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688 pages, Hardcover
First published October 19, 2017
“So the thing I said that she said she couldn’t advise on: that’s the thing she would advise if it wasn’t outside her professional competence. See? That’s what she thinks we ought to do. Blow it all wide open. But she can’t say that with squit in the room or they’ll say she advised us to break the law or whatever and take away her funny hat.”
“She’s a solicitor,” Annie said primly.
“Whatever. That’s what she’s telling us to do.”
“I thought she was telling us not to do that.”
“Yeah. Squit probably thinks so, too. Fuck him.”
“You’re getting all this from what she said about Turnpike?”
“Basically. It was a bit of a red flag. What, it really doesn’t mean anything at all to you? Still?”
“Colson,” Annie said. “You’re an info-rat. Not everyone’s brain works that way. The merger of state and corporate power: why is it important?”
Colson scowled as if both the question and the answer were part of some conspiracy of which he particularly disapproved. “It’s one of the basic victory conditions of Italian Fascism,” he said.
The bookshop is closed, but [the proprietor] goes down to the back office, puts on the kettle and opens the door. People will be very alarmed, and in his experience they always feel better knowing there's a bookshop open.
They say "dysfunctional," but all I hear is "uppity."
—Diana Hunter, p.406
The difficulty is cognitive I'm afraid.
—p.533
The difficulty is cognitive.
I'm afraid.
—later on p.533
composition is collision, synthetic as much as original. Authors are accretors. (292)
Most successful book: The Mad Cartographer’s Garden, in which the reader is invited to untangle not only the puzzle that confronts the protagonists but also a separate one allegedly hidden in the text like a sort of enormous crossword clue... (6)FA LA JI RO JI JA is repeated often enough to make me want to start cracking.
There are many advantages to the end of privacy, and one of them is the obsolescence of social awkwardness. The Inspector finds this outcome both efficient and laudable. (28)Characters are a treat to dive into, from the braggadocio-drenched, shark-haunted Greek banker to the sinister alien intelligences. There's also Harkaway's deep geekery, which lets him toss off references to "extremely rare and undervalued duodecimal quipus" and "locatively discursive spimes."
Finance by itself is ruthless, and that ruthlessness is its salvation. The real disasters are only possible when you bring politics into it, because politics is about pretending to care.(65)
Well. You don’t murder a universe without some degree of discomfort.(541)