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I read a lot of utter trash in the Science Fiction and Fantasy ghetto but every now and then it produces some utterly fantastic lines. The real unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, without anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present - they are real. Shards of Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold One of the lead characters talking about what he considers to be the worst form of crimes. It's a lot more poignant in context when you realise he considers himself to have been one of those calm men and he hates himself for it. Vimes climbed back up the barricade. The city beyond was dark again, with only the occasional chink of light from a shuttered window. By comparison, the streets of the Republic were ablaze. In a few hours, the shops out there were expecting deliveries, and they weren’t going to arrive. The government couldn’t sit this one out. A city like Ankh-Morpork was only two meals away from chaos at the best of times. Every day maybe a hundred cows died for Ankh-Morpork. So did a flock of sheep and a herd of pigs, and the gods alone knew how many ducks, chickens, and geese. Flour? He’d heard it was eighty tons, and about the same amount of potatoes, and maybe twenty tons of herring. He didn’t particularly want to know this kind of thing, but once you started having to sort out the everlasting traffic problem, these were the kind of facts that got handed to you. Every day, forty thousand eggs were laid for the city. Every day, hundreds, thousands of carts and boats and barges converged on the city with fish and honey and oysters and olives and eels and lobsters. And then think of the horses dragging this stuff, and the windmills…and the wool coming in, too, every day, the cloth, the tobacco, the spices, the ore, the timber, the cheese, the coal, the fat, the tallow, the hay EVERY drat DAY… And that was now. Back home, the city was twice as big… Against the dark screen of night, Vimes had a vision of Ankh-Morpork. It wasn’t a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted the land for hundreds of miles around. People who’d never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent that life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed… …and gave back the dung from its pens, and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made. And also clothes, and fashions, and ideas, and interesting vices, songs, and knowledge, and something which, if looked at in the right light, was called civilization. That was what civilization meant. It meant the city. Was anyone else out there thinking about this? A lot of the stuff came in through the Onion Gate and the Shambling Gate, both now Republican and solidly locked. There’d be a military picket on them, surely. Right now, there were carts on the way that’d find those gates closed to them. Yet, no matter what the politics, eggs hatch, and milk sours, and herds of driven animals need penning and watering, and where was that going to happen? Would the military sort it out? Well, would they? While the carts rumbled up, and then were hemmed in by the carts behind, and the pigs escaped, and the cattle herds wandered off? Was anyone important thinking about this? Suddenly the machine was wobbling, but Winder and his cronies didn’t think about the machine, they thought about money. Meat and drink came from servants. They happened. Vetinari, Vimes realized, thought about this sort of thing all the time. The Ankh-Morpork back home was twice as big and four times as vulnerable. He wouldn’t have let something like this happen. Little wheels must spin so that the machine can turn, he’d say. But now, in the dark, it all spun on Vimes. If the man breaks down, it all breaks down, he thought. The whole machine breaks down. And it goes on breaking down. And it breaks down the people. Night Watch Terry Pratchett This is pretty much Pratchett at his very best talking about the logistics of running a fantasy city and how organising a revolution can utterly throw it into chaos and it shows that the author really thought about these things. The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault. Blood Rites Jim Butcher The opening line to the book that tells you absolutely everything you need to know about the protagonist in one very short pithy sentence.
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Aug 27, 2015 10:20
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 15:48 |
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