To cross-love openly would be a quick route to pariah status, rather than the bad-boy chic he had assiduously courted. What scared him was not that t… - China Miéville

It had some allies. Believe me, there’s nothing so terrible that someone won’t support it.

Word got around. It does that. A city like London was always going to be a paradox, it’s so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes. All those alternative pathways to the official ones and to those that made Londoners proud: there’d be quite contrary tendencies.
There, there was no state worth shit, no sanctions but self-help, no homeostasis but that of violence. The specialist police dipped in, and were tolerated as a sect or offhandedly killed like the cack-handed anthropologists. “Oh, here we go, FSRC again,” wink wink stab stab.
Even absent a sovereign, things in London chugged on effectively. Might made right, and that was no moral precept but a statement of simple fact. It really was law, this law enforced by bouncers, bruisers and bounty hunters, venal suburban shoguns. Absolutely Fanny Adams to do with justice. Have your opinions about that, by all means—London had its social bandits—but that was fact.

The thing about good pulp is that you trust the reader and you know that the mind is a machine to process metaphors so of course all those connections will be there. But you've also granted the fantastic its own dynamic and allowed that awe. There's no contradiction. So I want to have monsters as a metaphor but I also want monsters because monsters are cool. There's no contradiction.