
Kraken

Who would ever have trusted a representative of the cephalopod fundamentalists to deal with the issue of the kraken? A rogue, on the other hand … Who could be more trustworthy? Billy shook his head. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “It was all an act. You were under the Teuthex’s orders all along.” “It wasn’t an act. It was a mission.” That ostentatious re
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That reconstitutive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense. Vardy even smiled. “Paranoia,” he said. “Theology.”
China Miéville • Kraken
With script, a new kind of memory, grimoires and accounts. Traditions could be created, lies made more tenacious. History written down sped up, travelled at the speed of ink. And all the tedious antique centuries before we were ready, the pigment was stored for us in the cephalopod containers—motile ink, ink we caught and ate and let run down and s
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“Don’t worry, Billy Harrow. That’s perspicacity, not paranoia, that, what you’re feeling.” Baron turned, taking in the London panorama, and wherever he looked, whenever he paused facing some particular patch of blackness, Billy looked too. “There is something wrong. And it’s noticed you. That’s not always the best place to be.” Billy sat in the mid
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It would not have been Dane’s church’s planned end, their infolding of convolutes into the glint on a giant eye, when roaring perhaps at the surface the elder kraken might rise like belligerent continents and die, and spurt out like ink a new time. This would not have been that hallelujah-worthy end, but an antiapocalypse, a numinousless revelation
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“I just done in the most dangerous piece of shit you can imagine by the most horrible method I ever had to use to do anything,” he said. “Wati said you got into this because you was paid to and you might’ve saved the world. If Griz’d got what he wanted earlier … So thank you. For that. But you are going to help. Knacking ain’t a drug. What did for
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“He knows religion is bollocks,” Collingswood said. “He just wishes he didn’t. That’s why he understands the nutters. That’s why he hunts them. He misses pure faith. He’s jealous.”
China Miéville • Kraken
Architeuthis lives in the aphotic zone: what purpose would the spray of dark sepia serve in a world without light? It was there for other reasons. We just would not get the hint, not for millennia. We didn’t invent ink: ink was waiting for us, aeons before writing. In the sacs of the deepwater god.
China Miéville • Kraken
Last-ditch defenders were not new. There were always kings under the hill. The golem of Prague—though that was a bad example, had missed its call, a dreadful oversleeping. Each of the cults of London had hopes in its own constructs, its own secret spirits, its own sleeping paladins, to intervene when the minute hand went vertical. The Krakenists ha
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