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China Miéville: 204 quotes0 likes

“Abomination from one perspective, it was advertising copy from another.”

China Miéville book The 9th Technique

The 9th Technique (p. 102)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“Lists make magic, the rhythm of itemized words: you do not list ten techniques, numbered and chantable, in austere prose appropriate for some early-millennium rebooted Book of Thoth, and not know that you have written an incantation.”

China Miéville book The 9th Technique

The 9th Technique (p. 102)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“They think I’m old-fashioned? Is being against racism and hatred old-fashioned? OK, I’m old-fashioned.”

China Miéville book The Junket

The Junket (p. 320)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“Metamorphosis is death. Inside a pupa larval flesh breaks down utterly, as if in chemical spill. Eyes do not become other eyes nor mouthparts mouths. All parts are lost in a reconfiguring slop, as absolutely formless as a salted slug, that ex liquid nihilo self-organizes into a quite other animal. A cocoon is not a transformation pod but an execution chamber, one that doubles as a birthplace, and is parsimonious with matter.”

China Miéville book The 9th Technique

The 9th Technique (p. 104)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“Across the globe, in dark places of the earth, secret lairs were rarely caves of monsters or marvels but markets. Shops. The worst-kept secret in circulation was that certain activities invested items in their proximity with certain affects, effects, and powers, and made them hugely valuable. And that thus it was imperative that they be sold. That, certainly, had been the case for as long as there had been people and things, but there were always fluctuations. The occult economies of charged items were always jostling.”

China Miéville book The 9th Technique

The 9th Technique (p. 101)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“Moral your artistic proclivities are not, nor fitting for a physician, though I won’t deny the skill in them. They are, I will say it, unnatural.”

China Miéville book The Design

The Design (p. 374)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“She knows most of this, to some extent, and she knows she’s depressed, but if knowing the problem was the solution, most patients wouldn’t need us at all.”

China Miéville book Dreaded Outcome

Dreaded Outcome (p. 159)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“It was an unusually hot afternoon. One of those days all slowly ambling bumblebees and honeysuckle and so forth, at which the English countryside, when it puts its mind to it, excels, and quite unlike any summer day anywhere else. Calm and still and lovely, but never without a sense of something impending. The sort of day one misses even as one experiences it.”

China Miéville book The Design

The Design (p. 377)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“What if the chosen one misunderstands what he’s been chosen for?”

China Miéville book The Tain

The Tain (p. 301)
Short Fiction, Looking for Jake (2005)

“You didn’t know, but not knowing is no excuse.”

China Miéville book The Tain

The Tain (p. 254)
Short Fiction, Looking for Jake (2005)

“This was not the time for rage but for politics and strategy.”

China Miéville book The Tain

The Tain (p. 252)
Short Fiction, Looking for Jake (2005)

“The other, more nebulous, but very strong influence of RPGs was the weird fetish for systematization, the way everything is reduced to “game stats.””

China Miéville

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.<br><br>Interview with Joan Gordon http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/mievilleinterview.htm

“Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable.”

China Miéville Embassytown

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 27 (p. 312)

“I don’t want to be a simile anymore, I want to be a metaphor.”

China Miéville Embassytown

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 24 (p. 296)

“There wasn’t even any reasoning. Secrecy was just a bureaucrats’ reflex.”

China Miéville Embassytown

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 22 (p. 276)

“What theology that would have been, a god self-worshipping, a drug addicted to itself.”

China Miéville Embassytown

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 18 (p. 239)

“It wasn’t a city anymore, it was a collection of broken places separated by war without politics or acquisition so not war at all really but something more pathological.”

China Miéville Embassytown

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 18 (p. 238)

“I suppose there were other institutions in Embassytown where the dynamic of the quotidian sustained—some hospitals, perhaps some schools, perhaps houses where shiftparents most deeply loved the children. Whenever any society dies there must be heroes whose fightback is to not change.”

China Miéville Embassytown

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 15 (p. 213)

“I suspect there was a power struggle in the Embassy, that some would have tried, out of habit, without rationale, to wall up information. They didn’t win.”

China Miéville Embassytown

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 10 (p. 172)

“A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don’t look back, don’t be each other’s anchors, no nostalgia. I wasn’t expecting any of them to return.”

China Miéville Embassytown

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter “Formerly, 1” (p. 53)