#873 The Crawl- China Mieville

#873 The Crawl- China Mieville

This is a written breakdown of a two-minute clip of a zombie attack film. Not much to it, as far as analysis goes. Pretty fun.

“Close up, a dead man’s face. Camera pulls back. He is one of many zombies in a city square. They crawl toward the camera. They do not crawl on their knees but on their toes and their knuckles or fingertips or the palms of their hands. They move as odds with their own bodies, like humans raised by spiders.”

Rating: 7-7-7-6 Total=27

#846 In The Slopes- China Mieville

#846 In The Slopes- China Mieville

The island town of Elam has always been an important site for archeology. The volcano has entombed many important artifacts and ancient wonders. It was always the oddly sized and shaped temples and the weird figures in the artwork that made the place mysterious. But in fact, those oddities were not a mythology but proof of extraterrestrial beings coexisting with humans.

When archeologist finally unearthed an alien body mummified trying to protect human figures from a lava flow, the island became something different, and became McCullough’s new home. 

“Seeing such things in glass cases, reading the captions that described them, McCulloch has been awed enough. Now he saw one delivered. He had to hold his breath.”

Now a “local” he runs a store and welcomes new teams as they come and go. There are currently two rival dig teams trying to uncover new artifacts. There is a dangerous rivalry happening around the digs and new science in the embalming process that is starting to cause trouble in town. Locals are split and history is lost.

Rating: 7-8-7-7 Total= 29

#817 The Dowager of Bees- China Mieville

#817 The Dowager of Bees- China Mieville

A story about cards. A card player, a sly slight-of-hand man at that, is discovered by a card playing legend and is invited to play in a high stakes game. He knows he is the target of cardsharks, but he his actually a good player and holds his own. This is the night he will be “inducted.”

Among serious players it is known that very rarely, or more rarely than a straight flush gets bested by a royal flush, a player loses to a hand with a “hidden suit.” When this happens you are “inducted” into the pantheon of players and part of the club. You must forfeit a special prize that any book of rules will show (only at the time of the hidden suit) and that prize will vary from suit to suit. 

The player we follow travels around the world with his card playing girlfriend and occasionally witnesses other people’s “induction.” He fatefully pockets his favorite “hidden suit” and saves it to cheat sometime down the road. When he does, he may be in for a surprise.

Notable Passage: “There is no percentage thinking about the might’ves.” 

Rating: 8-8-7-7 Total= 30

#789 The Condition of New Death- China Mieville

#789 The Condition of New Death- China Mieville

This is a mind experiment in perspective. There is a new way people see death, it is called New Death. People dies the same ways at the same rates and in the same places, but the manner in which the living perceive of the dead bodies has changed. It began with the death of one M. Morris.

“With great alarm, Mr. Morris began to walk around the body, but he stopped when, in his words ‘those feet wouldn’t stop pointing at me.’ Ms. Morris’s body appeared to him to be swiveling like a needle on a compass, her feet always facing him.”

“Stated most simply, New Death is the condition whereby human corpses now lie always on a horizontal vector—no matter the angle of the surface or the substance of the matter below them-and now orient so that their feet are facing all observers, all the time.”

The mind experiment comes in when you realize that even on video, no matter which angle you look from, that angle will be feet first, even when recorded at the same time. 

This phenomenon, not possible in our real physical word, is however a common occurrence in first-person-shooter video games. So, this could be seen as a satire on a society that is unable to unplug. That a society’s perspective has been shaped so much by the viewpoint of our personal electronic devices that it has become itself reality or at least a substitute for it that is so good, the people cannot differentiate one from the other. I say, not entirely far of from where we are now. Perspective becomes reality. 

Rating: 8-10-7-7 Total= 32

#761 Polynia- China Mieville

#761 Polynia- China Mieville

“They’d started as wisps, anomalies noticed only by weather watchers. Slowly, they’d grown, started to glint in the early-winter afternoon. They solidified, there sides becoming more faceted, more opaquely white. They started to shed shadows…Social media went mad with theory. The things were dismissed as mirages, hoaxes, advertising gimmicks for a TV show. They were heralded as angels, abominated as an alien attack or a new superweapon.”

Thus fifteen years ago, strange ice-bergs appeared over London, impossibly levitating in mid air, 9/10^th of which are not to be seen. At first they are the only thing the city can think about. What are they? Where are they from? What do they mean? Eventually curious climbers venture into the unknown never to be seen again. They still float there as life goes on, one more unexplained mystery for humans to ponder and fight over, selfishly wanting to know its secrets.

Rating: 9-8-8-8 Total=33