marriage. Scile was my fourth spouse.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
1f75463
|
He hurled another vast pot of unstable thaumaturgic compound at the militia. It fell short, but burst with such violence that it splashed onto and over the shields, mixing with the distillate and sending two officers screaming to the floor as their skin became parchment and their blood ink.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
26caa02
|
Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
88f053c
|
And even if you're right, the CIA paid millions of dollars to men trying to kill goats by staring at them," I said."
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
3c19fdf
|
Why's there a pharos here?" he said. "You don't put a lighthouse where no one's going to go. You put it somewhere dangerous where they have to go."
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
ced9e19
|
How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? Ul Qoman man and Besz maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realise that they live, grosstopically, next door to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the same time, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never ..
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
8cee471
|
Pokud cloveka matlo pobyvat v Prizrakove, kde ho obklopovali duchove predchozich forem, ocitnout se uvnitr teto budovy mu vyrazilo dech. Zdalo se, jako by se chodba stahovala a zuzovala podle kolotani jejich duchu. Steny byly ovesene osvedcenimi a obrazy, ktere obklopovaly dalsi v prizracne podobe. Kolem svetel visely prizraky holych zarovek a slozitych lustru. "Myslim, ze hodim savli," rekla Deeba. "To je ti jenom duchno," poznamenal Hemi..
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
8873892
|
That," she says, "is what I am. I am what's been sent for."
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
06fff09
|
If you didn't know, you wouldn't take him for part-ghost--but you'd know he wanted to be somewhere else.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
5fc19be
|
Of course you didn't volunteer the information, or even damn well admit it. But shit, Uther, I came to you and confronted you with what I'd worked out, and you ... Well, you're too professional to give away anything that could come back to bite you, but if you'd wanted to mislead me or leave me thinking I was wrong you could have.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
76f97ac
|
Volunteering's an early and strong indication that you're not suited," he said."
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
decdf23
|
In time, in time they tell me, I'll not feel so bad. I don't want time to heal me. There's a reason I'm like this. I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won't smooth you away. I can't say good-bye.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
e087a39
|
Things are going up in fire and never been there." When she looked no wiser he said, "There was a warehouse in Finchley. Round between the bath shop and the Pizza Hut. I know there was because I used to go there and because I've it." He tap-tapped his eyepiece again. "But 'seen it' butters no bleeding parsnips these days. That warehouse burnt down, and now it didn't ever was there. The bath shop and the Pizza Hut are joined up now, and th..
|
|
butters-no-parsnips
charred-bit-of-never
didn-t-ever-was
eyepiece
finchley
katachronophlogiston
marge
marginalia
pizza-hut
warehouse-in-finchley
butler
warehouse
fire
|
China Miéville |
|
d7c7bcf
|
I share the streets with aimlessly moving scraps of paper and little whirlwinds of dust, with motes that pass like erratic thieves under eaves and through doors.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
e2b9f68
|
I took the goats downslope a bit and they screamed at each other and I screamed too to see what it was like.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
50a556d
|
When I approached and told her the key-maker wasn't there she cursed filthily and threw something hard against the step, shouting, "What am I supposed to do with this now?" It bounced away. I waited while she stormed away and when she'd left I got onto all fours and found what she'd discarded. It was a bit of some engine. It looked like a heart, I remember that. I put it on the kitchen table. When, hours later, my father returned, he put do..
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
541fbea
|
It is a jungle where hierarchies of infinities tower like prehistoric beasts.
|
|
|
China Miéville |