This was the remnant of honour, nostalgic for spurious legendary times. - China Miéville

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

That’s the trouble with trying to counter clichés—the counterclichés cliché quicker than shit off a shovel, and with that comes domestication. Either you lose any subversive gloss at all—the hip-hop which now sells us jeans and cheese once fought the power—or, what’s perhaps worse, a horrible zombie gloss of radicalism is retained while you shuffle into the corridors of establishment, rotting.