Currently Reading
#China Mieville
It’s anecdotal, but I regularly see Frankenstein’s monster described as a warning against scientific hubris, an alarum about Tampering With Things That Should Be Left Alone™. This I think is quite wrong: I think it is a story about what happens when one fails the (still at the time of writing) radical enlightenment by failing to take social responsibility for one’s actions and interventions. If it’s a warning, it’s a warning about turning one’s back, out of cowardice, on what one creates, not about creating it in the first place.
China Mieville, interview with the Weird Fiction Review
(via brotticelli)
China Mieville, interview with the Weird Fiction Review
(via brotticelli)
“The last thing I want to say about escapism… is kind of against the literati, the borderguards’ accusation that we [fantasy readers] are escapist because we like books about dragons. The most escapist work of cultural production out there - I hesitate to call it art - …at the moment is The West Wing. This invidious, disgusting programme that allows American liberals to think [that] if one of theirs who is well-educated enough, and a good, decent man, gets into power, that he will wring his hands and shed a tear when he orders the bombers over Sudan, [and] this somehow represents an alternative world. This is the most rank, disgusting, reactionary, utopian drivel I have ever seen. And I would defend Tolkien over it a thousand times, but with their categories they can’t understand that as escapist. In fact they think it’s tremendously political.” - China Miéville, circa 2004
I ain’t got nothing. I’ve got nothing.
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 goodbye.
China Miéville, The Scar (p. 568)
Wow it was quiet enough tonight for me to finish me The Scar (finally!) and I swear I’ve read the ending before. And I managed to get a quarter of the way into Star Trek The Lost Era: One Constant Star. And it’s good so far.
Gods and fuck,” he growled in his graveyard whisper. The councilors were silent instantly, and aghast. He stood and spread out his arms. “I have been listening to you for hours,” he hissed, “spewing your trite horseshit. Platitudes and desperations. You are ineffectual.” He made the words sound like a soul-blasting curse. “You are failures. You are pointless. Get off my boat.
The Brucolac, The Scar (p. 229) by China Miéville.
Sometimes Garwater ships would prowl the coastal settlements of Bas-Lag committing wordstorms, and the pirates would rampage from house to house, seizing every book and manuscript they found. All for Booktown, the Clockhouse Spur.
China Miéville, The Scar (p. 100)
There’s no such thing as exploration or science - there’s only trade.
China Miéville, The Scar (p.122)

