I am often asked is [my work] science fiction or fantasy and my answer is usually ‘Yes’. - China Miéville

“I’m asking you all to have faith. Don’t be afraid. ‘How could it have gone?’ people have asked me. ‘Why aren’t the gods doing anything?’ Remember two things. The gods don’t owe us anything. That’s not why we worship. We worship because they’re gods. This is their universe, not ours. What they choose they choose and it’s not ours to know why.”
Christ, thought Billy, what a grim theology. It was a wonder they could keep anyone in the room, without the emotional quid pro quo of hope.

It's beyond words," indeed. "There's no such thing.

She was an artist. Her circle were the libertines, the patrons and the hangers-on, bohemians and parasites, poets and pamphleteers and fashionable junkies. They delighted in the scandalous and the outre. [...] Her love-life was an avant-garde transgression, an art-happening, like Concrete Music had been last season, or ‘Snot Art! the year before that.