The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

by M. John Harrison

Stories reproduced from every type of science periodical appeared cheek-by-jowl with listicle and urban myth. These essentially unrelated objects were connected by grammatically correct means to produce apparently causal relationships. Perfectly sound pivots, such as ‘however’ or ‘while it remains true that’, connected propositions empty of any actual meaning, as if the writer had learned to mimic sentence structure without having any idea how to link it to its own content. It would be incorrect, Shaw thought, to describe the data as ‘cherry-picked’, since that would imply an argument they had been chosen to fit. Instead, they were part of an endless list.

Under their influence, everything familiar about the café had gone. They had ripped it all out. The neon sign was gone, leaving only trailing cable above the door. Even the smells of stale fat and hot meat had gone, hauled away with the dismantled catering equipment; instead, the air in the street immediately outside reeked of sawn wood, sophisticated adhesives and cheap sealants; it was reverberating to the shriek of the angle-grinder, the snap of nail guns, the thud of music. You could hear this work they were doing broadcast itself across Hightown until, reflected by the ruins of Geoffrey de Lacy’s keep, it echoed away, dispersing like cross-ply ripples in a bowl of water.

Big or small, these events seemed all of a piece; they seemed to point to the same thing. But you couldn’t see what it might be.