China Miéville
"…the city is heart-stained, and the heart is city-stained too."
xenolinguistics; disaster-politics; ethics and aesthetics alike awash in the uneasy, the uncanny, and the rapidly unspeakable; driven by personal, social, and philosophical contradictions unrelenting in their thrusting towards deeper, sharper, and more fundamentally self-undermining folds; surging prose made all the more tang and savory-bitter by the bastardy character of its poetic ambitions; fecund and gasping ideological landscapes; the erotics, hermeneutics, and therapeutics of apocalypse, which slosh and rear and refuse to disentangle—: in Embassytown, Miéville makes the word flesh and the flesh, crawl.
Originally published September 22, 2021.