Embassytown

by China Miéville

This is what I excelled at: the life-technique of aggregated skill, luck, laziness and chutzpah that we call floaking.

It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It’s only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

A world-destroying mistake. Not a stupid one: only the very worst luck. A quirk of psyche and phonetics. It made sense that they would try. It would have been an elegant imperial manoeuvre. Counterrevolution through language pedagogy and bureaucracy.

What theology that would have been, a god self-worshipping, a drug addicted to itself.

It wasn’t the same. Before, with Embassytown and the world collapsing, they, and all the better Ambassadors, had kept us alive with their desultory trades. This time they followed orders. I had originally thought that Cal would do as little as he could when he became part of god-drug II. I was used to being wrong.