Iron Council
I have the fortune of not working today, so I've been reading China Miéville's third novel of the New Crobuzon anti-trilogy, Iron Council. China is one of those rare contemporary authours whose writing, tales, and theories have so much depth and passion that one can't help loving it. It is unfortunate that he is 'classified' under Sci-Fi in bookstores because he writes, as I have explained in previous blogs, something superior, which he calls "New Weird". I think the label is appropriate - what he writes is SF / Fantasy / Gothic all in one.
Anyways, the point of this entry was to showcase two passages from the novel that blew me away.
(1) Here, Judah, a character who knows Golemetry (the magical art of golems) is realizing its science. This is an incredible, mind-blowing bit of writing.
The living cannot be made a golem--because with the vitality of orgone, flesh and vegetable is matter interacting with its own mechanisms. The unalive, though, is inert because it happens to lie just so. We make it meaningful. We do not order it but point out the order that inheres unseens, always already there. This act of pointing is at least as much assertion and persuasion as observation. We see structure, and in pointing it out we see mechanisms and grasp them, and we twist. Because patterns are asserted not in stasis but in change. Golemetry is an interruption. It is a subordinating of the statis IS to the active AM.
(205)
(2)
From the way they have come, from the history in the roadbed, come noises Judah has never heard before. Something is approaching in a staccato onrush, a drumming on the flattened stone. A cavalry of striders. The borinatch. Moving at a speed that awes, their legs taller than the tallest man, unhinging, stiff unguligrade motion of spasms and lurching, turning by pinpoint acrobatics, twisting on their hooves. [...] They grope through dimensions, their limbs become unseen, reaching across gaps of space much too wide and grabbing gendarmes or punishing them through their skin. The striders attack with weapons extant in whatever other plane it is they touch, that are visible for instants only as purple flowers or silver liquid faces, and where they strike the gendarmes are cut and crushed and diminished in complex ways and scream without sound and stumble over angles of earth that should never trouble them.
(257-8)
It is something truly awe-some, is it not?
Anyways, the point of this entry was to showcase two passages from the novel that blew me away.
(1) Here, Judah, a character who knows Golemetry (the magical art of golems) is realizing its science. This is an incredible, mind-blowing bit of writing.
The living cannot be made a golem--because with the vitality of orgone, flesh and vegetable is matter interacting with its own mechanisms. The unalive, though, is inert because it happens to lie just so. We make it meaningful. We do not order it but point out the order that inheres unseens, always already there. This act of pointing is at least as much assertion and persuasion as observation. We see structure, and in pointing it out we see mechanisms and grasp them, and we twist. Because patterns are asserted not in stasis but in change. Golemetry is an interruption. It is a subordinating of the statis IS to the active AM.
(205)
(2)
From the way they have come, from the history in the roadbed, come noises Judah has never heard before. Something is approaching in a staccato onrush, a drumming on the flattened stone. A cavalry of striders. The borinatch. Moving at a speed that awes, their legs taller than the tallest man, unhinging, stiff unguligrade motion of spasms and lurching, turning by pinpoint acrobatics, twisting on their hooves. [...] They grope through dimensions, their limbs become unseen, reaching across gaps of space much too wide and grabbing gendarmes or punishing them through their skin. The striders attack with weapons extant in whatever other plane it is they touch, that are visible for instants only as purple flowers or silver liquid faces, and where they strike the gendarmes are cut and crushed and diminished in complex ways and scream without sound and stumble over angles of earth that should never trouble them.
(257-8)
It is something truly awe-some, is it not?
posted by Davyth | 9:16 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home