The Southern Reach Trilogy

The release schedule of the SRT is pretty interesting. A trilogy with all three parts in a calendar year – which surely beats waiting for the 3rd book in the Kingkiller Chronicles. It helps that each is a short novel, and that the three could conceivably have been released as one volume.

Aside from John Scalzi, who else is trying something new with release schedules, and segmenting a larger work into episodic chunks, each with a different timbre? It’s rumoured that True Detective will focus on a different set of characters each season, so what will the link between season be, aside from the name? The vibe, the setting, the fictional universe it inhabits?

Anybody who is “under th…

Anybody who is “under the impression that they made it clear” that some order was given who who didn’t put it in writing and who hasn’t had that order paraphrased back to them? Should be slapped. Or at the very least demoted. Unless you actually said it, you didn’t “make it clear.”

http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/459368.html

The Gone-Away World

I feel agony. But I have no idea if I feel love. I don’t have a great deal of experience sorting memory from the present. Is this love? Is that? What about this sort of squidgy feeling there? She might be right. Agony is not love. Not by itself. Unless love comes in various flavours and textures, and this is the one which hurts. That might be. Perhaps love is like hell, and every one is different.

The Gone-Away World – Nick Harkaway

I dream I am a playing card, but no one will tell me which one, and I cannot crane my neck to see.

The Gone-Away World – Nick Harkaway

“I quit,” I say. “This is wrong. Fuck you for thinking that it isn’t, and fuck you slowly for asking me to do it. This is not how you make a safe world. This is what got us here in the first place.”

The Gone-Away World – Nick Harkaway

…understanding that to love is an action, a verb, a thing of choice, and this can be promised and delivered where in love is a more tenuous and fragile thing which may come and go with the wind and the seasons.

The Gone-Away World – Nick Harkaway

In the distant past, in what might be described as the Golden Days of War, the business of wreaking havoc on your neighbours (these being the only people you could logistically expect to wreak havoc upon) was uncomplicated. You–the King–pointed at the next-door country and said, “I want me one of those!” Your vassals–stalwart fellows selected for heft and musculature rather than brain–said, “Yes, my liege,” or sometimes, “What’s in it for me?” but broadly speaking they rode off and burned, pillaged, slaughtered and hacked until either you were richer by a few hundred square miles of forest and farmland, or you were rudely arrested by heathens from the other side who wanted a word in your shell-like ear about cross-border aggression. It was a personal thing, and there was little doubt about who was responsible for kicking it off, because that person was to be found in the nicest room of a big stone house wearing a very expensive hat. Modern war is distinguished by the fact that all the participants are ostensibly unwilling. We are swept towards one another like colonies of heavily armed penguins on an ice floe. Every speech on the subject given by any involved party begins by deploring even the idea of war. A war here would not be legal or useful. It is not necessary or appropriate. It must be avoided. Immediately following this proud declamation comes a series of circumlocutions, circumventions and rhetoricocircumambulations which make it clear that we will go to war, but not really, because we don’t want to and aren’t allowed to, so what we’re doing is in fact some kind of hyper-violent peace in which people will die. We are going to un-war.

The Gone-Away World – Nick Harkaway

“If I stay here I will be found at fifty-five, naked under two secretaries with my feet tied to the bedposts and a lemon in my mouth, and I will be dead and fat and no one will cry except the shy woman living opposite who has always had a crush on me but could never tell me and who might have saved me from myself, but didn’t.”

The Gone-Away World – Nick Harkaway

“Garbage in, garbage out. Or rather more felicitously: the tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.”

The Gone-Away World – Nick Harkaway

I am being given the Spanish archer (“el bow,” if you are wondering)

The Gone-Away World – Nick Harkaway

The system doesn’t care about people, but we treat it as if it were one of us, as if it were the sum of our goods and not the product of our least admirable compromises.

The Gone-Away World – Nick Harkaway

“We’ve gotta go down there and put that fucker out, blow it out, uh, like a fucking candle, otherwise . . .” At which point he trailed his voice and let the breath flow out of him and he paused to let us construct our own metaphor for catastrophe. And that right there is what you call a rhetorical ellipsis, the cheapest device in oratory and one of the hardest to do well. An ellipsis is like a haymaker punch you throw with your mouth, and the only tricks more low rent than that are making fun of your opponent’s ugly puss and bringing up something by saying you won’t mention it. We all stared at him for a minute, and he went sort of pinkish and closed his mouth.

Anathem – Neal Stephenson

…it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.

Anathem – Neal Stephenson

“That is the kind of beauty I was trying to get you to see,” Orolo told me. “Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”

Assassin’s Quest – Robin Hobb

Time and again, I caught my mind drifting in vivid daydreams, musings so engrossing that coming out of them was like waking with a start. And like many a dream, they popped like bubbles, leaving me with almost no recall of what I had been thinking.

Royal Assassin – Robin Hobb

“Our own ambitions and tasks that we set for ourselves, the framework we attempt to impose upon the world, is no more than a shadow of a tree cast across the snow. It will change as the sun moves, be swallowed in the night, sway with the wind, and when the smooth snow vanishes, it will lie distorted upon the uneven earth. But the tree continues to be. Do you understand that?”

The Kraken Wakes – John Wyndham

“Darling, if I happen to mention that, as a process, autumn follows summer, it does not follow that I am all for getting a ladder and pulling the leaves off the trees.”

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – Julian Jaynes

Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else.

The Etymologicon (Mark Forsyth)

Hitting a stationary target was just too easy for the Tudors. So the best archers used to test themselves by putting a cat in a bag and hanging the bag from the branch of a tree. The ferocious feline would wriggle about and the sack would swing, and this exercise in animal cruelty provided the discerning archer with a challenge and English with a phrase.

The Lies of Locke Lamora – Scott Lynch

“You simply collapsed, sir. In layman’s terms, your body revoked its permission for you to continue heaping abuse upon it.”

What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Information Frontier (James Gleick)

Margaret Atwood writes: “As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn’t imagine how it was that you hadn’t known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.”

Rainbow’s End – Vernor Vinge

“But I have a theory of life,” said Chumlig, “and it is straight out of gaming: There is always an angle. You, each of you, have some special wild cards. Play with them. Find out what makes you different and better. Because it is there, if only you can find it.

Anansi Boys

Fat Charlie was thirsty and his head hurt and his mouth tasted evil and his eyes were too tight in his head and all his teeth twinged and his stomach burned and his back was aching in a way that started around his knees and went up to his forehead and his brains had been removed and replaced with cotton balls and needles and pins which was why it hurt to try and think, and his eyes were not just too tight in his head but they must have rolled out in the night and been reattached with roofing nails; and now he noticed that anything louder than the gentle Brownian motion of air molecules drifting softly past each other was above his pain threshold. Also, he wished he were dead.