|
350a689
|
I didn't tell the story to ask for help because I knew there was no help.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
223a3a8
|
I always stayed. I can't say I chose to stay as I felt quite without traction, without capacity to find myself or anything.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
ef81bca
|
Those created creations were treated like tools that talked, their sentience an annoying product of magic noise, by those little mortal demiurges who thought dominion a natural by-product of expertise or creation.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
628f4b2
|
There are a thousand ways of inhabiting it, but the aether, that in-between, is always what it is; and ghosts, spirits, the souls of lucid dreamers squeeze past each other in complex asomatic ecology. Who better to close in on Wati the bodiless subversive than bodiless forces of the law?
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
920c85f
|
There was a hubbub in Billy's head all night. He would hardly call so raging and discombobulated a torrent of images a dream. Call it a vomit, call it a gush. He was back in the water, not braving but frowning, synchronised swimming, not swimming but sinking, toward the godsquid he knew was there, a tentacular fleshscape and the moon-sized eye that he never saw but knew, as if the core of the fucking planet was not searing metal but mollusc..
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
ea9f8f4
|
The Tattoo. You wouldn't say "charming" -- that was hardly the adjective, but something, there was something to him. If you were deep in self-hate but stained with ego enough that you needed your death-drive diluted, eager for muteness and quiet, your object-envy strong but not untouched by angst, you might succumb to the Tattoo's brutal enticement."
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
03d0d6a
|
There were those Hosts who thought something better could have been said and better thoughts therefore thought, had I only been made to do other things than I had. That I could have been a better simile for those in need of one to speak precisely; to speak about those somethings other than me that I was--they would have asserted-- like. But those critics of course couldn't say what those thoughts would have been, because they could not have..
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
c49f8df
|
The fucking angels of memory were out. They had come out of their museums, out of their castles. They'd gone to war against whatever this incoming to-come was. The very facts of retrospection and fate that had various sides fighting were now out themselves, personified or apotheosed and smacking seven bells out of each other directly No longer solely reasons, justifications, teloi, casus belli for others to invoke or believe in: now combata..
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
083401e
|
It's a chain of whispers," he said. He leaned in and spoke quietly, ensuring that our conversation was private. "When they tell you that I came from the world of the dead, you're at the end of a chain of whispers. Each link has an imperfect join with those around it, and meaning leaches out between them." If"
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
8c8b39f
|
Sometimes he opened books and found words that had defeated him the first time he had seen them, and that he had then written down and learned. It delighted him. He felt like a fox that had tracked them. That was how it was with thorough, and climber, and khepri. When he encountered them for the second time, they surrendered to him, and he read them without pause. In
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
e3809d8
|
We are sick and tired of living in debt and slavery,' the Rakalovsk peasants had their chairperson write. 'We want space and light.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
c319c16
|
My father passed me. He looked briefly at me as you might at a stump or a broken machine or anything that's specific only in that it's in your way, to walk around it as my father did me.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
1cac6f2
|
The boy went to the low-down part of the attic where he drew, and drew a lizard in a bottle between the stems of the wallpaper's design. He came back the next day and, beside it, he drew a cat in another bottle and a fox in a third. He drew a fish in a bottle, a crow in a bottle, a mountain lion in a big bottle. He'd never seen a mountain lion but he heard them sometimes and knew he was to be afraid of them. He imagined that deep throaty gr..
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
10a63ee
|
Everything, even the dirt, was poised.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
43857a7
|
Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
4bea4f2
|
almanacs, or what was left of them when those pages making incorrect predictions and offering unhelpful advice had been torn out.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
c3f76b3
|
His manager taught him that words change with time, by single letters or more, sometimes their whole roots switching--a "y" to an "e" in a name for power, "sun-writing" becomes "light-drawing." The man eventually gave him this whole other tongue, and he revisited and at last learned from those cuttings about immense foreign wars."
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
88711cd
|
He didn't know what if anything it was his mother got from his father's company.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
b1ee5ff
|
Houses built on bridges are scandals. A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape,
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
9e2d682
|
I paid it nuts, Billy. What would you think I'd pay a squirrel?
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
aa5015b
|
Democracy' was a sociological term in Russia in 1917, denoting the masses, the lower class, at least as strongly as it did a political method. For many b those heady moments, Kerensky exemplified 'the democracy'.
|
|
russia
|
China Miéville |
|
a7210bf
|
On the hill we used a different, vaguer calendar than the one I've since learned. The seasons ours described--summer, dimming, and winter--were suited to a different place: the mountain had two seasons at most.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
75ae26c
|
My father didn't look at me. He dropped more stones upon a random-looking cairn. The townspeople were slow to get out of our sight. He waited and watched them and didn't look at me and kept adding to the substance of the hill with the substance of the hill.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
413f3be
|
I didn't move: I had no moving left in me.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
28c4cfa
|
And I who months before had run into town screaming my accusation was shy to say it now that I was asked to put it in clear words. I'd grown used to this world in which everyone knew what had happened or what I said had, in which it had gone from being spoken to being unspoken again, a secret everybody knew. Here I was, hesitating to speak it. I took persuading.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
273002a
|
But the powerful and respected party right, particularly Stalin, went so far in the direction of moderation as to support a merger of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks - the proposal of Irakli Tsereteli, the outstanding Menshevik intellect and orator, recently returned from Siberian exile and now in charge of the Petrograd Soviet.
|
|
tsereteli
stalin
russia
|
China Miéville |
|
330383c
|
Easiest way is to bend over and say 'car.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
85fc38e
|
The early days of revolution were remarkable for how submerged and scattered that hard right was. Most of its high-profile figures had left the country or been arrested after February. Only the erratic Purishkevich remained at large, more or less powerless, tolerated and toothless. The political integument of Petrograd in particular had lurched leftward, repositioning radicals as moderates and moderates as right-wingers. In those days every..
|
|
russia
|
China Miéville |
|
2e92424
|
The children from the bridge were often waiting there, eyeing me. They congregated by the stump and played a game involving motions as strange as those of worship. To me it looked as if they were feeling the missing bark for handholds, as if it were an expertise of town children that they could climb ghost trees.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
339e663
|
The branches dropped shaggy creepers that, when they reached the earth, hardened into roots and pried apart paving.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
0b75074
|
Rude creatures emit slime and phosphorescence and move with flickerings of unclear limbs. The logic of their forms derives from nightmares.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
186bc9e
|
So what's your alternative?' people say, as if that's logic. We don't have to have an alternative, that's not how critique works. We may do, and if we do, you're welcome, but if we don't that no more invalidates our hate for this, for what is, than does that of a serf for her lord, her flail-backed insistence that this must end, whether or not she accompanies it with a blueprint for free wage labour.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
fcd4976
|
Everything, though, depended on whether we could teach the Ariekei what we had to.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
5d806ae
|
Maybe it was always that way and everyone has always been forever waking in a flustered confusion deep at night trying to believe that the awful sound they think woke them was nothing, or was the nervous bark of a dog, not the sound of violence or of a child weeping in the kind of desolation or terror that demands intervention
|
|
terror
|
China Miéville |
|
650c95c
|
It's not just us keeping them apart. It's everyone in Beszel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We're only the last ditch: it's everyone in the cities who does most of the work. It works because you don't blink. That's why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn't work. So if you don't admit it, it does. But if you breach, even if it's not your fault, for more than the shortest time ... you can't come b..
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
cb87f78
|
Be a dilettante, a sciolist, a swindler ... So long as you return me to the sky, Grimnebulin.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
3806352
|
Otkroi-ka rot. I kak u tebia iazyk povernulsia razboltat' o sprute priiateliam. Ved' ne dolzhen byl povernut'sia. (s) Kollingsvud
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
0f6eb1e
|
The costumes raised memories of the Night of the Kinken Shards, when the New Quill Party had overrun the khepri ghetto in a storm of murder, shattering spit-sculptures in the Plaza of Statues, stamping the mindless males and butchering the women until they trod a ground of glass needles, ichor, blood.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
6d2abcd
|
He glanced beyond the walls, at the strange night, in which gods were ignored and memories were out hunting the future.
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
dd72775
|
common form of establishment, for much of Beszel's history, had been the DoplirCaffe: one Muslim and one Jewish coffeehouse, rented side by side, each with its own counter and kitchen, halal and kosher, sharing a single name, sign, and sprawl of tables, the dividing wall removed. Mixed groups would come, greet the two proprietors, sit together, separating on communitarian lines only long enough to order their permitted food from the relevan..
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
1861498
|
October, for an instant, brings a new kind of power. Fleetingly, there is a shift towards workers' control of production and the rights of peasants to the land. Equal rights for men and women in work and in marriage, the right to divorce, maternity support. The decriminalization of homosexuality, 100 years ago. Moves towards national self-determination. Free and universal education, the expansion of literacy. And with literacy comes cultura..
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
5bd54fd
|
It would be absurd, a ridiculous myopia, to hold up October as a simple lens through which to view the struggles of today. But it has been a long century, a long dusk of spite and cruelty, the excrescence and essence of its time. Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing that we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, an..
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
147abf9
|
When I think of my age I think in years, still, even after all this time and travel. It's bad form, and ship-life should have cured me of it. "Years?" one of my first officers shouted at me. "I don't give two shits about whatever your pisspot home's sidereal shenanigans are, I want to know how old you are."
|
|
|
China Miéville |
|
194e75c
|
Is it more foolish and childish to assume there is a conspiracy, or that there is not?
|
|
|
China Miéville |