Runnagate Rampant

All things related to China Mieville's Bas-Lag series.

[itsstaringatus-blog]

'They have been drunk,' he said again. 'Their thoughts have been taken, their dreams - their conscious and subconscious - they have been burnt up in the moths' stomachs, have trickled out again to feed the grubs. Have you taken dreamshit Isaac? … If you have, you have dreamed them, the victims, the prey. You have had their metabolized minds slip into your stomach and you have dreamed them.'

China Mieville Perdido Street Station

I am 3/4 of the way through this book and it’s blowing my mind. Bursting with so many unique ideas.

(via itsstaringatus)

[disposablebicycle]

don’t touch me like that I’m not ready you pig Look at those steamhammers! I’d like them if they didn’t make me work so! is this I am proud to be able to tell you that your father has consented to our match is this a and here I swim under all this dirty water towards the looming dark bulk of the boat like a great cloud I breathe filthy water that makes me cough and my webbed feet push forward is this a dream? light skin food air metal sex misery fire mushrooms webs ships torture beer frog spikes bleach violin ink crags sodomy money wings colourberries gods chainsaw bones puzzles babies concrete shellfish stilts entrails snow darkness Is this a dream?

China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

isaac tripping balls on dreamshit.

(via disposablebicycle)

[straycatreadsthat]

Behind her, for a moment, the sky was very full: an aerostat droned in the distance; tiny specks lurched erratically around it, winged figures playing in its wake like dolphins round a whale; and in front of them all another train, heading into the city this time, heading for the center of New Crobuzon, the knot of architectural tissue where the fibres of the city congealed, where the skyrails of the militia radiatef out from the Spike like a web and the five great trainlines of the city met, converging on the great variegated fortress of dark brick and scrubbed concrete and wood and steel and stone, the edifice that yawned hugely at the city’s vulgar heart, Perdido Street Station.

(via straycatreadsthat)

[fabular-mr-fox]

“Art is something you choose to make. it’s a bringing together of… of everything around you into something that makes you… More of a person.”

China Mieville, Perdido Street Station (via larazontally)

[runnagaterampant]

new crobuzon 

[runnagaterampant]

image inspired by a scene from perdido street station where masked and armored police riding giant floating jelly fish with taser like stingers clash with striking dock workers. 

[karmacham-deactivated20190705]

Khepri: as finished as it’s ever gonna be

[annemeier]

My very good friend commissioned this piece as a birthday present for his amazing girlfriend. She’s a big fan of the book “Perdido Street Station” and rightly so because it’s a puh-ritty epic read.  The picture is a portrait of Yagharek, one of the book’s main characters.  I think it turned out decently well and she seemed to like it so a great success all around! Happy Birthday Hannah!!:D

[quietlynonlinear]

Snickity Snackt.

[wintersunradish]

London’s dangerous. All of us who love it know that. In London, weird things go on. Stuff you really don’t want to get involved with. Back-to-back with the everyday, just behind us, London’s savage. We see movement out of the corners of our eyes. We’re watched from the city’s shadows. We all know that. We just don’t want to. Sometimes, though, you can’t help wondering – who are those other Londoners? The ones we never see? Who sifts through the rubbish? Who got oily handprints so high up on that building, way out of reach? Who scratched warning marks on those walls, who disturbs deserted building sites? I can tell you. There are a few of us that know the answer. Borribles. That’s what they’re called. Tribes of children who don’t need us, punky urban elves who’ve gone their own way, who are proud and resourceful and hard and who never grow up. Borribles. London’s neurotic about children. Oh, people love them, of course, bless them, the little darlings, of course we do, there’s nothing we won’t do for ‘the kids’. So how come everyone’s so scared of them? Scared rigid? Think of all the signs on newsagents’ doors – ‘Only Two School Children At A Time’. Watch the faces of the passengers when a bunch of noisy school- uniformed roughnecks appear on the bus. Listen to our politicians slapping down curfews wherever young people are bored and rowdy, locking them indoors like animals. And do you really, honestly think that children don’t notice? Is it any wonder that the idea of living without adults, these lumbering morons who are so clearly terrified of them, is so appealing? Living in a world where elders won’t try to convince them that ‘you little terror’ is a term of endearment? There are those who’d like children’s books to be clean, and instructive, and polite, and nice. I’m not one of them, and neither, thank God, is Michael de Larrabeiti. The Borribles are unapologetically mucky. As confused and contradictory as the rest of us. Violently anti-moralistic, these are some of the most moral books I know. A realistic morality, rooted in friendship and freedom, Borribles are true and worthy heroes for children – and for the rest of us. We need them more than ever. We need them, flicking Vs at those in authority. Look around you, they’d tell them. Look at your world. How dare you lecture us?

‘The Borribles’: An Introduction by China Miéville (via wintersunradish)

[saccharomyces]

We didn’t speak so much of certain things. Language spoke us. The words that wanted to be city and machines had us speak them so they could be. (..) Before the humans came we didn’t speak. We’ve been like countless things, we’ve been like all things, we’ve been like the animals over Embassytown in the direction of which I raise my giftwing, which is a speaking you’ll come to understand. We didn’t speak, we were mute, we only dropped the stones we mentioned out of our mouths, opened our mouths and had the birds we described fly out, we were vectors, we were the birds eating in mindlessness, we were the girl in darkness, only knowing it when we weren’t anymore.

China Miéville, Embassytown (via saccharomyces)

[ragdollparade]

It is depressing to have to point out, yet again, that there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & having the moral right not to be held accountable for what you say. Being asked to apologise for saying something unconscionable is not the same as being stripped of the legal right to say it. It’s really not very f-cking complicated. Cry “free speech” in such contexts, you are demanding the right to speak any bilge you wish without apology or fear of comeback. You are demanding not legal rights but an end to debate about and criticism of what you say. When did bigotry get so needy?

China Miéville (via lostdollsclub)

[suziedowninthequiet]

Like all comics nerds, I have, of course, long had my superheroic alter ego. His/my name is Doctor Crisis. I have pictures and everything. Power-sets are determined. I will attempt to retain a scrap of dignity by keeping them in my desk.

-China Miéville, being his adorable dork self.  (via suziedowninthequiet)

[runnagaterampant]

“They joined in the noisy chanting Over the next two hours, the mood hardened. A core of humans set up a counter demonstration inside the docklands low walls. They screamed abuse at the vodyonai, calling them frogs and toads. They jeered at the striking humans, calling them race-traitors. They warned that the vodyonai would ruin the dock, making human wages plummet..... The eddying weightless objects bobbed gently in the breeze and began to drift almost aimlessly towards the wharfs. the sky was suddenly full of the things. they were big and soft-bodied, each mass of twisted, bloated tissue coated with intricate flaps and curves of skin, craters and strange, dripping orifices. The central sac was about ten feet in diameter. Each of the creatures had a human rider visible in a harness sutured to the corpulent body. Below each body was a thicket of dangling tentacles, ribbons of blistered flesh that stretched the forty feet or so to the ground.  The creatures pink purple flesh throbbed regularly like  beating hearts. The extraordinary things bore down on the gathered crowd. There was a full ten seconds when those who saw them were too aghast too speak, or to believe what they saw. Then the shouts started, “Men-o-war!” As the panic began, some nearby clock struck the hour and several things happened at once.  Throughout the gathered crowd in the anti-strike demonstration and even here among the striking dock workers, clumps of men-and some women-suddenly reached over their heads and violently tugged on dark hoods. They were fashioned without visible eye or mouth holes, dark crumpled blanks.  ..... There were wails from the crowd, which fractured in terror. Its organic cohesion broke. The people fled in all directions, trampeling the fallen, grabbing children and lovers and stumbling on cobbled and broken flag-stones. They tried to disperese down the side streets that spread like a network of cracks out from the riverbanks. But they ran into the paths of men-o-war who bobbed sedately along the alley’s routes.  Uniformed militia were suddenly converging on the picket from every side street. There were shrieks of terror as mounted officers appeared on mounted bi-pedal shunn, their hooks reaching out, their blunt eyeless heads swaying as they felt their way with echos.  The air brimmed with sudden short screams of pain. People blundered in stumbling gangs around corners into men-o-war tentacles and shrieked as the nerve agent which riddled the dangling fronds oozed through their clothes and over their bare skin. There were a few breaths of juddering agony, then a cold numbness and paralysis.  The men-o-war pilots tugged at the nodules and subcutaneous synapses that controlled the creatures movements, coursing deceptively over the roofs of the hovels and dockside ware-houses, trailing their steeds venomous appendages into the channels between architecture. Behind them were trails of spasming bodies, eyes glazed and mouths frothed in dumb pain. Here and there, a few in the crowd- the old, the frail, the allergic, and the unlucky-reacted to the stings with massive biological violence. Their hearts stopped.  The militias dark suits were interwoven with fibers from man-o-war hide. The tendrils could not penetrate them.  Ranks of militia charged the open spaces where the pickets were congregated. Men and vodyonai wielded placards like badly designed clubs. Within the disorderly mess were brutal skirmishes, as militia agents swung spiked truncheons and whips coated in man-o-war stingers. Twenty feet from the frontline of the confused and angry demonstrators, the first wave of uniformed militia dropped to their knees and raised their mirrored shields. From behind them came the gibbering of shunn, then quick arcs of billowing smoke as their fellows hurled gas grenades over into the demonstration. The militia moved inexorably through the crowds, breathing through their filter masks.” -China Mieville, Perdido Street Station, 2000

[magictransistor]

Dominique Appia, Le Temps des Gares (The Time of the Stations), 1978.

[iguanamouth]

dont tell me this is all my fault

[aclockworkpie]

Reading Perdido Street Station. It’s an amazing book with interesting characters. I tried my hand at doodling them.