From Amazon
When Mae West said, "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful," she could have been talking about China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. The novel's publication met with a burst of extravagant praise from Big Name Authors and was almost instantly a multiaward finalist. You expect hyperbole in blurbs; and sometimes unworthy books win awards, so nominations don't necessarily mean much. But Perdido Street Station deserves the acclaim. It's ambitious and brilliant and--rarity of rarities--sui generis. Its clearest influences are Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy and M. John Harrison's Viriconium books, but it isn't much like them. It's Dickensian in scope, but fast-paced and modern. It's a love song for cities, and it packs a world into its strange, sprawling, steam-punky city of New Crobuzon. It can be read with equal validity as fantasy, science fiction, horror, or slipstream. It's got love, loss, crime, sex, riots, mad scientists, drugs, art, corruption, demons, dreams, obsession, magic, aliens, subversion, torture, dirigibles, romantic outlaws, artificial intelligence, and dangerous cults.
Generous, gaudy, grand, grotesque, gigantic, grim, grimy, and glorious, Perdito Street Station is a bloody fascinating book. It's also so massive that you may begin to feel you're getting too much of a good thing; just slow down and enjoy.
Yes, but what is Perdido Street Station about? To oversimplify: the eccentric scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is hired to restore the power of flight to a cruelly de-winged birdman. Isaac's secret lover is Lin, an artist of the khepri, a humano-insectoid race; theirs is a forbidden relationship. Lin is hired (rather against her will) by a mysterious crime boss to capture his horrifying likeness in the unique khepri art form. Isaac's quest for flying things to study leads to verification of his controversial unified theory of the strange sciences of his world. It also brings him an odd, unknown grub stolen from a secret government experiment so perilous it is sold to a ruthless drug lord--the same crime boss who hired Lin. The grub emerges from its cocoon, becomes an extraordinarily dangerous monster, and escapes Isaac's lab to ravage New Crobuzon, even as his discovery becomes known to a hidden, powerful, and sinister intelligence. Lin disappears and Isaac finds himself pursued by the monster, the drug lord, the government and armies of New Crobuzon, and other, more bizarre factions, not all confined to his world. --Cynthia Ward --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
From Publishers Weekly
King Rat (1999), Mi‚ville's much-praised first novel of urban fantasy/horror, was just a palate-teaser for this appetizing, if extravagant, stew of genre themes. Its setting, New Crobuzon, is an audaciously imagined milieu: a city with the dimensions of a world, home to a polyglot civilization of wildly varied species and overlapping and interpenetrating cultures. Seeking to prove his unified energy theory as it relates to organic and mechanical forms, rogue scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin tries to restore the power of flight to Yagharek, a member of the garuda race cruelly shorn of its wings. Isaac's lover, Lin, unconsciously mimics his scientific pursuits when she takes on the seemingly impossible commission of sculpting a patron whose body is a riot of grotesquely mutated and spliced appendages. Their social life is one huge, postgraduate bull session with friends and associates--until a nightmare-inducing grub escapes from Isaac's lab and transforms into a flying monster that imperils the city. This accident precipitates a political crisis, initiates an action-packed manhunt for Isaac and introduces hordes of vividly imagined beings who inhabit the twilight zone between science and sorcery. Mi‚ville's canvas is so breathtakingly broad that the details of individual subplots and characters sometime lose their definition. But it is also generous enough to accommodate large dollops of aesthetics, scientific discussion and quest fantasy in an impressive and ultimately pleasing epic.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.From Library Journal
Scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin and his lover, an insect-like creature named Lin, discover the risks of meddling in the affairs of mobsters, renegades, and revolutionaries when they fall afoul of the powers that rule the sprawling city of New Crobuzon. The author of King Rat delivers a powerful tale about the power of love and the will to survive in a dystopian universe that combines Victorian elements with a fantasy version of cyberpunk. Mi ville's visceral prose evokes an immediacy that commands attention and demands a wide readership. Highly recommended.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
From Booklist
As in Mervyn Peake's fantasy classic, the Gormenghast trilogy, the real protagonist of this gigantic book is a city, New Crobuzon, a steampunk version of Dickens' London that Mieville depicts in exhaustive detail. In the nooks and crannies of this colossal setting Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin labors to discover the secret of flight and restore it to his mutilated, nonhuman friend, Yagharek. To do this, he raises what turns out to be the larva of a deadly slake-moth. When it escapes and matures, Isaac is sucked into a frantic effort to track down and kill all the viciously telepathic slake-moths before the authorities catch up with him or them. Given its complicated setting, this chase rises above the level of a Godzilla movie, but critical readers may carp that much of the complication is just piled-on grunge and much of the characterization involves kinky sex and repetitious violence. More world building than storytelling, the yarn at least suggests that the author of King Rat (1999) is marching forward in his fantasy-writing career. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Review
"[A] phantasmagoric masterpiece . . . The book left me breathless with admiration."
--BRIAN STABLEFORD
"China Miéville's cool style has conjured up a triumphantly macabre technoslip metropolis with a unique atmosphere of horror and fascination."
--PETER HAMILTON
"It is the best steampunk novel since Gibson and Sterling's."
--JOHN CLUTE
From the Trade Paperback edition.
--BRIAN STABLEFORD
"China Miéville's cool style has conjured up a triumphantly macabre technoslip metropolis with a unique atmosphere of horror and fascination."
--PETER HAMILTON
"It is the best steampunk novel since Gibson and Sterling's."
--JOHN CLUTE
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Book Description
Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none—not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory.
Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger.
While Isaac's experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention: a brilliantly colored caterpillar that feeds on nothing but a hallucinatory drug and grows larger—and more consuming—by the day. What finally emerges from the silken cocoon will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon—and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it invokes . . .
A magnificent fantasy rife with scientific splendor, magical intrigue, and wonderfully realized characters, told in a storytelling style in which Charles Dickens meets Neal Stephenson, Perdido Street Station offers an eerie, voluptuously crafted world that will plumb the depths of every reader's imagination.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger.
While Isaac's experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention: a brilliantly colored caterpillar that feeds on nothing but a hallucinatory drug and grows larger—and more consuming—by the day. What finally emerges from the silken cocoon will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon—and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it invokes . . .
A magnificent fantasy rife with scientific splendor, magical intrigue, and wonderfully realized characters, told in a storytelling style in which Charles Dickens meets Neal Stephenson, Perdido Street Station offers an eerie, voluptuously crafted world that will plumb the depths of every reader's imagination.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Back Cover
"[A] phantasmagoric masterpiece . . . The book left me breathless with admiration."
--BRIAN STABLEFORD
"China Miéville's cool style has conjured up a triumphantly macabre technoslip metropolis with a unique atmosphere of horror and fascination."
--PETER HAMILTON
"It is the best steampunk novel since Gibson and Sterling's."
--JOHN CLUTE
From the Trade Paperback edition.
--BRIAN STABLEFORD
"China Miéville's cool style has conjured up a triumphantly macabre technoslip metropolis with a unique atmosphere of horror and fascination."
--PETER HAMILTON
"It is the best steampunk novel since Gibson and Sterling's."
--JOHN CLUTE
From the Trade Paperback edition.
About the Author
China Miéville is currently reading for his Ph.D. at the London School of Economics. His first novel, King Rat, was published in 1998. He lives in England.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
A window burst open high above the market. A basket flew from it and arced
towards the oblivious crowd. It spasmed in mid-air, then spun and
continued earthwards at a slower, uneven pace. Dancing precariously as it
descended, its wire-mesh caught and skittered on the building’s rough
hide. It scrabbled at the wall, sending paint and concrete dust plummeting
before it.
The sun shone through uneven cloud-cover with a bright grey light. Below
the basket the stalls and barrows lay like untidy spillage. The city
reeked. But today was market day down in Aspic Hole, and the pungent slick
of dung-smell and rot that rolled over New Crobuzon was, in these streets,
for these hours, improved with paprika and fresh tomato, hot oil and fish
and cinnamon, cured meat, banana and onion.
The food stalls stretched the noisy length of Shadrach Street. Books and
manuscripts and pictures filled up Selchit Pass, an avenue of desultory
banyans and crumbling concrete a little way to the east. There were
earthenware products spilling down the road to Barrackham in the south;
engine parts to the west; toys down one side street; clothes between two
more; and countless other goods filling all the alleys. The rows of
merchandise converged crookedly on Aspic Hole like spokes on a broken
wheel.
In the Hole itself all distinctions broke down. In the shadow
of old walls and unsafe towers were a pile of gears, a ramshackle
table of broken crockery and crude clay ornaments, a case of mouldering
textbooks. Antiques, sex, flea-powder. Between the stalls stomped hissing
constructs. Beggars argued in the bowels of deserted buildings. Members of
strange races bought peculiar things. Aspic Bazaar, a blaring mess of
goods, grease and tallymen. Mercantile law ruled: let the buyer beware.
The costermonger below the descending basket looked up into flat sunlight
and a shower of brick particles. He wiped his eye. He plucked the frayed
thing from the air above his head, pulling at the cord which bore it until
it went slack in his hand. Inside the basket was a brass shekel and a note
in careful, ornamented italics. The food-vendor scratched his nose as he
scanned the paper. He rummaged in the piles of produce before him, placed
eggs and fruit and root vegetables into the container, checking against
the list. He stopped and read one item again, then smiled lasciviously and
cut a slice of pork. When he was done he put the shekel in his pocket and
felt for change, hesitating as he calculated his delivery cost, eventually
depositing four stivers in with the food.
He wiped his hands against his trousers and thought for a minute, then
scribbled something on the list with a stub of charcoal and tossed it
after the coins.
He tugged three times at the rope and the basket began a bobbing journey
into the air. It rose above the lower roofs of surrounding buildings,
buoyed upwards by noise. It startled the roosting jackdaws in the deserted
storey and inscribed the wall with another scrawled trail among many,
before it disappeared again into the window from which it had emerged.
Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin had just realized that he was dreaming. He had
been aghast to find himself employed once again at the university,
parading in front of a huge blackboard covered in vague representations of
levers and forces and stress. Introductory Material Science. Isaac had
been staring anxiously at the class when that unctuous bastard Vermishank
had looked in.
“I can’t teach this class,” whispered Isaac loudly. “The market’s too
loud.” He gestured at the window.
“It’s all right.” Vermishank was soothing and loathsome. “It’s time for
breakfast,” he said. “That’ll take your mind off the noise.” And hearing
that absurdity Isaac shed sleep with immense relief. The raucous profanity
of the bazaar and the smell of cooking came with him into the day.
He lay hugely in the bed without opening his eyes. He heard Lin walk
across the room and felt the slight listing of the floorboards. The garret
was filled with pungent smoke. Isaac salivated.
Lin clapped twice. She knew when Isaac woke. Probably because he closed
his mouth, he thought, and sniggered without opening his eyes.
“Still sleeping, shush, poor little Isaac ever so tired,” he whimpered,
and snuggled down like a child. Lin clapped again, once, derisory, and
walked away.
He groaned and rolled over.
“Termagant!” he moaned after her. “Shrew! Harridan! All right, all right,
you win, you, you . . . uh . . . virago, you spit-fire . . .” He rubbed
his head and sat up, grinned sheepishly. Lin made an obscene gesture at
him without turning around.
She stood with her back to him, nude at the stove, dancing back as hot
drops of oil leapt from the pan. The covers slipped from the slope of
Isaac’s belly. He was a dirigible, huge and taut and strong. Grey hair
burst from him abundantly.
Lin was hairless. Her muscles were tight under her red skin, each
distinct. She was like an anatomical atlas. Isaac studied her in cheerful
lust.
His arse itched. He scratched under the blanket, rooting as shameless as a
dog. Something burst under his nail, and he withdrew his hand to examine
it. A tiny half-crushed grub waved helplessly on the end of his finger. It
was a refflick, a harmless little khepri parasite. The thing must have
been rather bewildered by my juices, Isaac thought, and flicked his finger
clean.
“Refflick, Lin,” he said. “Bath time.”
Lin stamped in irritation.
New Crobuzon was a huge plague pit, a morbific city. Parasites, infection
and rumour were uncontainable. A monthly chymical dip was a necessary
prophylactic for the khepri, if they wanted to avoid itches and sores.
Lin slid the contents of the pan onto a plate and set it down, across from
her own breakfast. She sat and gestured for Isaac to join her. He rose
from the bed and stumbled across the room. He eased himself onto the small
chair, wary of splinters.
Isaac and Lin sat naked on either side of the bare wooden table. Isaac was
conscious of their pose, seeing them as a third person might. It would
make a beautiful, strange print, he thought. An attic room, dust-motes in
the light from the small window, books and paper and paints neatly stacked
by cheap wooden furniture. A dark-skinned man, big and nude and
detumescing, gripping a knife and fork, unnaturally still, sitting
opposite a khepri, her slight woman’s body in shadow, her chitinous head
in silhouette.
They ignored their food and stared at each other for a moment. Lin signed
at him: Good morning, lover. Then she began to eat, still looking at him.
It was when she ate that Lin was most alien, and their shared meals were a
challenge and an affirmation. As he watched her, Isaac felt the familiar
trill of emotion: disgust immediately stamped out, pride at the stamping
out, guilty desire.
Light glinted in Lin’s compound eyes. Her headlegs quivered. She picked up
half a tomato and gripped it with her mandibles. She lowered her hands
while her inner mouthparts picked at the food her outer jaw held steady.
Isaac watched the huge iridescent scarab that was his lover’s head devour
her breakfast.
He watched her swallow, saw her throat bob where the pale insectile
underbelly segued smoothly into her human neck . . . not that she would
have accepted that description. Humans have khepri bodies, legs, hands;
and the heads of shaved gibbons, she had once told him.
He smiled and dangled his fried pork in front of him, curled his tongue
around it, wiped his greasy fingers on the table. He smiled at her. She
undulated her headlegs at him and signed, My monster.
I am a pervert, thought Isaac, and so is she.
Breakfast conversation was generally one-sided: Lin could sign with her
hands while she ate, but Isaac’s attempts to talk and eat simultaneously
made for incomprehensible noises and food debris on the table. Instead
they read; Lin an artists’ newsletter, Isaac whatever came to hand. He
reached out between mouthfuls and grabbed books and papers, and found
himself reading Lin’s shopping list. The item a handful of pork slices was
ringed and underneath her exquisite calligraphy was a scrawled question in
much cruder script: Got company??? Nice bit of pork goes down a treat!!!
Isaac waved the paper at Lin. “What’s this filthy arse on about?” he
yelled, spraying food. His outrage was amused but genuine.
Lin read it and shrugged.
Knows I don’t eat meat. Knows I’ve got a guest for breakfast. Wordplay on
“pork.”
“Yes, thanks, lover, I got that bit. How does he know you’re a vegetarian?
Do you two often engage in this witty banter?”
Lin stared at him for a moment without responding.
Knows because I don’t buy meat. She shook her head at the stupid question.
Don’t worry: only ever banter on paper. Doesn’t know I’m bug.
Her deliberate use of the slur annoyed Isaac.
“Dammit, I wasn’t insinuating anything . . .” Lin’s hand waggled, the
equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Isaac howled in irritation. “Godshit, Lin!
Not everything I say is about fear of discovery!”
Isaac and Lin had been lovers nearly two years. They had always tried not
to think too hard about the rules of their relationship, but the longer
they were together the more this strategy
of avoidance became impossible. Questions as yet unasked demanded
attention. Innocent remarks and askance looks from others, a moment of<...
A window burst open high above the market. A basket flew from it and arced
towards the oblivious crowd. It spasmed in mid-air, then spun and
continued earthwards at a slower, uneven pace. Dancing precariously as it
descended, its wire-mesh caught and skittered on the building’s rough
hide. It scrabbled at the wall, sending paint and concrete dust plummeting
before it.
The sun shone through uneven cloud-cover with a bright grey light. Below
the basket the stalls and barrows lay like untidy spillage. The city
reeked. But today was market day down in Aspic Hole, and the pungent slick
of dung-smell and rot that rolled over New Crobuzon was, in these streets,
for these hours, improved with paprika and fresh tomato, hot oil and fish
and cinnamon, cured meat, banana and onion.
The food stalls stretched the noisy length of Shadrach Street. Books and
manuscripts and pictures filled up Selchit Pass, an avenue of desultory
banyans and crumbling concrete a little way to the east. There were
earthenware products spilling down the road to Barrackham in the south;
engine parts to the west; toys down one side street; clothes between two
more; and countless other goods filling all the alleys. The rows of
merchandise converged crookedly on Aspic Hole like spokes on a broken
wheel.
In the Hole itself all distinctions broke down. In the shadow
of old walls and unsafe towers were a pile of gears, a ramshackle
table of broken crockery and crude clay ornaments, a case of mouldering
textbooks. Antiques, sex, flea-powder. Between the stalls stomped hissing
constructs. Beggars argued in the bowels of deserted buildings. Members of
strange races bought peculiar things. Aspic Bazaar, a blaring mess of
goods, grease and tallymen. Mercantile law ruled: let the buyer beware.
The costermonger below the descending basket looked up into flat sunlight
and a shower of brick particles. He wiped his eye. He plucked the frayed
thing from the air above his head, pulling at the cord which bore it until
it went slack in his hand. Inside the basket was a brass shekel and a note
in careful, ornamented italics. The food-vendor scratched his nose as he
scanned the paper. He rummaged in the piles of produce before him, placed
eggs and fruit and root vegetables into the container, checking against
the list. He stopped and read one item again, then smiled lasciviously and
cut a slice of pork. When he was done he put the shekel in his pocket and
felt for change, hesitating as he calculated his delivery cost, eventually
depositing four stivers in with the food.
He wiped his hands against his trousers and thought for a minute, then
scribbled something on the list with a stub of charcoal and tossed it
after the coins.
He tugged three times at the rope and the basket began a bobbing journey
into the air. It rose above the lower roofs of surrounding buildings,
buoyed upwards by noise. It startled the roosting jackdaws in the deserted
storey and inscribed the wall with another scrawled trail among many,
before it disappeared again into the window from which it had emerged.
Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin had just realized that he was dreaming. He had
been aghast to find himself employed once again at the university,
parading in front of a huge blackboard covered in vague representations of
levers and forces and stress. Introductory Material Science. Isaac had
been staring anxiously at the class when that unctuous bastard Vermishank
had looked in.
“I can’t teach this class,” whispered Isaac loudly. “The market’s too
loud.” He gestured at the window.
“It’s all right.” Vermishank was soothing and loathsome. “It’s time for
breakfast,” he said. “That’ll take your mind off the noise.” And hearing
that absurdity Isaac shed sleep with immense relief. The raucous profanity
of the bazaar and the smell of cooking came with him into the day.
He lay hugely in the bed without opening his eyes. He heard Lin walk
across the room and felt the slight listing of the floorboards. The garret
was filled with pungent smoke. Isaac salivated.
Lin clapped twice. She knew when Isaac woke. Probably because he closed
his mouth, he thought, and sniggered without opening his eyes.
“Still sleeping, shush, poor little Isaac ever so tired,” he whimpered,
and snuggled down like a child. Lin clapped again, once, derisory, and
walked away.
He groaned and rolled over.
“Termagant!” he moaned after her. “Shrew! Harridan! All right, all right,
you win, you, you . . . uh . . . virago, you spit-fire . . .” He rubbed
his head and sat up, grinned sheepishly. Lin made an obscene gesture at
him without turning around.
She stood with her back to him, nude at the stove, dancing back as hot
drops of oil leapt from the pan. The covers slipped from the slope of
Isaac’s belly. He was a dirigible, huge and taut and strong. Grey hair
burst from him abundantly.
Lin was hairless. Her muscles were tight under her red skin, each
distinct. She was like an anatomical atlas. Isaac studied her in cheerful
lust.
His arse itched. He scratched under the blanket, rooting as shameless as a
dog. Something burst under his nail, and he withdrew his hand to examine
it. A tiny half-crushed grub waved helplessly on the end of his finger. It
was a refflick, a harmless little khepri parasite. The thing must have
been rather bewildered by my juices, Isaac thought, and flicked his finger
clean.
“Refflick, Lin,” he said. “Bath time.”
Lin stamped in irritation.
New Crobuzon was a huge plague pit, a morbific city. Parasites, infection
and rumour were uncontainable. A monthly chymical dip was a necessary
prophylactic for the khepri, if they wanted to avoid itches and sores.
Lin slid the contents of the pan onto a plate and set it down, across from
her own breakfast. She sat and gestured for Isaac to join her. He rose
from the bed and stumbled across the room. He eased himself onto the small
chair, wary of splinters.
Isaac and Lin sat naked on either side of the bare wooden table. Isaac was
conscious of their pose, seeing them as a third person might. It would
make a beautiful, strange print, he thought. An attic room, dust-motes in
the light from the small window, books and paper and paints neatly stacked
by cheap wooden furniture. A dark-skinned man, big and nude and
detumescing, gripping a knife and fork, unnaturally still, sitting
opposite a khepri, her slight woman’s body in shadow, her chitinous head
in silhouette.
They ignored their food and stared at each other for a moment. Lin signed
at him: Good morning, lover. Then she began to eat, still looking at him.
It was when she ate that Lin was most alien, and their shared meals were a
challenge and an affirmation. As he watched her, Isaac felt the familiar
trill of emotion: disgust immediately stamped out, pride at the stamping
out, guilty desire.
Light glinted in Lin’s compound eyes. Her headlegs quivered. She picked up
half a tomato and gripped it with her mandibles. She lowered her hands
while her inner mouthparts picked at the food her outer jaw held steady.
Isaac watched the huge iridescent scarab that was his lover’s head devour
her breakfast.
He watched her swallow, saw her throat bob where the pale insectile
underbelly segued smoothly into her human neck . . . not that she would
have accepted that description. Humans have khepri bodies, legs, hands;
and the heads of shaved gibbons, she had once told him.
He smiled and dangled his fried pork in front of him, curled his tongue
around it, wiped his greasy fingers on the table. He smiled at her. She
undulated her headlegs at him and signed, My monster.
I am a pervert, thought Isaac, and so is she.
Breakfast conversation was generally one-sided: Lin could sign with her
hands while she ate, but Isaac’s attempts to talk and eat simultaneously
made for incomprehensible noises and food debris on the table. Instead
they read; Lin an artists’ newsletter, Isaac whatever came to hand. He
reached out between mouthfuls and grabbed books and papers, and found
himself reading Lin’s shopping list. The item a handful of pork slices was
ringed and underneath her exquisite calligraphy was a scrawled question in
much cruder script: Got company??? Nice bit of pork goes down a treat!!!
Isaac waved the paper at Lin. “What’s this filthy arse on about?” he
yelled, spraying food. His outrage was amused but genuine.
Lin read it and shrugged.
Knows I don’t eat meat. Knows I’ve got a guest for breakfast. Wordplay on
“pork.”
“Yes, thanks, lover, I got that bit. How does he know you’re a vegetarian?
Do you two often engage in this witty banter?”
Lin stared at him for a moment without responding.
Knows because I don’t buy meat. She shook her head at the stupid question.
Don’t worry: only ever banter on paper. Doesn’t know I’m bug.
Her deliberate use of the slur annoyed Isaac.
“Dammit, I wasn’t insinuating anything . . .” Lin’s hand waggled, the
equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Isaac howled in irritation. “Godshit, Lin!
Not everything I say is about fear of discovery!”
Isaac and Lin had been lovers nearly two years. They had always tried not
to think too hard about the rules of their relationship, but the longer
they were together the more this strategy
of avoidance became impossible. Questions as yet unasked demanded
attention. Innocent remarks and askance looks from others, a moment of<...
