China Miéville Quotes

Tearfly looked at Bellis curiously, bewildered by her ignorance. She did not care. What was important to her was where she was fleeing from, not where she was, or where she was going.

But it's a prize that... if you're into science-fiction and fantasy you grow up reading books with "Hugo [Award-winner]" on the cover. And this is very, very moving, to be in that position oneself. It's an odd situation [too], because, as you say, it was a tie, which is very rare with the Hugo, which has happened, like three times over sixty years, or something. But I prefer to think of it as a quantum Hugo and that Paolo Bacigalupi and I oscillate between between Hugo particle and wave form, this year. So it's properly science-fictional.

He planned his funeral, his oration, the invitations, the snubs, but that, death itself, was always Plan B. How, he would have said to his specialists, might we bypass this unpleasantness?

The priest was nodding as he sang. I remembered his anger. I remembered when his companion said, “Bastards,” and I realized I didn’t know if she meant the godnappers, or the gods who’d let themselves be taken, who’d let everyone down.

Smoke and grime built up in the air until the train seemed to ride on a smog tide. The sounds of industry increased. The train flew through clutches of vast, sparse chimneys like blasted trees as the train passed through Sunter.

The rotting buildings lean against each other, exhausted. The river smears slime on its brick banks, city walls risen from the depths to hold the water at bay. There is a vile stink here. (I wonder how this looks from above, no chance for the city to hide then, if you came at it on the wind you would see it from miles and miles away like a dirty smear, like a slab of carrion thronging with maggots, I should not think like this but I cannot stop now, I could ride the updrafts that the chimneys vent, sail high over the proud towers and shit on the earthbound, ride the chaos, alight where I choose, I must not think like this, I must not do this now, I must stop, not now, not this, not yet.)

She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.

Byrne was good, her expertise indispensable, her commitment to the project swiftly personal, but she could not unwind death itself. Only filigree it, in certain ways.

You make what you see into a window, and you see what you want through it. You make what you see a sort of a door.

An abstract individual is a garuda who forgot, for some time, that he or she is part of a larger unit, and owes respect to all the other choosing individuals.

The lamp was a beacon, a lighthouse in that forbidding city, steering the wyrman’s way over the river and out of the predatory night.

I refuse to play the wink-wink-nudge-nudge game with readers. I don’t like whimsy because it doesn’t treat the fantastic seriously, and treating the fantastic seriously is one of the best ways of celebrating dialectical human consciousness there is. The one-sided celebration of the ego-driven contextually constrained instrumentally rational (as opposed to rational in a broader sense) is bureaucratic: the one-sided celebration of the subconscious, desire/fantasy driven is at best utopian, at worst sociopathic. The best fantasies—which include sf and horror—are constructed with a careful dialectic between conscious and subconscious.

Timbers whisper and the wind strokes thatch, walls settle and floors shift to fill space; the tens of houses have become hundreds, thousands; they spread backwards from the banks and shed light from all across the plain. They surround me. They are growing. They are taller and fatter and noisier, their roofs are slate, their walls are strong brick. The river twists and turns to face the city. It looms suddenly, massive, stamped on the landscape. Its light wells up around the surrounds, the rock hills, like bruise-blood. Its dirty towers glow. I am debased. I am compelled to worship this extraordinary presence that has silted into existence at the conjunction of two rivers. It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night. It is not the current which pulls us but the city itself, its weight sucks us in. Faint shouts, here and there the calls of beasts, the obscene clash and pounding from the factories as huge machines rut. Railways trace urban anatomy like protruding veins. Red brick and dark walls, squat churches like troglodytic things, ragged awnings flickering, cobbled mazes in the old town, culs-de-sac, sewers riddling the earth like secular sepulchres, a new landscape of wasteground, crushed stone, libraries fat with forgotten volumes, old hospitals, towerblocks, ships and metal claws that lift cargoes from the water. How could we not see this approaching? What trick of topography is this, that lets the sprawling monster hide behind corners to leap out at the traveller? It is too late to flee.

Why wouldn’t the gods of the world be giant squid? What better beast? It wouldn’t take much to imagine those tentacles closing around the world, now would it?

The other, more nebulous, but very strong influence of RPGs was the weird fetish for systematization, the way everything is reduced to “game stats.” If you take something like Cthulhu in Lovecraft, for example, it is completely incomprehensible and beyond all human categorization. But in the game Call of Cthulhu, you see Cthulhu’s “strength,” “dexterity,” and so on, carefully expressed numerically. There’s something superheroically banalifying about that approach to the fantastic. On one level it misses the point entirely, but I must admit it appeals to me in its application of some weirdly misplaced rigor onto the fantastic: it’s a kind of exaggeratedly precise approach to secondary world creation.